Brazil Allows Police to Buy High Caliber Guns Essay Example for Free

Brazil Allows Police to Buy High Caliber Guns Essay The Brazilian military will now allow police and firefighters to buy powerful .45 caliber guns for personal use, raising fears over how the weapons will be used and where they might end up.Prior to the ruling, only federal police were permitted to buy .45 caliber weapons, while other police agencies carried less lethal .40 or .38 weapons. The new regulations open the way for civil, military, and transport police to purchase .45 handguns. The military command, which regulates gun sales in Brazil, said it changed the regulations in response to petitioning from state security forces. The move has already sparked controversy among some sectors. They are giving weapons to the police that they don’t know how to use. This is putting the safety of the police and the population at risk, a representative from violence prevention NGO Sou da Paz told O Globo. InSight Crime Analysis The decision to grant various police agencies access to more powerful weaponry is likely to prove controversial. Trust in the Brazilian police is low, amid widespread accusations of corruption, criminality and extrajudicial killings. Firefighters, who are allowed to carry weapons as part of the job, have also come under suspicion, with accusations that many form part of urban paramilitary groups while off-duty. The easing of the regulations could be linked to the ongoing conflict between criminal gang the First Capital Command (PCC) and the Sao Paulo police, which claimed the lives of at least 100 officers in 2012. The risk that rather than giving police another means to protect themselves, the increased availability of .45 weapons could only further fuel the conflict. Given past cases of Brazilian police selling weapons to criminal groups, there is a significant risk that these guns could fall into the hands of the gangs that are behind anti-police violence in much of the country. The high-power weapons could also end up being used by the vigilante militias that control many of Brazil’s favelas. Corrupt factions of the police and firefighting force are known to be members and collaborators of these militias.

Guess Jeans E-commerce :: GCSE Business Marketing Coursework

Guess Jeans Ecommerce Guess?, Inc. designs, markets, and distributes clothing apparel and accessories for men and women. It was created by three brothers, known as the Marciano brothers who grew up in Southern France. Maurice Marciano oversees the company’s design direction, Paul Marciano is the Co-Chairman and Co-chief officer, and Armand Marciano is the Senior Executive Vice President . They were inspired by the American western tradition to begin the clothing designs of Guess ?. After Bloomingdale’s agreed to purchase two dozen of their jeans as a favor they were sold out with in hours. That’s when, in 1981, the official Guess ? label was born, and would become one of the most recognized brand names. Guess ? uses historical trends within the market to develop a sales plan for designs and as a guide to the number of sales per garmet. With the sales plan in mind they seek out the best quality product at the best possible price. Once the materials are gathered the cost of the item is determined. Including manufacturing labor, fabric, trims, and various other details included in the production of the clothing a rough cost is agreed upon. After the cost is found Guess ? then determines on a style merchandising cost, which is based on raising or lowering prices to maximize sales and profits. As of today Guess ? has product licenses all over the world. Also it has distributors in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Guess ? can be found in many department, retail, specialty, and factory stores and as of January 1995 online. Guess’s ? online store is created in Los Angeles, were its E-Commerce department is located. Their responsibility is to create texts, graphics, researches of new technologies, and track online sales. The Guess?.Com website is updated every two to three months so the most accurate information is always available to consumers. On the Guess ? website they support electronic security clearly stated at the bottom of the page. They have security measures set up to protect the consumer from any loss or misuse of information under their control. Credit card information and sign-in passwords are always stored in an unreadable, encrypted format. Also, the site is protected by a multi-layer firewall based security system. So any consumer information personal or not is well protected. Guess Jeans E-commerce :: GCSE Business Marketing Coursework Guess Jeans Ecommerce Guess?, Inc. designs, markets, and distributes clothing apparel and accessories for men and women. It was created by three brothers, known as the Marciano brothers who grew up in Southern France. Maurice Marciano oversees the company’s design direction, Paul Marciano is the Co-Chairman and Co-chief officer, and Armand Marciano is the Senior Executive Vice President . They were inspired by the American western tradition to begin the clothing designs of Guess ?. After Bloomingdale’s agreed to purchase two dozen of their jeans as a favor they were sold out with in hours. That’s when, in 1981, the official Guess ? label was born, and would become one of the most recognized brand names. Guess ? uses historical trends within the market to develop a sales plan for designs and as a guide to the number of sales per garmet. With the sales plan in mind they seek out the best quality product at the best possible price. Once the materials are gathered the cost of the item is determined. Including manufacturing labor, fabric, trims, and various other details included in the production of the clothing a rough cost is agreed upon. After the cost is found Guess ? then determines on a style merchandising cost, which is based on raising or lowering prices to maximize sales and profits. As of today Guess ? has product licenses all over the world. Also it has distributors in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Guess ? can be found in many department, retail, specialty, and factory stores and as of January 1995 online. Guess’s ? online store is created in Los Angeles, were its E-Commerce department is located. Their responsibility is to create texts, graphics, researches of new technologies, and track online sales. The Guess?.Com website is updated every two to three months so the most accurate information is always available to consumers. On the Guess ? website they support electronic security clearly stated at the bottom of the page. They have security measures set up to protect the consumer from any loss or misuse of information under their control. Credit card information and sign-in passwords are always stored in an unreadable, encrypted format. Also, the site is protected by a multi-layer firewall based security system. So any consumer information personal or not is well protected.

Hrm: Job Involvement & Its Dimensions

JOB INVOLVEMENT Job involvement can be defined as â€Å"psychological identification with one's work† as well as â€Å"the degree to which the job situation is central to the employee and his or her identity†. As employees with a high degree of job involvement are more likely to regard work as the center of their self-concepts (Frone & Russell, 1995), they are also more likely to increase their self-respect through successful job performance (Burke, 1991) and display of organizational beneficial behaviors (Diefendorff, Brown, Kamin, & Lord, 2002). Brown (1996) opined that employees with high job involvement would have greater psychological identification with their work, which in turn would increase job satisfaction. Mowday, Porter, and Steers (1982) also pointed out that employees' psychological needs are gradually satisfied as the employees become involved with their jobs and that this satisfaction establishes a sense of organizational commitment. Researchers have revealed that employees with a high degree of job satisfaction or organizational commitment display a higher degree of Organizational Commitment Behavior (OCB) (Podsakoff et al. 2000). These studies suggest that job involvement has a positive influence on OCB. Task variety might mitigate employees' involvement in their jobs, which in turn would have a negative effect on their display of OCB. Factors affecting job involvement: 1. Job involvement and empowerment: Empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action and con trol work and decision making in autonomous ways. Empowering the employees means providing them with higher level tasks, responsibility and decision making in the performance of their job. According to Wilkinson et al. (1998) and Karia and Asaari (2006), empowerment is a dominant HRM/TQM practice; there was a strong association with job involvement. 2. Job involvement and teamwork Teamwork is defined as a joint action by a group of people, in which each person subordinates his or her individual interests and opinions to the unity and efficiency of the group. Over the years, HRM/TQM policies have come to recognize and emphasize the importance of teamwork to facilitate employees' ability to work together to get a job done (Morrow, 1997; Karia & Ahmad, 2000). A study by Osland (1997) found that working together with a production unit leads to better employee attitudes. 3. Job involvement and Communication Communication is an important factor in organizations, for connecting employees and permitting organizations to function, as well as an essential element to the implementation of HRM/TQM (Gray & Laidlaw, 2002). When communication is open and continuous in three directions, (up, down and across) work processes and performance increases. This in turn increases employees' job involvement. 4. Job involvement and employee participation A study conducted by Karia and Ahmad (2000) found that employee participation, predicts significantly towards job involvement. In some other surveys though, results indicate that lack of participation would not be able to improve employees' personal abilities and capabilities, help them change certain aspects of personal traits and increase their self-respect. 5. Job involvement and leadership There is a weak relationship between leadership and employees' job involvement. The lack of top management commitment from any particular group within these organizations can be a serious barrier in the management of quality and it is one of the reasons for the failure of HRM/TQM efforts on job involvement amongst employees (Wilkinson et al. 1998). A study by De Hoogh et al. (2005), which found that leadership has a positive influence on employee outcomes. 6. Job involvement and Training and Development It is important that management understand these activities tend to require long-term commitment, as results are not immediately realized. Therefore, the training department must provide continuous training and development in ensuring the success of HRM/TQM practices in contributing improvement in job involvement. The findings of Karia and Ahmad (2000) regarding training and development, states that employees' can generate innovative ideas for solving problems; and it helps employees' in their personal involvement. Impact of Job Involvement Cohen's (1999) research supported the important status of job involvement as an antecedent to organizational commitment. Specifically, Cohen argued that those individuals with high levels of job involvement, which stem from positive experiences on-the-job (Kanungo, 1979; Witt, 1993), make attributions for these experiences to the organization. Thus, having previously received benefits from the organization and being obligated by the norm of reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960) to repay them, high job involvement employees feel compelled to reciprocate in some form. Cohen (1999, p. 292) asserted that â€Å"to the extent that positive experiences are attributed to the efforts of organizational officials, these are reciprocated with increased affective organizational commitment to the persons who caused them†. This increased affective commitment (i. e. where employees adopt the company's goals as their own and, therefore, desire to remain with the organization to help it achieve its goals (Meyer & Allen, 1984; Mowday et al. 1979) later is found to reduce turnover intentions, absence behaviour, and/or turnover (Cohen, 2000; Hackett et al. 2001), as well as increase job performance (Carmeli and Freund, 2001). Given the fact that job involvement is thought to be an important determinant of effort and motivation, and other job attitudes have been shown to positively relate to OCBs (Van Scotter, 2000), it is anticipated that those high in job involvement will engage in more OCBs. Theory suggests that these gender differences may be more evident for OCB-Is (i. . , behaviors directed toward others, such as helping), than for the less communal OCB-Os (i. e. , behaviors directed toward the organization). Regardless of a person's sex, it may be expected that an individual high in job involvement will feel compelled to engage in OCB-Os, such as staying late, attending non-mandatory meetings, and not taking extra breaks. Alternatively, OCB-Is may be exhibited at different levels for highly involved women and highly involved men. Specifically, women who are deeply involved in their work may feel more obliged to help others than equally involved men, because women may internalize the belief that they should act communally and help others. Thus, highly involved women may engage in more OCB-Is (operationalized as altruism, courtesy, and possibly sportsmanship) than highly involved men, suggesting that sex will moderate the relationship between job involvement and OCB-Is. In terms of the specific OCB dimensions, the Civic Virtue dimension is most closely related to job involvement. Conceptually this finding makes sense given that Civic Virtue is defined as the level of involvement a person has in the political life of the organization. The fact that both the OCB-O dimensions (Conscientiousness and Civic Virtue) and in-role performance were predicted by job involvement regardless of sex, lends credence to the idea that exhibiting behaviors such as staying late, attending meetings, and completing task duties are performed at the same level for involved men and women. These dimensions represent behaviors that can be thought of as facilitating task performance and enhancing the environment surrounding one's focal tasks. Job Satisfaction and job involvement Job involvement (Employee engagement, or Work engagement), is a concept that is generally viewed as managing discretionary effort, that is, when employees have choices, they will act in a way that furthers their organization's interests. An engaged employee is a person who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, his or her work. Several Studies have shown that there exists a direct relationship between Job Involvement and Job Satisfaction. Past research on voluntary turnover has produced very extensive and sophisticated models; however, a recent and more parsimonious model of turnover utilizes only two employee work attitudes to predict turnover propensity. These two attitudes are job involvement and organizational commitment. The premise discussed here is that job involvement and organizational commitment interact jointly to affect turnover. For example, the job employees do helps them meet their intrinsic needs, such as satisfactorily performing a challenging job, which, in turn, increases their sense of competence. This leads to increasing employees' job involvement attitude. Likewise, the organization helps employees meet their social and other extrinsic reward needs, such as pay, fringe benefits and promotions. This leads to increasing employees' organizational commitment attitude.

Prehistoric Life During the Neogene Period

During the course of the Neogene period, life on earth adapted to new ecological niches opened up by global cooling--and some mammals, birds, and reptiles evolved to truly impressive sizes in the process. The Neogene is the second period of the Cenozoic Era (65 million years ago to the present), preceded by the Paleogene period (65-23 million years ago) and succeeded by the Quaternary period---and is itself comprised of the Miocene (23-5 million years ago) and Pliocene (5-2.6 million years ago) epochs. Climate and Geography Like the preceding Paleogene, the Neogene period witnessed a trend toward global cooling, especially at higher latitudes (it was immediately after the end of the Neogene, during the Pleistocene epoch, that the earth underwent a series of ice ages interspersed with warmer interglacials). Geographically, the Neogene was important for the land bridges that opened up between various continents: it was during the late Neogene that North and South America became connected by the Central American Isthmus, Africa was in direct contact with southern Europe via the dry Mediterranean Sea basin, and eastern Eurasia and western North America were joined by the Siberian land bridge. Elsewhere, the slow impact of the Indian subcontinent with the underbelly of Asia produced the Himalayan mountains. Terrestrial Life During the Neogene Period Mammals. Global climate trends, combined with the spread of newly evolved grasses, made the Neogene period the golden age of open prairies and savannahs. These extensive grasslands spurred the evolution of even- and odd-toed ungulates, including prehistoric horses and camels (which originated in North America), as well as deer, pigs, and rhinoceroses. During the later Neogene, the interconnections between Eurasia, Africa, and North and South America set the stage for a confusing network of species interchanges, resulting (for example) in the near extinction of South Americas Australia-like marsupial megafauna. From a human perspective, the most important development of the Neogene period was the continuing evolution of apes and hominids. During the Miocene epoch, a huge number of hominid species inhabited Africa and Eurasia; during the ensuing Pliocene, most of these hominids (among them the direct ancestors of modern humans) were clustered in Africa. It was immediately after the Neogene period, during the Pleistocene epoch, that the first human beings (genus Homo) appeared on the planet. Birds. While birds never quite matched the size of their distant mammalian cousins, some of the flying and flightless species of the Neogene period were truly enormous (for example, the airborne Argentavis and Osteodontornis both exceeded 50 pounds.) The end of the Neogene marked the extinction of most of the flightless, predatory terror birds of South America and Australia, the last dregs being wiped out in the ensuing Pleistocene. Otherwise, bird evolution continued apace, with most modern orders well represented by the close of the Neogene. Reptiles. A large chunk of the Neogene period was dominated by gigantic crocodiles, which still never quite managed to match the size of their Cretaceous forebears. This 20-million-year span also witnessed the continuing evolution of prehistoric snakes and (especially) prehistoric turtles, the latter group of which began to reach truly impressive proportions by the start of the Pleistocene epoch. Marine Life Although prehistoric whales had started to evolve in the preceding Paleogene period, they didnt become exclusively marine creatures until the Neogene, which also witnessed the continuing evolution of the first pinnipeds (the mammalian family that includes seals and walruses) as well as prehistoric dolphins, to which whales are closely related. Prehistoric sharks maintained their status at the top of the marine food chain; Megalodon, for example, had already appeared at the end of the Paleogene and continued its dominance throughout the Neogene as well. Plant Life There were two major trends in plant life during the Neogene period. First, plunging global temperatures spurred the rise of massive deciduous forests, which replaced jungles and rainforests in high northern and southern latitudes. Second, the worldwide spread of grasses went hand-in-hand with the evolution of mammalian herbivores, culminating in todays familiar horses, cows, sheep, deer, and other grazing and ruminant animals.