Biography Of Alfred Binet The Psychologist Research Paper

Biography Of Alfred Binet The Psychologist - Research Paper Example Thus, he began studying the natural sciences with a particular emphasis in neurology. In 1891, Binet took over as the director of the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology in Sorbonne. Specifically, Binet was interested in the development of children, specifically in the field of the developing intelligence (â€Å"Binet, Alfred). Intelligence, to this day, is still a highly debated field. The debate focuses on two main issues: defining what intelligence is and deciding whether it is an inherently biological feature or whether the environment defines it. Society has attempted to figure out ways to quantify the measure of one’s intelligence and this started with Binet. At first, Binet was interested in developing tests in which they would be used to see whether a child was suffering from a mental disability or not. This started when he was asked to join the Free Society for the Psychological Study of Children. His goal was to take this study and use a highly scientific and qua ntitative method in order to quantify this construct of intelligence. This use of quantifiable measurements lead to Binet creating the first types of intelligence tests, making him the father of all the modern intelligence tests that are used today to measure constructs from IQ to scholastic achievement. At the forefront of his intelligence tests, a student under the name of Theodore Simon appointed himself as Binet’s assistant in the study of childhood intelligence. They developed a scale of intelligence, which became famously known as the Binet-Simon scale. The Binet-Simon scale was the first created by Binet and Simon that was a psychological test in order to gauge a child’s intelligence level. The scale consisted of a number of tests, which would require the child to demonstrate different ways of thinking and problem solving. Some of these tests were aimed at measuring the child’s perception in response to a stimulus such as light, auditory, and tactile resp onses. Other tests worked on a recognition principle using the recognition of food as the construct. This would involve presenting the food with an object that wasn’t food, but was similar in the dimensions, appearance, etc. to see whether or not the child would be able to tell a difference. In addition, there were tests that were designed to gauge how effectively the child’s motor function and coordination worked through the execution of simple movements through commands. Lastly, they would test what today could be considered general intelligence in that it involved the recognition and statement of what objects were. This was accomplished through the use of physical objects, pictures, etc. which required not only for the child to recognize and process what it was, but be able to tell the tester verbally what they were seeing. Comparison tests were also used in order to determine whether the child could discriminate against objects, which were similar, but different. T ests in attention, suggestibility, memory, and problem solving were also conducted in order to determine the child’s intellectual level (Binet). Binet was very thorough in his methods as he wanted to use a scientific method as well as be able to quantify his data. However, he was a self-learned psychologists which in the end gave him a grave disadvantage when we was developing theories regarding intelligence. Thus, many of his scales were

Advantages Of Human Resource Planning Business Essay

Advantages Of Human Resource Planning Business Essay Human resource planning is really important that without this all planning will finally end up as a mere guess work. Even if the predictions or forecast is not always successful, it is still needed because the forecasts can be quite useful which will give a basis. Upon this basis it is able to avoid ad hoc problems to an extent. Therefore human resource planning should be articulated along with the organisational planning. A dearth of particular category of employee or particular kind skills will affect the organisation in achieving its goals. Rapid changes in technology, marketing, management etc., will result in need of particular category an skilled persons. Changes within an organization in its design and structure will affect manpower demand. Demographic changes like the altering profile of the manpower in terms of age, sex, education etc. The Government policies in regard to reservation, child labour, working conditions etc. Different labour laws affecting the demand and supply of labour. Pressure from trade unions, politicians etc. Advantages of Human Resource Planning: Human Resources Planning (HRP) expects not just the needed quality and quantity of employees instead decide the accomplish plan for all the occasions of human resource management .The major advantages of Human resource planning are: It assures the corporate plan of the firm. The HRP elucidates doubts and alters to the upper limit potential and enables the organization to have right kind of people at right time in right place. It allows background for progress and growth of employees through training, development etc. It aids in anticipating the cost of salary increasing, improved benefits etc. It also helps to predict the cost of pay offs, incentives and all other cost of human resources which facilitates the formulation of budgets in an organization. To forecast the changes in abilities, aptitude and attitude of personnel. It results in the advancement of different origins of human resources to encounter the organizational goals and objectives. It also aids in taking measures to amend human resource shares in the form of enhanced output ,business turnover etc It facilities the control of all the functions, operations, contribution and cost of human resources Planning as an organisational business strategy: Planning process in a strategic way is often accomplished by networking with in and outside the organisation. The focus is therefore on strengthening the networking with the internal human resource professionals and external human resource persons which will be rooted in sharing information, technology, tools necessary for planning and development of personnel. The outcome depends on effective implementation of the developed tools and resources needed. Out of these a sustainable and feasible strategy has to be formulated. The most important thing to be noted here is that the strategy formulated should be articulated with the overall business strategy of the organisation. For this they will consult different human resource managers and all the line managers in the organisation. In order to ensure highest possible utilization of the tools they will work in close conjunction with the managers. This will be aimed in creating a sound personnel data base and tools for the line managers. Long term planning for success in short term: Though long term planning is advised the daily operational pressures would cause the long term planning to give way to short term planning. This might cause the plans ultimately to be less successful. It can be very expensive too. Quite lot of lead time is needed for recruiting, developing talented personnel. This will require long term economic plans. For a successful planning, all the factors need to be interconnected. The impact of short term planning will be to rely on current work force for all the organisational activities. But so as to achieve long term goals of an organisation it must have some changes made in the current human resources. It should be able to foresee the future needs of the organisation even in worst external scenario. Now the focus has been shifted from long range planning to strategic planning. What long range means is to predict for a particular time in future the amount of demand of an organisations services and to analyse in what area that demand will occur in future. This is often used to determine the demand in certain situations like expansion, adding of more services to the existing situation, capital needs etc. But later when the industries became volatile and the external scenario became dynamic the long range planning was replaced by strategic planning. The idea behind long range planning is that the firm will continue its rendering of services so as to match with its demand. But the idea underlying behind the strategic planning is that there are lot of economic, social, political, technological and competitive changes happening. By understanding all these changes to analyse whether the organisation will be able to provide services that would meet these challenges or whether it should m ove to further new services and products. Though it will take considerable time to evolve a strategy, time span is not the important focus here. It might even take generations to evolve and implement a strategy. Therefore it is better to use long term and short term to describe the time that it will take for a strategy to implement. CHAPTER 2 Literature Review: Human beings are the most important assets in hospitals. Machines and other equipments which are integral parts of delivering health care require the human touch, expertise, and commitment for their full utilization and application in delivery of health care. Therefore planning of human resources is the key to any health care provision. The objective of human resource (HR) policy is to attract, recruit, retain and develop competent personnel and Create a continuously learning health care organisation. (B.Ray) Human resource planning is the projection of the number of people required and the type of people in terms of skill mix required for the organisation so as to achieve the desired goals and objectives of the organisation. This means that human resource planning is an important add on to the strategic plans. But evidence shows that the connecting bridge between human resource planning and strategic management is not stressed in practice (Baird et al.1983, De sancto-1983; Ohan Rynes-1983). Reason to this non utilisation is found in focus of human resource planning literature. Almost all the research focuses on human resource supply and demand forecasting (Zedeck Casci-1984). Extra care may be taken in developing a statistical model of manpower planning, but little care is given to gaining managerial acceptance of such plans. Thus there exist a huge gap between available techniques and their use because important organisational realities are not projected in to the models (Zedeck Casc io,1984) Rapid environmental change, globalization, innovations to provide competitive products and services, changing customer and investor demands have become the standard backdrop for organizations. To compete effectively, firms must constantly improve their performance by reducing costs, enhancing quality, and differentiating their products and services. To improve firm performance and create firm competitive advantage, HR should focus on better and new set of priorities. These newly set priorities should be more organisational, business and strategic oriented and less focussed towards old traditional HR functions like staffing, training, appraisal and compensation. Business strategic priorities include team-based job designs, flexible workforces, quality improvement practices, employee empowerment and incentive compensation (Jing and Huang 2005). SHRM was designed to diagnose firm strategic needs and planned talent development which is required to implement a competitive strategy and achieve operational goals (Huselid et al., 1997). Apart from report proof on the strategic importance of human resource planning, studies of organisation practices give an indication of its arousing grandness for strategic applications. A study interviewed human resource executives from 137 companies to describe the reasons why their companies were following human resource forecasting, which an important part of human resource is planning. The most important three reasons were for bringing up their human resources (77.6 percent), for avoiding personnel shortages (73.1 percent), and to collect information for decisions (73.1 percent). Another set of reasons for human resource forecasting included the following: optimistic action efforts (63.6 percent), budgeting (62.1 percent), and career planning (59.7 percent)

Assisi :: essays research papers

Critical Evaluation-Assisi A poem that I have been studying recently is Assisi by Norman McCaig, which I found very interesting to read because it made a statement which relates to our world today even though the poem was wrote about thirty or forty years ago. The poem has lots of ideas including effective figures of speech, good choice of words, important images and irony. The statement that McCaig makes is, where ever there is great wealth it always exists along side great poverty. The poem is set in Assisi in Italy around the 1970’s were all the rich tourists are coming in hundreds from all different countries far and wide to see the frescoes painted by Giotto in Assisi’s huge cathedral. McCaig mainly focuses on the dwarf outside of the three-tier cathedral built in honour of St. Francis. McCaig then proceeds to the priest guiding the tourists around the cathedral telling them the history of Giotto’s frescoes and how they individually teach people the goodness of God and the suffering of his son. McCaig uses effective littery techniques to describe the tourists and to describe the dwarf. He then goes on to explain that the tourists are not studying the frescoes and are just there to boast about being there. Then he goes on to tell of the dwarfs voice when he says â€Å"Grazie† for the money one of the tourists have given to him outside the cathedral. McCaig uses juxtaposition by situating the dwarf outside of the huge three tier cathedral. McCaig also refers to the dwarf as a â€Å"ruined temple†. By saying this he creates a huge contrast between the dwarf and the cathedral, he also uses irony to compare the dwarf to St. Francis were he says: â€Å"Outside the three tiers of churches built in honour of St. Francis, brother of the poor, talker with birds, over whom he had the advantage of not being dead yet.† This is saying that the dwarf had an advantage over one group of people, the dead. I think that it was a good idea to situate the dwarf outside the huge cathedral and create the image of a great, strong, beautifully designed building standing over a small, weak, deformed person. McCaig gives the reader a graphic description of the dwarf in both stanzas 1 and 3 where he uses many littery techniques to describe the dwarf. In stanza 1 he uses alliteration, simile and metaphor to give the reader a graphic view of the dwarfs deformed body:

Greektown Ethnography

I took a trip to Greek town Casino in Detroit Michigan with my father, this trip was something of an unexpected trip but I figured it was a great place to observe the behaviors of many different cultures as Greek town casino is the home of a multicultural society. I wanted to observe the behaviors of those between African American’s and Caucasian persons. I wanted to see if one race over the other tended to gamble more or if one culture got more aggressive as the night went on. While we know that casinos in Michigan restrict the age limit of gamblers did age affect those that gambled or was it just those of a certain race. The crowed is about sixty percent African American, Thirty Percent Caucasian and the other ten percent is in the category of what is called the â€Å"other’s† category. The age groups range from the young newbie’s that just turned twenty-one to late eighties. The bells and whistles are going off on nearby machines; the crowds grow increasingly big at different tables as the more a person wins. Yet those who come for just something to do keep sat at their machines playing their slots. Looking around the people didn’t seem any different the African American’s seemed to stay localized to the slots area whereas the Caucasian’s seemed to play at the tables more. I found a patron playing a penny slot named Gladys who gave me the rundown of the people and their actions. According to Gladys the Caucasian people tend to play on tables more and consume more alcoholic beverages as where the African Americans tend to gamble more at the slots and tend to smoke more than those of the Caucasian culture. I continued to observe the patrons to see if what Gladys was saying was true. Great majorities of the Caucasian’s were in fact at tables and about sixty percent of them had a drink at hand. While majority of the African American’s were at a slot machine or an electronic table with no human interaction. I wondered if there was something to the no human interaction did African American’s think it was bad luck. Did they think it would make them gamble more? The move I observed the cultures at the casino the quicker I noticed that African American’s gambled more on the slots then the Caucasian’s at the tables. As the day went on I continued to talk to the staff and patrons regarding he behavior of everyone around. A few waitresses claimed African American men; young or old were rude when it came to providing service. They were more touchy feely and made sexual comments, not to mention they left a lousy or no tip at all. Whereas Caucasian’s regardless of age, or gender provided better tips, manners and compliments said Allison the head supervisor of the wait staff. The pit managers claimed that Caucasian’s placed higher bets if there were a female table dealer where as African American’s placed higher bets if it was a male dealer. He went on to tell me that most Caucasian’s started their gambling in the casino with twenty-five dollars and that African American placed bets of one hundred dollars to start their gambling fiasco. While it seemed obvious that regardless of shape, size or color everyone at the casino claimed not to care whether the won or lost. But as long as they had fun that was all that mattered to them. In conclusion the African American’s tended to gamble more than Caucasian. But the Caucasian’s tended to get rougher as they drank and lost more.  It was right then and there that I realized that the casino wasn’t really about money but about freedom. People of all different cultures were coming to Greektown casino in the hopes that they would possibly win, someone would listen to their story, and most of all that they would have fun and escape their everyday life. Regardless if a person had a drink or cigarette in hand, they were there laughing and spending whatever money they came with. It didn’t matter who it was, African American, Caucasian or a member of the other category each and every one of them had a smile on their face and were laughing they were just there to have fun.

Being Wrong Chapter 5

Samantha Merlin October 14, 2012 IGE 120 MWF 11:45-12:50 Reading Response: Being Wrong: Chapter 5 by Kathryn Schultz At the beginning of chapter 5 â€Å"Our Minds, Part Two: Belief† Schultz informs us that Alan Greenspan testifies before congress on October 23, 2008 because of the financial crisis. The chapter then leads on to expand on theâ€Å"Greenspan moments† which is basically when beliefs fail us. Belief in casual conversation is a conscious belief, such as morality, politics, ourselves or others.Philosophers include all unconscious beliefs too, like believing that the sky is dark outside if you're in your bedroom at night with the blinds closed and that the sun won't rise for many more hours and when it does it will do so in the east. Both explicit beliefs like â€Å"everyone hates me† and implicit ones â€Å"the sky is blue† serve as a function of helping me figure out where to sit when I enter a room. Once an implicit assumption is violated, it b ecomes explicit. If I suddenly fall through the floor, my implicit assumptions about the solidity of the floor suddenly appear in my conscious.The beliefs at the acute ends of the implicit and explicit range breaks down most strikingly when they are revealed incorrectly. However, holding a belief can have many outcomes. Belief in overall perspective led to spending $300 million and $30 million per year on LIGO. We have distal beliefs because we need to be able to theorize about some things, but end up theorizing about everything. The theorizing process is quick and automated and doesn't require us to intentionally activate it, so we cant stop theorizing. We tend to mainly notice our theories when they're wrong.Babies as young as seven months are already theorizing about gravity. Alison Gopnik assumed that the theory drive exists particularly esfor early childhood, but functions throughout lives, just like sex drive exists precisely for fertile years, but works before and after. Alth ough we are good at making theories, we are not good at realizing we made them. We have a tendency toward â€Å"Naive realism† which means that our perception matches reality. Anyhow, this can not be true because there are things that we can not perceive like infrared and molecules.All children under the age of four are Naive realists because they believe that we can not believe things that are wrong. The chapters main idea was that if you believe that your beliefs are true, you will assume that those that disagree with you are ignorant of facts, are idiots or evil. Just from reading this chapter I have come to the conclusion that Schulz takes on a heavy topic that most of us don't understand. The broad majority of people either feel they have to be right at all costs, or that being wrong is a personal failure.In reality, being wrong is what helps us grow and understand our world better. It was impossible not to think about politics while reading this, either. Each political party has a hard and fast set of beliefs that define them, and anyone not advocating to those beliefs is wrong and needs to be corrected. Unluckily, even when presented with evidence to the contrary relating to one of their closely-held views, it is nearly impossible for the person to adjust their thinking and admit they were wrong. There's no discussion and consideration of views to come up with a compromise or to learn from others.It's often a duel to the death to be right while proving the other person wrong. In the end, nobody gains from that. In class i'd like to discuss whether people thought that Being Wrong had a great message and can make a difference in someone's life or thought it can't cause any type of dramatic change of perspective. I feel that it can make a person's life more productive and enjoyable. Unfortunately, I have little hope that the average man on the street who is affected by the need to always be right will ever take the time to read and understand the me ssage of this chapter or the whole book in general.