Patient Recording System Essay

The system supplies future data requirements of the Fire Service Emergency Cover (FSEC) project, Fire Control, fundamental research and development. Fire and Rescue Services (FRSs) will also be able to use this better quality data for their own purposes. The IRS will provide FRSs with a fully electronic data capture system for all incidents attended. All UK fire services will be using this system by 1 April 2009. Creation of a general-purpose medical record is one of the more difficult problems in database design. In the USA, most medical institutions have much more electronic information on a patient’s financial and insurance history than on the patient’s medical record. Financial information, like orthodox accounting information, is far easier to computerize and maintain, because the information is fairly standardized. Clinical information, by contrast, is extremely diverse. Signal and image data—X-Rays, ECGs, —requires much storage space, and is more challenging to manage. Mainstream relational database engines developed the ability to handle image data less than a decade ago, and the mainframe-style engines that run many medical database systems have lagged technologically. One well-known system has been written in assembly language for an obsolescent class of mainframes that IBM sells only to hospitals that have elected to purchase this system. CPRSs are designed to review clinical information that has been gathered through a variety of mechanisms, and to capture new information. From the perspective of review, which implies retrieval of captured data, CPRSs can retrieve data in two ways. They can show data on a single patient (specified through a patient ID) or they can be used to identify a set of patients (not known in advance) who happen to match particular demographic, diagnostic or clinical parameters. That is, retrieval can either be patient-centric or parameter-centric. Patient-centric retrieval is important for real time clinical decision support. â€Å"Real time† means that the response should be obtained within seconds (or a few minutes at the most), because the availability of current information may mean the difference between life and death. Parameter-centric retrieval, by contrast, involves processing large volumes of data: response time is not particularly critical, however, because the results are us ed for purposes like long-term planning or for research, as in retrospective studies. In general, on a single machine, it is possible to create a database design that performs either patient-centric retrieval or parameter-centric retrieval, but not both. The challenges are partly logistic and partly architectural. From the logistic viewpoint, in a system meant for real-time patient query, a giant parameter-centric query that processed half the records in the database would not be desirable because it would steal machine cycles from critical patient-centric queries. Many database operations, both business and medical, therefore periodically copy data from a â€Å"transaction† (patient-centric) database, which captures primary data, into a parameter-centric â€Å"query† database on a separate machine in order to get the best of both worlds. Some commercial patient record systems, such as the 3M Clinical Data Repository (CDR)[1] are composed of two subsystems, one that is transaction-oriented and one that is query-oriented. Patient-centric query is considered more critical for day-to-day operation, especially in smaller or non-research-oriented institutions. Many vendors therefore offer parameter-centric query facilities as an additional package separate from their base CPRS offering. We now discuss the architectural challenges, and consider why creating an institution-wide patient database poses significantly greater hurdles than creating one for a single department. During a routine check-up, a clinician goes through a standard checklist in terms of history, physical examination and laboratory investigations. When a patient has one or more symptoms suggesting illness, however, a whole series of questions are asked, and investigations performed (by a specialist if necessary), which would not be asked/performed if the patient did not have these symptoms. These are based on the suspected (or apparent) diagnosis/-es. Proformas (protocols) have been devised that simplify the patient’s workup for a general examination as well as many disease categories. The clinical parameters recorded in a given protocol have been worked out by experience over years or decades, though the types of questions asked, and the order in which they are asked, varies with the institution (or vendor package, if data capture is electronically assisted). The level of detail is often left to individual discretion: clinicians with a research interest in a particular condition will record more detail for that condition than clinicians who do not. A certain minimum set of facts must be gathered for a given condition, however, irrespective of personal or institutional preferences. The objective of a protocol is to maximize the likelihood of detection and recording of all significant findings in the limited time available. One records both positive findings as well as significant negatives (e.g., no history of alcoholism in a patient with cirrhosis). New protocols are continually evolving for emergent disease complexes such as AIDS. While protocols are typically printed out (both for the benefit of possibly inexperienced residents, and to form part of the permanent paper record), experienced clinicians often have them committed to memory. However, the difference between an average clinician and a superb one is that the latter knows when to depart from the protocol: if departure never occurred, new syndromes or disease complexes would never be discovered. In any case, the protocol is the starting point when we consider how to store information in a CPRS. This system, however, focuses on the processes by which data is stored and retrieved, rather than the ancillary functions provided by the system. The obvious approach for storing clinical data is to record each type of finding in a separate column in a table. In the simplest example of this, the so-called â€Å"flat-file† design, there is only a single value per parameter for a given patient encounter. Systems that capture standardised data related to a particular specialty (e.g., an obstetric examination, or a colonoscopy) often do this. This approach is simple for non-computer-experts to understand, and also easiest to analyse by statistics programs (which typically require flat files as input). A system that incorporates problem-specific clinical guidelines is easiest to implement with flat files, as the software engineering for data management is relatively minimal. In certain cases, an entire class of related parameters is placed in a group of columns in a separate table, with multiple sets of values. For example, laboratory information systems, which support labs that perform hundreds of kinds of tests, do not use one column for every test that is offered. Instead, for a given patient at a given instant in time, they store pairs of values consisting of a lab test ID and the value of the result for that test. Similarly for pharmacy orders, the values consist of a drug/medication ID, the preparation strength, the route, the frequency of administration, and so on. When one is likely to encounter repeated sets of values, one must generally use a more sophisticated approach to managing data, such as a relational database management system (RDBMS). Simple spreadsheet programs, by contrast, can manage flat files, though RDBMSs are also more than adequate for that purpose. The one-column-per-parameter approach, unfortunately, does not scale up when considering an institutional database that must manage data across dozens of departments, each with numerous protocols. (By contrast, the groups-of-columns approach scales well, as we shall discuss later.) The reasons for this are discussed below. One obvious problem is the sheer number of tables that must be managed. A given patient may, over time, have any combination of ailments that span specialities: cross-departmental referrals are common even for inpatient admission episodes. In most Western European countries where national-level medical records on patients go back over several decades, using such a database to answer the question, â€Å"tell me everything that has happened to this patient in forward/reverse chronological order† involves searching hundreds of protocol-specific tables, even though most patients may not have had more than a few ailments. Some clinical parameters (e.g., serum enzymes and electrolytes) are relevant to multiple specialities, and, with the one-protocol-per-table approach, they tend to be recorded redundantly in multiple tables. This violates a cardinal rule of database design: a single type of fact should be stored in a single place. If the same fact is stored in multiple places, cross-protocol analysis becomes needlessly difficult because all tables where that fact is recorded must be first tracked down. The number of tables keeps growing as new protocols are devised for emergent conditions, and the table structures must be altered if a protocol is modified in the light of medical advances. In a practical application, it is not enough merely to modify or add a table: one must alter the user interface to the tables– that is, the data-entry/browsing screens that present the protocol data. While some system maintenance is always necessary, endless redesign to keep pace with medical advances is tedious and undesirable. A simple alternative to creating hundreds of tables suggests itself. One might attempt to combine all facts applicable to a patient into a single row. Unfortunately, across all medical specialities, the number of possible types of facts runs into the hundreds of thousands. Today’s database engines permit a maximum of 256 to 1024 columns per table, and one would require hundreds of tables to allow for every possible type of fact. Further, medical data is time-stamped, i.e., the start time (and, in some cases, the end time) of patient events is important to record for the purposes of both diagnosis and management. Several facts about a patient may have a common time-stamp, e.g., serum chemistry or haematology panels, where several tests are done at a time by automated equipment, all results being stamped with the time when the patient’s blood was drawn. Even if databases did allow a potentially infinite number of columns, there would be considerable wastage of disk space, because the vast majority of columns would be inapplicable (null) for a single patient event. (Even null values use up a modest amount of space per null fact.) Some columns would be inapplicable to particular types of patients–e.g., gyn/obs facts would not apply to males. The challenges to representing institutional patient data arise from the fact that clinical data is both highly heterogeneous as well as sparse. The design solution that deals with these problems is called the entity-attribute-value (EAV) model. In this design, the parameters (attribute is a synonym of parameter) are treated as data recorded in an attribute definitions table, so that addition of new types of facts does not require database restructuring by addition of columns. Instead, more rows are added to this table. The patient data table (the EAV table) records an entity (a combination of the patient ID, clinical event, and one or more date/time stamps recording when the events recorded actually occurred), the attribute/parameter, and the associated value of that attribute. Each row of such a table stores a single fact about a patient at a particular instant in time. For example, a patient’s laboratory value may be stored as: (, 12/2/96>, serum_potassium, 4.1). Only positive or significant negative findings are recorded; nulls are not stored. Therefore, despite the extra space taken up by repetition of the entity and attribute columns for every row, the space is taken up is actually less than with a â€Å"conventional† design. Attribute-value pairs themselves are used in non-medical areas to manage extremely heterogeneous data, e.g., in Web â€Å"cookies† (text files written by a Web server to a user’s local machine when the site is being browsed), and the Microsoft Windows registries. The first major use of EAV for clinical data was in the pioneering HELP system built at LDS Hospital in Utah starting from the late 70s.[6],[7],[8] HELP originally stored all data – characters, numbers and dates– as ASCII text in a pre-relational database (ASCII, for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is the code used by computer hardware almost universally to represent characters. The range of 256 characters is adequate to represent the character set of most European languages, but not ideographic languages such as Mandarin Chinese.) The modern version of HELP, as well as the 3M CDR, which is a commercialisation of HELP, uses a relational engine. A team at Columbia University was the first to enhance EAV design to use relational database technology. The Columbia-Presbyterian CDR,[9],[10] also separated numbers from text in separate columns. The advantage of storing numeric data as numbers instead of ASCII is that one can create useful indexes on these numbers. (Indexes are a feature of database technology that allow fast search for particular values in a table, e.g., laboratory parameters within or beyond a particular range.). When numbers are stored as ASCII text, an index on such data is useless: the text â€Å"12.5† is greater than â€Å"11000†, because it comes later in alphabetical order.) Some EAV databases therefore segregate data by data type. That is, there are separate EAV tables for short text, long text (e.g., discharge summaries), numbers, dates, and binary data (signal and image data). For every parameter, the system records its data type so that one knows where it is stored. ACT/DB,[11],[12] a sys tem for management of clinical trials data (which shares many features with CDRs) created at Yale University by a team led by this author, uses this approach. From the conceptual viewpoint (i.e., ignoring data type issues), one may therefore think of a single giant EAV table for patient data, containing one row per fact for a patient at a particular date and time. To answer the question â€Å"tell me everything that has happened to patient X†, one simply gathers all rows for this patient ID (this is a fast operation because the patient ID column is indexed), sorts them by the date/time column, and then presents this information after â€Å"joining† to the Attribute definitions table. The last operation ensures that attributes are presented to the user in ordinary language – e.g., â€Å"haemoglobin,† instead of as cryptic numerical IDs. One should mention that EAV database design has been employed primarily in medical databases because of the sheer heterogeneity of patient data. One hardly ever encounters it in â€Å"business† databases, though these will often use a restricted form of EAV termed â€Å"row modelling.† Examples of row modelling are the tables of laboratory test result and pharmacy orders, discussed earlier. Note also that most production â€Å"EAV† databases will always contain components that are designed conventionally. EAV representation is suitable only for data that is sparse and highly variable. Certain kinds of data, such as patient demographics (name, sex, birth date, address, etc.) is standardized and recorded on all patients, and therefore there is no advantage in storing it in EAV form. EAV is primarily a means of simplifying the physical schema of a database, to be used when simplification is beneficial. However, the users conceptualisethe data as being segregated into protocol-specific tables and columns. Further, external programs used for graphical presentation or data analysis always expect to receive data as one column per attribute. The conceptual schema of a database reflects the users’ perception of the data. Because it implicitly captures a significant part of the semantics of the domain being modelled, the conceptual schema is domain-specific. A user-friendly EAV system completely conceals its EAV nature from its end-users: its interface confirms to the conceptual schema and creates the illusion of conventional data organisation. From the software perspective, this implies on-the-fly transformation of EAV data into conventional structure for presentation in forms, reports or data extracts that are passed to an analytic program. Conversely, changes to data by end-users through forms must be translated back into EAV form before they are saved. To achieve this sleight-of-hand, an EAV system records the conceptual schema through metadata – â€Å"dictionary† tables whose contents describe the rest of the system. While metadata is important for any database, it is critical for an EAV system, which can seldom function without it. ACT/DB, for example, uses metadata such as the grouping of parameters into forms, their presentation to the user in a particular order, and validation checks on each parameter during data entry to automatically generate web-based data entry. The metadata architecture and the various data entry features that are supported through automatic generation are described elsewhere.[13] EAV is not a panacea. The simplicity and compactness of EAV representation is offset by a potential performance penalty compared to the equivalent conventional design. For example, the simple AND, OR and NOT operations on conventional data must be translated into the significantly less efficient set operations of Intersection, Union and Difference respectively. For queries that process potentially large amounts of data across thousands of patients, the impact may be felt in terms of increased time taken to process queries. A quantitative benchmarking study performed by the Yale group with microbiology data modelled both conventionally and in EAV form indicated that parameter-centric queries on EAV data ran anywhere from 2-12 times as slow as queries on equivalent conventional data.[14] Patient-centric queries, on the other hand, run at the same speed or even faster with EAV schemas, if the data is highly heterogeneous. We have discussed the reason for the latter. A more practical problem with parameter-centric query is that the standard user-friendly tools (such as Microsoft Access’s Visual Query-by-Example) that are used to query conventional data do not help very much for EAV data, because the physical and conceptual schemas are completely different. Complicating the issue further is that some tables in a production database are conventionally designed. Special query interfaces need to be built for such purposes. The general approach is to use metadata that knows whether a particular attribute has been stored conventionally or in EAV form: a program consults this metadata, and generates the appropriate query code in response to a user’s query. A query interface built with this approach for the ACT/DB system[12]; this is currently being ported to the Web. So far, we have discussed how EAV systems can create the illusion of conventional data organization through the use of protocol-specific forms. However, the problem of how to record information that is not in a protocol–e.g., a clinician’s impressions–has not been addressed. One way to tackle this is to create a â€Å"general-purpose† form that allows the data entry person to pick attributes (by keyword search, etc.) from the thousands of attributes within the system, and then supply the values for each. (Because the user must directly add attribute-value pairs, this form reveals the EAV nature of the system.) In practice, however, this process, which would take several seconds to half a minute to locate an individual attribute, would be far too tedious for use by a clinician. Therefore, clinical patient record systems also allow the storage of â€Å"free text† – narrative in the doctor’s own words. Such text, which is of arbitrary size, may be entered in various ways. In the past, the clinician had to compose a note comprising such text in its entirety. Today, however, â€Å"template† programs can often provide structured data entry for particular domains (such as chest X-ray interpretations). These programs will generate narrative text, including boilerplate for findings that were normal, and can greatly reduce the clinician’s workload. Many of these programs use speech recognition software, thereby improving throughput even further. Once the narrative has been recorded, it is desirable to encode the facts captured in the narrative in terms of the attributes defined within the system. (Among these attributes may be concepts derived from controlled vocabularies such as SNOMED, used by Pathologists, or ICD-9, used for disease classification by epidemiologists as well as for billing records.) The advantage of encoding is that subsequent analysis of the data becomes much simpler, because one can use a single code to record the multiple synonymous forms of a concept as encountered in narrative, e.g., hepatic/liver, kidney/renal, vomiting/emesis and so on. In many medical institutions, there are non-medical personnel who are trained to scan narrative dictated by a clinician, and identify concepts from one or more controlled vocabularies by looking up keywords. This process is extremely human intensive, and there is ongoing informatics research focused on automating part of the process. Currently, it appears that a computer program cannot replace the human component entirely. This is because certain terms can match more than one concept. For example, â€Å"anaesthesia† refers to a procedure ancillary to surgery, or to a clinical finding of loss of sensation. Disambiguation requires some degree of domain knowledge as well as knowledge of the context where the phrase was encountered. The processing of narrative text is a computer-science speciality in its own right, and a preceding article[15] has discussed it in depth. Medical knowledge-based consultation programs (â€Å"expert systems†) have always been an active area of medical informatics research, and a few of these, e.g., QMR[16],[17] have attained production-level status. A drawback of many of these programs is that they are designed to be stand-alone. While useful for assisting diagnosis or management, they have the drawback that information that may already be in the patient’s electronic record must be re-entered through a dialog between the program and the clinician. In the context of a hospital, it is desirable to implement embeddedknowledge-based systems that can act on patient data as it is being recorded or generated, rather than after the fact (when it is often too late). Such a program might, for example, detect potentially dangerous drug interactions based on a particular patient’s prescription that had just been recorded in the pharmacy component of the CPRS. Alternatively, a program might send an alert (by pager) to a clinician if a particular patient’s monitored clinical parameters deteriorated severely. The units of program code that operate on incoming patient data in real-time are called medical logic modules (MLMs), because they are used to express medical decision logic. While one could theoretically use any programming language (combined with a database access language) to express this logic, portability is an important issue: if you have spent much effort creating an MLM, you would like to share it with others. Ideally, others would not have to rewrite your MLM to run on their system, but could install and use it directly. Standardization is therefore desirable. In 1994, several CPRS researchers proposed a standard MLM language called the Arden syntax.[18],[19],[20] Arden resembles BASIC (it is designed to be easy to learn), but has several functions that are useful to express medical logic, such as the concepts of the earliest and the latest patient events. One must first implement an Arden interpreter or compiler for a particular CPRS, and then write Arden modules that will be triggered after certain events. The Arden code is translated into specific database operations on the CPRS that retrieve the appropriate patient data items, and operations implementing the logic and decision based on that data. As with any programming language, interpreter implementation is not a simple task, but it has been done for the Columbia-Presbyterian and HELP CDRs: two of the informaticians responsible for defining Arden, Profs. George Hripcsak and T. Allan Pryor, are also lead developers for these respective systems. To assist Arden implementers, the specification of version 2 of Arden, which is now a standard supported by HL7, is available on-line.[20] Arden-style MLMs, which are essentially â€Å"if-then-else† rules, are not the only way to implement embedded decision logic. In certain situations, there are sometimes more efficient ways of achieving the desired result. For example, to detect drug interactions in a pharmacy order, a program can generate all possible pairs of drugs from the list of prescribed drugs in a particular pharmacy order, and perform database lookups in a table of known interactions, where information is typically stored against a pair of drugs. (The table of interactions is typically obtained from sources such as First Data Bank.) This is a much more efficient (and more maintainable) solution than sequentially evaluating a large list of rules embodied in multiple MLMs. Nonetheless, appropriately designed MLMs can be an important part of the CPRS, and Arden deserves to become more widespread in commercial CPRSs. Its currently limited support in such systems is more due to the significant implementation effort than to any flaw in the concept of MLMs. Patient management software in a hospital is typically acquired from more than one vendor: many vendors specialize in niche markets such as picture archiving systems or laboratory information systems. The patient record is therefore often distributed across several components, and it is essential that these components be able to inter-operate with each other. Also, for various reasons, an institution may choose to switch vendors, and it is desirable that migration of existing data to another system be as painless as possible. Data exchange/migration is facilitated by standardization of data interchange between systems created by different vendors, as well as the metadata that supports system operation. Significant progress has been made on the former front. The standard formats used for the exchange of image data and non-image medical data are DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) and HL-7 (Health Level 7) respectively. For example, all vendors who market digital radiography, CT or MRI devices are supposed to be able to support DICOM, irrespective of what data format their programs use internally. HL-7 is a hierarchical format that is based on a language specification syntax called ASN.1 (ASN=Abstract Syntax Notation), a standard originally created for exchange of data between libraries. HL-7’s specification is quite complex, and HL-7 is intended for computers rather than humans, to whom it can be quite cryptic. There is a move to wrap HL-7 within (or replace it with) an equivalent dialect of the more human-understandable XML (eXtended Markup Language), which has rapidly gained prominence as a data interchange standard in E-commerce and other areas. XML also has the advantage that there are a very large number of third-party XML tools available: for a vendor just entering the medical field, an interchange standard based on XML would be considerably easier to implement. CPRSs pose formidable informatics challenges, all of which have not been fully solved: many solutions devised by researchers are not always successful when implemented in production systems. An issue for further discussion is security and confidentiality of patient records. In countries such as the US where health insurers and employers can arbitrarily reject individuals with particular illnesses as posing too high a risk to be profitably insured or employed, it is important that patient information should not fall in the wrong hands. Much also depends on the code of honour of the individual clinician who is authorised to look at patient data. In their book, â€Å"Freedom at Midnight,† authors Larry Collins and Dominic Lapierre cite the example of Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s anonymous physician (supposedly Rustom Jal Vakil) who had discovered that his patient was dying of lung cancer. Had Nehru and others come to know this, they might have prolonged the partition discussions indefinitely. Because Dr. Vakil respected his patient’s confidentiality, however, world history was changed.

Lamb to the Slaughter: How Did Social Roles Allow Mrs. Maloney to Get Away with Murder

Amber Lopez Mr. Lopez AP English III February 4, 2013 Snapped: How Mrs. Maloney got away with murder In the short story â€Å"Lamb to the slaughter† by Roald Dahl, Mrs. Maloney gets away with killing her husband and nobody really suspects her of doing so because she's a woman. The setting and time period of the story plays a large role because this is still an era when men and women had gender roles. Mrs. Maloney isn't a suspect to her husband's murder because she had an alibi and one of the main reasons was she had the gender role of the typical house wife.In the story the detctives do not suspect Mrs. Maloney of killing her husband because her gender roles as a woman are being fragile, dumb, incapable of doing anything that needs physical force, does nothing but cook, clean, take care of the house, tend to her husband, and above all she is pregnant which helps her get away with murdering her husband. Mrs. Maloney is the typical house wife that always tends to her husbands ev ery need. When she kills her husband and the detectives come to her house to investigate his murder they do not expect her to have done such a thing.The detectives believed that her husband was hit behind the head with a heavy blunt object and her gender role being a woman let alone a pregnant woman help her get away with murder. Since she's a pregnant woman her gender role helps her seem fragile and weak Incapable of carrying a heavy object and exerting enough force to kill someone, so that's one of the reasons she gets away with murder. Another reason Mrs. Maloney gets away with killing her husband is that she basically worshipped him, she lived for him. Mrs.Maloney did everything she possibly could make her husband a happy man, the way it should be in those times. In the story it shows how much Mrs. Maloney loved her husband, and how she enjoyed being a house wife. The police officers and detectives notice that Mrs. Maloney seemed to be grieving over her husband's death, and they didn't know about Mr. Maloney's intentions on leaving Mrs. Maloney, so it makes her look less suspicous. Last but not least Mrs. Maloney was a smart woman, and created an alibi. Men in those times thought women were dumb, and they were also supposed to be virtuous and innocent.So when the detectives questioned her she had the perfect alibi. To men a woman could have never been able to do such a thing because they were too innocent, and since they were considered dumb they knew she would've been caught if they would have killed someone. In Conclusion, the gender roles of women played a large role in the story because it hepled Mrs. Maloney get away with murdering her husband. The detectives obviously had stereotypes about her being the typical house wife and she played along, so Mr. Maloney's murderer will remain a mystery. DUN DUN DUN

Analysis of Trust and Equity in Law Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Analysis of Trust and Equity in Law - Case Study Example In order to understand the term trust well, one has to understand some technical terms such as resulting trusts, an express trust, fiduciary, fixed trust, beneficiary, charitable trust, personal remedies, and constructive trusts. Trust is always a unique creation of the common law. When a trustee is transferring property to a beneficiary he may be bound by numerous duties which may be either imposed by general principles of equity, by statute or by the trust instrument and there are always serious impacts to the trustee who may either neglect his duties or breach the terms contained in the contract. When establishing a trust, there must be certainty and clarity. It is very necessary to be clear as to who the property is transferred to. There should also be the establishment of the rights of the beneficiary with certainty so that in case the trustee fails to carry his duties, the trust should be enforced. There must be different types and levels of formality when dealing with differen t and various types of property. It is very important for the trustee to be invested properly with the title to the trust property that he wishes to transfer. This is because he is the owner of the property. Unless the trustee does so, the trust is considered as incomplete and the beneficiaries may have no claim over the property. This fact is well illustrated in case Milroy v Lord (1862). In special instances where the property has to be transferred to the beneficiary, the trustee needs to closely examine the particular type of trust that he wants and wishes to transfer so that he can determine what needs to be done in order to transfer the property effectively. If the trustee of the property has a title, there is no need of any formality in the transfer. For an effective declaration to take place is only some clear evidence of irrevocable and present declaration of trust. This evidence may take any form. It is a condition that for a declaration of a trust to be effective, there mu st not be a failed attempt by the owner of the property to create the trust by transferring the property to the beneficiary. In the case, Paul v Constance [1977] 1 WLR 527, Mr. Constance who was deceased was operating a bank account in his own name. In many instances, he heard as saying to his de facto partner Mrs. Paul that the money he had was his as well as hers. By that time, Mr. Constance was still legally married to Mrs. Constance, who was the defendant in this case. Constance later died intestate and all his assets including the bank account passed to his wife. With this statement, it was not sufficient enough that there was a trust which had been created.  Ã‚  

Research Request - Has the U.S. governments war on drugs done anything Proposal

Request - Has the U.S. governments war on drugs done anything to reduce the use of illegal drugs - Research Proposal Example The message to the Congress comprised of text concerning with devoting more federal resources to preventing new additions and rehabilitating those who were already addicted, however, this part was not the center of attention like the war on drugs. It is estimated that the US devotes more than one billion dollars every year towards the War on Drugs and this research seeks to find out if the War on Drugs has been successful in reducing the use of illegal drugs in the United States and how effect this is on the overall drug issue. Almost three million people use eighty percent of the illegal hard drugs in the United States and there is highly likelihood of dealing with the Drug-trafficking organizations through changing the behavior of the heavy users of these drugs (Cassel & Bernstein, 2007). A reduction of the rate of consumption of the casual users will not have a considerable effect on the flow of drugs into the country or the flow of money into the areas that produce the drugs. The experience the US has had with marketing’s power has inclined the country to prefer prohibiting and enforcing rather than legalizing and marketing of the drugs. However, this option has associated consequences as an increased number of American citizens go to jail for offences associated to drugs as well as parole violations as compared to property crimes (Alexandrova, 2004). Further, even though the nation spends five times more to jail the people convicted of drug offences that it did thirty years ago, the prices of cocaine and other drugs have reduced by eighty to ninety percent compared to the prevailing prices during the beginning of the war on drugs. Consequently, critics have argued that imprisoning the low-level dealers in the streets is a futile endeavor as their transactions that cost approximately two hundred dollars will cost the state almost one hundred thousand dollars in the offender is given a sentence that

Culture and communication Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Culture and communication - Essay Example China has fifty-six ethnic groups. The Huis, Mongolians, Tibetans, Hans and the Manchu are the five major ethnic groups. Hans are the majority with the rest of the nationalities combined forming around 8% of the entire population (Gunde, 10). China is further divided in to three administrative levels namely the province (sheng) – there are 22 of these in China; the zhizhiqu or the self-governing areas; and the zhixiash, the municipalities under the central government. China can be generally divided in to the north and southern China. North china is predominantly dry while the southern China is wet, with irrigated rice fields. Unlike the northern part, which is densely populated, the southern part is sparsely populated with homes only half a mile away from each other (Fairbank, 4). Wheat noodles are the staple food of the northern people while the southern people mostly feed on rice. The northern people are having a strong psyche than their southern counter parts. To accommodate their differences, the Chinese have compromised their prominent differences in culture, body structure as well as their economic activitie. Chinese value relationships – closer ties are essential and this is the basis of Guanxi, or a social network. People belonging to the same guanxi extended favors to each other in both employment and business (Gunde, 8 ). During the Mid 1900s, the government had suppressed the Chinese rights to cultural activities but after the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese could now freely enjoy varieties of cultural practices like painting, dancing, singing and freedom of worship. The Chinese have been so artistic and have brought to the world so many inventions like porcelain, ink, playing cards, wheelbarrows, among others. The Chinese were also recognized for their fine silk whose production mode remained their kept secret for a long time. People all over the world love and appreciate the Chinese

People in Organizations Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

People in Organizations - Essay Example We are all amateur psychologists, and the most successful influencers are able to assess accurately their target influencees, and adapt their influencing messages to suit them. Such adjustments lead to the creation of influencer-influencee rapport. The conversation of people who are in rapport flows, and both their body movements and their words become synchronized with each other. The recommendation to match the influencee so as to create rapport is itself based on the even broader notion of liking. This says that we like people like ourselves and, in consequence, will be more willing to comply with their requests (Aguinis, & Henle, 2001),. Not only do we know that people are different, but we also know that they are predictably different. Indeed, we spend a great deal of our time classifying them into broad types, and explaining the differences between the types. Every popular newspaper contains an astrological section which implies that Capricorns behave in one way and that Scorpios act in another. The twelve signs of the Zodiac represent one attempt at classifying people into personality types based on the time of the year in which they were born. How accurate or useful are they Historically, many attempts have been made to classify people according to their personalities. The Greek physician, Hippocrates, offered the temperaments model of personality. He believed that there were four basic personalities or temperaments - melancholic, choleric, sanguine and phlegmatic. In his view, each was determined by the amount and type of bile and phlegm that people possessed in their bodies (Aguinis, & Henle, 2001). Distinguishing Between Personality Types If you are to select a particular influencing approach on the basis of your target influencee's personality, then the personality framework employed has to be both easy to understand and simple to use. You need to be able to divide people into a very limited number of personality types or classes, based on the personality traits that they possess. In modern times, Carl Gustav Jung was the first to observe that people's behavior, rather than being individually unique, fitted into patterns, and that many of the seemingly random differences in human behavior were actually ordered and consistent (Lambert, 1996). It is obvious that any attempt to reduce personality into only four categories inevitably ignores the subtlety of human differences. On the other hand, anything more complex is unusable by an influencer. For this reason, in using these four personality stereotypes, one is inevitably trading accuracy off against ease of use. The framework does allow you to classify the individual whom you may wish to influence in a simple way using your observation of their behavior and the examination of their created work or home environment. Such information can then be immediately put into practice. Personality Testing One obvious way to understand the relationship of individual differences to work-related behavior is to examine the applied literature on personality testing in the workplace. Psychological tests, attempting to measure individual differences related to occupational behaviors, have been used for over 60 years, and there now exist nearly 80,000 occupational-related tests. Both world wars, particularly the second, were

The Ethical Issues and Social Responsibility of Corporate Management Research Paper

The Ethical Issues and Social Responsibility of Corporate Management at Ford - Research Paper Example Since its production, people have been curious and apprehensive about this Ford Pinto model as it has low capacity and safety measures, catching fire, particularly after a rear-end collision. The specific case of the three teenagers received media attention primarily because the company was charged with criminal conduct and murder, not simply negligence. Connected to this case were the several other pending civil cases against Ford for this particular problem. Larger of the problems that Ford faced was that of corporate social responsibility where ethical concerns included conducting successful and people-oriented business in today’s time (Ethics and the Individual, n.d). The paper talks about this ethical concern that Ford faced and the ethical decisions it took to cater to this issue at hand. Furthermore, the paper also discusses the various alternative actions that the company could have taken to cater to this ethical dilemma at hand. The Ethical Issues in the Case and the Approach used by Coordinator The various ethical concerns at hand that this case identifies include the launch of Ford Pinto with complete knowledge that the product was faulty and prone to problems such as the fuel tank catching fire after a slow rear-end collision with any other car. This ethical concern is magnified by the forty or so civil and one criminal case against Ford Motor Company based on this problem identified in the car. The cars had specifically been tested to evaluate whether the fuel tank was faulty and it was discovered that out of eleven cars, eight cars had ruptured fuel tanks which caught fire. This problem is complicated further by the fact that Ford decided to launch its Ford Pinto in two years, which is one year and six months earlier than the regular time span it took for the product to be put in the market, from a conception of the product. The product was out in the market and it implies that the coordinator had a clear idea on the failures of the product and yet launched it in the market with this explicit knowledge (The Revised Trevino & Nelson 8-step model, n.d). In the ethical case elucidated above, the philosophical approach that the coordinator used in this case was the justice or fairness approach. This approach implies the principal taught by Aristotle that equals are to be treated equally while unequal should be treated unequally. In this respect, the moral question is that whether the actions taken by the coordinator were fair and whether these actions treated everyone similarly or in a similar manner or not. The case indicates that the coordinator launched the product despite knowing its faults and problems, thus showing discriminatory behavior towards the other stakeholders of the product (Andre, Meyer, Shanks & Velasquez, 1996). The Stakeholders for the Dilemma It is pertinent to study the various stakeholders and their relationship to the case as it will help us in evaluating which stakeholders had the most negative ef fect from the launch and running of Ford Pintos in the market. The first and foremost were the users of Ford Pinto who either drove the Ford Pinto or were passengers in the car. The negative effect for them was that any small accident particularly involving the rear end of the Ford Pinto, would result in a ruptured fuel tank and possibly a fire which could be dangerous to these stakeholders.

Interview with a group of adolescents Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Interview with a group of adolescents - Essay Example They said they were glad they were young and didnt need to worry with things like that. They also agreed that being young was great because they didnt need to work a full time job. Some of them had casual jobs they did for their own spending money, but they realized that they didnt need to go to work every day like their parents. This line of discussion lead naturally into what they didnt like about being a teenager. They expressed frustration about the lack of freedom they had. They were forced to go to school, eat the food prepared for them at home and wear the clothes their parents bought for them. They didnt like the fact that they were required to go to school, but most of them agreed that school was more fun than it was work so they didnt mind being there. All of them agreed that not being able to drive a car yet was a pain. They all looked forward to getting their drivers licenses and seemed to think that being able to drive would solve most of their problems. Life would be so much better after age sixteen. I can commiserate with these kids as I remember being a teenager. There was a conflict that seemed to intensify each year until age sixteen. On the one hand I felt I deserved more freedom, but on the other hand, there was no real way for my parents to grant that freedom until I could drive a car. I remember feeling exactly like these kids. A car would change everything! I received lots of different answers about what was the best thing in life right now for these kids. Interesting enough, most of the answers for both best and worst aspect of life dealt with some sort of interpersonal contact within the family of the peer group. Some of the kids said the best thing in their life right now was their girlfriend or boyfriend. Three said that the worst thing was that they had just broken up with their boyfriend or girlfriend. One girl

Develop marketing options for small business operations Assignment

Develop marketing options for small business operations - Assignment Example Currently, Vodafone and 2degree and telecom sell so many brand cell phones like nokia Samsung LG Motorola IPHONE Blackberry etc... There about 80% market for them. We do special mobile phone in the market that’s different with them. We can sell mobile phone price cheaper than them but with good quality and more features. Future growth of the market/products is projected in the following areas: Dual sim card: that’s mean people don’t need carry two phones on every day. Two sim card and works at same time. People can get two different numbers in one mobile. TV function: people can watch on the tv in anywhere with mobile phone they have. That’s totally free no cost for that. Picture message: people can send and received text with it. Java game: people can download and play java game with it. Potential customers Business People, Professionals, Students, Parents, Senior Citizens. Potential suppliers Our potential suppliers would be coming from China to ensure cost effectiveness making us competitive in the market in terms of price. Competitors Nokia C2 LG KS660 Dual-SIM Touchscreen Mobile Phone Spice D-1100 Dual SIM PDA Mobile Phone Spice D-88 Dual SIM Mobile Spice D-90 Dual SIM Mobile Phone Complementary business operations and affiliates Mobile Phone carriers like Vodafone, Telecom and 2degrees because they require celphone unit to be able to connect on their network. Publications Local news paper, Chamber Newspapers, School Publications, Market Research providers Can be done in-house to save on cost Market source Industry organisations Local market business organizations like Avondale, business and chamber organizations. Government agencies and departments SEC, Department of Trade and other regulating agencies Local Body organizations Avondale market business organizations. Internet Marketing Trade Me and Stella online shopping website. b) Give a brief description of the foll owing Market Research methods. (P.C. 1.2) i. Questionnaires Questionnaire is a quantitative form of getting information about the market in a form of written questions to obtain useful statistical information from a given sample from the market that determines consumer preference, customer behavior, market hypothesis, etch. ii. Surveys Survey is a quantitative form of getting information about the market’s individual characteristic that comprises the market from a given sample that represents the entire market. iii. Interviews Is qualitative method of getting information from the market through a structured and prepared conversation. iv. Product demonstrations Product demonstration is marketing research method whereby potential customers are asked to sample the product with a condition that tjeu will report its feedback that will be

Reflections on the similar principles underlying T. Chamber's Essay

Reflections on the similar principles underlying T. Chamber's masterpiece 'Hudson Highlands' circa 1840 and Samuel Barber's composition 'The Violin Concerto' with Piano Accompaniment - Essay Example Both works are masterpieces in their own right with similarities that are obvious even to a layman like me. Both are soft and mellow in their respective styles with slight variations in tempo and timbre. Both compositions are balanced in a delicate manner with no sudden changes of form or loudness to jolt the eye and ear. In the painting the emphasis is on the play of shadows like that of a Rembrant work while in the musical composition it is the accompanying piano that lays the emphasis against the soft foreground sounds of the violin. The painting is well proportioned, the different constituents of the landscape blending harmoniously in the composition, without one overcrowding the other. In the music also the play between the violin and piano and the variations of pitch and timbre are in proportion without downplaying the importance of either. Â  The movement in the picture is depicted by the brush strokes of the road with softly curving stripes while the piano takes upon itself the task of movement, alternating between slow and fast movements. Both the painting and the musical piece have slow and sedate rhythms with slight variations to relieve the monotony. No work of art is without repetition. While Chambers does it with the drawing of trees and sails, Barber does it with the same movements alternated with different tunes in between.

Grant Proposal Essay Example for Free

Grant Proposal Essay Program planning is a process that shows the needs of a community and the reason and purpose for the programs an organization wants to set up to address that need. Through program planning; goals, objectives, activities, and evaluations are set up to provide the framework for the grant proposal to be written. A well written grant proposal will show the reader that the organization writing the proposal truly understands the problems within a specific community and it will convince the reader that they want to provide the financial help that will be necessary for the organization to solve the problem. Once a problem within a community has been discovered, an organization figures out how to confront that problem and writes a grant proposal to explain that problem and how it plans to help solve that problem, by proving that they understand the situation. The grant proposal starts with the premise, which explains the understanding the organization has about the problem and shows the belief they have that they will be able to provide the help necessary to solve the problem. The conclusion portion of the grant proposal explains the ways that the organization plans to address the problem through the programs and services they will provide to the community. Finally, the grant proposal will provide a detailed explanation of what they plan the outcomes of their programs to be. The organization has to prove that their programs will truly be an asset to the community using their grant proposal by making sure that each part of the proposal will compliment the other through a descriptive and flowing argument and by making sure that each part of the grant proposal compliments the other.

Do Prisons Work Essay Example for Free

Do Prisons Work Essay This study will examine the effectiveness of current prison treatment programs in Australia, New Zealand, South East Asia, United States of America in rehabilitating or reforming an individual and coinciding recidivism rates upon a prisoners release. Prison based treatment programs for sex offenders in Western Australia, New South Wales and New Zealand are examined and recidivism rates compared. Treatment programs for offenders with drug and alcohol issues and the various strategies within the criminal justice system such as diversion, education and drug court programs are examined and differences explained. Rehabilitation programs such as education, life skills, employment and cognitive behavioural treatment are explained and research discussed. Conclusions will be drawn outlining programs with the highest level of recidivism both in Western Australia and globally. The â€Å"nothing works† mantra (Martinson) 1974, is seen to be refuted and treatment is seen to be successful when it is matched to the criminogenic needs of the offender (MacKenzie, 2006). Future recommendations are made in regards to the need for correctional staff to assess each offender as an individual with different needs, and to therefore implement programs that will give the offender the best change of reform or rehabilitation (MacKenzie, 2006). There are many treatment and rehabilitation programs currently used in corrections around the world aimed at reducing recidivism (MacKenzie, 2006). A heuristic approach classifies various strategies into incarceration, treatment programs and rehabilitation (McKenzie, 2006). These interventions represent different strategies for controlling crime in the community, and have some theoretical rationale for expecting a reduction in crime, despite being different in the mechanism anticipated to produce the reduction (MacKenzie, 2006). Incarceration deprives the prisoner of opportunities to commit crime, usually through detention in prison or in some states capital punishment (McKenzie, 2006). Rehabilitation is based on the premise that people can change, and if assessment is to contribute to rehabilitation it must be capable of measuring change (MacKenzie, 2006). The Static 99 risk assessment measure is an International Tool that is currently used to assess recidivism levels of sex offenders (Hoy Bright, 2008). Rehabilitation orientated treatment programs include education, cognitive skills and employment (MacKenzie, 2006). Correctional educational programs are seen to have optimistic results in lowering levels of recidivism in prisoners (Stevens Ward, 2007). Kaki Bukit Prison School based in Singapore is seen to be successful in reducing recidivism by aiming to creative a learning environment based on Peter Senge’s book â€Å"The Fifth Discipline† (Senge, 1990). Part of the discipline involves inmates engaging in the â€Å"The Reflective Thinking Process† (Oh, 2007), an education programme which aims to assist prisoners in reflecting on past destructive behaviour and to encourage appropriate restitution. The school is supported by a multidisciplinary team of teachers, prison officers and counsellors who work together to help students in their studies and in their journey of change to become responsible, thinking citizens (Tam, 2007). For inmates who completed their studies at Kubit Bukit Centre and were released in 2000 and 2001, the 2 year recidivism rate was 24% (Oh, 2007). Acacia, Western Australia’s only private run prison, is operated by Serco and aims to bring service to life (Needham, 2009). Storybook Dads is an example of this and aims to rehabilitate prisoners, break the cycle of reoffending and close the gap between a child and his father (Needham, 2009). The program opens up a broad range of educational opportunities ranging from writing their own stories to learning how to use a computer (Needham, 2009). The main objective of the program is to empower fathers and for children to feel loved, which then improves the lives of the prisoner’s children (Needham, 2009). Prisoners are given the opportunity to record their child’s favourite bedtime story on a CD with sound effects, personal message and CD cover (Needham, 2009). Current research indicates that fathers who have been imprisoned tend to withdraw from life outside the prison and subsequently lose contact completely with their children (Needham, 2009). Statistics show that six out of ten children whose father is a current or ex- prisoner become involved in criminal activities and consequently find themselves in similar situations to their father’s in prison (Needham, 2009). The Storybook Dad’s program runs in eighty prisons in the United Kingdom and maintains family connections and reduces reoffending (Needham, 2009). The National Fatherhood Initiative runs a similar programme called the Incarcerated Father’s Program which operates at Branchville Correctional Centre in Indiana (Gosnell, 2006). It is similar to Storybook Dad’s programme in helping prisoners reunite with their children and families (Gosnell, 2006). One study monitored 186 men for three years after release from prison with only five returning (Gosnell, 2006). Three men returned for small offences whilst two came back on a long term basis indicating low levels of recidivism, when in comparison seventy percent of men released from prison normally return within an average of one to three years (Gosnell, 2006). Prison based treatment programs offered in Western Australia for sex offenders are the Sex Offender Program, Indigenous Sex Offender and Intellectually Disabled Offender (Macgregor, 2008). Community based maintenance programs are offered for each type of offender, the current program for disabled people being the Safe Care Program (Macgregor, 2008). In Australia, most treatment programs for sex offenders are based on cognitive behavioural therapy aimed to target the criminogenic needs or risk factors of offenders (Macgregor, 2008). If these needs are altered the chances of changing the criminal behaviour are higher in the range of 10-30% (Blud, 1999). The programs are seen to be effective in that they work to alter many of the cognitive deficits displayed by offenders (Blud, 1999). They target the known risk factors for sexual reoffending which are cognitive distortions, empathy deficits and wide ranging self regulation (Hoy Bright, 2008). A Western Australia study in 2002 measured recidivism rates of 2165 sex offenders referred to the treatment unit from 1987 to 1999 (Greenberg, 2002). The study compared treated offenders with non-treated offenders, with no significant findings on effects of treatment on sexual recidivism (Greenberg, 2002). Systematic differences between the non-treated and treated group in the Western Australian study, such as indigenous status, risk category, and length of sentence may have impaired comparisons of groups (Lievore, 2004). Inconsistencies across the data, methodological limits may have limited the study from being able to identify less significant treatment outcomes, and to identify sources (Greenberg, 2002). At present a prison based treatment program designed for adult sex offenders is offered in every Territory and State Australia, despite many having yet to be evaluated (Macgregor, 2008). An evaluation conducted in New South Wales on the Custody Based Intensive Treatment program for high risk offenders (Hoy Bright, 2008) compared recidivism rates of 117 treated offenders with those predicted by the STATIC 99 risk assessment measure, an internationally used tool that assesses the recidivism risk of sex offenders (Hoy Bright, 2008). STATIC 99 risk probabilities are based on a large sample of sex offenders in the United Kingdom and Canada (Hanson Thornton, 2000). The study found that 8. 5% of sex offenders treated at the Custody Based Intensive Treatment programs committed further sexual offences in 3. 5 years, compared with a predicted sexual recidivism of 26% (Hoy Bright, 2008). An evaluation was conducted on the Te Piriti Special Treatment Program for child sex offenders in New Zealand (Nathan, Wilson Hillman, 2003). Te Piriti incorporates cognitive behavioural therapy methods in combination with Tikanga Maori, holistic practices derived from world view and a desire to understand the universe (Nathan, 2008). This study compared recidivism rates of Te Piriti graduates with a control group used in the Kia Marama study (Nathan, 2008). In comparison with the non-treated group’s sexual recidivism rate of 21%, a small 5. 7% of offenders who completed the programme at Te Piriti reoffended sexually (Nathan, 2008). Maori sexual offenders were also found to have a positive response to the program (Nathan, 2008). Only 4. 41% of Maori offenders reoffended sexually after receiving treatment at Te Piriti (Nathan) 2003 compared with 13. 58% of Maori Kia Marama graduates (New Zealand Corrections, 2003). These results are supportive of the argument that programs are more effective in reducing sexual recidivism when the design and implementation are attuned to the cultural background of the offenders (Macgregor, 2008). Currently, there are various strategies within the criminal justice system that respond to offenders with drug and alcohol issues (Makkai Payne, 2003). At one end of the spectrum is the diversion by police of first offenders or low level offenders into education or treatment programs (Makkai Payne, 2003). At the other end, is the diversion of repeat drug dependent offenders facing imprisonment into intensive drug court programs (Makkai Payne, 2003). Drug courts aim to divert both men and women offenders (Freeman, Karski Doak, 2000). The elements of the New South Wales drug court program are treatment; social support and the development of living skills; regular reports to the court; and regular urine testing (Freeman et al. , 2000). During the twelve month program, participants are expected to stabilise their lives by not using drugs to address health issues, and to cease criminal activity (Freeman et al. ,). Ideally, they consolidate their situation and develop life and job skills, and financially reintegrate fully, becoming financially independent (Freeman et al. ,). Analysis of the data indicates a high success rate, with only thirteen percent of the participants having committed an offence on completion of the program, indicating a low level of recidivism (Freeman et al. ,). A promising approach to combating illicit drug use has been implemented at the Metropolitan Women’s Correctional Centre in Victoria (Peachy, 1999). Carniche program includes core courses in drug awareness, drug education and Alcoholics Anonymous, which provides a group therapy environment and a twelve step program based on abstinence and group support (Peachy, 1999). The program runs for three to four months, after which the prisoners are reintegrated into the mainstream prison population (Peachy, 1999). The program involves a maximum of ten prisoners who live in a residential unit separate from the main prison population who participate in intensive drug group and individual counselling (Peachy, 2000). The program has not been evaluated for its effect on offender recidivism and its success may depend on the support available to prisoners upon release (Peachy, 2000). A new program for women offenders, titled Reconnections, completed its pilot phase at Bandyup Women’s prison in September 2009 (Porter, 2009). The program was based on therapeutic interventions to assist women in looking at past trauma and abuse in addressing their offending behaviour (Porter, 2009). Although the program was scheduled to commence in early 2010, funding problems prevented the commencement of the program (Porter, 2009). Despite the program failing to commence prison doors at Bandyup continue to open to volunteers and visitors, a move imprisoned women value (Department of Corrective Services, 2005). The Western Australian Department of Justice allows over 3,000 volunteers who provide support for victims of crime, prisoners and juvenile detainees (Department of Corrective Services, 2005). Western Australia’s drug rehabilitation is seen to be a part of the whole sentencing process both in prison and the community for a prisoner’s release on parole (Cox, 2007). There is a continuum drug users who go through the Perth Drug Court’s treatment programs are less likely to reoffend than those sent to prison (Cox, 2007). Recidivism rates for offenders using the court’s drug treatment programs were 17 percent lower than those for offenders sent to prison (Cox, 2007). The study assessed 250 drug users, dealt with the Drug Court who were charged with offences such as burglary, theft or fraud between 2000 and 2003 (Cox, 2007). In comparison to Western Australia one in every 100 adults is locked up in America and there punitive corrections system do not follow a Western approach, incorporating resources such as Drug Courts to help prevent re-offending (McClatchy, 2008). Kansas has been seen to rethink incarceration policies, with a focus on reserving prison for the worst criminals who pose a real danger to society (McClatchy, 2008). Kansas’ only drug court, in Lyon County, has slashed offender rearrest rates almost by half. (McClatchy, 2008). In California, a study found that in a two-year period, drug courts cost $14 million but saved tax-payers more than $43 million over the costs of sending offenders to prison (McCatchy,2008). Kansas Department of Corrections has had success with a new parole re-entry program, including a pilot project in Wichita that gives parolees more support and helps them to keep on the straight and narrow (McClatchy, 2008). Corrections Secretary Roger Werholtz has seen the new philosophy dramatically cut re-offender rates state-wide and reduced recidivism (McCatchy, 2008). Spectrum Addiction Services offers residential treatment, outpatient, detox and domestic violence service for substance abusers and Correctional Recovery Academies in Massachusetts, Georgia and Rhode Island (Astell, 1995). The treatment strategy supported by Spectrum is based on behaviour and based on self-esteem, participant’s feelings, and self-revelation much as the 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous (Astell, 1995). Spectrum views the way to fight recidivism is behavioural, teaching people the skills to stay straight (Astell, 1995). A situational approach to drug abuse may be another avenue to explore when examining the Vietnam War (Astell, 1995). Many American soldiers who were involved with heroin use in South East Asia did not bring the habit home, indicating that some drug abuse is situational (Astell, 1995). In the mid 1970’s a pessimistic assessment of rehabilitation programs by Robert Martinson asserted that â€Å"nothing works† in correctional treatment (Cullen Gendreau, 2000). However recent reassessment using methods of meta-analysis has found that offender treatment programs do reduce problem behaviour (Cullen Gendreau, 2000). Effective programs are those which recognise the importance of individual differences and the measurement of these factors when assessing what programs and interventions would be most suitable for each offender (Harland, 1996). Privatisation of prisons is seen to be a positive solution to improving treatment programs and reducing associated recidivism in developing more of a restorative framework to treatment programs (Corporate Responsibility, 2007). This involves emphasising the importance of good relationships between prisoners and staff, the need to recognise the impact of cultural differences when implementing programmes and matching an officer of suitable culture and temperament to best assist the needs of the prisoner (Corporate Responsibility, 2007). Further study is indicated as being required for WA Sex Offenders with little research being available for this group of offenders when compared to other states in WA (Cullen Gendreau, 2000). Systematic differences between the non-treated and treated group in the Western Australian study, such as indigenous status, risk category, and length of sentence may have impaired comparisons of groups (Lievore, 2004). Inconsistencies across the data, methodological limits may have also limited the study from being able to identify less significant treatment outcomes, and to identify sources (Greenberg , 2002). A recommendation for improved research design is suggested in the implementation of a similar tool as the Static 99 in Australia which is currently only available internationally in measuring sexual recidivism (Mackenzie, 2006). Another finding from reviews of the studies is the large difference of amount of research completed for drug-offenders in comparison with other offenders, such as women prisoners and sex offenders which is currently limited (MacKenzie, 2006). Given the current concern about the increasing amount of drug offenders entering the correction system it is apparent as to why there is uch a large number of evaluations of programs being completed for these offenders (MacKenzie, 2006). Although the role for corrections appears to be a current challenge, it is hoped that with further research, funding , availability of treatment programmes and education of prison officers in addressing individual and cultural differences, that the offender be given the greatest chance for rehabilitation, reform and consequently a life of freedom outside the prison bars (MacKenzie, 2006).

America And World War Ii History Essay

America And World War Ii History Essay The objective of this book is to subject the chief features of the Good War myth to bright analysis in the hope of present an additional realistic picture, one that does not demean the achievement of the United States and of liberal democracy but that at the same time does not diminish the stress, suffering, problems, and failures inevitably faced by a society at war. The war was good for the economy. It was liberating for women. It was a war of tanks and airplanes a cleaner war than World War I. Americans were united. Soldiers were proud. It was a time of prosperity, sound morality, and power. But according to historian Michael Adams, our memory is distorted, and it has left us with a misleading even dangerous legacy. Challenging many of our common assumptions about the period, Adams argues that our experience of World War II was positive but also disturbing, creating problems that continue to plague us today. Michael C Adams has contributed to The Best War Ever: America and World War II as an author. Michael C. C. Adams, a professor of history at Northern Kentucky University, is the author of The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I (1990).   Much of the events of WWII has been mythologized not only by Hollywood and government propaganda, and over the years this mythology has been perpetuated by those who lived through the war themselves. Michael C. C. Adams has sought to expose these stories for what they are, fabrication and oversimplifications, and provide the basic facts that facilitate a truer understanding of WWII and the world wide cultural changes surrounding it, both before and after the war itself. In chapter one, Mythmaking and the War, Adams sets out the myth itself, as defined by Hollywood dramatization, government propaganda, advertisement agencies, and the revised memories of those who stayed home, as well as those who fought in the war itself. The war became Americas golden age, a peak in the life of society when everything worked out and the good guys definitely got a happy ending. (Adams, 2) The WWII era came to serve a purpose; to be the bygone age which America once was, and if worked hard enough for, could be again. It was, in a sense, Americas Garden of Eden, the time and place where all things were right. Of course, this was a manufactured ideal, what Adams calls a usable past. In creating a usable past, we seek formulas to apply in solving todays problems. Americans believe that WWII proved one rule above all othersit is usually better to fight than to talk. (Adams, 4) To make WWII into the best war ever, we must leave out the area bombings and other questionable aspects while exaggerating the good things. The war myth is distorted not so much in what it says as in what it doesnt say. (Adams, 7) This applies not only to the war itself, but also to the home front. Chapter two, No Easy Answers, begins the process of deconstructing the myth, and demonstrating that the events leading up to WWII began long before the Treaty of Versailles, and the ramifications of WWII will last much longer than the generation that fought it. Adams lays out the frame of the complex political, cultural and economic histories of each of nations which would become involved in WWII, and shows that there was no obvious point at which one decision would have prevented the war from happening. Taken in context, the actions each nation took leading up to WWII make sense. Adams asks, what could have been done differently? Apparently, not much; appeasement didnt work in Europe, and determent didnt work in Asia. There really were no easy answers. Chapter three, The Patterns of War, 1939-1945 lays out the way in which each nation fought the war, with a new speed and brutality made possible by technology and the remoteness of the enemy. Chapter four, The American War Machine, demonstrates how the tools were created and sent into battle, and how the soldiers and organization of each army differed, for better or worse. Chapter five, Overseas, outlines the realities of life for the American soldier both in the European and Pacific theatres, while chapter six, Home front Changes, does the same for those who stayed home. These chapters have one unifying purpose; to define the reality of the WWII era, expose the complex history and actors, and above all, disabuse us of the reigning WWII mythos. Chapter seven, A New World, takes us one step further and debunks the myth that returning GIs readjusted quickly without lasting physical ailments and emotional traumas and into a society awaiting them with open arms, friendly smiles and lovin g families. Above all else, Adams has provided an interesting and easily accessible framework with which one can examine WWII and appreciate the complexities and realities of the era. While his history is intentionally brief and uncomplicated by example and detail, it does achieve its purpose. By identifying the mythos and realities of WWII, the Good War can be appreciated for what it actually was; an ugly, brutal and ultimately necessary war. Adams says that the existence of the WWII distortions is not entirely the fault of the American public. It is also the fault of the Federal Government and the media. The government censored controversial material during the war and only delivered to the public details that were uplifting and beneficial to the cause. The media also used the war to its advantage, promoting products using references to the war.   Adams also goes into detail the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome the soldiers endured during the war.   The book does go into some historical accounts of WWII. Most of Adams references though were secondary sources. I would have liked to see him use more primary sources which would have provided more authenticity and credibility to the book. I do recommend the book if you are looking for a quick read about WWII, but if you are looking for a military history about WWII, this is not the book for you. 3-John F. Kasson, AMUSING THE MILLION: CONEY ISLAND AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (American Century) Amusing the Million examines the historical context in which Coney Island made its reputation as an amusement park and shows how Americas changing social and economic conditions formed the basis of a new mass culture. Exploring it afresh in this way, John Kasson shows Coney Island no longer as the object of nostalgia but as a harbinger of modernityand the many photographs, lithographs, engravings, and other reproductions with which he amplifies his text support this lively thesis. After studying the whole book my point of analysis on this book is that In these times, when entertainers bare body parts normally kept strictly covered, it is hard to believe the cover photo of this book was considered rather racy a century ago. It shows a line of girls on the beach at Coney Island where the skirts on their swimsuits have been raised to reveal the shorts underneath. Considering that they also appear to have full-length tights on underneath the shorts, to modern eyes, they look overdressed. There were many social commentators at the end of the nineteenth century that argued that the egalitarian social structure of Coney Island was debasing the social fabric of the nation. As Coney Island was the most conspicuous example of the dramatic social changes taking place in the United States. By the turn of the century, the people were generally no longer rural tillers of the soil, having been transformed into urban tillers of the machines. Furthermore, by this time, the social distinctions between the upper and other classes were being blurred. As the author points out, at Coney Island, many of the stiff social restrictions came down. People who otherwise would not speak to each other became friendly and shared rides, beach water and other amusements.   The members of the compressed urban society craved simple and inexpensive recreation and Coney Island provided it. Therefore, as Kasson points out so well, it was a phenomenon that grew out of a social need and in many ways served as a social release. People could, for a very small fee, leave their crowded dwellings and engage in a day of escape. Everyone was equal on the rides and the beaches, so at least at that location, social distinctions disappeared.   Until I read this book, I had never considered the amusement park as a barometer for social change. However, it is now clear that Coney Island was a metaphor for a dramatic change in the social fabric of the nation and from this book, you can learn many of the details. These were all much the same in nature, differing mainly in size and duration. Their reason for being and the reason or them becoming a thing of the past is all the same.   The book suggests that they started in the mid-1800s is stretching the point somewhat as Fairs of all types were around for many centuries and only differed in how big they were, how far people travelled to them ,how much new inventions became incorporated and how long they lasted.   It seems that throughout history people loved to gather for just about any reason, but generally some sort of amusement along with the hope of seeing something new. Thus there were Races, Exhibitions of animals, crafts, products for prizes or sale, Auctions, Magic shows, Plays, Sporting events; and on and on ad infantilism.   This happened at Stonehenge and before, at the Roman Collisium, and Religious Celebrations. It didnt take much to create an event; heck, even a Hanging was enough to get a huge crowd out.  The same sort of thing continues today. So instead of taking the Subway to Coney Island or some other Amusement park; we go to the great Theme Parks, National Parks, Sporting Events, Concerts, Casinos, Vegas, Nashville, Ski Hills, Cruises, or even events and locations around the world, such as World Fairs or the Olympics.   The old adage The more things change, the more they become the same applies to Amusement Parks, just as it does to everything else.   The greatest change is in the ease of travel, the amount of disposable income available, and the introduction of TV where everything can be brought right into the living room. That doesnt leave much but the Thrill Rides, the Smells and Sounds, the Crowds and the Outdoors; but thats coming too.  The Canadian National Exhibition continues to run for 3 weeks in August: however it gets poorer and tackier every year and who knows how much longer it will continue. Amusement parks that began to exist during the turn of the century served as venues for fun and excitement as well as helped to release the repressed from the gentility of the Victorian Age of the nineteenth century. John Kasson examines the social and cultural ramifications that occurred in American society in his book, AMUSING THE MILLIONS: CONEY ISLAND AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY. In his study, Kasson shows how the American landscape became playgrounds, especially in New York, which extended the use of recreational space, New Yorks Central Park, and expositions that commemorated and celebrated the American historical past, Chicagos Columbian Exposition of 1893. They magnified the cornerstones and building blocks of the city, and the behavior that was exhibited with the rising middle class, which attracted a mass audience. The city became cosmopolitan and modern where many engaged and frolicked, and helped to unlatch social, racial, and economic boundaries that were bestowed upon ma ny individuals; they also helped to rejuvenate cities through urban planning.   Indeed, Kasson explores the world of imagination. The amusements ran the gamut from a Barnum and Bailey atmosphere to reveling along the boardwalk amongst exotic and unusual exhibits that coveted Coney Islands Luna Park and Dreamland Park. And within the text Kasson highlights those who helped architect this unrestrained environment of excess, such as Frederick Law Olmstead, Daniel H. Burnham, George C. Tilyou, Frederic Thompson, James Gibbons Huneker, and Maxim Gorky. Undoubtedly these were elaborate and spacious constructed palatial playgrounds of pleasure full of materialism and consumption where many gathered for pure utopian enjoyment. According to Kasson, these amusements also served as an outlet for artists and painters whose works did not particularly belong in museums. However, they reflected the modernist and realist genres of the art world before they came into vogue, and they depicted technological, urban, populous, egalitarian, erotic, hedonist, dynamic, and culturally d iverse images that the public were not accustomed to (88).   Overall, this is an interesting trip down nostalgic memory lane. Through the revealing pictures and detailed narrative, Kasson shows readers how Coney Island at the turn became a form of liberation for an array of classes. In essence, this is a good source to refer to when studying or reading about the American Dream as it relates to amusement parks that transcended social and cultural change in American society.   4-John Kenneth Galbraith, THE GREAT CRASH, 1929 The Great Crash of 1929 The Great Crash, 1929  is a book written by  John Kenneth Galbraith  and published in 1954; it is an economic history of the lead-up to the  Wall Street Crash of 1929. The book argues that the 1929 stock market crash was precipitated by rampant speculation in the stock market, that the common denominator of all speculative episodes is the belief of participants that they can become rich without work and that the tendency towards recurrent speculative orgy serves no useful purpose, but rather is deeply damaging to an economy.  It was Galbraiths belief that a good knowledge of what happened in 1929 was the best safeguard against its recurrence. Galbraith wrote the book during a break from working on the manuscript of what would become  The Affluent Society. Galbraith was asked by  Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.  if he would write the definitive work on the  Great Depression  that he would then use as a reference source for his own intended work on Roosevelt. Galbraith chose to concentrate on the days that ushered in the depression. I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.  Galbraith received much praise for his work, including his humorous observations of human behavior during the speculative stock market bubble and subsequent crash. The publication of the book, which was one of Galbraiths first bestsellers, coincided with the 25th anniversary of the crash, at a time when it and the  Great Depression  that followed were still raw memories and stock price levels were only then recovering to pre-crash levels. Galbraith considered it the useful task of the historian to keep fresh the memory of such crashes, the fading of which he correlates with their re-occurrence. For the purpose of the summary and analysis phase of this book I thought that the Republican Great Depression of 1929-1939 has been an unending source of mystery, fascination, and disinformation for the past four generations. As youre reading these words, theres a huge push on by conservative think-tanks and wealthy political activists to reinvent the history, suggesting that Roosevelt prolonged the Depression or that New Deal programs were ineffective. At the same time, folks like David Sirota are valiantly pushing back with actual facts and statistics, showing that Roosevelts New Deal was startlingly effective, particularly when compared with the Republican policies of 1920-1929 that formed the bubble that crashed in 1929, and the Republican failures to deal with its consequences during the last three years of the Herbert Hoover administration (1929-1933). To really understand what brought about the great crash, however, its most useful to read an historical narrative written by one of the worlds preeminent economists when that world-changing event was still fresh in his and his readers minds.  The Great Crash  is that book, first written by Galbraith in 1953-54 (and published in 1955) and updated for modern readers in 1997. From this book I like to discuss some points in its summary phase. From the Introduction The people who remained sane and quiet Extracts from  The Great Crash: 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith, First Published 1955, Page 27 Even in such a time of madness as the late twenties, a great many man in Wall Street remained quite sane. But they also remained very quiet. The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them. From Chapter 1: A Year to Remember Opportunities for the social historian Extracts from  The Great Crash: 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith, First Published 1955, Page 26 In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings. Like most humans, most of the time, they did some very foolish things. On the while, the greater the earlier reputation for omniscience, the more serene the previous idiocy, the greater the foolishness now exposed. Things that in other times were concealed in a heavy facade of dignity now stood exposed, for the panic suddenly, almost obscenely, snatched this facade away. We are seldom vouchsafed a glance behind this barrier; in our society the counterpart of the Kremlin walls is the thickly stuffed shirt. The social historian must always be alert to his opportunities, and there have been few like 1929. From Chapter 7: Things Become More Serious Things keep getting worse Extracts from  The Great Crash: 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith, First Published 1955, Page 130 In the autumn of 1929 the New York Stock Exchange, under roughly its present constitution, was 112 years old. During this lifetime it had seen some difficult days. On 18 September 1873, the firm of Jay Cooke and Company failed, and, as a more or less direct result, so did fifty-seven other Stock Exchange firms in the next few weeks. On 23 October 1907, call money rates reached one hundred and twenty-five per cent in the panic of that year. On 16 September 1922 the autumn months are the off-season in Wall Street a bomb exploded in front of Morgans next door, killing thirty people and injuring a hundred more. A common feature of all these earlier troubles was that, having happened, they were over. The worst was reasonably recognizable as such. The singular feature of the great crash of 1929 was that the worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to ensure that as few as possible escaped the common misfortune. The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. The bargains then suffered a ruins fall. Even the man who waited out all of October and all of November, who saw the volume of trading return to normal and saw Wall Str eet become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next twenty-four months. The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable. 5-Ronald G. Walters, AMERICAN REFORMERS, 1815-1860 American Reformers, 1815-1860, Revised Edition With American Reformers, Walters has composed a fine synthesis of secondary literature on the varied antebellum reform movements. In doing so, he argues that the reform impulse emerges out of evangelical Protestantism but by the Civil War takes a more secular turn more involved in legislating social controls than converting the hearts of individuals. As he develops this argument he addresses the different forms that this reform impulse took and organizes the book thematically. He discusses in successive chapters utopian movements and secular communitarians, abolition, the womens movement and the peace movement, temperance, health reform and spiritualism, working mans reform, and institutional reform, into which he groups mental hospitals, prisons and schools. Walters demonstrates the secularization of reform in the realm of communitarian societies. Thus, the early nineteenth century utopian settlements that often emerged out of pietistic impulses gave way to more secular experiments in social engineering such as Owenism, or as in the case of Oneida, how a once religious community endured only as a commercial venture. Similarly he shows institutions such as asylums wove their religious inspiration with the science of the times but like prisons and almshouses became holding pens for outcasts rather than places for healing and reform. Walters also situates the emergence of reform in the particular circumstances of antebellum America. He argues that the emergence of the middle class created made it possible for people to devote time to reform, and those technological advances in printing made it possible for people to actually make a living as an agitator. He also argues that reform helped shape the identity of the emerging middle class. This point comes through particularly clearly in his chapter on working mans reform. Walters synthesis suffers from its grand scope and short length. In it he sacrifices a certain amount of detail and analysis for space and clarity. The section on utopian movements, for example, traces the personalities of the major reformers and a brief outline of the community that followed without in-depth analysis. Throughout the book quotations from primary sources would have been helpful in giving a feel for the particular movement under discussion. The lack of primary source material allows Walters to sacrifice documentation, and the reader sometimes wishes for some assistance in discerning the origin or fuller development of a particular point. To his credit, Walters provides a good bibliographical essay at the end, but the lack of documentation sometimes proves frustrating and thus interrupts the otherwise smooth flow in the text. Nonetheless, American Reformers is a very readable and useful synthesis of the secondary sources on antebellum reform. As such, it is a helpful an d welcome addition to the field. In my mind, this is an introductory text, albeit a fine one. Walters is very accessable, he tries to include necessary historical perspective and whatever cultural information he deems to be valuable to the story hes telling in each chapter. And while each chapter is a story of a different movement or people, he also demonstrates those things these groups have in common. I wont spoil it for you, but at the least of it, they were all idealists who thought to affect the world around them. Material and political changes transformed America at a dizzying pace in the 1820s and 1830s. The expansion of industrialization, the creation of roads and canals to connect manufacturers to new markets, westward migration, a prolonged period of economic depression following the panic of 1837, and the broadening of voting rights triggered vast social upheavals. Reform movements were often attempts to cope with the consequences of these changes. Some movements wanted reform of institutions like prisons, schools, and asylums. Others looked to individual regeneration to transform the whole society. Some reformers drew attention to a particular groups suffering: Richard Henry Danas  Two Years before the Mast  (1840), for example, pressed for expanded legal rights for sailors. Others, like the founders of Brook Farm, sought radical and universal reform. A powerful source of reform emerged from the Second Great Awakening, the religious revivals sweeping the nation from the 1790s through the 1820s. Like the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, this series of revivals emphasized individual, often emotional religious experiences. Yet unlike the first period of revival, the Second Great Awakening had an even broader impact. The disestablishment of religion in the early national period and the deism associated with Americas founding fathers (that is, their belief in the power of reason and the existence of a Supreme Creator and their skepticism about supernatural religious explanations) seemed to threaten the nations Protestant moral foundation. Moreover, many Christians attributed certain social ills (drinking, dueling, disregard for the Sabbath, and the like) to Chris-tianitys decline. Ministers such as Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) and Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) responded with messages about wickedness, conversion, and the imm inent return of Christ. Moving away from the Calvinist doctrines (such as predestination) associated with the initial Great Awakening, they preached individual moral agency and personal salvation, moral improvement and perfection, and a responsibility to hasten the coming of Gods Kingdom. These religious ideas contributed to the desire for reform and creation of voluntary benevolent societies such as the American Education Society (1815), American Bible Society (1816), and American Tract Society (1825). These organizations distributed religious literatures, but their members also led efforts to stem Sabbath-breaking, drinking, and other forms of vice. Various female moral reform societies focused on ending prostitution, sexual exploitation, and the sexual double standard. The ostensibly moral concern with sexual vice also helped justify the not-so-pious demand for reform literature featuring fallen and wronged women in texts like Maria Monks  Awful Disclosures  (1836) and George Fosters  New York by Gas-Light  (1850). Evangelical reformers also played important roles in other reform movements. Theodore Dwight Weld (1803-1895), a disciple of Finney, began his career distributing tracts and preaching against strong drink. In 1829 Weld shifted his efforts to the campaign against slavery and authored two antislavery classics,  The Bible against Slavery  (1837), which dismantled biblical pro-slavery arguments, and  American Slavery As It Is  (1839), the text that inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) to write  Uncle Toms Cabin  (1851-1852). Evangelical reform spread popular literature as tracts, sermons, Sunday school books, and temperance testimonies. The revivals also had an important influence on developments in literary style. Religious writings became more emotional and imaginative, formally less rigid, and theologically less rigorous. Antebellum religious texts began to rely on vivid narratives to illustrate, edify, and entertain. This new religious style, as David S. Reynolds calls it in his study  Beneath the American Renaissance  (p. 15), reshaped not only evangelical writing but also the style of liberal reformers, popular writers, and transcendentalists. 6-James M McPherson, ABRAHAM LINCOLN Abraham Lincoln In honor of the bicentennial of Lincolns birth, renowned Civil War scholar James M. McPherson has written a wonderful brief biography of our 16th President. This book will be a wonderful source for beginners to study Lincoln and will serve as a good framework for larger works, like David Herbert Donalds  Lincoln. This book covered the important aspects of Lincolns life from his birth and childhood in Kentucky and Indiana to his coming to Illinois, to his administration and death. McPherson discussed Lincolns tarnished relationship with his father and his wonderful relationship with his step-mother, which presented a more personal side of the man. Though short, this book does a great job of discussing Lincolns life in the larger context of American history. McPherson summarized the important moments and events during his life and provided a wonderful look at the war and its effect on him. True to his scholarly reputation, McPherson used great sources for this little biography, including the  Collected Works of Lincoln  and  Lincoln at Cooper Union  to name a couple. In addition to using great primary and secondary sources, McPherson provided a bibliographic essay that provided a great synthesis of the historiography of Lincoln and where it may be heading in the coming year. There are many things to like about this book. It is a well-researched, but brief biography that will reach a wide audience. The reputation of James McPherson as a scholar lends great weight to the legitimacy of this biography.  Abraham Lincoln  is a wonderful beginning to the scholarly celebration of the Lincoln bicentennial. - James McPherson has emerged as one of Americas finest historians.  Battle Cry of Freedom  , his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in  The New York Times Book Review  , called history writing of the highest order. In that volume, McPherson gathered in the broad sweep of events, the political, social, and cultural forces at work during the Civil War era. Now, in  Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution  , he offers a series of thoughtful and engaging essays on aspects of Lincoln and the war that have rarely been discussed in depth. McPherson again displays his keen insight and sterling prose as he examines several critical themes in American history. He looks closely at the Presidents role as Commander-in-Chief of the Union forces, showing how Lincoln forged a national military strategy for victory. He explores the importance of Lincolns great rhetorical skills, uncovering howthrough parables and figurative languagehe was uniquely able to communicate both the purpose of the war and a new meaning of liberty to the people of the North. In another section, McPherson examines the Civil War as a Second American Revolution, describing how the Republican Congress elected in 1860 passed an astonishing blitz of new laws (rivaling the first hundred days of the New Deal), and how the war not only destroyed the social structure of the old South, but radically altered the balance of power in America, ending 70 years of Southern power in the national government. The Civil War was the single most transforming and defining experience in American history, and Abraham Lincoln remains the most important figure in the pantheon of our mythology. These graceful essays, written by one of America are leading historians, offer fresh and unusual perspectives on both. From my analysis point of view the book itself in hardcover is a joy to hold with its compact size, readable typeface and bound-in ribbon bookmark. Whoever worked on this project obviously did it as a labor of love. They worked the details on this one.  You cant honestly compare this work to others like Carl Sandbergs Lincoln or With Malice towards None or even my nice coffee table book of photographs taken of Lincoln. This work COMPLEMENTS those more comprehensive volumes. That said, it is not incomplete. It does an excellent job of hitting the hundreds of high and low points in Lincolns too brief life. The pace moves quickly and precisely along so that you never have the feeling that youre being written down to if thats the phrase Im looking for. This one has NOT been dumbed down for the reader.   Personally I see this smaller volume as an annual read