War on terror as a media war Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

War on dread as a media war - Essay Example In the past,the job of Media was characterized and static as media was definitively utilized as a source to depict information and information.In the contemporary period,media’s jobs and capacities are diverse,as now media has been utilized to make propagandas,spread political plans and channelize an ideal arrangement of sentiment to the publicActually,media has come out with a job to change the view of the mass people. It has come out to rule the view of the bigger populace (Barker, 1997). As indicated by numerous researchers, War on Terror was a war that got started and set up on media. It was media that constrained the reasons of war on fear and it was media that really finished the September 11 episode, which turned into the explanation behind starting the purported war on psychological warfare. This examination is exploring the US proclaimed War on Terror as a Media War. The examination remains on the contention that war on fear is in truth a war of media, which is just a telecom instrument in any majority rule society like US, UK, and Europe. Is media a propagator, a controller or a spreader of the correct arrangement of data? is an inquiry, which this examination will attempt to research and answer. The September 11 occurrence and the Media Projection When the September 11 assaults hit America, it was the most noteworthy media inclusion that the episode got around then. The inclusion was so all around coordinated and very much anticipated that it got saw at the mass worldwide level. TVs, radios, Internet news entries, and sites all got exchanged up to communicate this unfortunate occurring (Baudrillard, 2002). It was really an upheaval of data that acquired during this calamitous occasion. What right? Individuals considered it an inflatable of data that got exploded at the hour of September 11 occurrence. Data secured the world, secured the mass worldwide crowd, its enormous discernment and conclusion. These were the most grounded ramifications, w hich media welcomed on the September 11 occurrence. It was anticipated that Osama Bin Laden with his expectations to assault America was behind this fear based oppression action. Also, the later projections of media were that Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussain structured this mass fear act. This is the means by which over and over, media anticipated of what it was advised to extend and exhibited of what it was told to illustrate (Barker, 1997). This is the contention, which a few writers and anchorpersons put onto the media inclusion of the September 11 episode. The media inclusion was rising above and out of the cutoff points to communicate the 9/11 occurrence. This is the thing that a large portion of the pundits contention that media projection and exhibition of the September 11 occurrence was not in agreement to media commitments and measures. A 10-hour transmission every day on all worldwide telecom discussions was the means by which media exhibited the 9/11 occurrence. It was past th e media laws, past the media ward, code and commitment as proposed by Dowmunt (1993) in his book about the job of media as a propagator. It was seen after September 11 that media got utilized as an arranging instrument. The pundits contention that media was not media as it was before the hour of September 11 occurrence. It was something like a proliferating machine after the September 11 occurrence as media job talked about by Wasko and Mosco (1992). Spreading data reliably and correctly to the mass worldwide crowd turned into the essential capacity of media at the hour of September 11 episode happened. For what reason was it so? The pundits react to it such that that media turned into an energetic channel to spread an ideal purpose of supposition and an ideal discernment to people in general after the occurrence dominated (Mirzoeff, 2005). Conveying an ideal discernment to open for changing the popular feeling was something, which was something thought and thrived on media sources. The pundits declare that media was utilized as a tracker of data and

Security in Industrial Internet of Things †Free Samples to Students

Question: Talk about the Security in Industrial Internet of Things. Answer: Presentation: The interfaces are commonly seen as making an existence of an individual muddled when there are tangled applications on the cell phone for opening the entryway of the vehicle. With this, there are interfaces like the sign up and afterward utilizing all the compulsory finishes paperwork for surfing on any site. The screen based intuition with the great structuring likewise helps in illuminating the issues yet they are not restricted to the wireframe GUI. The choices set for this are oddity of decision which coordinates towards the procrastinated level. The organizations like Google and Facebook are buckling down for keeping their hang on the investors instead of the GUI. (Cheng et al, 2017). A portion of the models which could be seen are the sensors and the robotization which could prompt a portion of the consistent UX, where the emergency clinic model with the sensors of the patient and the programmed cautions are given to the specialists, vehicle air sacks and the identification of the competitors wounds, the programmed entryway sliding is likewise observed to be a consistent choice where there is no need of the User Interface. The GUI can likewise be significant for a portion of the spots where there is a need of the keen light model which is considered to have the GUI for an appropriate superseding and tune setting. (Dastjerdiet al.,2016) Twister Pair Cable Coaxial optic Fiber Data transfer capacity 0-4Khz 0 to 500 Mhz 186-350 Thz Separation 3km 10km 40 km Obstruction rating Medium level Medium level Lower level Cost Not exactly coaxial Medium High Security Medium Medium High There are a portion of different links which are incorporated: The UTP incorporates the associations with the settings that are for the correct associations arrangement with the connector. With this, there are costs identified with the UTP which is by all accounts taking a shot at the various reaches that are for the changing pace from 1 to 10000 Mbps. The utilization is to deal with the lessening arrangement with the reaches to decide the framework security. The STP is the Shielded Twisted Pair which is for the treatment of impedance which is medium and afterward the cost that supposedly is medium to bear. It requires a wellbeing and separation is medium more than UTP (Hinckley, 2017). The radio range cost from low to medium and there are arrangements dependent on the normalized intensity of weakening. It works for the handling which incorporates the sign contingent on the reaction with the possibility that is for the obstructions that adds up to a lesser security. Sensors The sensors are for the IoT with the development of the shrewd innovation that helps in acquiring the network the framework and taking care of the gracefully chain. It works with the brilliant sensors which incorporates the RFID with the labels, and afterward fill the various needs. The distinguishing proof of the things, area and afterward deciding the natural conditions depends on the gracefully chain the executives and the assembling. The applications are the social insurance, estimating temperature and so on. The significant detriment to this is the loss of the employments of the individuals because of the expanded innovation use. RFID It incorporates the Radio-Frequency Identification where the reference to the little electronic gadgets is viewed as taking care of the data. The RFID is significant for the ATM cards and the Mastercards for the exchanges of information. Here, the RFID gadgets are set for the high recurrence gadgets which incorporates the innovation taking care of the various labels. (Roca et al.,2016). The significant hindrance to this is the peruser crash with the labeling issues. For this, it is imperative to beware of how the perusers can get the signs and afterward deal with the frameworks which will be to stay away from any issues with the label crash that happens when the labels are in the little region. The issue is additionally identified with the perusing time with the simple merchants chipping away at the improvement of the frameworks and afterward reacting to the labels one after another (Romero et al., 2016). Video Tracking The video following is considered to include the diverse investigation where the innovation depends on how the learning calculations can take a shot at permitting the cameras for perceiving the individuals, objects and the various circumstances. For this, the IoT applications are for the driving development and afterward inspecting the open doors with the utilization case, settings and the innovation. The applications they are utilized in are the cameras or the vision sensors which are utilized with the video ability and the visual information complex feeds. The propelled design acknowledgment and the multidimensional choices are critical to chip away at the numerous factors also. The issues are the security issues where a portion of the clients are uncomfortable and afterward they attempt to screen the various circumstances with the creation line laborers. The innovation depends on how the segment data like the sexual orientations and the periods of the customers could be followed. The issues and the security depends on how the people are set from the introduction in IoT and work towards the insurance of the earth with the physical and intelligent elements. The one of a kind identifier is for taking care of the correspondence and work on the transmission of the information which takes a shot at combination to the opposite end focuses. Subsequently, for this, the correspondence depends on the organized components where the divided information should be broke down and worked upon. The systems administration depends on the globalized availability and the exchange of the information where the item planning is set with permitting to demand the Wi-Fi certifications for legitimate access to the system. Here, the protection and the security issues are assessed dependent on the examples where there is a need to check the verification of the information with the recovery of the location and different purposes of data. The customer protection is essential to gauge about t he data give which can construe from the various focuses with the utilization of the query frameworks that are significant for the particular clients. The attribution of the labels to the items are additionally viewed as under drawing the consideration of the follows with the irritating the issues. The business forms are for the most part to address the information with the security necessities that depend on significant worry of the hazard the executives and the ideas of the administering industry exercises. Full circle proliferation is 12ms Procedure demand 3ms Furthermore, the applications handle 2ms. Applications square then the time financial plan spared is 1.015sec. Handling for the full circle time would be 6ms+2ms= 8ms. The Nielsen law depends on working for the client data transfer capacity which will in general develop each year by half. Here, here are particulars for the updates about how the exponential bend for the annualized development is expressed. (Sun et al., 2016) This is set with the PC that pairs in the ability at regular intervals. It straightforwardly speaks with the data transmission with a portion of the gating factor. The normal data transfer capacity likewise will in general increment with the client who are seen as hesitant for spending the cash on the transmission capacity. The client base is by all accounts getting more extensive with the standard clients who will in general work on the low end than the very good quality movements. The innovations depend on working over the quicker conveyance of the transmission capacity and afterward setting the ramifications of the structure with the best possible ordinary top of the line clients who will in general be happy to pay for the premium with the tried gear. The Nielsen law is seen as set up than the Moore Law, where here are laws dependent on the transfer speed that will in general become delayed than the intensity of the PC. With this, there is an ability for the PC that gets multiplie d for the occasions in like clockwork. The transfer speed will likewise incorporate the accomplished characteristics that are set for the web medium sets. The Moores law is found for the preparing power with the rest of the transmission capacity that is bound. The learnability, effectiveness and the memorability is followed the best possible pecking order and the visual pieces of information of the framework. The thought for the Internet of Things depends on working over the wide scale multiplication of the versatile and the scaled down registering, which incorporates the telemetry applications and the helps dependent on the information preparing and taking care of the substance the executives also. References Cheng, K. M., Tseng, C. E., Tseng, C. H. (2017, May). Producer and Internet of Things application in the wise security by case of intensity additional string. InApplied System Innovation (ICASI), 2017 International Conference on(pp. 239-241). IEEE. Dastjerdi, A. V., Buyya, R. (2016). Haze processing: Helping the Internet of Things understand its potential.Computer,49(8), 112-116. Hinckley, K. (2017). The Editor's Spotlight: TOCHI Issue 24: 2 ExtravaganzaSpecial Issue on End-User Design for the Internet of Things, and The TOCHI Best Paper Award 2016.ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI),24(2), 8. Roca, D., Nemirovsky, D., Nemirovsky, M., Milito, R., Valero, M. (2016). Developing practices in the web of things: a definitive ultra-huge scope system.IEEE micro,36(6), 3 Romero-Mariona, J., Hallman, R., Kline, M., San Miguel, J., Major, M., Kerr, L. (2016). Security in the mechanical web of things-the C-SEC methodology. InProceedings of the International Conference on Internet of Things and Big Data(Vol. 1, pp. 421-428). Sun, Y., Song, H., Jara, A. J., Bie, R. (2016). Web of things and huge information examination for shrewd and associated communities.IEEE Access,4, 766-773.

Underground

Underground Full disclosure:  Regarding the tagline: I have no idea how to write an ode. To be totally honest, Im not even really sure what an ode is. I googled how to write an ode but then got distracted by one of my 39 tabs open in Chrome (which is apparently the threshold at which the symbols on the tabs disappear and you have no idea where you are clicking anymore), so now in an effort to get this post up, Im just going to wing it. Sorry guys. Hope you didnt have your heart set on a real, live, poetic ode. As a freshman, I would, on occasion, hear people talking about the MIT Tunnels. Back then, it was tunnels with a capital T because to my uninformed self, they seemed foreign and special and important. I was under the impression that they were tunnels in the most adventurous sense of the word: cavernous cement cylinders wreathed in shadows and coated in a moldy film of dampness, perfect for piercing flashlight beams and a spirit of discovery. Or maybe one of those side-of-the-mountain tunnels with walls of dirt, a carpet of moss, rocks, and spiders the size of your face. An old abandoned Boylston subway tunnel. What I was not expecting was a carbon copy of the infinite, just one floor down. The tunnels being totally and uninterestingly benign. No face-sized spiders in sight. Most of the staircases in the infinite (if not all, Im not sure) lead to the tunnels. Its the same tile, the same white walls, the same door-shaped doors. It wasnt even as excitingly labyrinthine as I thought it would be. There are convenient signs above the hallways at every crucial junction or fork in the road, plus tiny maps at the intersection of buildings with helpful you are here symbols. At least there are cool pipes on the ceiling. Im not complaining or anything. Just putting my own initial disillusionment out there for the sake of all you adventure-y dreamers out there. Unless you plan on going hacking, the tunnels are wholly normal. On the otherhand, disillusions aside, the tunnels are amazing from a practical standpoint. Heres why: 1. Protection from the elements If you remember my last blog post (https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/thirteen-things-to-do-over-iap-1-5), I spent the first half of IAP in sunny California where 50 degrees is freezing cold and we break out our winter coats. Unfortunately, despite being amazingly prepared to bask in the sunshine of the West Coast, I was rather less prepared for the return trip. I flew back in jeans, a T-shirt, my trusty sweatshirt, and a pair of Converse sneakers. The woman sitting next to me looked rather alarmed as I was preparing to deplane and inquired as to whether or not I had a winter coat to go over the rest of my wardrobe. I said no. We exchanged sad and knowing smiles. Then we parted ways. After taking the Silver and Red Line back to Kendall/MIT station, I noticed the ground covered in a blanket of soft, powdery snow. At first, I balked at the idea of walking all the way back to Maseeh with no snow boots, no coat, and no protection from the biting wind chill. But thankfully, I remembered the glory of the MIT tunnels and only had to run across the street and down half a block into building E25 which is right next to MIT Medical. From there, I descended into the tunnels and resurfaced in front of 77 Mass Ave at the other end of the infinite. Frost bite crisis averted. Its especially nice during the winter/blizzardy seasons to be able to walk indoors from dorm row to the Kendall T stop or any of the buildings on that side of campus. Ive used the tunnels quite a few times to avoid snowy weather, mostly because I still have yet to purchase water-proof boots, gloves, or generally appropriate winter clothing. I love, love, love the cold, but even I know its not healthy to dig snow tunnels or make snow angels with wet jeans, wet socks, and exposed extremities. 2. Theres stuff down there The tunnels are not just tunnels, in the strict transportation sense. Perhaps most useful is CopyTech, MITs student printing and copying service hub. I have come down here to get larger, color posters printed for event publicity and Ive been told that you can also use CopyTech to get papers bound such as for making a notebook, or maybe consolidating class notes. Upon further investigation (-cough- google), I have discovered that you can also go to CopyTech for design consultations, MIT business cards, and advertising in the infinite. Also, Costco membership cards on loan. +1 for free samples. Underneath the biological engineering building, there is also a store room in the basement that sells reagents, equipment, and other laboratory needs for the convenience of all the labs in the vicinity. Its where I got my very first laboratory notebook (it was forest green and oh so beautiful) so it holds a very special place in my heart. Furthermore, there are a lot of offices underground, as well as some labs and workspaces, including the room in which students can learn glassblowing over IAP. Ive also passed by the MIT biomimetic robotics lab that works on cheetah-inspired quadrupeds which I thought was pretty neat. 3. Avoiding crowds Even in non-wintery situations, the tunnels can be useful as an alternative path. Sometimes the infinite can get clogged with tourists or even with students during the five minutes right before the next round of classes starts. I have not personally used the tunnels for this purpose, but I imagine if there is ever a day where I dont have the patience to weave around little kids and camera flashes, Ill remember my good friend, the MIT tunnels. 4. Having fun Taking strolls through underground tunnels is always buckets of fun. Theres even a special part of the tunnels underneath building E18 that smells suspiciously of mice habitats. Hooray. But the best part of all? Katherine 17, Dora 18, and Joy 18 chairing (and screaming). Theres a lot of screaming.   And so, to the MIT tunnels: Dont let the fact that Ive demoted you to lower-case status change our wonderful, blossoming relationship.

Difference Between the Way the Law Treats Married and Unmarried Couples - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 9 Words: 2787 Downloads: 6 Date added: 2017/06/26 Category Law Essay Type Compare and contrast essay Did you like this example? Discuss the difference between the way the law treats married and unmarried couples. Do you think there should be such differences legally? Does the law on cohabitation, marriage and divorce need reform? There are several ways in which married couples are treated differently to unmarried couples. Most of the differences occur in respect of money issues and generally become apparent on the death of one of the parties or when the parties separate . Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Difference Between the Way the Law Treats Married and Unmarried Couples" essay for you Create order Issues that are handled differently with married couples include capital gains tax , wills , inheritance tax , pensions and issues where children are involved. This includes children from former relationships as well as from their present relationship . When examining the law surrounding capital gains tax and inheritance tax the law will treat unmarried couples as two separate individuals when dealing with these matters. By treating them this way they are taxed individually. In situations were the couple are married capital gains tax and inheritance tax would be avoided altogether. An unmarried couple would have to pay both if one of the partners dies. When assessing capital gains tax according to tax legislation all people have an allowance of  £8,000 before they have to pay tax. Married couples get allowed twice this amount per year and can avoid paying such tax by transferring assets to the partner who earns the lowest . Unmarried couples are governed by the allowance a nd cannot avoid tax in this manner. Similarly the law on inheritance tax is set at  £285,000 for anyone who is not married. Inheritance tax includes the price of any property that is left to the beneficiary which makes it so that a lot of people will be subject to this tax given the recent huge increase in house prices. With married couples the whole of the estate can pass to the surviving spouse without being subjected to any inheritance tax regardless of the amount inherited . For those who are not married a will is essential as it would be unlikely for the partner to be able to inherit anything from their deceased partners estate without a will . Such a will has to specifically name the partner as a personal representative of the deceased in order for the surviving partner to be able to administer the will. In cases where unmarried couples have failed to make a will the partner has occasionally not received any property or money from the estate of the deceased . By con trast in cases where the couple are married and the parties have not made a will the estate and any other possessions of the deceased will automatically be awarded to the surviving spouse in cases where there are no children from the relationship . If they do have children then a proportion of the inheritance would be reserved for the children. Problems have also arisen in respect of pensions . The government has attempted to address this issue just recently but as yet the new proposals have not been implemented so it is debatable as to whether unmarried couple would be entitled to the pension or not. In general most employers do not consider cohabiting couples in respect of payments for death in service . Those who are cohabiting can make it so that their partner does benefit by naming the intended beneficiary in the policy . Couples who are not married can also face difficulties if one of the parties needs medical treatment. With a married couple the spouse is regarded as th e next of kin and can give permission for surgery or treatment if the other party is unable to do so because of their condition. With an unmarried couple the other party is not classed as the next of kin and therefore the hospital have to assume the role of deciding what treatment is in the best interests of the patient. Similarly if one of the parties dies the unmarried partner is not allowed to deal with the funeral arrangements unless there is no surviving next of kin to handle the arrangements. Unmarried partners are not entitled to register the death of their partner unless they were the one that came upon the partner after they died. They would not be able to register the death as the partner of the deceased and would merely be classed as the person authorised to arrange the funeral. Cohabiting couples can also face problems if the relationship comes to an end and they decide to separate. Some have made preparation for such eventualities by drawing up cohabitation agreement s . Within a cohabitation agreement the couple can include how the property and items within the property should be distributed in the event of the couple deciding to split up. One of the biggest areas of contention usually concerns the house on which the couple have been living. Both married and unmarried couples can reside in the property either as tenants in common or as joint tenants. Where the property is registered in the names of both parties they each will have equal shares regardless of whether they are married or not. Difficulties arise where the property has only been registered in one name. In some instances the courts will be asked to decide whether the property should belong to the name person only or whether the other party should be entitled to a share. The courts are free to infer joint ownership using the principle of implied or constructive trusts . A constructive trust could be inferred if the actions of the parties would appear to suggest that they expected t o have an interest in the property. This assumption can be made from evidence showing direct contribution to the household bills or to repairs in the property . Evidence that money was paid towards the purchase price could lead to the presumption of a resulting trust which would entitle that party to a direct share of the property. With a married couple the courts will often allow the spouse to remain in the family home regardless of whether the property has been registered in that persons name or not . The Matrimonial Proceedings and Property Act 1979 s37 entitles married partners to remain in the home even if the property was only registered in one of the couples names. It is not only mortgaged or owned properties that can cause these problems. Rented accommodation can be problematic especially with local authority housing as the council will often not allow the property to transfer to the partner not named on the agreement if the couple are not married. Married couples are more fortunate and it is more likely that the council would allow the transfer to a spouse . Difficulties with transferring rented properties to unmarried partners have occurred on a number of occasions and also affect same sex couples as well as heterosexuals . Jointly owned properties can be transferred to either spouse or partner at the order of the courts, and particular regard is likely to be given to the issue of children within the relationship. In some instances the court will order that the property is to be settled, especially where there are children to consider. With a settled property the parent with control of the child would be entitled to remain in the property until that child attains the age of 18 .After this time the property would be ordered to be sold and the profit from the equity to be split. A further issue that is different for married couples to unmarried couples is that with a married couple the wife is usually entitled to financial support for both her and her children . An unmarried person is less likely to be granted financial support. Most unmarried couples find it difficult to prove that they were a couple. When making awards to unmarried couples the courts will look for evidence that the couple were acting in a manner that could be regarded as a marriage . It is the responsibility of the couple to provide the necessary proof to demonstrate that they regarded themselves as though they were married. Failure to provide this proof can lead to the courts rejecting any application with regards to the family home or financial support of any kind . Difficulties can also arise in respect of children from the relationship in situations where the parents are not married. With a married couple both parents will have automatic parental responsibility for any children born inside the marriage . Unmarried couples are treated differently with the father of the child only being granted parental responsibility if he attends with the nat ural mother to register the birth or if he applies to the courts for parental responsibility in cases where the mother refuses to allow him to have parental parental responsibility. Registering the childs birth is also different depending on whether the couple are married or not. Under s9 of the Registration of Births and Deaths Regulations 1987 the birth must be registered by a qualified informant. Married couples are both classed as qualified informants . In an unmarried couple situation only the mother is a qualified informant and the father can only appear on the childs birth certificate if the natural mother agrees to him being included. An unmarried father would only be entitled to register either by a statutory declaration made by the natural mother or through a court order . The government has attempted to address the unfairness in the present system for same sex cohabiting couples through the introduction of the Civil Partnership Act 2004. The introduction of this Act only affects those that have undergone a civil ceremony to have their relationship formally recognised. For those that have had a civil ceremony legislation protects their rights with regard to property and finances in much the same way as with married couples. At present the government has still got to ratify the Relationships (Civil Registration) Bill. This commenced its journey through Parliament in 2002 but as yet has not been made law. Once the Act is passed cohabiting couples will have similar protection to married couples despite there having been no formal ceremony undertaken. There have been many objections to this Bill, the most important of these being the assertion that allowing the Bill to be passed would undermine the whole notion of marriage. Many believe that if the Bill becomes law there will no longer be a need for anyone to get married as they can acquire the same rights as married couples by relying on the Bill. The Bill if introduced would entitle cohabit ing couples to register their relationship in a similar way to marriage which would give them tights in respect of inheritance, housing problems, pensions, social security payments and immigration as well as other areas. Under the Bill if the couple decide to separate then the registered partnership could be dissolved twelve months after dissolution has been applied for. The Solicitors Family Law Association has backed the proposal for new laws on cohabiting couples. They believe that the existing law is too ambiguous and does not adequately meet the needs of those who have chosen not to marry but to cohabit. Concern has been raised that the proposed Bill would effectively amend social security legislation and place registered partners in the same position financially as married couples. The Law Commission in their paper in July 2007 entitled Cohabitation: The Financial Consequences of Relationship Breakdown examined couples living together outside of marriage to decide whethe r any remedies could be suggested to make things more equal for couples when they separate or one of the parties dies. They felt that financial provision should be made under the Children Act 1989 where there are children from the relationship. They also felt that in circumstances where the cohabitant dies intestate the surviving partner should have automatic rights to inherit. At present cohabitants can only benefit from the estate under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 which will grant them a discretionary award on the basis of the needs of the surviving partner. Argument has surrounded providing further protection through legislation for cohabiting heterosexual couples on the basis that it would be unfair to give them the same rights as married couples and not have the same hurdles for them to overcome in the event of the relationship breaking down. At present married couples wishing to end their relationship have to go through the formal process of divorce which can be extremely costly. Cohabiting couples can just go their separate ways without the need to make the separation formal. Under the Civil Partnership Act 2004 same sex couples have to undergo the equivalent of a divorce in order to dissolve the relationship. It is difficult to reach a firm conclusion as to whether the law in this area required revising as the argument that a cohabiting couple should marry if they want to protect their rights seems to be a very valid proposition. Couples who choose to cohabit often do so because of the ease at which the relationship can be brought to an end in the event of things going wrong in the relationship. Simplifying the law on divorce and reducing the amount it costs to obtain a divorce might encourage more cohabiting couples to get married. The removal of tax benefits such as the MIRAS scheme has also meant that many couples that might previously have married to gaining such benefits no longer feel the need to. The r ecent changed in the law in respect of parental responsibility have also done little to promote marriage as a positive element. Previously parental responsibility could only be obtained through an order of the court. Since December 2003 the father of the child gains automatic parental responsibility if they are named as the father on the birth certificate at the time that the baby is registered. It could be argued that not protecting the rights of unmarried couples is tantamount to forcing them to enter into a marriage in order to receive the benefits attached to married couples. However, the counter argument from those opposed to cohabitation is that the ceremony is only a formality and that if the couple intend to stay together regardless then it should not matter if they are made to undergo a formal marriage ceremony. The conclusion that can be drawn from the above is that there is a great deal of unfairness in the way that cohabiting couples are treated as opposed to marri ed couples. By providing legislation to protect their rights in a similar manner to the rights of married couples would undermine the whole purpose of marriage and make it more tempting for couples to opt for cohabitation as opposed to marriage as it is easier and less costly to get out of a cohabiting relationship then a married one. Simplification in divorce proceedings and a less costly way of handling divorce might give cohabiting couples the necessary incentive to undergo a formal marriage ceremony. Bibliography Cretney, S.M Masson, J M, Principles of Family Law, 6th Ed, 1997, sweet Maxwell Gravells, N P, Land Law Text and Materials, 2nd Ed, 1999, Sweet Maxwell Inns of Court School of Law, Family Law in Practice, 5th Ed, 2001, Oxford University Press Oldham, M ¸ Statutes on Family Law, 10th Ed, 2002, Blackstones The Child Support Agency, Child Support Handbook 2001/2002 CSA Standards of Service The Law Commission in their paper in July 2007 entitled Cohabitation: The Financial Consequences of Relationship Breakdown Thomas, M, Statutes on Property Law, 8th Ed, 2001, Blackstones https://www.oneplusone.org.uk https://news.bbc.co.uk https://www.hmrc.gov.uk https://www.taxationweb.co.uk https://www.crossmans.co.uk Table of Cases Crake v Supplementary Benefits Commission [1982] 1 All ER 498 Drake v Whipp [1996] 1 FLR 826 Fitzpatrick v Sterling Housing Association Ltd [2001] 1 A.C. 27 [1999] 3 W.L.R. 1113 [1999] 4 All E.R. 705 [1999] 2 F.L.R. 1027 [2 000] 1 F.L.R. 271 [2000] 1 F.C.R. 21 [2000] U.K.H.R.R. 25 7 B.H.R.C. 200 (2000) 32 H.L.R. 178 [2000] L. T.R. 44 [2000] Fam. Law 14 [1999] E.G.C.S. 125 (1999) 96(43) L.S.G. 3 [1999] N.P.C. 127 (2000) 79 P. C.R. D4 Times, November 2, 1999 Independent, November 2, 1999 Gissing v Gissing [1971] AC 886 H v M ( Property: Beneficial Interest) [1992] 1 FLR Leadbetter v Leadbetter [1985] FLR 789 Lloyds Bank Plc v Rosset [1991] 1 AC 107 Mesher v Mesher [198] 1 All ER 126 Ungurian v Lesnoff [1990] Ch 206 Table of Statutes Administration of Estates Act 1925 Children Act 1989 Family Law Act 1996 Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1994 Law of Property Act 1925 Matrimonial Proceedings and Property Act 1979 Pensions Act 2004 Registration of Births and Deaths Regulations 1987 Relationships (Civil Registration) Bill Will Act 1837 Fraud Order 202655 This essay/coursework/dissertation was stolen from UK Essays, call 0115 966 7955 to speak to a Fraud Officer now for more details. We have made it available for use as a study resource. Date Of Order: 14/12/07 Date Paid: 17/12/07 Email Address Used: [email  protected]/* */ Likely Course: Law Level Of Study: University Level

Biography of Wilfred Owen, a Poet in Wartime

Wilfred Owen (March 18, 1893—Nov. 4, 1918) was a compassionate poet whos work provides the finest description and critique of the soldiers experience during World War One. He was killed towards the end of the conflict in Ors, France.   Wilfred Owens Youth Wilfred Owen was born to an apparently wealthy family; however, within two years his grandfather died on the verge of bankruptcy and, missing his support, the family were forced into poorer housing at Birkenhead. This fallen status left a permanent impression on Wilfreds mother, and it may have combined with her staunch piety to produce a child who was sensible, serious, and who struggled to equate his wartime experiences with Christian teachings. Owen studied well at schools in Birkenhead and, after another family move, Shrewsbury—where he even helped to teach—but he failed the University of Londons entrance exam. Consequently, Wilfred became lay assistant to the vicar of Dunsden—an Oxfordshire parish—under an arrangement designed so the vicar would tutor Owen for another attempt at University. Early Poetry Although commentators differ as to whether Owen started writing at the age 10/11 or 17, he was certainly producing poems during his time at Dunsden; conversely, the experts agree that Owen favored literature, as well as Botany, at school, and that his main poetic influence was Keats. The Dunsden poems exhibit the compassionate awareness so characteristic of Wilfred Owens later war poetry, and the young poet found considerable material in the poverty and death he observed working for the church. Indeed, Wilfred Owens written compassion was often very close to morbidity. Mental Problems Wilfreds service in Dunsden may have made him more aware of the poor and less fortunate, but it didnt encourage a fondness for the church: away from his mothers influence he became critical of evangelical religion and intent on a different career, that of literature. Such thoughts led to a difficult and troubled period during January 1913, when Wilfred and Dunsdens vicar appear to have argued, and - or because perhaps as a result of - Owen suffered a near nervous breakdown. He left the parish, spending the following summer recovering. Travel During this period of relaxation Wilfred Owen wrote what critics often label his first war-poem - Uriconium, an Ode - after visiting an archaeological dig. The remains were Roman, and Owen described ancient combat with especial reference to the bodies he observed being unearthed. However, he failed to gain a scholarship to university and so left England, traveling to the continent and a position teaching English at the Berlitz school in Bordeaux. Owen was to remain in France for over two years, during which time he began a collection of poetry: it was never published. 1915—Wilfred Owen Enlists in the Army Although war seized Europe in 1914, it was only in 1915 that Owen considered the conflict to have expanded so considerably that he was needed by his country, whereupon he returned to Shrewsbury in September 1915, training as a private at Hare Hall Camp in Essex. Unlike many of the wars early recruits, the delay meant Owen was partly aware of the conflict he was entering, having visited a hospital for the wounded and having seen the carnage of modern warfare first-hand; however he still felt removed from events. Owen moved to the Officers school in Essex during the March of 1916 before joining the Manchester Regiment in June, where he was graded 1st Class Shot on a special course. An application to the Royal Flying Corps was rejected, and on December 30th 1916, Wilfred traveled to France, joining the 2nd Manchesters on January 12th 1917. They were positioned near Beaumont Hamel, on the Somme. Wilfred Owen Sees Combat Wilfreds own letters describe the following few days better than any writer or historian could hope to manage, but it is sufficient to say Owen and his men held a forward position, a muddy, flooded dug-out, for fifty hours as an artillery and shells raged around them. Having survived this, Owen remained active with the Manchesters, nearly getting frost bite in late January, suffering concussion in March—he fell through shell-damaged land into a cellar at Le Quesnoy-en-Santerre, earning him a trip behind the lines to hospital—and fighting in bitter combat at St. Quentin a few weeks later. Shell Shock at Craiglockhart It was after this latter battle, when Owen was caught in an explosion, that soldiers reported him acting rather strangely; he was diagnosed as having shell-shock and sent back to England for treatment in May. Owen arrived at the, now famous, Craiglockhart War Hospital on June 26th, an establishment sited outside Edinburgh. Over the next few months Wilfred wrote some of his finest poetry, the result of several stimuli. Owens doctor, Arthur Brock, encouraged his patient to overcome shell-shock by working hard at his poetry and editing The Hydra, Craiglockharts magazine. Meanwhile, Owen met another patient, Siegfried Sassoon, an established poet whose recently published war work inspired Wilfred and whose encouragement guided him; the exact debt owed by Owen to Sassoon is unclear, but the former certainly improved far beyond the latters talents. Owens War Poetry In addition, Owen was exposed to the cloyingly sentimental writing and attitude of non-combatants who glorified the war, an attitude to which Wilfred reacted with fury. Further fueled by nightmares of his wartime experiences, Owen wrote classics like Anthem for Doomed Youth, rich and multi-layered works characterized by a brutal honesty and deep compassion for the soldiers/victims, many of which were direct ripostes to other authors. Its important to note that Wilfred wasnt a simple pacifist—indeed, on occasions he railed against them—but a man sensitive to the burden of soldiery. Owen may have been self-important before the war—as betrayed by his letters home from France— but there is no self-pity in his war work. Owen Continues to Write While in the Reserves Despite a low number of publications, Owens poetry was now attracting attention, prompting supporters to request non-combat positions on his behalf, but these requests were turned down. Its questionable as to whether Wilfred would have accepted them: his letters reveal a sense of obligation, that he had to do his duty as poet and observe the conflict in person, a feeling exacerbated by Sassoons renewed injuries and return from the front. Only by fighting could Owen earn respect, or escape the easy slurs of cowardice, and only a proud war-record would protect him from detractors. Owen Returns to the Front and Is Killed Owen was back in France by September—again as a company commander—and on September 29th he captured a machine gun position during an attack on the Beaurevoir-Fonsomme Line, for which he was awarded the Military Cross. After his battalion was rested in early October Owen saw in action again, his unit operating around the Oise-Sambre canal. Early in the morning of November 4th Owen led an attempt to cross the canal; he was struck and killed by enemy fire. Aftermath Owens death was followed by one of World War Ones most iconic stories: when the telegram reporting his demise was delivered to his parents, the local church bells could be heard ringing in celebration of the armistice. A collection of Owens poems was soon created by Sassoon, although the numerous different versions, and the attendant difficulty in working out which were Owens drafts and which were his preferred edits, led to two new editions in the early 1920s. The definitive edition of Wilfreds work may well be Jon Stallworthys Complete Poems and Fragments from 1983, but all justify Owens long-lasting acclaim. The War Poetry The poetry is not for everyone, for within Owen combines graphic descriptions of trench life—gas, lice, mud, death—with an absence of glorification; dominant themes include the return of bodies to the earth, hell and the underworld. Wilfred Owens poetry is remembered as reflecting the real life of the soldier, although critics and historians argue over whether he was overwhelming honest or overly scared by his experiences. He was certainly compassionate, a word repeated throughout this biography and texts on Owen in general, and works like Disabled, focusing on the motives and thoughts of soldiers themselves, provide ample illustration of why. Owens poetry is certainly free of the bitterness present in several historians monographs on the conflict, and he is generally acknowledged as being the both the most successful, and best, poet of wars reality. The reason why may be found in the preface to his poetry, of which a drafted fragment was found after Owens death: Yet these elegies are not to this generation, this is in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is to warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. (Wilfred Owen, Preface) Notable Family of Wilfred Owen Father: Tom OwenMother: Susan Owen

Marco Polo in Renaissance Free Essays

Born in 1254 in Venice, Marco Polo is today a well-known figure of pre-Renaissance travels, and for his ground breaking travels to lands never before Journeyed by Europeans. He was an Italian traveler and author, and spent the majority of his life traveling and exploring. His father Nicola and uncle Miffed, both merchants, had conducted business and trade in Constantinople (now known as Istanbul) and the Crimea. We will write a custom essay sample on Marco Polo in Renaissance or any similar topic only for you Order Now However, when Genoas merchants, rivals to the Italian Polo’s, took over trade in Constantinople, Nicola and Miffed were forced to find alternative trade opportunities. Thus, in 1260, they set out to the north of the Caspian Sea and reached Babushka (which was on the caravan route to China) and remained there for 3 years. Thereafter, in 1263, Joining the Persian envoys, they made their way to visit the Mongol Emperor Kabuki Khan in Changed (near present Beijing). To arrive there, they traveled the Silk Route via Samara Sand, the Northern Tibetan desert and the Mongolia Steppes. Upon their arrival, Kabuki Khan commissioned them to return with 100 missionaries to convert his nation to Christianity in opposition to the heartening Islamic armies. Over the next 3 years the Polo brothers traveled via Babushka, Persia, Syria and Acre (near Jerusalem) to arrive back home in Venice in 1269. The return to China In 1271, at the age of 17, Marco Polo accompanied his father and uncle back to China, visiting Acre to collect a letter from the newly elected Pope Gregory X for Kabuki Khan. They also collected a flask of oil from the Holy Land and 2 Dominican monks (who were later to desert the Pools) from Gregory X to deliver to the Khan. In the hopes of revealing to India by sea, the Pools traversed Persia to the mouth of the Persian Gulf, Horror. Yet, unsuccessful at finding a suitably safe boat, they continued traveling by land in a North-Easterly direction through Persians deserts and mountains to Karakas (now Khakis), on the Chinese border. As Marco Polo was ill, they waited here for a year to rest, after which they continued Journeying up the River Ox’s (now AMA Dairy). They traveled through the Hindu Cush and Pamper mountains, (home of the large horned sheep that now bear Marco Polo’s name), after which they traveled along the ringer of the Take Make desert to the region of Lop Nor in Sinking Province, China. Finally they crossed, by meaner of camel caravan, the Gobi Desert to reach (3 and a half years after leaving Europe) Kabuki Khan’s court in Changed in 1275. The Pools were the first Europeans to reach most of the territory they had covered, particularly the Gobi Desert and Pamper mountains. Marco Polo’s experiences in the Orient Marco Polo became an agent on numerous missions to various parts of the Mongolia Empire for 17 years as a part of the Khan’s diplomatic service. As part of his duties, he Journeyed through Tibet as well as along the Yanking, Yellow and upper Mekong rivers. He was probably also the first European to set foot on Burmese soil. It is believed he visited countries as far field as Siberia to Indonesian archipelago. He also visited the Mongolia capital at Khartoum. It is also believed that Marco Polo was city governor for Yanking (now Honchos) for three years from 1282 to 1285. During all this time, Marco’s father and uncle served as military advisors to the Khan. As the Khan aged, the Pools were uneasy as to the Empire’s soundness. In 1292 the Polo’s escorted the Mongol princess to Persia, where she was to be married to the Persian Khan. They traveled for two years, having to use a sea route as war prevented the use of the land route. With a crew of 600 and a 14-ship fleet, they sailed from Sustain (today known as Quantico) on China’s coastline to Horror. On their way to Horror they Journeyed through Sumatra, the Strait of Malice, past Sir Lankan, past the Madman and Nicolai Islands, reaching the city in 1294. By this time, however, only 18 of the original crew had survived, and the Persian Khan had died a year earlier, leaving the Mongolia Princess to marry his son. Finally, 24 years after the commencement of their travels, the Pools returned to their hometown of Venice in 1295. By that stage they were very wealthy, as they had sewn precious gems and stones to their clothing for safekeeping. When Venice went to war with Genoa, Marco Polo was a captain in the Venetian fleet. However, he was taken prisoner by the Genomes in 1298, and during his imprisonment dictated the history of his travels to inmate Rustically of Pisa, a writer of romances. When he was released from prison in 1299, he returned to Venice where he married, had 3 daughters, and later died in 1324. He was buried next to his father in the church of Lorenz. Polo’s Legacy The account of Polo’s travels, first brought to light in French as Liver De Marseilles du Monde, later translated to The Travels of Marco Polo, is most probably the most influential travel book in history. Providing the reader with distinct descriptions and orphic detail, this account provided pre-Renaissance Europe with an influential and revolutionary knowledge of the geographical make-up, history and life of the Orient. Although known to be somewhat exaggerated with fabulous extravagances, this book became the foundation for the first correct maps of Europe and Asia. The Polo’s ultimately inspired Christopher Columbus’ interest in the East and spurred him on to set off on a new west-ward route to the Orient in 1492, and later spurring Vases dad Gamma to round the Cape of Good Hope in another new voyage in 1497. How to cite Marco Polo in Renaissance, Papers

Clean Energy free essay sample

Energy is Possible First of all, energy comes from many sources like oil, coal, nuclear and wood. These four sources and others are dirty energy. There is clean energy like the solar, wind, water, and kinetic energy. Both of them cause bad or good problems I agree with writer with some points and I disagree with hem on other points. First I agree with him with the point the one that he talks about burning wood and coal causes a lot of pollution in the atmosphere also burning oil is dirty when the car burn the gasoline. And I agree with him about the â€Å"nuclear power is very dirty, there are three parts to use nuclear power. The first is mining it, the second is processing it and the third is using it in a power station. Nuclear supporters† advertise nuclear power as clean energy. Advertising is not always truthful. It’s true it’s clean until there an accident, and accidents always happen. We will write a custom essay sample on Clean Energy or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page In fact, there is no industry that has no accidents. In addition, â€Å"getting the uranium out of the ground to process into plutonium for nuclear power stations is a very dangerous risky business for workers. Uranium mining often causes terrible poisoning of people and land. Nuclear power stations, when there are leaks also cause the same problems: cancer, death, food supplies destroyed† (Cox amp; Hill, 2007) Now we have know that the nuclear and oil and wood is very dirty. The clean energy I can give an example about the clean energy solar energy, solar energy is so clean energy because it not causing any trouble because it came from the sun. But the problem is the clean energy is to expansive, and that why governments don’t use it to much. For the I just give some example about dirty and clean energy’s and I hope so that governments all over the world find the best solution how to fix that big problem causing the world global warning and people life’s are in dinger from the bad energy’s and all the money of the world don’t cost to make people life’s in risk.

Richard Nixon Essays (556 words) - Richard Nixon, American Quakers

Richard Nixon I am writing a report on a significant person in U.S. history. The person I chose is Richard Nixon, the thirty-seventh president of the United States. Richard Milhous Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California in 1913. His Father, Frank Nixon, had many failing businesses that took the family different places. His mother, Hannah Nixon, had two boys before Richard. They both died young After high school, Nixon attended Duke University to study law. He tried twice to become class president. Finally he succeeded. Soon after his college schooling, Nixon enrolled in the Navy. War broke out and he was sent to fight. He was stationed at Green Island however; he never saw any combat action. He was a ration distributor. When discharged, he had acquired the rank of Lieutenant Commander. Soon after discharge he was brought into politics. His stance of anti-communism made him well respected. Good in debates, Nixon was a shoe-in. Soon he began his political struggle. He challenged Jerry Voorhis for a district seat in the California House of Representatives. Amazingly, he won. After acquiring some political power, he decided to move up more. He soon set his sights on the U.S. Senate. He defeated the expected senator; Ms. Helen Douglas. Since he won the senate he set his eyes on a bigger prize; vice president was his next goal. He was voted in with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He went through many political high points, such as the Caracas Mob incident, where Nixon was taken hostage. The Kitchen Debate, noted as a high point for Nixon, where he and the Russian leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, discussed issues in a kitchen. With Eisenhower he served two terms. Nixon's next goal was to become the President of the United States. In 1960, John F. Kennedy and Nixon ran for presidency. As it turned out, Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson won by only 120,000 votes which isn't much in this type of race. It was believed Kennedy bought Texas and Illinois. Johnson soon became president after Kennedy's assassination. Now Nixon would try presidency once more. Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey with some political strategy. He told the citizens of the U.S. he would stop the war in Vietnam and make it better. In the long run he made it worse. He would be, soon, our first president to resign. It was when Nixon pulled off a huge upset for his second term. At first, nobody thought anything of it. Burglars broke into the Watergate Hotel stealing Democratic plans. Soon tempers rose, and fingers started to point at Nixon. He was becoming angry and short-fused. While they were drafting articles of impeachment, Nixon resigned to escape impeachment. It became to be one of the most embarrassing moments in U.S. history. After leaving office he lived a secluded life with his family in California. On April 22,1994, former President Nixon dies. I liked this book because of the way they illustrate his life through pictures. It was also informative and it provided me with a better feel on Nixon. I knew he was a president but I did not know what he did while in office. I learned that Nixon didn't want segregation to end and that Nixon played such a big part in Watergate. History Essays

The Two Meanings of Apprehend and Apprehension

The Two Meanings of Apprehend and Apprehension The Two Meanings of Apprehend and Apprehension Although spelled in the same way in each case, apprehend can be used to mean two different things. The same is true of apprehension. Get up to speed with how these terms should be used so that you can write with flair and confidence. Apprehend (Understand or Capture) The verb apprehend has two main meanings. The first is to understand or learn something. If we were struggling to understand someone, for instance, we might say: I cannot apprehend your meaning. The second sense of apprehend is to arrest and detain a suspected criminal. When used in this context, the word would appear in a sentence like this: The suspect was apprehended at midnight, carrying the stolen goods. Apprehension (Understanding or Anticipation of Misfortune) One common sense of the noun apprehension corresponds to the first definition of apprehend above, as it refers to understanding something: Your son has good apprehension of algebra. The second meaning of apprehension is anticipation or misfortune, usually characterized by fear or anxiety about the future. When used in this context, it would appear in a sentence like this: Mary was full of apprehension before taking to the stage to perform. Although apprehension can be used to describe apprehending (or capturing) a criminal, it is an unusual term in this context. If you would like more advice about word use, or to have a 500-word sample of your writing proofread for free, get in touch with the professionals at Proofed today!

Unfunded Educational Mandates and how they creat Non-Market Failures Research Paper

Unfunded Educational Mandates and how they creat Non-Market Failures - Research Paper Example Over the years, significant mandates have been put forth in relation to employment, persons with disabilities, water and air pollution, and equal opportunities in education. The debate on mandates have been long-standing historically primarily due to the implied fiscal responsibilities impinged on local districts. Redistribution of state funds becomes necessary to allocate budget for federal mandates. There are other non-fiscal consequences of mandates as well. With federal mandates, a generic solution is provided for highly sensitive issues underplaying the diversity factor in each state or locality. â€Å"The initiative of state and local governments to pioneer innovative approaches is undermined as a result† (Posner, 1998, p. 6). However, despite these continuing issues, mandates have proven resilient since inception, and policy makers [i.e. Congress] remain positive on their position in creating federal mandates. The first major wave of federal mandates happened between 1960’s and 1970’s which included essential issues such as environment, civil rights, and education (Posner, 1998). Specifically, in the mid-1960’s, the state government increased its authority and intervention in education. As pointed out by Fusarelli (2009), â€Å"a crucial reason for a fundamental shift in the state education role is the widespread loss of confidence in local educators and their communities† (p. ix). In 1983, the loss of confidence in local education revolved around children with special needs. In recent times, the No Child Left Behind Policy (NCLB) became the driving force behind an increase in the state-mandated laws in education. Perhaps one of the more formidable issues emphasized by individuals advocating against state-mandated laws, especially in education, is funding. Most, if not all, mandates come with price tags that become additional budgetary burdens for local districts. Sink (2010) borrows the

Media analysis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Media analysis - Essay Example They often perceive that marriage is the only way that a man and woman may get to know each other sexually (MacQueen, 2003). That was God’s wish. However, today, it is not hard to see even married couples looking for pleasure outside their marriage. That is the aim of this poster. It is not fair to assume that it is promoting promiscuity rather trying to find a safe way in which people engaging in sex, have the safest method to do this. From a gender perspective, it is likely to hear very many judgemental things about this poster. The first thing that will be talked about will be the girl’s willing nature to get to the point of getting in the poster. Society has a mentality about how women or girls should behave. They do this not knowing that they have a part to play in the growing of society as much as the male species (Nelson, 1999). A gender perspective can be termed as the analysis of a situation, mostly sociological, based on the sex of the parties involved. In the above poster, there is the presence of both sexes. The male position in such a poster is considered as being normal (Nelson, 2001). However, the female role is looked at as being wrong. When a woman is seen to appear in such poster and/or advertisements, it is often attributed to where she is coming from. It is often understood that they are as a result of broken homes. For example, an alcoholic and abusive father, a mother who does not pay attention to her and all sorts of things (Okely, 1996). This is a common misconception that many people in society have. It is otherwise known as stereotyping. Not all people who appear in such advertisements came from such homes. Some people appear in them due to the feeling of creating change among their peers. It is some of these thoughts that are often misconstrued. Society thinks that they are out to benefit themselves or to make their parents feel guilty for something. The generation present now is referred to as the microwave

Bic Corporation Marketing Strategies

Bic Corporation Marketing Strategies Introduction A smile is a curve that sets everything straight. Now a days, smile is being lost in this competitive world thus Bic Corporation is back with an innovation in toothbrush cum tooth paste know as Joy-Top. Dental hygiene is the most important part of dental care. This preserves the charming smile in most efficient manner. Primarily, good dental hygiene is essential to the health of the mouth which can be maintained by brushing teeth twice a day. It is also essential in a cosmetic manner. Pleasant, healthy smile makes a personality look more confident and thus makes them feel healthier while interacting with people. Bic Corporations, leading manufacturers of disposal pens, lighters and shavers. Manufacturing facilities are extensive in north and South America including Toronto, Canada, Milford, Connecticut, Clearwater, Saint.petersberg, Florida, Guatemala city and Mexico. Their products are low cost plastic items. The most affordable in their category are pens, lighter and shavers. Half of the companys production, sales and earnings lie on pens. The most prominent product is Clear plastic ball point Bics lighter is top seller in North America. It also makes correction fluid and pens and has acquired a premium pen manufacturing position. Joy-Top Bic Corporations focuses on low cost, good quality, disposable items, and innovations. So as to develop the product line of the company a new product called Joy-Top toothbrush cum paste has been taken into consideration. Pens, lighter, shavers are the daily used commodity for a common people so Joy-Top also appears in the same lane to these products. Whats new in Joy-Top? Joy-Top is a toothbrush which consists of head of tightly clustered bristles mounted on a handle which includes paste. The toothpaste contains fluoride which helps in increasing the effectiveness of brushing. When the bristles are pressed against teeth, in a required proportion of paste appears on the bristles internally. On an average the paste can be used for about 15-20 times. Features:- Brush head gives a great clean. The multilevel layer bristles in which the top layer act as a dental floss. As it cleans by improving gum health. Never brush too hard again when the bristles are pressed a bit hard against the teeth the paste appears internally in the bristles. If pressed more than once there will be excess of paste which can be harmful for the teeth. It is best suitable for travelers. Thus Joy-Top promises long term care. Comfort grip. Soft bristles Developing Marketing Strategies and Plan Mission statement: To provide dental health of superior quality and value which will improve the lives of the worlds consumers, as a result they will reward us with never ending smile and happiness. SWOT analysis: Strength Strong brand. Focuses on innovation. Price, Quality, Value. Marketing- Distribution, Awareness, Reach. Capabilities. Development of new technologies. Global advantages. Weaknesses Less competitive power. Low budget product. Customer service staff requires training. Drawbacks of proposition. Opportunities Development of new products. Competitors can be surprised. Business can be exceeded to overseas. Positive response from end users to new ideas. Good profit margin. Huge potential to rise in emerging markets. Variations according to season weather and fashion. Lifestyle trends. Threats Distraction from core business. High competition in the market. Unfavorable conditions due to environmental effects. High competition in the market. Global economic condition. Litigation (2011, Business balls) Summary SWOT analysis is a tool which is commonly used to provide useful information. So from the above we can say that the company is holding a strong position in todays world, keeping aside all weaknesses and threats this company can produce a product with long lasting future and considering some of the factors which are given below: Low cost Reliability Innovation Disposability Objective Objectives are the basis of policy and performance appraisal. They bind entire organization together. Objectives can also be explained as mission, purpose, which can be achieved within the expected time frame and with the available resources. (Business dictionary) Marketing objectives Target customer. Effectiveness and practical use. Research over hardness/Softness of bristles. Type of grip and general structure of toothbrush. Customer satisfaction. Product quality to be maintained in accordance with low cost. Word of mouth. Packaging to be done so as to attract maximum customers. Advertisement (Visual, Audio, Print media). Financial objectives To achieve growth in revenue of 10% per year. To increase earnings by 15% annually. To increase dividend per share by 5% per year. To increase in net profit margin 2-4% per year. Stable earnings during the period of recession. Gathering information and scanning the environment Secondary data: It is been collected by individuals or agencies for purposes other than primary research. Internet sources:- Internet search tools like Google and yahoo can help to find specific sites which are rich in information. Discussion groups, post to a chat room or news groups can help to find secondary data. Wikipedia: It helps in quick and easy search of relevant information through a bunch of Google searches. It is great for finding out basic explanation of something very important. Scribd:-It is worlds largest social reading and publishing company. Information and original written content are shared across the web and mobile devices. Non internet sources:- Library:-Periodicals (Magazines, Journals and Newspaper) art materials which are published at regular intervals. Questionnaire: They are very cost effective as compare to face to face interviews. These are easy to analyze. Wikipedia helps in collection of quantitative data which can be helpful in market research. As Scribed connects people with the information online market research will be helpful for market planning. Library contains current information which helps to translate trends into marketing opportunities. Questionnaire reduces biasness. And thus Wikipedia and Scribed helps in providing necessary information and questionnaire and library serves a way towards the research and therefore these sources becomes the important aspects in drawing marketing plan. Technological Funds for research. Potential of innovative ideas. Communication and information. Communication across the globe. Buying mechanism of end users. Demographic Lifestyle Advertisement and sales promotion Consumer buying patterns. Brand, Company image. Difference in consumer opinions. Media views. Age. Level of education. Social class. Family. Economy Industry factors. Issues regarding money/International trade. Exchange and interest rates. Trends from home economy. Market cycle (2011, Business balls) Conducting marketing research and forecasting demand Future demand Toothbrush being a daily commodity needs special attention. Bic Corporation has decided to perform and experiment in the form of a new product Joy-Top. Brushing are teeth twice a day is a major part of our daily lives, everyone wants to have a beautiful smile but brushing teeth twice a day does not mean any difference so Joy-Top with enormous features estimates the capacity of 150 million toothbrushes to be sold per annum.. Thus estimating a production of 12.5 millions monthly. Marketing effectiveness It is the quality of the marketers to go to the market with the goal to achieve good results for both short term as well as long term. An increase sale is a goal of marketing but it is a measurement of the effectiveness of the entire company. Awareness:-Effectiveness can be through website visits, traditional media mentions, and social media mentions etc. Loyalty marketing:-Customer satisfaction, retention etc. These can be effective measurements to marketing efforts Creating customer value, satisfaction and loyalty Customer satisfaction is a measurement of product and services supplied by the company to meet end user satisfaction. Measurement provides an indication of the organization been good at providing products/services to the market. (2011, En.wikipedia) Measurement 1Reliability Performance Product range 2 Quality of communication Quality of offering Flexibility Reaction time Repairing quality Information, support Availability Quality of delivery service Quality of order handling 4 3 Analyzing Consumer Market The process of selection buying using disposing of ideas, services, and goods in order to satisfy needs and wants by individuals, groups and organization is consumer behavior. (2011, scribd) Factors affecting Joy-Top Cultural factors Culture: There are different taste and manners which are being seen throughout the world. Toothbrush, the daily routine commodity is used by one and all. Now the people residing in various parts may prefer to use different paste which may or may not be suitable for our product. Subculture: This culture mainly helps in segmenting the market into various small proportions. It consists of different religions, geographic regions, racial groups etc. The needs of this particular group depend upon their lifestyle. Thus local advertisement will affect the buying behavior for Joy-Top. Social class: These are the people determined by occupation, income, education, family background and location. The buying behavior of them will be according to their piece of earning. They may prefer spending their single penny for other useful things. Social factors Reference groups: These are the people pursuing special talent to convince people for the particular product so as to increase the customers. Thus by providing practical benefit of Joy-Top can help to increase the influence. Family:-The member of the family is most influential thus the role of the members are very important for example- If the buying decision of a particular product is influenced by elderly people then the advertisement will be targeted on them. Roles and status:-There are different roles and status of a person in the society for example- A man working in the organization as a manager will play the role of manager as well as a father therefore buying decisions will be influenced according to his role and status. Personal factors Age:-Joy-Top is basically for youngster and above. Consumer changes the purchase of goods and services with the passage of time. Thus as the age increases there will be different consumers within the range. Occupation:-Joy-Top is best suitable for travelers and people having high lifestyle. Economic situation:-This trendy toothbrush focuses on all people having different economic situations Lifestyle: Joy-Top is a product which will help person to express their style in the surrounding. Personality:-Different features like self confidence, dominance etc can help to buy our product. Psychological factors Motivation:-Joy-Top can be a motivating factor so as to satisfy the needs of the consumer. Perception:-To set a better perception customer attention is necessary towards the product. Beliefs and attitude:-By launching special campaigns, customers attitude can be made positive. (2011, Business.ezinemark) Research tools The different research tools are as: Online marketing service:-Online study becomes premier data collection method for customer satisfaction research. Online research surveys are generally appropriate for customer satisfaction because data collected is quality as well as quantitative. Focus group research:-It is useful as a way to personally connect with buyers and observing their expressions and body language as they speak about the product and brand name. Competitive intelligence:-This is any information about competitors which is helpful for obtaining their strategies, strength, weakness and resources. Go to market plan:-This plan includes live market test, advertisement campaign which helps in understanding buyers attitude and behavior. Consumer buying roles Consumer buying roles relevant for Joy-Top are: Influencer: Helps in viewing influence between buyers and deciders. Buyer: Holds formal authority to select their products. User:-User of the product. Gatekeeper:-Controls information s and helps influencer and buyer. (2011, provenmodels) Stages of buying process Need:-Low cost and sales promotions like coupons, product samples can create the high need for the product. Collection of information:-Information can be collected through the sources as People (Friends, relatives, family etc) Product (details) Advertisements(Print ads, television etc ) Experiment(Using the product) Purchase decision:-Price, product, public relations can be the factors which can be consider while having buying decision. Post decision:-Physical evidence and price can be the market activity so as to confirm satisfaction to the consumers (2011, openlearningworld) Identifying market segments and targets Market segmentation:-This helps in identifying small portion the market which is different from one another. It helps customer satisfying their need. Consumer market segmentation:-Psychographic or behavioralistic are the most suitable variables to segment our consumer market. Psychographic segmentation:-In this segmentation customers are group according to different lifestyles. Variation in interest, activities, attitude, values, opinions etc helps to choose product differently Behavioralistic segmentation:-Customer behavior towards product varies due to usage rate brand loyalty readiness to buy occasions this is direct starting point for market segmentation. Business market segmentation:-The market customers are fewer in number and purchase larger quantities. There decision process involves more than one person like manufacturers, government, institutions etc. Behavioral characteristics:-This is suitable as it includes different buying status, purchase procedure and usage rate. Company type:-Company type includes industry, company size, and decision making unit. (2011, netmba) Evaluation of attractiveness of market segmentation Attractiveness will be evaluated as follows: Segment competition. Brand loyalty. Number of customers. Customers growth rate. Expected profit Target market selection Bic Company pursues selective specialization as this is multiple segment strategy for example- Lighters, shavers mainly target youth and above while stationary are targeted to all segments similarly Joy-Top targets youth and above. (2011, netmba) Dealing with competition Strategic group Big business is the strategic group for Bic Corporation. It includes business men, managers, employees, workers and many other similar groups in Bic Corporation. (2011, slideshare) Best companies in the manufacturing of toothbrush Butler gum Breath remedy Colgate Crest Dentek Dr. Fresh Glide Gripit Johnson Johnson Mentadent Oral B Plak smacker Reach Sonicare Sulcabrush Oral B is a worldwide market leader which targets children and adults. Their brushes are used by most of the dentist worldwide. (2011, Oralb) Objectives The main objective is to provide superior quality and services which improves the life of worlds consumers. Thus consumer will reward them with leadership sales profit and value creation. (2011, pg) Strength It focuses on five core strength: Understanding consumers-Fulfills the need of consumers. Innovation-Translates desire into new product. Brand building-Shapes purpose inspired brands. Go to market capabilities-Reaches consumers, retailers at the right time, at the right place. Scale-Drives consumer value and efficiency. Competitive intelligence Competitive intelligence is defining, gathering, analyzing about products, customers and competitors. Additional competitive intelligence which is required to have the complete knowledge of market leaders are: Competitors Ads-Clipping competitors ads will be helpful in collecting market material used by competitors. Competitors brochures-This helps to check out the marketing strategies, format, special offers, pricing, the key benefits and clues to the marketing segment which may be underserved. Mystery shop-Mystery shop is actually to buy their products r services so as to experience the purchases process. Internet-Major search engines can help in gathering information about them. This also helps in visiting their websites which can give important clues. (2011, Gordon) Newspapers-Newspapers can also provide major information about the market leader. Competitive strategy Bic Corporation being the market challenger needs to gain the market share and become the leader. This can be done by attacking the market leader, other firms of the same size, smaller firms. Frontal attack strategy will be the most effective for Bic Corporation by providing quality, price with low cost. Setting product strategy Core benefits Core benefits are the benefits which are being enjoyed internally as well as externally some of them are as follows: Joy-Top can provide long term care. It is flexible as well as durable. Joy-Top provides oral hygiene in low cost. It helps in avoiding gum diseases. Outer case of the toothbrush will avoid contact with germs as it is a germ free case. Joy-Top is a toothbrush cum toothpaste. So travelers need not to take paste along with them. Augmented product Bic Click one of the New Zealands favorite retractable ball pen. Sturdy pocket clip. 1.0 mm medium ball diameter. Ridges on barrel for better writing Available in colors Blue, Black, Green, Red. (2011, au.bicworld) Developing pricing strategies and programs Pricing objectives To maximize long run profit as toothbrush is never ending demand. To obtain a target rate of return on sales so as to achieve profit. To get competitive advantage. To enhance the image of Bic Corporation. To increase sales volume. As toothbrush being easily available commodity customers are not likely to be price sensitive. As Joy-Top is a low cost product demands will be elastic. Pricing decisions Internal factors: Product pricing depends heavily on the productivity of operating facilities. Increasing productivity can reduce the cost of production of each product and thus allows the marketer to lower the product price. External factors:-There are number of influencing factors which are not controlled by the company but will have the impact on pricing decision. Pricing decisions changes due to following: Elasticity of demand Customer expectation Government regulation Competition and other products (2011, know this) Promotional pricing like 20% less of the actual price would be adapted by Bic Corporations. Designing and managing value networks and channels Marketing flows Physical flow-In physical flow manufacturer, transporters, and warehouses will directly deal to customers. Title flow-Title flows from supplier to the manufacturer then dealers and finally to the customers. Payment flow-Payment is received by customers then to banks-dealers-banks-manufacturer-banks and finally to suppliers. Information flow-Information flow from suppliers to transporters, warehouses, banks to manufacturers and from manufacturers to transporters, warehouses, banks-dealers-transporters, banks-customers and vice-versa. Promotion flow- It flows from suppliers-advertising agency-manufacturers-advertising agency-dealers-customers. Selective distribution is the most appropriate distribution as it works in normal pattern where sellers stock the product in consumer as well as in business market. Managing retailing, Wholesaling, Logistics Types of retailers The most appropriate retailers are: Departmental stores:-They bear a resemblance to a collection of specialty stores and offer considerable customer service. Advantages:- 1. Cheaper price than of special shops because of bulk buying. 2. Large range of goods Disadvantages:- Lower quality of service as compared to special shops. Supermarkets:-Supermarkets sell mostly daily products as well as food products. Advantages:- Sometimes cheaper than other shops. Quality is often assured here Disadvantages:- Generally prices are higher. Variety stores:-These offer extremely low cost goods with limited selection. Advantages:- Convenient Able to compare product price and features. No pressure to buy. Disadvantages:- No enjoyment of retail shopping. Privacy and security issues. Product category risk. Too many choices. Wholesalers They are the people selling service to the third party who in turn sells the products to their customers. Wholesalers are referred as decision support system for production and distribution. They propose an optimization model to satisfy the best service at low cost. There decision support system is developed to build different aspects and suitable models for selling. (2011, article alley) Market logistic issues The product has to be delivering at the right time for the right place in right condition. Outsourcing and considerable values are the functions to be performed by logistics. A thorough knowledge of materials, foreign exchange, custom regulations, purchasing, transportation, and information technology and supply chain management is required. (2011, bestlogisticsguide) Designing and managing integrated market communications Audience targeted Bic Corporations would target unintended audience as Joy-Top is a daily routine commodity and is used by one and all. (2011, everything2) Image Bic Corporations need to attract more customers and client. Thus Bic Corporations is focusing on trustworthy business image. Although, Bic is successful in maintaining trustworthy image through the products like pens, shavers, lighters, thus they tend to serve more customers. (2011, sbinfocanada) Objective of communication campaign The basic objective of the campaign is to educate the public. The goal of the campaign is to build peoples confidence in dental hygiene and to ensure a smooth product. The campaign would consist of free dental check-ups and thus the need of Joy-Top will be shown. Campaigning would consist of distribution of brochures, free samples and promotional products. Promotional tools In Store promotion:-This influences the consumer decision making process at the particular moment. A lot of purchases are made by impulse buying. Trade fairs:-This tool helps in export promotion and also an expensive tool. Advertising:-Advertising is directly targeted to the big audience and end users. It is also targeting the players in distribution channels, importers and wholesalers. Internet:-Internet offers display possibilities and advertisement space. Catalogues, brochures, company profile can be digitalize and put on the web. It is an economic and flexible option. The corporate brochure:-Material and print used are of superior quality and thus A3 sizes of papers are used to provide required information. (2011, infomipyme) Marketing communications budget The budgeting process helps in determination of the realistic plan for profit margin; 10-20% gross revenue is projected to marketing and communications. 4% on the purchase of advertisement and promotion media including internet, TV, newspaper. + 2% producing and printing all communications including newsletters, brochures etc. + 1.5% producing special events. + 2% promotional products + 3.5% salaries, consultants and independence. = 13% Total percentage of Bic budget going to communications and market (2011, getting attention) Managing mass communication: Advertising, sales promotion, event and public relations Joy-Top being a new product needs attention in the market. Advertisements will help the consumers to know about the product and the services without advertisement there are chances of bad word of mouth and fake visual clues. (2011, financialcrisis2009) Advertising goals Goals are very specific. Generally advertising goals are made to increase sales. It increases knowledge and awareness. Thus advertising goals are: Target market to achieve Corporate image Emphasis on Joy-Top Monetary expenditure Right time of advertisement Smile to the fullest and make this world a better place to live in -a message with Joy-Top reveals. Television and internet are most appropriate media as these media are the best ways to express this message. Promotion Consumer promotion is to stimulate sales by influencing the end consumers. Bic Corporations mainly focuses in serving end users. Thus consumer promotion is the best option. Promotion of public relation Bic Corporations being a brand name already sustains a good corporate image in the market. Promotions are being done using advertisements rather than public relations. Managing personal communications: Direct marketing and personal selling Direct selling Direct selling is basically marketing and selling products, directed to customers from fixed retail location. Bic Corporations prefer direct selling force as it has its own advantages which are as follows: There are more opportunities to meet new people. Internet helps in increasing sales tremendously An unlimited amount of money is been expected to be earned (2011, improvingyourworld) Selling activities should focus on professional sales people who are well trained and ethically responsible. Sales objective To develop a strong personnel relationship with the customer in order to be successful. A special skill which is not generally seen in common people. Role of E-marketing Internet plays a very important role in every aspect of product life cycle. It delivers the highest value during the growth and maturity. The medium of searching makes internet an ideal platform for informing sharing and educating. Primary goal of internet during launch is to create awareness, encourage trial and build a brand. Online brand building and awareness can be cost effective to serve consumers because the target audience can be naturally drawn to specific online information (2011, lewis) Sales Representative The biggest challenge for a sales representative is time and territory management. Some strategy requires selling Joy-Top is: They should have complete knowledge of Bic Corporations and their product. The person should be a good communicator and influencer. The representative must know the product. The representative must maintain customer contacts in order to get feedbacks, to know new trends and to have new customers request. (2011, llc) Executive summary Bic Corporations is a manufacturing company dedicated to low cost, innovative and disposable product. The company has production line as pen, lighter, shaver. The company was formed in 1945 and has 2700 employees. The company intends to become a manufacturer leader by expanding and adding to its product line. Thus a new daily base commodity (Toothbrush) has come into consideration. Referencing Anonymous., 2011. SWOT analysis method and examples [Online] Available at: http://businessballs.com/swotanalysisfreetemplate.htm [Accessed 2 February 2011] Anonymous., 2011 Develop specific financial goals and objectives [Online] Available at: http://www.e-channelnews.com/ec_storydetail.php?ref=411299 [Accessed 2 February 2011] Anonymous., 2011 Objective [Online] Available at: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/objective.html [Accessed 2 February 2011] Anonymous., 2011 Finding the perfect toothbrush [Online] Available at: http://yogizilla.wordpress.com/2007/05/10/finding-the-perfect-toothbrush-a-lesson-in-marketing [Accessed 2 February 2011] Anonymous., 2011 Secondary objective [Online] Available at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/18789047/Secondary-Data-Sources[Accessed 2 February 2011] Anonymous., 2011 Pest analysis [Online] Available at: http://businessballs.com/pestanalysisfreetemplate.htm[Accessed 2 February 2011] Anonymous., 2011 How to achieve total customer satisfaction [Online] Available at: http://www.businessknowledgesource.com/marketing/how_to_achieve_total_customer_satisfaction_027879.html [Accessed 2 February 2011] Anonymous., 2011 How many ways can a toothbrush be improved [Online] Available at: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100218095845AA8jZHp[Accessed 2 February 2011] Anonymous., 2011 Factors affecting consumer behavior [Online] Available at: http://business.ezinemark.com/factors-affecting-consumer-behavior-50fc758b3b5.html[Accessed 2 February 2011] Anonymous., 2011 Oral b toothbrush 9900 review [Online] Available at: http://oralbtoothbrush.org/oral-b-toothbrush-9900-review[Accessed 2 February 2011] Anonymous., 2011 Toothbrush background [Online] Available at: http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Toothbrush.aspx[Acce

How to Become a Straight a Student

Contents Cover Page Title Page Introduction Part 1. Study Basics Step 1 Manage Your Time in Five Minutes a Day Step 2 Declare War on Procrastination Step 3 Choose When, Where, and How Long Part One Cheat Sheet Part 2. Quizzes and Exams Step 1 Take Smart Notes Step 2 Demote Your Assignments Step 3 Marshal Your Resources Step 4 Conquer the Material Step 5 Invest in â€Å"Academic Disaster Insurance† Step 6 Provide â€Å"A+† Answers The Plan in Action Part Two Cheat Sheet Part 3. Essays and Papers Step 1 Target a Titillating Topic Step 2 Conduct a Thesis-Hunting ExpeditionStep 3 Seek a Second Opinion Step 4 Research like a Machine Step 5 Craft a Powerful Story Step 6 Consult Your Expert Panel Step 7 Write Without the Agony Step 8 Fix, Don’t Fixate The Plan in Action Part Three Cheat Sheet Conclusion Acknowledgments Getting in is just the beginning Copyright Page Introduction â€Å"My friends always wondered why I was never in the library, but instead in the student center socializing, or at a party, or at an event. They said I made it ‘all look so easy. ’† Anna, a straight-A college studentThis is not your average college study guide. Unlike the titles next to it on the shelf, none of the advice presented here was devised by professors or self-proclaimed academic skills experts. I promise that you won’t find any mention of the Cornell note-taking method, mental map diagrams, or any other â€Å"optimal learning technique† crafted in an office or laboratory—environments far removed from the realities of typical college life. Instead, this book reveals—for the first time—the study habits used by real straight-A college tudents. All of the advice that follows was distilled from a series of interviews I conducted with a large group of top-scoring undergraduates. These participants were drawn predominantly from the Phi Beta Kappa rolls of some of the country’s most rigorous colleges and u niversities—including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Amherst, and Skidmore—and they were carefully chosen to represent a wide variety of academic concentrations. In each interview, I asked the student to detail his or her study habits.The questions ranged from the general (â€Å"How do you defeat the urge to procrastinate? †) to the specific (â€Å"What techniques or systems do you use to locate and organize sources for a research paper? †). If the questionnaire revealed the student to be a grind—someone who earns high grades simply by studying an excessive amount—I discarded the responses. I was interested only in students who improved their grades through smarter, more efficient study skills—not through longer hours and more painful study sessions. How did I know such students existed?I am one of them. When I arrived as a freshman at Dartmouth College, I had no idea how to prepare for exams or write coll ege-level papers. Like most students, I left high school believing that to study meant to reread your class notes and assignments as many times as possible and that paper writing required you to sit down in front of your computer and start typing until you finished. The problem, however, is that college is not high school. The material to be mastered is much more complicated and the professors have higher expectations.In the college environment, simple brute force study methods can end up requiring a lot of time and causing a lot of pain. Nevertheless, most students still rely on them. And this is why they find themselves regularly pulling all-nighters and developing an antagonistic attitude toward their courses. The taxing effects and spotty success of these methods also underlie the common belief that only geniuses and grinds can score top grades. When I first entered college, I shared in these beliefs. But soon I became dubious. It didn’t take long for me to decide that th ere had to be a better way to learn the material.The results of my studying using simple techniques varied widely—I’d spend all night hacking away at an essay and end up scoring a B-, or give what I thought was a frantic last-minute review for a quiz and score an A. I constantly felt like I was behind in my reading, and there always seemed to be new deadlines on the horizon that I had to scramble to meet. It was truly a chaotic existence. But when I looked around, all of my friends seemed to be having the same experience—and none of them seemed willing to question it. This didn’t sit right with me.I wasn’t content to work in long, painful stretches and then earn only slightly above-average grades for my efforts. I wanted to be exceptional. And I wanted to achieve this without having to sacrifice sleep or my social life. To many students, such a goal may sound hopelessly hubristic. But I’m an optimist by nature, and, observing the sorry state of my current study skills, I was convinced that I could do better. It took me most of my freshman year to construct, through repeated experimentation, a toolbox of sufficiently improved study habits.But once I had perfected them, the results were profound. Of the thirty-six courses I took between my sophomore and senior years of college, I scored exactly one A- and 35 perfect As. The most stunning piece of this transformation, however, was how much less time I had to spend on studying. As my strategies became more refined, the hours required were reduced. By my senior year it got to the point where, during finals periods, I would sometimes pretend to be heading off to the library just so I wouldn’t demoralize my roommates, who were preparing for yet another grim all-nighter.What was my secret? Efficiency. The simple truth is that the brute force techniques used by most students are incredibly inefficient. When it comes to exam preparation, passive review is not an effective way to learn complicated concepts. It’s also mentally draining, which further diminishes the rate at which you can absorb and internalize information. For paper writing, this same problem holds. When you approach the task without proper preparation, it becomes incredibly tiring and you can end up spinning your wheels.After a while, even the formation of coherent sentences becomes difficult and time intensive. In contrast, the techniques I came up with were so streamlined that I could learn more material than my classmates and actually spend less time studying. By eliminating stupid habits and wasted effort, I transformed exam prep and paper writing from a dreaded chore to a targeted activity. For a while, I was convinced that I was unique for having discovered such a smart approach to learning. But, alas, this illusion was soon shattered.It occurred during the winter of my senior year, when I was attending a ceremony celebrating my induction, along with thirty other classmat es, into Phi Beta Kappa. This group represented, more or less, the thirty students with the highest G. P. A. s out of my class of over a thousand. Accordingly, I had arrived at the venue prepared to spend the evening with some serious nerds. As it turns out, however, I was in for a surprise. Upon walking through the door that night, I was immediately struck by how many of the other students I knew socially.These were people who, given their level of visibility on campus, I never would have imagined were scoring straight As. They were magazine editors, frat boys, and crunchy environmentalists. I knew them from parties and campus clubs and through mutual friends. They were, for the most part, normal, well-rounded, and interesting—not at all the type of super-grind one might assume would occupy such an elite level of academic achievement. The lesson of that night was obvious: Perhaps I was not, in fact, as unique as I had first imagined.Maybe there were others out there who had discovered similar secrets to academic success. The writer instincts in me soon took over. Fascinated to know exactly how these seemingly normal students had done so well, I sent all of my fellow Phi Beta Kappas a survey about their study habits. Most were happy to share their methods and I quickly confirmed that my suspicions were true. Not only were many of them using innovative, homegrown study strategies, but many of these strategies were surprisingly similar to those that I had developed during the previous few years.At the time I had just finished editing the manuscript for my first book, How to Win at College, so I wasn’t exactly eager to get started right away with another massive writing project. But after seeing these initial survey responses, I knew I had stumbled onto something big. While most college students toil arduously through the study and paper-writing processes, there exists an elite group of undergrads who have discovered unconventional strategies for ea rning much higher grades in much less time. I wanted to share these secrets with other students, and thus the idea for this book was born.Soon I was sending out more questionnaires to more straight-A students at colleges around the country, until I gathered enough responses, from students with enough different backgrounds and majors, to distill the advice presented in this guide. In the pages that follow, you will discover the details of these often surprising study strategies. I’ve included examples and case studies throughout the book to demonstrate how to apply the advice in many different reallife academic situations. You will learn how to: †¢ Manage your time and deal with the urge to procrastinate. Take targeted notes in class. †¢ Handle reading assignments and problem sets with ease. †¢ Prepare efficiently for exams. †¢ Master the art of exam-taking. †¢ Write incisive critical analysis essays. †¢ Conduct thorough research. †¢ Write st andout term papers. Remember, this advice comes from real students and was honed, through trial and error, in real college classrooms. This distinction is important. It’s what separates this book from the many existing study guides that sit next to it on the bookstore shelf.As mentioned, most study guides are written either by professors or academic skills experts, many years separated from their own college experience. The result is that the authors of these guides are disconnected from the realities of undergraduate life. For example, How to Study, by college professors Allan Mundsack, James Deese, and Ellin K. Deese, suggests that students wake up at 7 A. M. each morning, go to sleep by 11 P. M. each night, and on many days schedule only a single hour of â€Å"recreation,† with the rest of the time dedicated to attending class, eating, or working.One gets the feeling that these professors haven’t spent much time socializing with students lately. Even their pl an for Friday—the biggest party night of the week—has the student working until 10 P. M. , taking a one-hour break, then turning in by eleven. Student Success Secrets, written by Eric Jensen, a learning expert and professional public speaker, offers equally out-of-touch suggestions. His tips to help you remember concepts learned from a reading assignment include â€Å"put it in a picture or poster—use intense colors,† â€Å"act out the material or do a fun role play in your own room,† or â€Å"create or redo a song; make a rap. Just try to imagine a sophisticated liberal arts major attempting to make a rap about her recent reading assignment concerning post-structuralist interpretations of pre-Victorian English literature! (Key question: What word rhymes with â€Å"Foucault†? ) The granddaddy of all unrealistic study guides, however, just might be What Smart Students Know, by Princeton Review cofounder Adam Robinson. In this best-selling gu ide, Robinson suggests—and I swear I am not making this up—that students approach a reading assignment as a twelve-step process! That’s right, twelve separate steps.Before you even crack the actual assignment, Robinson suggests that you jot down questions about the importance of the reading and then take notes on what you know about the topic, what it reminds you of, and what you want to learn. He then asks you, among other things, to read the assignment a total of three separate times, write and then rewrite your notes, represent the information in picture form, construct â€Å"question charts,† and devise mnemonics to help you memorize the concepts. Needless to say, this approach to a simple reading assignment is humorously unrealistic.I even did a little math. For a typical college-level liberal arts course, a student might be assigned an average of two hundred pages of reading a week. In his book, Robinson provides a one-page sample reading and descri bes twenty-three different questions that students might ask about it. At this rate of twenty-three questions per page, spending thirty seconds on each query, we would end up spending around forty hours a week (i. e. , a full-time job’s worth of time) simply completing one of the twelve steps on the reading assignments for just one class.Sounds like a great plan! These examples highlight the simple truth that the advice in most existing study guides—written by â€Å"experts,† not students—is often impractical and time consuming. How to Become a Straight-A Student, on the other hand, is the first guide based on the experiences of real college students, and it was written to provide an alternative to the other titles on the market. In the pages that follow, you will find homegrown strategies that are compatible with the demands of your day-to-day student life.They may not be as elaborate as the intricate systems devised by the â€Å"experts,† but the y’re easy to implement—and they get the job done. Best of all, when you start putting these strategies into practice, you will experience immediate results. Keep in mind: If you find a piece of advice that doesn’t quite fit your needs or circumstances, that’s okay. In fact, you should expect this. Each of the students I interviewed for this book had his or her own unique take on the best way to study. Follow their lead and, when stuck, experiment.Replace techniques you don’t like with ones that seem better. If these new techniques work, keep them; if they fail, replace them with something else. The key to improving your grades without becoming a grind cannot be found in any single study habit. It is, instead, rooted in the big picture decision to reject rote review once and for all and begin the flexible search for strategies that work better for you. Above all, remember that college is a multifaceted experience, of which grades are just one of man y important pieces.It’s my hope that this book will help you painlessly conquer this one piece so you can have more time and energy to explore all of the others—the friends, the unburdened idealism, the heroic beer consumption—that make these four years so rich. A common complaint I hear from students is that they never seem to have enough time to finish all of their work. They vent about how many hours they spend—late nights reviewing in the library, weekends sacrificed to paper writing—but no matter how hard they try, there always seems to be something else due.As Matthew, a straight-A student from Brown, explains, it’s easy for college students to become â€Å"stuck in a state of permanent catch-up. † Understandably, these students feel like they have reached their academic limit; they believe that unless they forgo sleep or any semblance of a social life, there are simply not enough hours in the day to stay on top of all their sch oolwork. Let’s start by getting one thing clear: This belief is false. The problem here is not the amount of available hours, but rather how each hour is spent. I know this from firsthand experience.While researching this book, I spent time with some of the country’s most accomplished students, and I can assure you that no matter how diligent you think you are, there is a Rhodes scholar out there who fits in three times the amount of work and activities you do and probably still manages to party harder than you would ever dare. I don’t mean to imply that everyone should aim to become a drunken Rhodes scholar (though it would certainly be fun to try); rather, my point is that a surprising amount of work, relaxation, and socializing can be extracted from a single twelve-hour day.A lack of time, therefore, isn’t enough to explain why so many students feel overwhelmed. So what does explain this phenomenon? The answer, as it turns out, has much more to do with how we work than what we’re trying to accomplish. As humans, our minds have evolved to prefer short-term tasks such as â€Å"run away from that lion† or â€Å"eat food. † Therefore, when you walk into the library on a Sunday morning with the goal of finishing all of your homework and writing a paper, your brain isn’t happy. The idea of spending eight consecutive hours trapped in a study carrel is dispiriting.Plus, it’s hard to focus for that long, so pretty soon fatigue will set in, your concentration will wander, and every distraction will suddenly seem impossibly appealing. Before you know it, the day will be over and you’ll realize that you haven’t accomplished much productive work at all. The next day, new assignments will pile onto those you didn’t finish on Sunday, and the tedious process starts all over again. Jason, a straight-A student from the University of Pennsylvania, uses the term â€Å"pseudo-working† to describe this common approach to studying.The pseudo-worker looks and feels like someone who is working hard—he or she spends a long time in the library and is not afraid to push on late into the night—but, because of a lack of focus and concentration, doesn’t actually accomplish much. This bad habit is endemic on most college campuses. For example, at Dartmouth there was a section of the main library that was open twenty-four hours a day, and the students I used to see in there late at night huddled in groups, gulping coffee and griping about their hardships, were definitely pseudo-working.The roommate who flips through her chemistry notes on the couch while watching TV is pseudo-working. The guy who brings three meals, a blanket, and six-pack of Red Bull to the study lounge in preparation for an all-day paper-writing marathon is also pseudo-working. By placing themselves in distracting environments and insisting on working in long tedious stretches, these stud ents are crippling their brain’s ability to think clearly and efficiently accomplish the task at hand. The result is fatigue headaches and lackluster outcomes. The bigger problem here is that most students don’t even realize that they’re pseudo-working.To them pseudo-work is work—it’s how they’ve always done it, and it’s how all of their friends do it. It never crosses their mind that there might be a better way. Straight-A students, on the other hand, know all about pseudo-work. They fear it, and for good reason. It not only wastes time, but it’s also mentally draining. There is just no way to be wellbalanced, happy, and academically successful if you’re regularly burning through your free hours in long, painful stretches of inefficient studying. The students I interviewed for this book emphasized again and again the importance of avoiding this trap.In fact, when asked what one skill was most important in becoming a non -grind straight-A student, most of them cited the ability to get work done quickly and with a minimum of wasted effort. So how do these students achieve this goal? A big part of the solution is timing—they gain efficiency by compressing work into focused bursts. To understand the power of this approach, consider the following simple formula: work accomplished = time spent x intensity of focus Pseudo-work features a very low intensity of focus. Therefore, to accomplish something by pseudo-working, you need to spend a lot of time.The straight-A approach, on the other hand, maximizes intensity in order to minimize time. For example, let’s rank intensity on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the most intense). Assume it takes ten hours to finish studying for a test by pseudo-working with a low intensity score of 3. According to our formula, this same amount of work can be accomplished in only three one-hour bursts, each with an intensity of 10. The work that took you all da y Sunday to complete could instead be finished by studying an hour after breakfast, an hour after lunch, and an hour after dinner—the rest of the day being free for you to relax!With this formula in mind, you can begin to understand why many straight-A students actually study less than their classmates: They replace long, low-intensity stretches of work with a small number of short, high-intensity sessions. Of course, this is not the whole story behind their success; what straight-A students actually do in these short bursts is also crucial—technique is just as important as timing. Part Two (Quizzes and Exams) and Part Three (Essays and Papers) of this book are dedicated to these technical details.But learning how to follow an efficient schedule, and banishing pseudo-work from your college experience for good, is a crucial first step toward your academic overhaul. To accomplish this transformation, however, you will need to gain control over your lifestyle—and t hat’s often no small task. For example, you will need to spread out the intense work sessions so that you have time in between to recharge. This requires basic time-management skills. You’re also going to have to overcome your urge to procrastinate, because scheduling your work is meaningless if you don’t actually work in the time you set aside. This requires self-motivation.Finally, to obtain the highest possible levels of intensity, you need to choose the right locations, times of day, and durations to study. If you aren’t careful about how you select these three factors, you can unintentionally sabotage your ability to focus. This requires a smart planning strategy. Part One will teach you how to satisfy these requirements. It begins with the presentation of a simple timemanagement system, customized for the busy college lifestyle. Don’t be frightened, the system is incredibly lightweight—it’s designed to require only five minutes a day of planning and can survive periods of neglect.Part One then continues with a collection of battle-tested strategies to help you fight procrastination. This advice comes straight from the experiences of real students and has been proven to work amid the chaos and distractions of the typical undergraduate lifestyle—it is simple, easy to apply, and surprisingly effective. This part concludes with a discussion of when during the day, where on campus, and for how long to study to maximize your productivity. The students interviewed for this book experimented extensively to find the right answers to these key questions, and, in this final step, I pass these answers on to you.Together, these basic skills are the foundation upon which all the advice in this book is built. Without them, you’ll be unable to implement the specific study techniques described in the parts that follow. Master them, however, and you will experience improvements in all aspects of your life†”not just grades. You’ll have more free time, you’ll get the sleep you crave, you’ll party harder, and you’ll be able to devote more energy to your extracurricular interests. So relax. You are about to take your first step toward a much more enjoyable and productive college experience. Step 1Manage Your Time in Five Minutes a Day Real straight-A students, like most reasonable students, hate time management. After all, college is supposed to be about intellectual curiosity, making new friends, and becoming obsessed with needlessly complicated drinking games. An overwhelming interest in time management is best left to harried business executives (or, perhaps, premeds). At the same time, however, you can’t abandon all attempts to keep tabs on your schedule. As mentioned in the introduction to Part One, all of the techniques described in this book require some ability to control your schedule.Ignore this skill, and you doom yourself to four long year s of playing catch-up with your work. As Doris, a straight-A student from Harvard, states: â€Å"Time management is critical—it’s a skill that you absolutely must develop over the course of your time at college. † Most students, however, misunderstand the purpose of time management—they believe it’s used only to cram as much work as possible into the day. But this is not the main motivation behind controlling your schedule. As it turns out, a little planning goes a long way toward reducing your daily stress levels. Having deadlines and bligations floating around in your mind is exhausting—it makes it impossible to completely relax, and, over time, can lead you down the path toward a breakdown. However, once you figure out what work needs to be done and when, it’s like a weight being lifted from your shoulders. The uncertainty vanishes: When you work, you can fully concentrate on the assignment in front of you, and when you relax, you can do so without any anxiety. â€Å"I don’t believe in giving up anything,† says Jenna, a straight-A student from Princeton. â€Å"Not my social life, not my extracurricular activities, not my academic success. Basic control over your schedule breeds balance. This is why time management, as Doris stated earlier, is the key to getting the most out of all aspects of your college experience. The goal of Step #1 is to present a time-management system that helps you achieve this stress-free balance without requiring you to sacrifice the spontaneity and excitement of college. Specifically, we present a system tailored to the typical undergraduate lifestyle that meets the following criteria: 1. Requires no more than five to ten minutes of effort in a single twenty-four-hour period. 2. Doesn’t force an unchangeable minute-by-minute schedule on your day. . Helps you remember, plan, and complete important tasks before the very last moment. 4. Can be quickly restarted af ter periods of neglect. We will cover the details of this system in a few simple steps and then conclude with a detailed case study so you can see how it works in a realistic setting. What You Need This system requires two pieces of equipment. 1. A calendar: It doesn’t matter what type of calendar, and it’s not something that you have to carry around with you. It can be Microsoft Outlook or iCal on your computer, a cheap day planner, or one of those advertisement-laden freebies they hand out at orientation.It just has to be something that you can reference every morning that has enough space to record at least a dozen items for each day. 2. A list: Some piece of writing material that you can update throughout the day. This you do have to carry around with you, so make it something simple, like a sheet of paper ripped out of a notebook each morning. The Basic Idea Record all of your to-dos and deadlines on your calendar. This becomes your master schedule, the one place that stores everything you need to do. The key to our system, however, is that you need to deal with your calendar only once every twenty-four hours.Each morning, you look at it to figure out what you should try to finish that day. Then, throughout the day, whenever you encounter a new to-do or deadline, simply jot it down on your list. The next morning, you can transfer this new stuff from your list onto your calendar, where it’s safe. And we’re back where we started. That’s it. Pretty simple, right? The whole system can be summarized in three easy steps: (1) Jot down new tasks and assignments on your list during the day; (2) next morning, transfer these new items from your list onto your calendar; and (3) then take a couple of minutes to plan your day.Now, we’ll examine these steps in a little more detail. In particular, we need some strategies for how to plan your day each morning using your calendar and what to do when unexpected events interfere and turn that plan upside down (trust me, this will happen more often than not). Update Your Calendar Each Morning This is where the magic happens. Every morning, spend a few minutes to update your calendar and figure out what you should try to accomplish. This is the only serious time-management thinking you have to do for the whole day, so the demand is pretty reasonable.This updating process should proceed as follows: Find your list from the day before. It will probably look something like the example described in Figure 1. Don’t worry too much about how this list is formatted; we will discuss that shortly. For now, focus on the â€Å"things to remember† column, which contains the new to-dos and deadlines that were jotted down throughout the day. Figure 1. Sample List Tuesday—1/24/06 Today’s Schedule †¢ 10:00 to 12:00 Econ class †¢ 12:00 to 1:00 Lunch with Rob †¢ 1:00 to 1:45 Government reading †¢ 2:00 to 4:00 Government class †¢ 4 :00 to 5:30 Finish government reading 5:30 to 6:30 Start French essay Things to Remember †¢ Econ study group, Thur. at 9 P. M. †¢ French quiz moved to Friday. †¢ Laundry †¢ Start researching summer internship opportunities. Transfer these new items onto your calendar. Write the deadlines on the appropriate dates, and write the todos on the days when you plan to complete them. Following the example of our sample list, you would first jot down the econ study group time under Thursday’s date and the French quiz under Friday’s date. You would then choose a day to do laundry and jot down a reminder under that date, and choose a day to start internship research and ot down a reminder under this date. You can move these items around on your calendar as many times as you want, so don’t worry too much about which date you initially choose for a new to-do. However, try to use some common sense. For example, if Wednesday afternoon and evening are packed with meetings and work, this might not be the best day to schedule doing your laundry. Similarly, if you have a big test Monday morning, don’t schedule a lot of annoying errands for Sunday; you’ll need your concentration for studying.If something is not especially time sensitive, such as the internship research example from above, don’t be afraid to put it on a day far in the future, at a point when you know you will be less busy—such as right after midterms or at the beginning of a new semester. Next, move the to-dos that you planned for yesterday, but didn’t complete, to new days on your calendar. In our sample list from Figure 1, the Today’s Schedule column describes to-dos planned from the day before. As you can see, in this example, all the to-dos were completed except the â€Å"Start French essay† task, so you would need to move this task to a new date.At this point, your calendar once again holds everything that you need to ge t done. Now it’s time to figure out your plan for the current day. Go ahead and trash yesterday’s list—it’s served its purpose—and grab a fresh sheet of paper to use as today’s list. Divide it into two columns, as shown in Figure 1, and label them Today’s Schedule and Things to Remember, respectively. Next, look at the calendar entry for the current day. It will probably contain a handful of appointments and todos. Your goal is to figure out how much of this work you can realistically accomplish.You might be tempted to simply copy all of these tasks into your Today’s Schedule column and then treat it as a simple to-do list for the day. Don’t do this! If you want to avoid getting overwhelmed by your work, you need to be smarter about your time. Here is what you should do instead: Try to label each of your to-dos for the day with a specific time period during which you are going to complete it. Be honest. Don’t reco rd that you are going to study for three hours starting at three if you know that you have a meeting at five. And be reasonable about how long things really take—don’t plan to read two hundred pages in one hour.For simplicity, group many little tasks (errands that take less than ten minutes) into one big block (for example: â€Å"10:00 to 10:45—mail letter, return library book, buy new deodorant, fill out transcript request form at registrar†). Leave plenty of time for breaks. Give yourself an hour for meals, not twenty minutes. And, if possible, end your day at an appropriate hour; don’t try to fit in work right up until sleep time because you need to be able to unwind and relax. In general—though it may seem counterintuitive—be pessimistic. The truth is: Things will come up.Don’t assume that every hour that looks free in the morning will stay free throughout the day. Remember, the goal here is not to squeeze everything into o ne day at all costs, but rather to find out how many of the tasks listed for the day you actually have time to accomplish. If you can’t fit all the to-dos into your schedule for the day, no problem! Simply move the remaining items onto the calendar entries for future dates. You can deal with them later. Your final step is to record the tasks you will have time for into the Today’s Schedule column of your list. As shown in Figure 1, label each task with its time.That’s it. You can now reference your list throughout the day to remind yourself of what you should be doing and when. But here’s the important point: The specific times on your schedule aren’t set in stone—they’re more of a suggestion. As we will discuss shortly, you will be free to move tasks around throughout the day, depending on your energy level and unexpected events that may arise. The main reason you break down your to-dos into time slots is to help you avoid the common student mistake of overestimating your free time. Many well-intentioned students use a simple to-do list to keep track of their daily obligations.But without time labeling, they have no idea how much they can actually accomplish, leading to an unrealistic plan. A twelve-hour day seems like a large amount of time, but when you account for meals and classes and meetings and breaks and socializing, your schedule suddenly becomes a lot tighter. The equation is simple: If you overestimate your free time, then you are likely to put off work until it’s too late. And this leads to all-nighters, panic attacks, and shoddy performance. A realistic sense of time is arguably one of the most important factors in succeeding as a student.After a week or two of time labeling your to-dos, you will be well along your way toward developing this crucial trait. Use the List During the Day As you move through your day, use the rough schedule recorded under the Today’s Schedule column to rem ind yourself what you should be doing. Keep in mind that the student lifestyle is, generally, quite unpredictable. Things will always come up at the last minute. Work will take longer than expected, your roommate will point you toward some absurd Web site that immediately demands an afternoon of your scrutiny—you know how it goes.So adjust your time labels as many times as needed. But don’t procrastinate excessively! The list you constructed in the morning should contain a reasonable amount of work, so if your schedule doesn’t become too unexpectedly crazy, you should be able to accomplish most, if not all, of these tasks. In general, if you’re completing most of what’s on your list at least five days out of seven, then you’re as productive as any student realistically needs to be. If not, don’t worry—the next section of Part One will teach you how to combat your urge to procrastinate.Remember, your list also serves another imp ortant purpose. During the day you will probably encounter various new to-dos and deadlines that need to be scheduled. For example, a professor might announce the date of an upcoming exam, or a friend might give you the date and time for an upcoming study group. The key is to get these obligations out of your head as soon as possible so your mind is not unnecessarily cluttered. Jot down a quick reminder on your list, in the Things to Remember column, as soon as they occur. This takes only a few seconds, and then you can forget about them.The actual scheduling of these tasks will take place the next morning; all you have to do for now is scribble a few words on a piece of scrap paper. Remember, to-dos and deadlines that exist only in your mind drain your energy, distract your attention, create stress, and are more likely to be forgotten. When you’re working, you should be able to concentrate on working, and when you’re relaxing, you should be able to enjoy relaxing. But you can’t devote 100 percent of your energy to any activity when you have important reminders bouncing around in your head.Few students have the energy to schedule every new piece of information that comes along during the day. Think about this for a moment: If it’s the middle of the afternoon, and you are hungry, and everyone is just getting up to leave at the end of a long class, when suddenly the professor yells out a notice that a paper topic is due the following week†¦you’re probably not going to have the energy to stop packing up, take out a calendar, think about what steps are involved in coming up with a paper topic, and then schedule each step on the appropriate days.It would be nice if you did, because then you could purge the deadline from your mind and be confident that it’s safely recorded in your calendar—but this is unrealistic. And it violates our original criterion that any timemanagement system should require only a few minu tes each day. That’s the power of the â€Å"things to remember† column of your list. You can’t expect yourself to be able to think seriously about time management at all points during your busy day. But the act of pulling out a piece of scrap paper from your pocket and quickly jotting down â€Å"anthro paper topic† requires minimal energy, no thinking, and barely any time.You don’t have to consider when to begin working on the paper topic, what steps are involved, or how many days it will require. You simply scribble down three words. The key is that the list is a trusted piece of storage. You are confident that tomorrow morning, when you’re doing your only time-management thinking for the day, you will see that reminder and record the appropriate steps in your calendar. Because of your list, the deadline will not be lost. It will be scheduled. Restarting After a Period of NeglectTo date, I have yet to have successfully followed any time-man agement system without interruption for longer than two months. I try, but inevitably I hit a rough patch. Typically, this happens during the few days following a really busy period—I’m so exhausted from the intensity of the preceding work that I find myself unable to even mention the word â€Å"to-do† without breaking into a cold sweat. This happens to everyone, and you can expect that periodically it will happen to you too. Don’t fear these occasions, and don’t let them make you feel like a failure.They’re normal. The key point is that these lapses are temporary. After a couple days of swearing off my calendar, I always find myself growing uncomfortable with the increasing number of obligations that are free floating in my mind. Before I know it, I’m back into the swing of using the system again, and no worse for wear. The same will be true for you. Once you have learned the power of feeling organized, you will have a hard time goin g long periods without it. Fortunately, the system described here is adaptable to these periods of neglect.If you skip a few days, all you need to do upon restarting is to dump all the to-dos and deadlines free floating in your mind onto a sheet of paper and then push these back onto your calendar for future dates. Case Study: A Monday with Stephen Even the simplest systems can come across as confusing when first described. So let’s go through a quick example that will show you how to put this system into practice. Stephen’s story is based upon the real-life college experiences of myself and the many students I interviewed. If you’re already at college, what follows will seem familiar.If you haven’t yet started your undergraduate career, don’t panic! Yes, Stephen has a lot on his plate. Notice, however, how he uses our system to keep control of his many obligations. Though he can’t finish everything in one day, he remains confident that ever ything that needs to get done will get done in time. As you read this example, imagine how Stephen’s stress might increase, and his efficiency decrease, if he didn’t have his list and calendar to guide his actions and capture the new to-dos and deadlines that constantly pop up. Monday Morning Stephen gets up early because he has class at 9:30 A.M. —a horrible thing. He grabs his calendar from his desk and roots around in his hamper to find the sheet of notebook paper that he used as yesterday’s list. He has only a couple of minutes before class, but that’s okay. Our system requires very little time. Figure 2 shows what Stephen finds recorded on his calendar for today. Figure 2. Stephen’s calendar entry for Monday Monday—3/11/07 †¢ Finish reading for Tuesday Gov class. †¢ Gift for Dad’s birthday †¢ First step of research for Gov paper—find books, Xerox relevant chapters. †¢ Pay cell phone bill. †¢ Return Mark’s CD. First half of Econ problem set (due Wed) †¢ Pick topic for Anthro paper (due tomorrow). †¢ Read five chapters from Anthro book (need to catch up for Friday’s quiz). †¢ Dinner with guys—7 P. M. —Molly’s †¢ Ill-conceived toga party—10 P. M. —Alpha Chi Figure 3. Stephen’s list from Sunday Sunday—3/10/07 Today’s Schedule †¢ 1:00 to 3:00—read article for Anthro. †¢ 3:00 to 6:00—write Government essay. †¢ 7:00 to 8:00—dinner with Sarah †¢ 9:00 to 10:00—edit Government essay. †¢ 10:00 to 11:00—start reading for Tuesday’s Government Things to Remember †¢ Call home. †¢ Start researching summer nternships. †¢ Create schedule for practicing guitar? class Figure 3 shows what he finds scrawled on yesterday’s list. There are several things to notice here. First, Stephen has a lot of work recorded on hi s calendar entry for today. More than he can probably accomplish in twelve hours, so some of these to-dos will need to be moved to other dates. Also notice Stephen’s schedule from the day before (Sunday). This is typical. A fun night on Saturday inevitably leads to a late start and a large workload on Sunday. Stephen was too ambitious with his planning, and by 10:00 P. M. e was burnt out from working on his essay and never got around to starting the Government reading he had scheduled. So this task will need to be carried over to today. Finally, notice how Stephen’s Things to Remember column from yesterday includes some long-term projects, such as â€Å"Create schedule for practicing guitar. † This is a great use of the list! If you jot down ideas for extracurricular and personal projects as they occur to you, they will get moved onto your calendar and therefore won’t be forgotten until you finally get around to doing something about them. Now let’ s see how Stephen gets a handle on all of this before class.What Does Stephen Do First? Stephen’s first step is to time label the tasks currently on his plate so he can determine how much he can actually get done. Between his calendar entry for today and the leftovers from yesterday’s list, Stephen has a lot of to-dos to schedule. His strategy is simple: He starts time labeling in order of importance until his schedule is full, and then moves the rest of the items to other days on the calendar. To effectively time label, however, he must first figure out how much free time he has available. Stephen quickly runs through the following in his head:I have class from 9:30 to 10:30, and another class from 11:00 to 12:00. It’s unlikely that I will get any work done between my 7:00 P. M. dinner and the Alpha Chi party that starts soon after. I should also try to squeeze in an hour or two for a predinner workout (have to look good in that toga), so I should aim to be don e with all of my work by 5:00. With his free time now identified, Stephen can begin to time label his to-dos. Here is his thought process: In between class, from 10:30 to 11:00, I can squeeze in my three small tasks—pay cell phone bill, buy a birthday gift for Dad, and return Mark’s CD.After my second class, I will need to get lunch, but then I should get right to work on my Government reading because it’s due tomorrow! Let’s see, I have three Government articles to read, which will realistically take two hours, so I will label this task with 1:00 to 3:00. Hmmmm, I am running out of time here. I need to start that Econ problem set because those suck, and it’s due Wednesday morning, so I’ll label that task with 3:00 to 4:30. Okay, I am down to my final half hour. What else has to get done? My Anthro paper topic is due tomorrow, so I will have to squeeze that in at 4:30 to 5:00. And that’s all I have time for.At this point, Stephen is a lmost done. All that’s left is taking care of the still-unscheduled to-dos by moving them to future dates. Remember, these include both the unscheduled tasks recorded for the current day and the â€Å"things to remember† items from yesterday’s list. On yesterday’s list I have a reminder to Call home†¦this week is so busy†¦okay, I’ll jot that down on the calendar entry for Friday, I’ll be more relaxed by then. I really don’t have time right now for these other two reminders—start internship research and create guitar schedule—so I’ll jot those down on the calendar entry for the first weekend after midterms are over.I should have more free time then. Okay, what’s left? The unlabeled items from today’s calendar entry. No problem. I can move the Anthro reading to tomorrow’s calendar entry, and then move the Government paper research to Wednesday—I can work on it after I hand in my Econ problem set. Done! That’s it. Stephen has finished all of his serious time-management thinking for the day. Before leaving for class, he rips out a fresh sheet of notebook paper to use for today’s list. He divides it into two columns and jots down the tasks he scheduled for the day. Figure 4 shows what Stephen’s list looks like as he bolts out the door.The entire process described above would realistically take only around three to five minutes to complete. The more you use this system, the more natural it becomes. Before you know it, updating your calendar and dashing off a daily schedule will become as routine as taking a morning shower. Remember, this is the only serious timemanagement thinking that Stephen has to do all day. Now he’s ready to face his Monday with his mind free from worry about tasks he’s forgetting or due dates that are looming. He knows he has scheduled all the tasks on his plate and that they will get done eventually.He has a flexible plan. And he can trust it. Figure 4. Stephen’s list on Monday morning Monday—3/11/07 Today’s Schedule †¢ 9:30 to 10:30 Class †¢ 10:30 to 11:00—Gift for Dad’s birthday, pay cell phone bill, return Mark’s CD. †¢ 11:00 to 12:00—Class †¢ 12:00 to 1:00 Lunch/Break †¢ 1:00 to 3:00 Do Government reading assignment. †¢ 3:00 to 4:30 Start work on Econ problem set. †¢ 4:30 to 5:00 Come up with topic for Anthro paper. †¢ 5:00 to 7:00 Get huge. †¢ 7:00 Dinner followed by inevitable embarrassment at toga party (Note to self: Flex a lot at party. ) Things to RememberNow let’s see how Stephen holds up†¦ During the Day on Monday The day starts off fine. Stephen successfully finishes the small tasks that he scheduled for 10:30. During his second class, he remembers that he has some overdue library books that need to be returned. No problem. Stephen whips the list out of his pocke t and jots down â€Å"Return books† under the â€Å"Things to Remember† column. A little later, the professor announces the date and time of the midterm—something else that needs to be scheduled. Again, no problem for Stephen. He adds â€Å"Sched. Gov midterm (4/5, 3 P. M. † to his list, and then leaves the classroom confident that these tasks will be scheduled appropriately tomorrow morning. After a leisurely lunch, Stephen hunkers down in the library to tackle his government reading. The articles are a little shorter than usual, so he finishes by 2:30, which is nice. As he leaves the library, however, Stephen runs into a friend who convinces him to tag along on a Wal-Mart run. To be honest, it didn’t take much convincing. College students, for some inexplicable reason, love Wal-Mart runs. After this (unavoidable) detour, Stephen gets back to campus by 3:30. Now he’s behind schedule.Quickly checking his e-mail, Stephen sees a message from a classmate asking if he wants to join a study group at 4:00 to work on the Econ problem set. Swiftly adapting, Stephen once again whips out his list and makes a couple of rapid changes to the Today’s Schedule column. He bumps up the Anthro paper topic work to start now, and then replaces his Econ problem set work with the study group that he just found out about. One of the big advantages of this system is its flexibility. Schedules will always change, but this the system makes it easy for you to regain your focus after getting sidetracked.Figure 5 shows the new state of Stephen’s list. Figure 5. Stephen’s list Monday afternoon Monday—3/11/07 Today’s Schedule †¢ 9:30 to 10:30—Class †¢ 10:30 to 11:00—Gift for Dad’s Return Mark’s CD. Things to Remember †¢ return books. †¢ Sched. Gov midterm birthday, Pay cell phone bill, (4/5, 3 P. M. ) †¢ 11:00 to 12:00—Class †¢ 12:00 to 1:00—Lu nch/Break †¢ 1:00 to 3:00—Do Government reading assignment. †¢ 3:30 to 4:00—Choose Anthro paper topic †¢ 4:00 to 5:00—Work with group on Econ problem set †¢ 5:00 to 7:00—Get huge. †¢ 7:00—Dinner followed by inevitable embarrassment at toga party. (Note to self: Flex a lot at party. )The Anthro work goes fine. Stephen finds a topic that he is happy with and then runs off to meet with his Econ group. During the meeting, the group agrees to meet again Tuesday morning to finish the problem set. Stephen quickly jots down â€Å"Econ group—10 A. M. † under Things to Remember and then heads off to the gym. He’s done with work for the day. The Aftermath Because he finished a lot of work during the morning and afternoon before the party, Stephen was able to really relax and have a good time that night. In addition, he successfully recorded all of the new to-dos and deadlines that cropped up during the day.Instead of bouncing around in his head and causing stress, they were safely placed in Stephen’s system and will be scheduled in due time. Most important, none of this required him to explicitly think about time management beyond the five minutes he spent planning that morning and the quick rescheduling he did in the afternoon. As suggested at the beginning of this case study, imagine for a moment what Stephen’s day might have been like without the simple time-management system. What if, instead, he’d employed the strategy used by most students and simply tried to remember what he needed to get done?It’s highly unlikely that the small tasks— returning a CD, buying a birthday gift, paying a bill—would have been completed. Without a schedule, people don’t like to do menial chores unless they’re 100 percent necessary. There’s also a good chance that he would have forgotten about the Anthro paper topic altogether after the last-minu te study group came up. What about the big-picture reminders from Sunday—calling home, scheduling internships, creating a guitarpracticing schedule? Those would have been pushed out of his head completely by the demands of near-future deadlines.Without a system to capture them, we can’t expect Stephen to remember long-term ideas for any extended period of time. Most important, without the system, Stephen would have completed much less schoolwork on Monday. The day would have focused, more or less, only on the Government reading, because that was the only big task actually due the next day. Without time labels, Stephen would have had a much hazier understanding of his free time, so he probably wouldn’t have started this reading until later in the afternoon (for the most part, students don’t like to start any work without a large block of free time ahead of them).Remember, however, that this assignment took a couple of hours to complete, so that means if St ephen had waited until the afternoon to start, he would have finished only this single task by 5:00, with the Econ problem set and Anthro paper topic likely falling by the wayside. Instead, Stephen ended up finishing six tasks by 5:00, leaving plenty of time for exercise and debauchery during the evening. As you can see from the case study, this simple time-management system, which requires only a few minutes of planning each day, made Stephen significantly more productive and significantly less stressed.It will do the same for you. In other words, five minutes every morning and a sheet of scrap paper in your pocket are enough to transform you from a stressed-out student struggling to get things done, into an organized, relaxed, finely tuned academic machine. If you remember one lesson from this book, it should be the lesson of this case study: A little organization goes a hell of a long way. Step 2 Declare War on Procrastination In the previous section we introduced a simple time-m anagement system to help you plan your day intelligently. That was the easy part.Anyone can spend five minutes to figure out what they should be doing. The real challenge is marshaling the motivation to actually do the work once it’s scheduled. Without some control over your schedule, you cannot be a happy and successful student—no matter how good your intentions. As you might expect, in conducting interviews for this book, I put a significant focus on the issue of procrastination. Anyone who makes straight As has clearly found a way to consistently get work done when it needs to be done, and I wanted to find out how. As it turns out, however, I was in for a surprise.Every student I interviewed was asked the following question: â€Å"How do you defeat procrastination? † As soon as the first responses were returned, it became clear that something was not quite right. I received answers such as: â€Å"I don’t. † â€Å"Rarely. † â€Å"I didnâ €™t. † â€Å"I don’t think that you can. † These were not the responses that I expected—it didn’t make sense! Everything else they told me about how they studied and wrote papers clearly indicated that these scholastic studs were kicking some very serious procrastinatory ass, so why were they all claiming they didn’t defeat procrastination?What was going on here? Fortunately, many students went on to qualify this first reaction, and it was in these qualifications that I began to figure out what they really meant. â€Å"I don’t think that you can,† was how Lee, a straight-A student from Columbia, began his answer, but he soon added: â€Å"You just have to try to limit it. † Ryan, a straight-A Dartmouth student, started by claiming, â€Å"Really, I don’t defeat procrastination. † But then he continued: â€Å"Or, at least, I don’t think I do†¦although, I suppose, compared to the majority of stu dents, I’m not as bad as I think. † I don’t know that I’ve yet defeated procrastination,† was how Christine, a straight-A Harvard student, began before concluding: â€Å"but I’ve found ways to make this inevitable tendency less destructive. † Over time, these extended responses began to paint a clear picture. When the straight-A students answered â€Å"I don’t defeat procrastination,† they really meant to say â€Å"I don’t defeat the urge to procrastinate. † And this makes perfect sense. To put it simply, some work just plain sucks, and you, like the straight-A students interviewed for this book, will want to procrastinate on this sucky work.It’s unavoidable. Therefore, the goal in this step is not to teach you how to love all work and never feel like procrastinating ever again. Instead, I’m going to describe some targeted strategies to help you sidestep this unavoidable urge when it arises†”not destroy it altogether. This is how straight-A students prevent procrastination from destabilizing their schedule. They don’t rely only on willpower and good intentions, but instead deploy an arsenal of specific, tested rules that help them short-circuit their natural desire to procrastinate.These students, of course, aren’t perfect, and they still occasionally put off work for no good reason. But overall their strategies made them significantly more effective at following a study plan then their peers—and this made all the difference. What follows are five anti-procrastination battle plans drawn directly from my straight-A interviews. These techniques are not theoretical; they are exhaustively used by real students to beat down procrastination again and again. Trust them. Put them into practice immediately. Make them into a habit. The effect will be immediate.You may never fully rid yourself of the urge to procrastinate, and that’s okay. But with t he right strategies in place, you can rid yourself of the fear that you’ll always give in to that urge. Procrastination Battle Plan #1: Keep a work progress journal Think about the last time that you procrastinated on something important. You can probably recall some of the wishy-washy excuses your mind concocted for delaying the work. Something along the lines of â€Å"I don’t have all the materials here with me now, but if I waited until tomorrow, I could get tarted right away with everything I need,† or â€Å"It’s getting late, and my concentration is waning, it would be a waste to start now, so I will wait to tackle this when I’m fresh in the morning. † Why are these excuses necessary? Why don’t we simply think: â€Å"This is boring, and I’m lazy, so I’m not going to do it,† which is much closer to the truth? The answer is that your ego is a powerful force. We procrastinate, but we don’t want to admit t o ourselves that we procrastinate. So we make excuses to ourselves to avoid the truth. A work progress journal is a simple tool that takes advantage of this reality to help you defeat procrastination.It works as follows: Buy a cheap spiral notebook, and keep it near your calendar. Each morning, when you work out your schedule for the day, quickly jot down in the notebook the date and the most important tasks that you are scheduled to get done. At the end of the day, if you’ve completed all of these tasks, simply jot down all completed. If you failed to complete some tasks, record this, along with a quick explanation. The system adds only an extra minute to your morning routine and requires only an extra minute each night before you go to sleep. It’s simple enough to turn into a habit.What’s amazing, however, is the journal’s immediate effect. Having to record, in ink, on paper, that you procrastinated over a task for no good reason is a powerful blow to y our ego. It might be easy to tell yourself a few weak excuses for putting off a tedious assignment, but when you have to record these same excuses on paper their foolishness is exposed. You can no longer get away with lame rationalizations. This is especially true if you continue to delay the same task day after day. After seeing all of those excuses pile up in your journal, there will be no escape from reality: You are being lazy!Your ego won’t like this truth, so it will kick-start your motivation in an effort to avoid it. The journal, in this way, acts like a personal drill sergeant, sitting on your shoulder and yelling into your ear: â€Å"Soldier, I want you to go get me a pillow, because I know I must be dreaming. I thought I just saw you consider not starting your paper this afternoon, and I knnnoooowwww you wouldn’t try to pull that crap with me standing right next to you! Now go grab your notes and get workin’ before I make you record your laziness in ink where everyone can see it! Many students, myself included, don’t keep a journal all the time, but use it to help them get through unusually busy periods. For example, my work progress journal was a key force in getting me through my senior fall semester, which involved classes, grad school applications, and the writing of my first book. Others have had great success with the journal to keep focused on their LSAT preparation while juggling the demands of regular class work. Some students go so far as to use the system with a friend, agreeing to review each other’s journal once a week.As Christine from Harvard suggests: â€Å"If you have a friend in the same class, check up on each other’s progress. † And even if you can’t find a willing journal partner, there are other ways to use friends to jumpstart your drive: â€Å"It helps to simply tell your roommates of your goals, and have them guilt-trip you into working. † Procrastination Battle Plan #2: Feed the Machine Low energy breeds procrastination. Most students know the feeling—your mind starts to feel sluggish, you begin to read whole pages of text without remembering a single word, and writing coherent notes becomes a Herculean task.It’s almost impossible to motivate yourself to stick to a schedule under these mental conditions. Accordingly, during long work periods, you need to feed your body the fuel it needs to perform at it