Corporate finance Essay Example for Free

Corporate finance Essay There are three main reasons companies purchase investments in debt or stock securities. The first reason is if corporations have extra cash that they don’t need for immediate purchase of operating assets. The second reason is; Companies purchase investments to generate earnings from investment income. The third reason companies purchase investments is for strategic reasons. A company can exercise some influence over a customer by owning a significant, but not controlling, interest in that company. Or, a company may purchase a non controlling interest in another company in a related industry in which it wishes to establish a presence. (Weygandt, Kimmel, Kieso, 2010). Sometimes corporations will have excess cash for investment reasomns. It may invest in things, incase in the future the economy falls then it has money to fall back on when money is gone, or low. 3. Low-risk, high-liquidity, short-term securities such as government-issued securities are best when investing for short periods of time. 4. Debt securities, from banks and other financial institutions and stock securities from mutual funds and pension funds generate earnings when investing. 5. 6. Stocks of companies in a related industry or in an unrelated industry that the company wishes to enter Q: E12-2 Foren Corporation had the following transactions pertaining to debt investments. Jan. 1 Purchased 50 8%, $1,000 Choate Co. bonds for $50,000 cash plus brokerage fees of $900. Interest is payable semiannually on July 1 and January 1. July 1 Received semiannual interest on Choate Co. bonds. July 1 Sold 30 Choate Co. bonds for $34,000 less $500 brokerage fees. Instructions (a) Journalize the transactions. (b) Prepare the adjusting entry for the accrual of interest at December 31. A. Jan. 1 Debt investments $50,900 Cash $50,900 July 1 Cash $2000 Interest rev.$2000 July 1 Cash $33,500 Debt Investment $33,540 Gain on sale $2,960 Dec. 31 Interest receivable $2000 Interest revenue $2000 References Weygandt, J. J., Kimmel, P. D., Kieso, D. E. (2010). Financial accounting (7th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley Sons.

Ion Drive Propulsion: An Overview

Ion Drive Propulsion: An Overview TANG,YOUHENG Ion Drive propulsion, also called ion engine, which is a technology that involves gas ionization and can be used instead of standard chemicals. Give an electrical charge or ionize the gas xenon, which is like neon or helium, but heavier, the ionized gas can be electrically accelerated a speed of about 30km/s by the electric field force. When xenon ions are emitted at such high speed as exhaust from a spaceship, the spacecraft can be pushed in the opposite direction. The ion engine was firstly demonstrated by Emst Stuhliger, the German-born NASA scientist. Then at NASA Lewis Research Center (now called Glenn research center) from 1957 to the early 1960s IDP was developed in form by Harold R.Kaufman. Moreover, the ion drive propulsion was first demonstrated in space in â€Å"Space Electric Rocket Test (SERT)† I and II by NASA Lewis Research Center. The SERT-1, which is the first test was launched in July 20, 1964, proved the technology operated as predicted in space successfully. Furthermore, the second test SERT-II, which was launched on February 3rd 1970, verified the thousands of running hours operation of two mercury ion drive propulsions, though IDP were seldom used before the late 1990s. â€Å"Electric propulsion works by using electrical energy to accelerate a propellant to much higher velocities than is possible using chemical reactions. The most common propellant used in ion engines is xenon. Early ion engines used mercury and cesium, but they proved hard to work with. At room temperature, mercury is liquid and cesium is solid; they both must be heated to turn them into gases. Also, as mercury or cesium exhaust cooled, many of their atoms would condense on the exterior of the spacecraft, contaminating solar cells and instruments. Eventually researchers turned to xenon as a cleaner, simpler fuel for ion engines.† (De Felice, 1999). For IDP’s operation system, it uses an electric field to accelerate charged atoms or molecules to a high velocity. Ion thrusters generally use a cathode to generate a stream of electrons, which form an electric circuit with a positively charged ring the anode. A small magnetic field is used to aid this process (electrons spiral around the magnetic field lines, increasing the chance of electron-atom collisions). The ionized gas is accelerated out of the thruster and drifts towards an extraction grid system, so it can produce thrust. A neutraliser similar to the cathode is used to generate free electrons and balance the overall space charge of the outgoing beam so that the spacecraft does not charge itself up. To deal with this problem NASAs Deep Space 1 probe is testing a new type of ion thruster. The following description of DS-1s ion thrusters is from the official DS-1 Website: â€Å"Its ion propulsion system (IPS) utilizes a hollow cathode to produce electrons, used to ionize xenon. The Xe+ is electrostatically accelerated through a potential of up to 1280 V and emitted from the 30-cm thruster through a molybdenum grid. A separate electron beam is emitted to produce a neutral plasma beam. The power-processing unit (PPU) of the IPS can accept as much as 2.5 kW, corresponding to a peak thruster operating power of 2.3 kW and a thrust of 92 m N. Throttling is achieved by balancing thruster and Xe feed system parameters at lower power levels, and at the lowest thruster power, 500 W, the thrust is 20 m N. The specific impulse decreases from 3100 s at high power to 1900 s at the minimum throttle level. (De Felice, 1999)† Mostly, IDP is being used in aerospace application. Here are a couple of simple examples. Deep Space 1 which is a spacecraft of the NASA New Millennium Program dedicated to testing a payload of advanced, high risk technologies.Also it is the first spacecraft which used ion drive propulsion. Hayabusa which is an unmanned spacecraft developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to return a sample of material from a small near-Earth asteroid named 25143 Itokawa to Earth for further analysis and used xenon ion engines Dawm which is a space probe launched by NASA on September 27, 2007, to study the two most massive objects of the asteroid belt–the protoplanet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. It is the first NASA exploratory mission to use ion propulsion to enter orbits. There are three advantages of Ion Drive Propulsion which can probably explain why IDP is being used. First, it uses much less propellant than chemical rocketry so it may promise better reliability and simplicity than chemical rocketry or, from another perspective, it gets much more mileage out of a given quantity of propellant. Third, it could use 100% lunar or asteroid derived propellant. IDP can push a spacecraft up to about ten times as fast as chemical propulsion comparing IDP with chemical propulsion under the circumstances which ion propulsion is appropriate for. To sum up, the ion propulsion systems efficient use of electrical power and fuel enables modern spacecraft to travel farther, and it is cheaper than any other propulsion technology currently available. Ion drive propulsion is currently used for main propulsion on deep space probes and for station keeping on communication satellites. Ion thrusters expel ions to create thrust and can provide higher spacecraft top speeds than any other rocket which is available currently. In addition, the top speed of ion drive propulsion is startling. By using the principle of relativity, a physical situation could be analyzed from any reference frame as long as it moves with some constant speed relative to a known inertial frame. As a function of the proper time Ï„ experienced on the rocket, the acceleration of the rocket is a (Ï„),in Newtonian mechanics there is a quantity which increases the way velocity called the rapidity of the rocket . The rapidity ÃŽ ¸ will be ÃŽ ¸(Ï„)=∠« Ï„ 0 a(Ï„)dÏ„ The velocity is then v(Ï„)=tanhÃŽ ¸ . If a=g ,v(Ï„)=tanh(gÏ„) So if one year has passed on the rocket, the time on Earth will be tanh(1.05)=0.78C which means 78% of light. Since the limit of tanh is one as τ→∞, so the velocity of rocket will never get light speed. A more important limiting factor is the fuel. Fusion isnt a way around this because of E=mc^2 there is a limited energy can be calculate from a given mass of fuel. If a fraction (f) of the rocket is fuel, if all the fuel are burned, the momentum of the rocket will be ÃŽ ³m(1−f)ÃŽ ², with m the original mass. The conservation of momentum and energy give m=ÃŽ ³m(1−f)+E fuel 0=ÃŽ ³mÃŽ ²(1−f)+p fuel ÃŽ ²=−p fuel m−E fuel According the formulas and result shows that the fuel and rocket go opposite directions. To maximize ÃŽ ², make p fuel as large as possible and subject to a fixed E fuel so assume the fuel is massless with ÃŽ ² fuel =1 p fuel =−E fuel . ÃŽ ²=1−(1−f) 2 1+(1−f) 2 à £Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€š ¬Ãƒ £Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€š ¬ To sum up, even the fuel has 50% of the rockets original mass it just can get 3/5C. Researching in the area of ion propulsion is pushing the envelope of propulsion technology. To achieve higher power levels and speeds, longer durations advancements are being made. As new power sources become available, higher power thrusters will be developed that provide greater speed and more thrust. Nowadays, PPU and PMS technologies are being developed that will allow NASA to build lighter and more compact systems while increasing reliability. These technologies will allow humankind to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system also it will allow humankind to explore the farthest reaches which is out of our solar system. Work Cited List NASA:â€Å"New Millennium Program† http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds1/tech/ionpropfaq.html Lucian Dorneanu : â€Å"How Does Ion Drive Propulsion Work?† May 10th, 2007, 21:06 GMT http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-Does-Ion-Drive-Propulsion-Work-54439.shtml Permanent.com: â€Å"Electric Propulsion for Inter-Orbital Vehicles†Ã‚  http://www.permanent.com/space-transportation-electric.html Dennis Ward:â€Å"Electric(Ion)Propulsion†Ã‚  http://eo.ucar.edu/staff/dward/sao/fit/electric.htm

Behavioral Economics Essay -- Neo-economists, Labor Market

Introduction Described as the economic field that deals with the analysis of the effect that the process of decision making impacts on the decisions reached, behavioral economics is a field that has elicited lots of interest from various scholars (Altman, 24). The economists consider this branch of economics as cognitive science due to the fact that it deals with analysis of the process of decision making. Eric Wanner one of the earlier founders of the discipline describes this economic field as a component of cognitive science in his attempt to explain the basis and the characteristic analysis of the discipline in terms of strengths and weaknesses. Simply put it is a field of economic that explains the decision making process of economic agents based on theories formulated in its different branches (Altman, 25-26). Behavioral economics is a diverse subject dealing with numerous topics but for purposes of this research paper, my focus will be on the labor market; fairness and reciprocity. Employ ees as well as their employers have financial interests for which they desire to achieve from their entry into the labor market or the industry for which the employers are recruiting employee (Altman, 29-30). The employee will always seem to reciprocate any extra pay from the employer with additional input whereas the employer will give incentives to encourage extra output. Literature review Neo-economists describe the labor market as one having employees who work for a wage and employers who pay wages for the work performed. Arkelof theory on fair wage stated that for an employer to pay extra money to the employee the employee always viewed the extra money as mere compensation for the above average work that they performed (Colin, 2010... ...effort in the tasks they perform. Fairness by the employer is the determinant in the level of output from an employee. The essay has also illustrated the impact that fairness and reciprocity has on the nature or mix of employment contracts that an employer decides to employ for the different tasks performed by the different employees. There are two classes of employee; some employees fall in the category of fair employees while the rest are trust employee. Most employees however are fair employees who expect fair treatment from their employers in order for them to reciprocate the generosity with increased output. The most popular kind of engagement is the bonus reward system. Further research needs to be carried out in determination of the relationship between fairness and reciprocity in the labor market and demand of goods of high quality at the product market.

Hemingway :: Hemingway Postmodernism Essays

Hemingway [1] Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary even when, having been accused of lacking concrete relevance, they call attention to and appropriate the experience of "difference" and "otherness" in order to provide themselves with oppositional political meaning, legitimacy, and immediacy. Very few African-American intellectuals have talked or written about postmodernism. Recently at a dinner party, I talked about trying to grapple with the significance of postmodernism for contemporary black experience. It was one of those social gatherings where only one other black person was present. The setting quickly became a field of contestation. I was told by the other black person that I was wasting my time, that "this stuff does not relate in any way to what's happening with black people." Speaking in the presence of a group of white onlookers, staring at us as though this encounter was staged for their benefit, we engaged in a passionate discussion about black experience. Apparently, no one sympathized with my insistence that racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived either as opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory. The idea that there is no meaningful connection between black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics or culture must be continually interrogated. [2] My defense of postmodernism and its relevance to black folks sounded good but I worried that I lacked conviction, largely because I approach the subject cautiously and with suspicion. Disturbed not so much by the "sense" of postmodernism but by the conventional language used when it is written or talked about and by those who speak it, I find myself on the outside of the discourse looking in. As a discursive practice it is dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another with coded familiarity. Reading and studying their writing to understand postmodernism in its multiple manifestations, I appreciate it but feel little inclination to ally myself with the academic hierarchy and exclusivity pervasive in the movement today. [3] Critical of most writing on postmodernism, I perhaps am more conscious of the way in which the focus on "otherness and difference" that is often alluded to in these works seems to have little concrete impact as an analysis or standpoint that might change the nature and direction of postmodernist theory. Since much of this theory has

Background Info on My Forbidden Face :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live as an Afghan girl under the rule of the Taliban? This question is answered in the book My Forbidden Face. Latifa, a young Afghan girl, discusses her struggles throughout the book. Latifa faces several different problems while being under the rule of the Taliban. She handles these problems with the best of her ability.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  First of all, Latifa had to deal with the struggles her mom was facing. Latifa’s mother was very ill so she dealt with the situation by trying to help her mother out in every way possible. Latifa was always there to comfort her mom. Latifa’s mother was also struggling with not being able to work. Because women weren’t allowed to do anything in the Afghan society, Latifa opened a school for the apartment children. Latifa’s mother managed to help out by cooking, which she considered a form of work. She watched her children be mistreated throughout the Taliban rule. Latifa had all intentions of receiving an education but she couldn’t go to school due to the laws of the Taliban. Latifa’s mother saw strong ambitions in her daughter so she encouraged her to believe in herself and always do her best. Latifa managed to deal with her mom’s struggles very well.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Secondly, Latifa had to deal with the way women were treated in the Afghan society. Women weren’t allowed to go outside of their homes without the company of their father or brother. Latifa managed to deal with this by staying inside. She knew she wouldn’t have to deal with the Taliban if she avoided them. Latifa also couldn’t stand the fact that women couldn’t hold jobs. She opened up a school for the children of her apartment complex knowing there would be harsh consequences if caught. She also had to deal with knowing her mother and sister had to give their jobs up. Women were also required to dress in certain clothing. Latifa claimed   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   she couldn’t walk in the long skirts and couldn’t breathe under the facial clothing. Latifa liked to wear nail polish and earrings but this privilege was taken away when the Taliban came into power. Women were treated very badly under the Taliban rule, but Latifa found ways to deal with it.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Thirdly, Latifa had to deal with her own illness of depression and learned to deal with this by reading.

Oppressed Caribbean Culture Essay

Caribbean culture, in so far as it is conceded to exist, is at once the cause, occasion, and result of evolved and evolving paradoxes. The psychic inheritance of dynamic response to disparate elements interacting to find ideal, form, and purpose within set geographical boundaries over time could not have produced otherwise. The 1990s have witnessed no less of this, precisely because the decade serves to encapsulate contradictions in human development over the past half a millennium. The entire Caribbean, and indeed all of the modern Americas of which the Caribbean, like the United States, is only one part, are the creatures of the awesome process of cross-fertilization following on the encounters between the old civilizations of Europe, Africa, and Asia on foreign soil and they, in turn, with the old Amerindian civilizations developed on American soil long before Christopher Columbus set foot on it. It is a development that has helped to shape the history and modern condition of the world for some half a millennium and one that has resulted in distinctive culture-spheres in the Western hemisphere, each claiming its own inner logic and consistency. The Caribbean, at the core of which are a number of island nations, themselves in sub-regional groupings, is conscious of the dynamics of its development. For it rests firmly on the agonizing and challenging process actualized in simultaneous acts of negating and affirming, demolishing and constructing, rejecting and reshaping. Nowhere is this more evident that in the creative arts, themselves a strong index of a people’s cultural distinctiveness and identity. Admittedly, other indices of culture such as linguistic communication, which underpins the oral and indigenous scribal literatures of the region, religion, and kinship patterns, reveal the texture and internal diversity that are the result of cross-fertilization of differing elements. The result is an emerging lifestyle, worldview, and a nascent ontology and epistemology that all speak to Caribbean historical experience and existential reality, in some cases struggling to gain currency and legitimacy worldwide (and even among some of its own people) for being native-born and nativebred. For this is the original meaning of â€Å"Creole. † Whites born in the American colonies were regarded as â€Å"creoles† by their metropolitan cousins. And the Jamaican-born slaves were similarly differentiated from their â€Å"salt-water Negro† colleagues freshly brought in from West Africa. The term was soon to be hijacked by or attributed to the mulatto (half-caste) who defiantly claimed certified rootedness in the colonies–a status not as easily claimed by the person of African or European descent whose ancestry lay elsewhere, it was felt, other than in the Caribbean or the Americas. An understanding of the shared human thirst for freedom in terms of its cultural significance is critical. For the impulses that drive the Caribbean people (like people anywhere) to freedom within nation states, to the right to choose their own friends and political systems, and to independent paths to development are the same impulses that drive them to the creation of their own music, their own languages and literature, their own gods and religious belief-systems, their own kinship patterns, modes of socialization, and self-perceptions. All plans made for them from outside must take this fact into account, whatever may be the dictates of military and strategic interests or the statistical logic of tabulated growth rates and gross national products. The Caribbean people, faced as they are with the post-colonial imperative of shaping civil society and building nations, expect to be taken seriously in terms of their proven capacities to act creatively in coordinated social interaction over centuries in the Americas. They feel passionately that their history and experience are worthy of theory and explanation and expect others to understand and appreciate this fact. They are unique, paradoxically because they are like everybody else. The Caribbean has been engaged in freedom struggles and its inhabitants have been at the job of creating their own languages, and designing their own appropriate lifestyles for as long as and, in some cases, longer than most parts of what became the United States. Recognition of this and the according of the status due such achievement is a prized wish of all Caribbean people–Black, White, Mestizo, Indian (indigenous and transplanted), Chinese, and Lebanese. By general critical consent, the principal women writers in English to emerge, so far, from the Caribbean are the properly varied trio of Jamaica Kincaid (Elaine Potter Richardson) and Jean Rhys. I say â€Å"properly varied† because the immensely mixed political and social history of the Caribbean is reflected by and in its writers. Kincaid, the most experimental of the three, is seen by her admirers as a deliberate subverted of Dead White European Male modes of narrative. Yet any reader deeply immersed in Western literature will recognize that prose poetry, Kincaid’s medium, always has been one of the staples of literary fantasy or mythological romance, including much of what we call â€Å"children’s literature. † Centering almost always upon the mother-daughter relationship, Kincaid returns us inevitably to perspectives familiar from our experience of the fantasy narratives of childhood. Kincaid genuinely expresses her regard to Caribbean as those that have been â€Å"creolized† into indigenous form and purpose distinctively different from the original elements from which those expressions first sprang. With some of those original elements, especially those from a European source, themselves reinforcing their claims on the region, whether through politics, economic control, or cultural penetration, the Caribbean is becoming even more conscious not only of its own unique expressions but also of the dynamism and nature of the process underlying these expressions. These in turn constitute the basis for the claims made for a Caribbean identity. Jean Rhys, of Creole Dominican descent, is a formidable contrast to Marshall and seems to me the major figure to emerge thus far among Caribbean women writers. Though she lived mostly in Paris and England, the imagination of Rhys came fully alive in her novel of 1966, Wide Sargasso Sea, a remarkable retelling of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre from the perspective of Bertha Mason, Rochester’s mad first wife. The terrifying predicament of the 19th-century Creole women of the West Indies, regarded as â€Å"white niggers† by colonialists and as European oppressors by blacks, is presented by Rhys with unforgettable poignancy and force. Shrewdly exploiting the modernist formal originalities of her mentor, Ford Maddox Ford, Rhys achieved a near masterpiece in Wide Sargasso Sea. Allusive, parodistic, and intensely wrought, the novel remains the most successful prose fiction in English to emerge from the Caribbean matrix. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the starting point is this placelessness. Although Rhys’s novel starts with Antoinette’s childhood in Coulibri, its boundaries lie outside the novel in another woman’s text. In Jane Eyre we have the madwoman Bertha locked up in the attic of Thornfield Hall. The significant title â€Å"Wide Sargasso Sea† refers to the dangers of the sea voyage. Rochester first crosses the Atlantic alone to a place which threatens to destroy him, then once more, bringing his new wife to England. Both Rochester and Antoinette are transformed through this passage. Rochester gives Antoinette a new name, Bertha, and in England she finally is locked up as mad. Rhys finds her own place in Jane Eyre, â€Å"a prisoner of another’s desire. † She sets out to describe that place and, in doing that, she redefines it as her own. In her challenge to Jane Eyre, Rhys draws on the collective experience of black people as sought out, uprooted, and transported across the Middle Passage and finally locked up and brutally exploited for economic gain. She uses this experience and the black forms of resistance as modes through which the madwoman in Jane Eyre is recreated. In the film version Wide Sargasso Sea develops stereotypes of Black West Indians that strongly mirror Bogle’s discussion of classic film depictions of African Americans. The inner stereotype in the film is that of the â€Å"tragic mulatto† which, the film hints, describes Angelique, the evidently White child who has been raised by Blacks. Although Angelique insists on her â€Å"Whiteness,† a menacing dark skinned stranger claims at diverse points in the film to be her brother through her father’s relationship with a slave. The viewer is left to consider whether the widowed plantation owner seen at the beginning of the film is actually Angelique’s mother. While it does not answer this question directly, it obviously shows through Angelique’s actions that her culture is far more African than European. These suspicions, actions, and Angelique’s reliance on the ex-slave Christophine ultimately destroy her marriage and drive her insane. Christophine, herself, fulfills the â€Å"mammy† role since the film portrays her as a constant presence who fiercely guards Angelique from all dangers. In the West Indian context, though, she is given a twist, as she is not only guardian angel but also a practitioner of the magical art of â€Å"obeah. † This portrayal — a staple of films dealing with the West Indies — is never completely developed. Nevertheless, the film permits us to witness its potency, as Angelique, despairing of keeping her husband’s love, calls on Christophine to develop a magical potion to bind his affections to hers. One opponent for those affections is Emily, a young Black servant who might well be characterized as a female â€Å"Black buck† — a sexual predator who seduces a married White man into interracial unfaithfulness. Finally, there is Nelson, the long-suffering head of the household who intimately approximates Bogle’s â€Å"Tom. In the film, insults of various sorts that are directed towards him result only in silence and a determination to remain a faithful servant. Though, in Dominican novelist Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the island’s riotous vegetation and dramatic landscape are depicted with an ominous intensity that prompts the protagonist’s English husband to equate it with evil. Lally, the narrator of another Dominican classic, Phyllis Shand Allfrey The Orchid House ( 1953), faced with the menacing power the island’s nature exerts over Stella and Andrew, ruefully concludes that the island offered nothing but beauty and disease. Rhys’s protagonists, most evidently Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, share a view of England as deadening, grey and emotionally destructive. England is a place of hypocrites, and the English have a ‘bloody, bloody sense of humour’. With a West Indian accent, she goes on, ‘and stupid, lord, lord’ (Wide Sargasso Sea: 134). But it remains Rhys’s place, the source of those English books which provided an early contribution to her construction of herself as writer. The idea of definitive national origin and affiliation is a source of anxiety for Rhys’s protagonists. For Rhys herself nationality was complicated by her exile and her race: also England did not value her Caribbean origins. For Rhys’s women, as perhaps for herself, England is also a place where human emotions, especially those associated with sexuality, are outlawed or repressed; she described sex in a letter of 1949 as a ‘strange Anglo-Saxon word’ (Abalos, David T. 1998, 66). Hemond Brown comments that Rhys’s attitude to England remained remarkably consistent over her whole writing career: ‘For those fifty-odd years, England meant to her everything she despised’ (Bandon, Alexandra. 1995). But despite this, she surely demonstrated in her characterisation of working-class English chorus girls and call girls and Rochester (perhaps informed by her important attachments to Lancelot Grey, Hugh Smith, Leslie Tilden Smith and Max Hamer, all upper- or middle-class Englishmen), that the poor Englishwoman and even the colonizing, socially secure Englishman have their own areas of serious emotional damage. She may have blown off steam sometimes, but in her fiction she took pains to be fair to the country which had both given her sustained literary identity and denied her dignity. In the Caribbean, complex racial narratives are the most powerful signifiers, although class increasingly reverberates now. In England, in Rhys’s lifetime, it was the class narrative which primarily constructed identity, though Rhys clearly writes the importance of race as a formative self-construction from her Dominican childhood. She sometimes sees race and class as equally important even in England, as in the case of Selina, who carries Rhys’s own outlaw status during an important period of her life. In the two explicitly Caribbean novels, Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, race is evidently a major source of identity. Jean Rhys had long described the cultural dialectic of his region’s historical experience and contemporary reality in the following way: â€Å"But the tribe in bondage learned to fortify itself by cunning assimilation of the religion of the Old World. What seemed to be surrender was redemption. What seemed the loss of tradition was its renewal. What seemed the death of faith was its rebirth†. Caribbean existential reality is here portrayed as a creature of paradox. Surface appearances may well be masks for their opposites. What one sees is not likely to be what one gets. Other similar manuscript was in â€Å"Goodbye Mother† by Reinaldo Arenas, the grief inundated daughters Ofelia, Otilia, Odilia and Onelia kill themselves in front of their dead mum just for their cadavers to occasion a series of triumphant choruses from the legion of rats and maggots who feast on the putrefactory banquet. Neither of these authors, nor the evenly talented Rene Depestre and the former Dominican President Juan Bosch, is Anglophonic. It’s usually believed that the most excellent Caribbean literature in English consists of chronological polemics On the other hand Cristina Garcia novel â€Å"Dreaming In Cuban† tells the stories of the women of a Cuban family, scattered by revolution but still connected through a shared past. The narrative is polyphony of several voices who, in turn, describe their world from their viewpoint. Characters include Lourdes, an anti-Castro exile who runs a chain of â€Å"Yankee Doodle Bakeries,† and Felicia, whose perceptions connect and blur the lines between insanity and santeria. Pillar, Lourdes’s daughter and an aspiring punk artist, is determined to return to Cuba to reconnect with her grandmother and make her present life meaningful. She laments that history does not tell the important stories and longs to recover Cuba for herself: â€Å"[T]here’s only imagination where our history should be† (138). In the title of Dreaming in Cuban, â€Å"Dreaming† includes all the diverse dreams of Garcia’s female protagonists about the nature of being Cuban, what it is to be Cuban, to dream, not in American, but in Cuban. This necessitates Garcia’s taking into account all the conflicting elements of contemporary Cuban-ness for Cuban and Cuban American women. Amazingly, she never invalidates or disputes the diverse and conflicting perspectives of these different dreamers. She succeeds by giving readers a complexity of experience beyond binaries, where many diverse and conflicting perspectives circle around one another endlessly. These differences are constructed by differences in the various ideologies that the characters embrace communism, capitalism, traditional gender relations, voodoo, and feminism–and also by differences in their experiences due to varying historical locations in time and place.

The Place of Mental Preparation of Athletes

The sports community now recognizes that mental factors such as confidence, composure, focus, and motivation are highly significant to athletic performance. As a result, over the year’s performance enhancement has become an emerging career track within the field sport psychology. Sport psychology (or sports psychology) is the study of the psychological factors that affect participation and performance in sports.Sport psychology professionals who focus on performance enhancement aim to increase athletic performance by minimizing the psychological effects of poor performance and instilling the mental skill needed to attain peak performance. In order for the field of sport psychology to advance professionals must educate the sports community on the value and benefits of mental training. Psychology principles such as positive thinking, imagery, and goal setting can be applied in sports to help athletes perform and prepare for competition.At the elite levels all athletes have the t alent and the physical tools to compete. In an interview hall of quarterback and sports analysis, Troy Aikman stated, â€Å"When you get to the elite level in sports, athletically, what separates the really great performers are the ones who are mentally tough and see things a little bit quicker than their competitors. † These athletes have the ability to move on after mistakes, maintain confidence and composure in the face of adversity, and focus on what is need to execute each task successfully.The best practice to enhance athletic performance in the field sport psychology is through mental training. Mental training is the segment of sports psychology that concentrates specifically on helping athletes break through the mental barriers that are keeping them from performing up to their peak potential. Many athletes and coaches resist mental training because they do not understand how it can help them. In order for athletes to get the most out of their sport, it is critical for them to understand the value of improving their mental game.Athletes are more likely to embrace mental training when they understand it and its benefits. However, the best way for athletes to embrace into mental training is when they actually experience its power firsthand. Mental training is about improving one’s attitude and mental skills to help them perform their best by identifying limiting beliefs and embracing a healthier philosophy about their sport. Mental skills, just like physical skills, take repetition, practice, and game-time application to develop.Helping athletes and coaches understanding the mental barriers that limit performance and the benefits of sports psychology intervention is a critical step in the mental training process. Mental barriers include high expectations, perfectionism, fear of failure, lack of emotional control and attentional focus. Athletes can overcome these barriers through sport psychology intervention that aim to enhance confidence, f ocus, composure, trust and mental preparation. Most athletes are highly committed to excellence and seeing how far they can go in sports.They love competition and testing themselves against the best in their sport. They understand the importance of a positive attitude and mental toughness. These athletes want every possible advantage they can get including the mental edge over the competition. Sports Psychology is about improving your attitude and mental toughness to help you perform your best by identifying limiting beliefs and embracing a healthier philosophy about your sport. Mental training is used by elite athletes to help improve focus, confidence and deal with distractions.Many athletes have the ability to concentrate, but often their focus is displaced on the wrong areas such as when a batter thinks â€Å"I need to get a hit† while in the batter’s box, which is a result-oriented focus. Sport Psychology Today is a sports mental training resource for athletes, sp orts parents, coaches, sport psychology scholars, and professionals provided by Mental Edge Athletics. Please sign up for our Discussion Forum   to share your experiences, ask questions, and gain access to advice from our readers and team of experts around the world.Topic and information requests can be sent by using our Contact Page. Sport Psychology and Mental Training Products are Coming Soon, so   stay tuned to Sports Psychology Today for more information. In the meantime, please search for your topics of interest on Sports Psychology Today and continue to improve your sports performance, mental toughness, and mental game. Also please share our website with your friends and family and   â€Å"Like† us on facebook   (facebook. com/mentaledgeathletics or search Sport Psychology Today) to gain access to discounts and special offers.Mental training is important for athletes, whether striving to do their personal best or competing against others. Mental imagery, what B ruce D. Hale of Penn State calls   â€Å"No Sweat Practice,† is very effective. The mind cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined. Practice is practice, regardless of whether it is mental or physical. Ask the athlete to sit in a relaxed position in a quiet place with few distractions. Tell the athlete to close their eyes and picture performing a particular skill. Each is seeing him/herself on a large movie screen on a football pitch.Walk them through the skill step by step. Use as much detail as possible, using words to elicit all the senses  Ã¢â‚¬â€ sight, hearing, touch and smell-soft foot, cushion, deep it close, toe down, light touches. Ask the athlete to repeat the image. Picture rehearsing the skill successfully, even to the point of seeing the ball going in the goal. Some athletes need help to start the process. Others will learn to practice this way on their own. The link between performing the skills in the mind and performing the ski lls on the football pitch may be hard to explain.However, the athletes who repeatedly imagine themselves correctly completing a skill and believing it to be true are more likely to make it happen. Whatever goes into one's mind and one's heart comes out in their actions. â€Å"If you really want to do something, you'll find a way; if you don't, you'll find an excuse. † –Author Unknown â€Å"Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything. † –Napoleon Hill â€Å"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure. † –Colin Powell Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit. † –Napoleon Hill â€Å"Winners are those people who make a habit of doing the things losers are uncomfortable doing. † –Ed Foreman â€Å"Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willi ng to cut all sources of retreat. Only by doing so can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win–essential to success. † –Napoleon Hill â€Å"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. † –Albert Einstein â€Å"If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way. –Napoleon Hill â€Å"Only a strong tree can stand alone. † –Arnold Glasow â€Å"Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness. † –Napoleon Hill â€Å"The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind. † –Napoleon Hill â€Å"The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind. † –Dr. Wayne W. Dyer â€Å"It's a sure thing that you'll not finish if you don't start. † –Napoleon Hill â€Å"The individual with a negative mental at titude attracts troubles as a magnet attracts steel fittings. –Napoleon Hill â€Å"Our attitude is the primary force that will determine whether we succeed or fail. † –Dr. John C. Maxwell â€Å"The key to having a good attitude is the willingness to change. We are either the masters or the victims of our attitudes. It is a matter of personal choice. Who we are today is the result of choices we made yesterday. Tomorrow we will become what we choose today. To change means to choose to change. † –Dr. John C. Maxwell â€Å"The ladder of success is never crowded at the top. † –Napoleon Hill Photo Credit the athlete image by csaba fikker from Fotolia. om Physical training is only one facet of the training that successful athletes undergo. While the body is pushed to its limits and trained to perform under pressure for as long as necessary, the mind also must be prepared for competition. The world's best athletes all have techniques they use to win and achieve their goals. Function Sound mental training prepares athletes for competition by eliminating the anxiety that often surrounds performance. One of the main functions of mental athletic training is to help athletes concentrate on the moment.Trainers at Mental Goaltending report that athletes must learn to concentrate on the positive and refuse to entertain negative thoughts. Types One type of mental training that many athletes use is called visualization. Athletes are urged to see themselves performing at their peak and crossing the finish line or making a goal or basket. Visualization is designed to infuse the subconscious mind with a reality developed by the athlete so that the conscious mind follows through and makes it happen. Benefits In addition to providing competitive athletes with an edge, mental training can help relieve some of the stress involved in competition.Sports psychologists at Protex Sports report that in addition to the pressure of the competit ion, athletes face stress and pressure from managers, coaches, teammates and fans. They often face rigorous schedules and family demands that create additional stress that could affect their performance. Mental training is meant to alleviate some of the stress. Features A thorough mental training program features work in a range of areas that affect performance. Athletes look to psychological trainers to help them improve their mental toughness to withstand the demands of the competition as well as help them focus on their priorities.They work to uncover any fears that might be standing in the way of success and find ways to address those fears. Through mental training, athletes can gain confidence and composure. Considerations After an injury, many athletes have a difficult time adjusting to not playing their sport and facing a possible end to their athletic careers. Mental training for athletic success includes considerations for those times. During rehabilitation or preparing to retire, athletes have special needs that can be addressed through specially trained therapists.