Looking back on my past university experiences, every single task I was given to accomplish is meaningful because I have invested large amount of time and effort to achieve them. However, I think rewarding experience is a bit different from meaningful experience; I believe something is rewarding when one creates additional value to other people in expense of personal interest, while meaningfulness is a broader term where both personal growth and rewarding experiences are included. In this sense, my half-year teaching experience in Catholic Church is the most rewarding experience than internships, or school activities I participated in.
Independent Study:Analyzing Qualitative Case of GoogleAbstract: This paper examines Google’s strategies and conducts external and internal analysis based upon the current strategic issues Google is facing with the rise of Facebook in the online advertising market. The paper uses STEEP/PEST analysis, the Five Forces Model, Generic Strategy Analysis, and Competitive Advantage Analysis for a qualitative case study. The paper aims to study what strategy is and draw theoretical and social significance from analyzing the actual case of Google.Google has been the preeminent online Search Engine Company, earning 96% of its revenues from online advertising. Yet, Facebook – a global social networking site – has launched social recommendation advertisement. It can be said that Facebook is attempting to disrupt the existing market; social networking services were primarily focused on bringing in online users for non-commercial usage, such as uploading status, pictures and getting updates from bothbility to influencepoliticaldecisionmakingValue systemsfor socialclassesPresence of technologyClustersPollution levelsInterest ratesVoting rates andtrendsCulturalbackgroundof citizensPace of processor productimprovementsSubstitutabilityof raw materialsSmall businesslending levelsNature ofpower and decision-makingstructuresBirth anddeath ratesBandwidthCapacityLevel ofenvironmentalregulationBalance ofpaymentsPublic opinionSocietalThere is a high possibility that end-users of the internet advertising industry will raise the question of the appropriateness of advertising, especially to teenagers. It is a fact that teenagers these days spend more time on the Internet than watching television, given the broad distribution of with internet access and smart phones. Social researches have indicated that the Internet has a disproportionate number of unhealthy food advertisements targeting children. The guidelines to protect children from these vulnerable exposures are ambiguous, especially when externality – where the value of the system increases with the number of people using the same technology. To illustrate the concept, there is a positive network effect when more information and data are available on the Google search engines, more users will be attracted to using it, and more contents-providers as well as advertising companies will be drawn to the server. Thus, there is a virtuous business cycle that is hard to imitate in a short period of time for new entrants especially when Google is dominating the existing search engines in the market.Threat of RivalryThe threat of rivalry among the search engine companies may have been intense in the past with the growth of the internet market. However, in 2012, the threat of intense competition has become relatively low. One of the biggest reasons is that Google’s search engine competitors are no longer roughly equal in size and power. While the online advertising market has grown in the last decade, Google’s next two biggest cver, does not fit into a focus strategy as it does not have “a particular buyer group, segment of the product line or geographic market.” This is analyzed more specifically in the firm scope, but Google has global buyers, diverse product line from device to ad technologies, and covers 130 countries with 70 offices over the world.Google’s Business Strategy: Competitive AdvantagesFor Google to implement the differentiation strategy, it requires different resources and skills, organizational arrangements, and inventive systems. According to RPV theory, a company will be positioned to succeed if it has the best and most appropriate resources, procedures, culture for its business and strategy – all of which constitutes a firm’s competitive advantage. Thus, Google’s competitive advantages, supporting the differentiation strategy, will be analyzed in terms of organizational requirements, required skills and resources.A. Organizational RequirementTo pursue a differentiation strategy, a firm muogle provides users with e-mail services (Gmail), photo albums (Picasa), a web surfing profile (AdSense and DoubleClick), medical records (Google Health), location (Google Latitude), appointments (Google Calendar), transcripts of phone messages (Google Voice), work files (Google Docs), and more. Despite the diverse products, Google is not assessed as diversified company because it mostly engages in a single industry sector. Diversified companies would be firms like General Electric that span a number of different industries such as finance, energy, healthcare, lightings and electronics.Geographical ScopeThe geographical scope of a firm deals with “what is the optimal geographical spread of activities for the firm” in terms of its strategy. As of 2012, Google operates approximately 70 offices in more than 40 countries around the globe. With multi-nationality, Google localized distribution, marketing, and service, in turn ensuring maximum profit on a global scale. Profit is maximized by 29
The Argument for Animal RightsA pregnant teenager is locked up in a dark room and gives birth. A stranger, however, takes away her baby after a few breastfeeding. Without having any rights to refuse, the teenager is raped, pregnant and locked up again. The process will repeat until the day this young girl dies. If the story was made public, the world would have demonstrated to punish whoever was in charge of the incident, in shock. However, will the response be the same if the victim was not a teenager, but a pig? Animals are treated badly, if not worse; however, many assume that animal rights completely differ from that of human. In response to the opinion, Peter Singer argues in his book of Animal Liberation that “no matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering of any other being.” (P8) Along the line of his argument, I will be concentrating on this paper why it is important to value animal’s paiwhich is taking the suffering into consideration and attempting to minimize the possibility of suffering when a being is in a pain. Then, Singer provides two supporting arguments that animals have the ability to perceive and express pain like humans, to prove their pain is no different from humans. The standard form will explain the logical flow better briefly to the conclusion:P1: Moral is actions that reduces pain.P2: Morality is universal, so it has to be applied to everything as long as it is capable of suffering.P3: Any similar nervous system to human nervous system will produce similar feelings and reactions like human beings in similar circumstances.P4: Human’s external indication for pain is equal to other being’s external indication for pain.P5: Animals have nervous systems very like humans, which respond physiologically as ours do when the animal is in circumstances in which human would feel pain.S1: Scientifically, animals have the ability to perceive pain just like humans.Pge, the expression of pain can be manipulated and falsified.P8: Behavioral acts can outweigh the importance of communication when one expresses pain.P9: Animals can not communicate like humans, but they can perfectly express behavioral signs in a state of pain.S2: Philosophically, there is no counterargument that animals do not have the ability to express pain.C: So there can be no moral justification for regarding the pain that animals feel are less important than the pain felt by humans.In order to prove that animals can be in a state of pain before anything, Peter Singer argues that “pain can never be observed because it is a state of consciousness.” To elaborate, pain may be sensed through physical harm in the body, but it is eventually perceived and evaluated in the brain; so there is no absolute way to prove pain. In this matter, however, denying the existence of pain will be a mistake as humans for instance do feel pain through direct experiences like accidental paper cuts and brity between nervous systems could be one way to measure pain, under an assumption that its functions and produced feelings are comparable to humans when in a similar circumstances. Singer notes that the similarity can be supported by the evolution history of animals’ nervous system that developed much alike to humans until the central features appeared in human nervous system. This natural development of animal nervous system also provides grounds for differences with non-painful beings like robots with artificially manipulated brain system. Moreover, many species of animals specifically mammals and birds have favorably developed diencephalons – a part of brain that mainly produces impulses, emotions and feelings which are expressed as external evidences in a state of pain. Thus, Singer concludes that animal’s pain can clearly be proved through scientific evidences.Moving on to the second argument of Singer, expressed reactions during suffering can be another way to measure pain. Sing. However, Singer questions the necessity of linking language to expressing pain. Singer points out that there are even humans –including a year old baby – who can not express their pain in language, but can in a nonlinguistic way. It is undeniable that both animals and this specific group of humans can feel pain and thus, language is only one of many possible evidences to prove pain. Also, language provides the ability to lie about something like pain, so it may not even be a good evidence to prove pain. It is well known that behavioral signs including writhing, facial contortions, moaning, yelping or other forms of calling are shown in animals. Hence, Singer maintains that animals have the ability to express reactions similar to human’s external indication in pain. According to Singer, therefore, it is proved that animals scientifically and philosophically feel the pain based on the fact that their perception and expression of pain is similar to human. People generally agree that it .
Critical Assessment on Peter Singer’s Animal RightsOne of the biggest central debates in ethical history that has no definite answer is whether animals should be considered to have morally equal rights to humans or not. Peter Singer, as one of the prominent defenders of animal rights, provides sufficient evidences and arguments in his book of Animal Liberation, to reach a conclusion that animal’s pain should be valued equally to human’s pain as long as it has the capacity of suffering like that of humans. In this essay, I will be focusing on Singer’s defensive arguments toward animal rights and present his logical fallacies by pointing out one of his contradictory premises.Singer assumes that moral is actions that reduce pain. Moreover, Singer considers morality as universal, and assumes it has to be applied to everything as long as the subject is capable of suffering. These assumptions are based on the premise that within humanity it is morally wrong to inflict pain on humans for plealy his premises proved to be sound, but also his argument on animals being capable of suffering. However, it should be pointed out that Singer only applied his arguments to the relationship between animals and humans. When Singer’s arguments are stretched universally -as his second premise on realm of morality goes- and applied to relationship among animals, countless questions and problems are raised to apply this argument realistically.For instance, people are aware that lions are voracious carnivores that eat up African Buffalo (Thanks to the Discovery channel…) and can require up to seven kilograms of meat per day for both survival and pleasure. Then, according to Singer’s argument, is it morally right to let lions keep hunting Buffalos or other flesh of large mammals? Along the line of his argument to support this ‘animals are morally equal to humans,’ Singer should respond to this question by providing measures that are needed to minimize animal’s pain to be consistent with his l inevitable due to survival purposes, while other two relationships are not; thus, measures are not necessarily needed to reduce overall pain of victims capable of suffering.An innocent killing just for the sake of survival, though, does not change the fact something is morally wrong. Animals that are capable of suffering will continue to die out as daily meals of carnivores. Standing by and letting this to happen will be as bad as allowing humans to inflict pain on animals both intentionally and unintentionally. Thus, there is no appropriate moral justification for the cases of animals inflicting pain on other animals when human and animal relation is considered to have no exceptions either.Furthermore, though humans have the choice to switch between different food types while animals don’t have that luxury, consequences of humans choosing vegetarian life to avoid animal pain will not necessarily turn out positive. This is because humans are also part of the natural food chain, playin the world’ may be extreme and exaggerated, the point is made that humans consuming animals are a part of the natural food chain process, and it should not be denied even if meat is not the only survival means for humans. Also, it should be acknowledged that what humans find necessary to survive far exceeds the standards which animals live by, due to the nature of human society.Human lives became far more complicated than that of animals through civilization. Humans started to develop social rules to keep maintain order, created profession to make lives more efficient, develop and various kinds of ways to spend leisure time for higher standard of life. Giving up on inevitable animal infliction ranging from meals to medical experiments to maintain the civilization will bring human society into primitive level.To illustrate, for one, there will be less professions that compose human society. Certain professions, like national athletes, require appropriate amount of meat, poultry and evenn animals killing other animals are defensible. Lastly, treating animals morally equal to humans can bring down the humanity to primitive level; and it should be once again considered if animal right overweigh the importance of our lives and should there be no exception at all to sustain the long-built up civilization, while end results of animal deaths are inevitable due to natural chain.APPENDIX:Standard form of Peter Singer’s argument in his book of Animal Liberation that “no matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering of any other being.” (P8)P1: Moral is actions that reduces pain.P2: Morality is universal, so it has to be applied to everything as long as it is capable of suffering.P3: Any similar nervous system to human nervous system will produce similar feelings and reactions like human beings in similar circumstances.P4: Human’s external indication for pain is equal to other being’s externGE 7