Friday, October 25, 2019

Essay: Analysis of Sonnet 33 -- Sonnet essays

Analysis of Sonnet 33 Full many a glorious morning I have seen Flatter the mountaintops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy, Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rock on his celestial face And from the forlorn world his visage hide, Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace. Even so my sun one early morn did shine With all-triumphant splendor on my brow. But out, alack! he was but one hour mine, The region cloud hath masked him from me now Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth, Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth. This sonnet houses nature imagery, personifying certain elements of nature. 1-2: 'Ý have seen a large amount of glorious mornings' "flatter the mountaintops with (a) soverign eye." The sun here is the eye of the morning, making the latter in semblance of a person. Using "sovreign" to describe the "eye" gives the reader the impression of the sun as, perhaps, the ruler of natur...

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Yahoo and Alibaba

3. How has the strategic value of Yahoo to Alibaba changed over time since 2005? 2005 was a tough year for Alibaba. Because of the US$100 million investment in China by eBay, Alibaba and its subsidiary – Taobao fell into a severe price war against eBay which hindered the profitability of the group and much more capital was needed for operational and technological improvement in order to win the battle. Under this circumstance, Alibaba formed a partnership with Yahoo! Inc. Yahoo invested US$1 billion in Alibaba and transferred the ownership of Yahoo! China to Alibaba.In return, Yahoo got a 40% stake and 35% voting rights in Alibaba. Beside the cash injection, another reason for the initiation of the partnership was that Alibaba valued much on the importance of search engine for its e-commerce work. At that time, owing Yahoo! China was a competitive advantage of Alibaba against eBay. At that time, Yahoo had much strategic value to Alibaba due to its large capital base and techno logy to help Alibaba safeguard its market share under eBay’s attack. However, the operation of Yahoo! China under Alibaba was unsatisfactory.Since 2005, Yahoo! China has been losing its market share and lagging behind its rivals. Although Alibaba tried to re-orientate it as more business-oriented to grasp the market niche, the effort was in vain. The influence of Yahoo! China in the search engine market in China diminished. Hence, it failed to draw attention of potential customers of Alibaba and was not capable to bring enough benefit to Alibaba leading to a fall in strategic value of Yahoo!. Even for the parent of Yahoo! China – Yahoo! Inc. , the story was more or less the same.The net income of Yahoo dropped 78% in the first quarter of 2009 which resulted in a massive layoff. Due to the low profitability, Yahoo formed a 10-year agreement with Microsoft. Under this contract, Yahoo had to adopt Microsoft’s search technology (Bing) instead of its own technology i n all Yahoo’s website. Similarly, Yahoo agreed to use Google’s search engine in Yahoo! Japan (search ads platform). In other words, it surrendered its own searching technology which Alibaba valued most. Search engine is important to e-commerce companies.As many people use search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. to get appropriate results of their queries, a smart search engine can allocate much traffic to the e-commerce website by placing their website on the top of result pages so that potential customers can be created. Now that Yahoo lost its own search engine, it may only be able to provide support to Alibaba under Microsoft’s constraints which was unlikely to be what Alibaba wants and thus lowering Yahoo’s strategic value. Unlike the poor performance of Yahoo, the profit of Alibaba surged after the partnership.Apart from being the market leader in China, Alibaba started to expand its business overseas in 2008. For instance, it formed a partnershi p with Informedia India Limited; set up Alibaba Japan, a joint venture with Softbank to foray and launched AliExpress in US etc. All these new strategies had no correlation with its partner – Yahoo! Inc. These revealed that Alibaba was keen on developing new relationships with overseas companies to enter foreign markets. Due to the poor relationship with Yahoo, Alibaba no longer seek cooperation with it and the strategic value of Yahoo further diminished.Because of the poor performance of Yahoo! China, Alibaba started to provide Sogou (a local search engine) in addition to Bing for its customers. This probably made Yahoo’s market share further decrease as customers no longer need to choose Yahoo! China’s Etao as the only access to Alibaba and they can opt for Sogou Shopping instead. Even Alibaba loses Yahoo! China, it still has its new channel to reach its potential customers. It seems that Yahoo has lost its role as an exclusive search engine of Alibaba and los t its strategic value meanwhile.

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Discrimination Against Females in Sport

Discrimination against Females in Sports Gender difference has always been an issue in many shapes and forms and throughout many circumstances in the past, present and still will be in the future. This paper focuses on the issue of discrimination against women in sports. Either being an athlete or a coach, women have always been looked upon as not as talented sports wise as men, even though in reality, they are. This issue is articulated in many ways.The news paper Green Leaf Weekly reports from the past that sports editors and journalists think that women’s sport is not â€Å"newsworthy† (Brown, 1993). Just that quote says a whole lot about the lack of respect people have for women who play sports who work just as hard as men to contend in their sport. Research by Eileen McDonagh and Laura Pappana demonstrates that sex segregation in sports does not simply reflect biology, but it actively constructs and reinforces social ideas of female inferiority (McDonagh & Pappana, 2010).For example, it has been a known fact that women have better physiological endurance compared to men, but yet in the Olympics some of the racing events are actually shorter compared to the men because the women are perceived as not being able to handle the same distance men run. In May of 2004 the sports world was flipped upside down when Title IX was put in place. This title should have been put in place a long time ago, but with all the discriminatory gender issues, it took this long to come to be. Title IX prohibits discrimination against girls and women in federally funded education and athletic programs.The law states that schools who do not follow Title IX, will lose their federal funding. This was a huge step in the beginning of discriminatory actions towards females in sport to be diminished. There are many resources available for exploring this subject area. Finding data and charts is hard to find, but there are many news paper articles on discrimination against wome n in sports. Also a few websites as well to help you get informed on how and why there is discrimination towards women in sports in the first place. There is a website called Women’s Sports Foundation that has a lot of information about women in sports.The good thing about this website is that though it focuses on the negative aspects like discrimination, it also focuses on the positive aspects and what women have achieved in sport and what future goals for women’s sports are. A fact the website states that by 2010, 53 athletic opportunities were offered to every 100 high school boys, and 41 athletic opportunities were offered to every hundred high school girls. Though the number is lower than that of the males, it still is much better than 20 years before this time when it was seldom that 7 athletic opportunities were offered to every 100 high school girl.This statistical research shows that discrimination in sports towards women is improving, slowly, but surely. Wome n are the most affected by this issue because they are being discriminated against in sports. More so than just women, younger women have an even harder time as when you are a young girl there are no girl’s leagues, just mixed leagues with boys. When females play with males, a lot of people say discriminatory things about girls and how they are incapable of playing with males.Likely problems that could come out of this for Canadian society would be that the discrimination problem against women will never be fixed, or it could also get worse. Women need to realize their worth and do something about the issues that are being brought towards them in sports. They have the right to play sports and enjoy them just as much as males do, and they are just as talented as males are. There are many solutions to this problem. A few solutions have already been created in order to better the sports world for women.The Title IX was definitely an important time in history when the document wa s put in place that discrimination against women is strictly prohibited in federally funded sports (Steven, 2004). Women’s sports being in the Olympics also play a very important part in helping this problem. Over the years as more women’s sports were added into the Olympics, it got more media coverage and more attention. With this attention, more young females joined the sports world and the female sports world vastly grew. I feel more women’s sports need to be added into the Olympics, and maybe even create a professional women’s sports league, like the NHL or NBA.Creating a professional women’s sports league would definitely capture enough attention to possibly make the discrimination simmer down. Another option is to possibly create women’s sports centers all over the world for women to come together who play sports and possibly make a change and realize there are a lot of other females all around the world who feel just as they feel. Mak ing people aware of the problems of discrimination in sports could open the eyes of a lot of people to see that it actually is a huge problem. In conclusion, sports are meant to be an activity to demonstrate teamwork, hard work, pain, courage and most of all belief.Belief is hard to achieve when you are being discriminated against, and a lot of people turn to sports to gain confidence. Gender in sports shouldn’t matter, sports teach to you the lessons no matter what gender you are. Many people use sports as a getaway from the crazy world now days and they should feel comfortable. Females need to realize their worth to the sports world, and if more people become aware of the problem and try and solve it, many younger females will be inspired in the future society to take sports to a whole new level, without discrimination against females.The problem will never be completely solved, but with determination anything is possible. References Brown, C. , (1993). Green Leaf Weekly. A rticle, 121. Retrieved from http://web. ebscohost. com. library. smu. ca:2048/ehost/detail? vid=3&hid=11&sid=66b0d127-bc37-4ca5-a903-ef2cab3580af%40sessionmgr11&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=fyh&AN=MRB-WRI0271980 McDonagh, E. , Pappana, K. , (2010). In Brief. Women’s Studies, 39(1), 67. Retrieved from http://web. bscohost. com. library. smu. ca:2048/ehost/detail? vid=3&hid=11&sid=66b0d127-bc37-4ca5-a903-ef2cab3580af%40sessionmgr11&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=fyh&AN=46837840 Steven, L. Y. , (2004). The Sport Of Numbers: Manipulating Title IX To Rationalize Discrimination Against Women. Brigham Young University Education & Law Journal, 1, 155. Retrieved from http://web. ebscohost. com. library. smu. ca:2048/ehost/detail? vid=3&hid=