The Summa Teologica By Thomas Essay -- essays research papers

The Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Born in Italy, Thomas Aquinas was one of the most educated men of his time. Aquinas, whose family were noble, was educated as a monk and later continued his education at the University of Naples followed by the University of Paris where he studied the ancient Greek thought of Aristotle. Educated in both philosophy and theology,Aquinas is thought to be one of the most important philosophers of Catholicism. One ofAquinas's most influential writings is the Summa Theologica. In this document, Aquinas clarifies four questions concerning the Church: Whether it can be demonstrated t Godexist? Whether it is always sinfuhatl to wage war? Whether it is lawful for Clerics and Bishops to fight? And whether it is lawful to fight on holy days? He answers each question thoroughly but indecisively; however, when he answers the second question it seems his conclusion have been manipulated in ways that can benefit the church without making them look double sided with their teachings. The second question is: Whether it is always sinful to wage war? In this question Aquinas states in his objection (1), 'It would seem that it is always sinful to wage war because punishment is not inflicted except for sin. Now those who wage war are threatened by our Lord with punishment; therefore, all wars are unlawful.'; (172) However, he justifies the act of war by giving three necessities. The first he mentions is only an au...

What Is a Moratorium On Foreclosures

The mortgage crisis in America is a political hot topic that has taken a front seat to many other topics of national importance. Even the upcoming presidential election has the potential of having this very topic at the center of each candidate’s agenda. However, with a matter of such national significance it would appear as though all most Americans seem to know is that the economy is bad and that about covers it. Many Americans are unaware of this economic crisis occurring and are even less aware of how it could affect them. Therefore, the apathetic and ignorant attitude towards such a dilemma could be explained. In order to assist in the eradication of this issue, one must examine the meaning of a mortgage and that will improve the understanding as to why foreclosures are occurring throughout the country. Furthermore, with this base understanding of this market we might better understand why Congressional and state legislators wish to place a moratorium, or temporary freeze, to the current foreclosure emergency. What is a Mortgage? First, let’s examine what a mortgage is. According to the Freddie Mac lending agency a mortgage is, â€Å"†¦ a lien on a property/house that secures a loan and is paid in installments over a set period of time. The mortgage secures your promise that you'll repay the money you've borrowed to buy your home. † There are also several types of mortgages available through lending agencies as well. Some of the following are the primary options available: fixed rate, adjustable rate, balloon/reset, reverse, and the hottest one that is being talked about the subprime mortgage. This is the one that should be hit on most heavily because this is the reason for the foreclosure crisis occurring right now. The problem with subprime mortgage lending is the fact that a subprime lender is predatory in nature, much like a loan shark. These companies prey on those who cannot receive a mortgage through mainstream companies as a result of poor credit or and/or a number of other factors. These companies then charge very high interest rates on the mortgages they extend to consumers. These interest rates are placed on the principle of the loan and essentially the individual paying on the loan will have to pay on the interest in lieu of the principle for a very long period of time. According to Reuters, â€Å"The crisis surrounding subprime mortgages extended to borrowers with spotty credit [can] unnerve financial markets and could deepen a slump in the U. S. housing market that some economists fear could put the economy close to a recession. † What is a Foreclosure? Second, Foreclosures occur when an borrower or owner of a parcel of property or home defaults on a loan payment, such as a mortgage payment, and the lender files a default notice, whereby a bank or mortgage company repossesses they property in question and the owner/borrower looses whatever rights he/she might have had prior to the default. The problem with foreclosing on individual’s property today is that there are a plethora of people in America that are defaulting on their mortgage payments as a result of the slowing economy, predatory lending, credit card debt; the list is endless. If the mortgage companies foreclosed on all those defaulting, there would be more homeless Americans than in U. S. history. What Is the Proposed Solution? Finally, let’s examine what has been proposed as a solution to the problem of foreclosures as a result of extended mortgages to borrowers, as it stands. The U. S. government is attempting to broker a deal with mortgage lenders to assist troubled borrowers with defaulting on their mortgage payments. However, many lawmakers also would like to see a moratorium occur; freezing all foreclosures so that financially-troubled borrowers can have some time to keep from losing their homes. Lawmakers believe this action will not only assist borrowers, but it will also help to stabilize the economy and the housing market as a result of homeowners having time to accrue equity. Furthermore, lawmakers have proposed to extend more than five billion dollars to the hardest-hit communities so that homeowners might be able to cope a little easier with the crisis. Florida, Nevada, California, Michigan and Ohio are key state in next year’s elections as well as some of the hardest-hit as a result of the mortgage crisis. With lawmakers steering at the helm for a solution to one of the greatest financial questions since the Great Depression all one can do is waiting to see what the next administration will do to assist with the issue at hand.

Ethical Dilemmas in Interpreting Essay

Ethical dilemmas in interpreting: case study 2 In the scenario, I am interpreting at a medical practice. The Service Provider (SP) is the GP practice and Service User (SU) is a patient. I arrive at the reception on time, the receptionist waves me in direction of the patient and then she answers a phone call. Then the patient is called into the consultation room. At the consultation room, I try to introduce myself and give my Code of Practice (CoP) to the doctor but he ignores me and asks what the problem with the patient is. I reply to him that he can ask the patient himself and I will interpret for him. Then the doctor ask me to take the patient back to the waiting room so I can interview her, while he sees another patient, then he will call us back. The following things went wrong during my job assignment: * The receptionist behaves unprofessionally because she shouldn’t leave me alone with the patient because this could cause me being partial and unsuitable to do this assignment. * The doctor ignores my introduction. The Code of Practice (section 5.24) says that Service Provider should â€Å"allow to interpreter to introduce him or herself†. Introduction is important because it allows me explain the rules and terms which I am going to follow during assignment. * The doctor should â€Å"address member of the public directly† (Code of Practice section 5.26). It is important that a service provider speaks directly to a service user, because it allows better communication and connection between, in this situation, patient and doctor, and SU doesn’t feel left out. * The doctor doesn’t want to interview the patient and ask me to leave the consultation room. The Code of Practice defines this problem as follows: â€Å"Conduct all of the interview yourself. It may be tempting to ask the interpreter to go off and have chat with your client, and then come back and tell you the relevant points, but the interpreter is not qualified to know what information to look for or how to process the information received.† (Code of Practice, section 5.29) I wasn’t sure what I should do as an interpreter to be in line with my Code of Practice. If I did what doctor asks, I wouldn’t be assertive and impartial (Code of Practice, section 2.4). If I refused to do what doctor insists, I would leave the patient without  any help. I decide to explain to the doctor what my job description is and ask him one more time to interview the patient. If doctor still refuses to do interview I ask him if would be possible to assign the patient to diffe rent doctor or nurse. After I finished assignment, I would report the incident with the doctor to the agency if I work for one or report it to practice’s manager if I am be freelance interpreter.

Global Warming and Sustainable Energy essays

Global Warming and Sustainable Energy essays Sustainability is defined as patterns of economic, environmental, and social progress that meet the needs of the present day without reducing the capacity to meet future need. Sustainable energy refers to those patterns of energy production and use that can support society's present and future needs with the least life-cycle economic, environmental, and social costs. Life-cycle is the cost of a product from acquiring its original raw material to manufacturing, transporting, and using it to its final demolition and disposal (Randolf and Masters 3). Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley (2005) that energy is as the top of the list of problems in our quest for sustainability. In his view, enough available, affordable and clean, efficient energy would enable resolution of all other problems and is a key to achieving a sustainable world system Randolf and Masters 4. But the supply of non-renewable energy sources - petroleum, natural gas, and coal - is at risk as the majority of our energy consumed (83% in 2009) is being generated from these sources (Renewable However, there are those who believe that over-consumption is more of an environmental threat than population, as expressed by Fred Pearce, in an article at e360 at Yale, "...a small portion of the world's people - those in the affluent, developed world - use up most of the Earth's resources and produce most of its greenhouse gas emissions (Pearce)." He goes on to mention the work of Stephen Pacala, director of Princeton Environment Institute, who calculates that the world's richest half-billion people - that is about 7 percent of the global population - are responsible for 50 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, while the poorest 50 percent are responsible for 7 percent of the emissions (Pearce). Mo...

A Brief History of the Chinese Yuan Currency

A Brief History of the Chinese Yuan Currency Literally translated as the peoples currency the renminbi (RMB) has been the currency of China for over 50 years. It is also known as the Chinese yuan (CNY) and by the symbol  ¥. For many years, the renminbi was pegged to the U.S. dollar. In 2005, it was officially unpegged and as of February 2017, had an exchange rate of 6.8 RMB to $1 U.S. dollar. The Renminbis Beginnings The renminbi was first issued on December 1, 1948, by the Chinese Communist Partys Peoples Bank of China. At that time, the CCP was deep into the civil war with the Chinese Nationalist Party, which had its own currency, and the first issuance of the renminbi was used to stabilize Communist-held areas which assisted in a CCP victory. After the defeat of the Nationalists in 1949, Chinas new government addressed the extreme inflation that plagued the old regime by streamlining its financial system and centralizing foreign exchange management. The Currencys Second Issue In 1955, the Peoples Bank of China, now Chinas central bank, issued its second series of the renminbi that replaced the first at a rate of one new RMB to 10,000 old RMB, which has remained unchanged since. A third series of RMB was issued in 1962 which used multi-color printing technology and used hand-engraved printing plates for the first time. In this period, the RMBs exchange value was unrealistically set with many western currencies which created a large underground market for foreign exchange transactions. With Chinas economic reforms in the 1980s, the RMB was devalued and became more easily traded, creating a more realistic exchange rate. In 1987, a fourth series of RMB was issued featuring a watermark, magnetic ink, and fluorescent ink. In 1999, a fifth series of RMB was issued, featuring Mao Zedong on all notes. Unpegging the Renminbi From 1997 to 2005, the Chinese government pegged the RMB to the United States currency at about 8.3 RMB per dollar, despite criticisms from the United States. On July 21, 2005, the Peoples Bank of China announced that it would lift the peg to the dollar and phase in a flexible mechanism of exchange rates. Following the announcement, the RMB was reevaluated to 8.1 RMB per dollar.

Weak Form Market Efficiency Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4250 words

Weak Form Market Efficiency - Essay Example However finance theory assumes idealistic models for the stock markets and formulates the investor utility functions and expectations accordingly. These models are based on perfect competition and passage of information in an unfettered manner. As Wikipedia (2007) seems to point out, "In economics and financial theory, analysts use random walk techniques to model behavior of asset prices, in particular share prices on stock markets, currency exchange rates and commodity prices. This practice has its basis in the presumption that investors act rationally and without bias, and that at any moment they estimate the value of an asset based on future expectations. Under these conditions, all existing information affects the price, which changes only when new information comes out. By definition, new information appears randomly and influences the asset price randomly. Empirical studies have demonstrated that prices do not completely follow random walk. Low serial correlations (around 0.05) exist in the short term; and slightly stronger correlations over the longer term. Their sign and the strength depend on a variety of factors, but transaction costs and bid-ask spreads generally make it impossible to earn excess returns. Researchers have found that some of the biggest prices deviations from random walk result from seasonal and temporal patterns. In particular, returns in January significantly exceed those in other months (January effect) and on Mondays stock prices go down more than on any other day. Observers have noted these effects in many different markets for more than half a century, but without succeeding in giving a completely satisfactory explanation for their persistence. Technical analysis uses most of the anomalies to extract information on future price movements from historical data. But some economists, for example Eugene Fama, argu e that most of these patterns occur accidentally, rather than as a result of irrational or inefficient behavior of investors: the huge amount of data available to researchers for analysis allegedly causes the fluctuations. Another school of thought, behavioral finance, attributes non-randomness to investors' cognitive and emotional biases". Taking an apposite viewpoint Leverton () states, "Without market fundamentals being able to predict prices, the investor is forced to learn new ways of investing.. Ratios and trend analysis are important to picking a winning portfolio. Subscribers to the adaptive expectations theory believe investors are backward looking in deciding on the correct price to pay for a stock". Realized and expected rreturns from the stock markets have been the subject of intense debate since a long period of time .Several theories suggesting various constructs and factors responsible for determining the returns from the stocks have been postulated thus far.It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that a fully-developed, empirically-supported theory of share prices' behavior emerged in the form of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH).Prior to the development of the EMH , analysts assumed some degree of dependence across successful price changes. Very many efforts were made towards identifying a predictable trading pattern which could be used for chasing profitable deals. From the mid-1950s to the early 1980s, a random walk theory (RWT) of share prices was developed based on the past empirical evidence of randomness in share price movements. RWT

Understand How To Lead Groups & Teams And Navigate Conflicts & Essay

Understand How To Lead Groups & Teams And Navigate Conflicts & Negotiation - Essay Example Understand How To Lead Groups & Teams And Navigate Conflicts & Negotiation Leader gives his priority attention to the internal and external customers and their wants or needs, he provide the resources, training and environment reasonable for work to his sub ordinates, he believed in continuous improvement in a positive manners, he encourage the collaboration between his team members and prefer to do work by mutual corporation instead of this working against each other in a team finally affect the future goals on which they are working, leader is a trainer of his team he help his sub ordinates to do their job in a better way, if there is a problem in an organizational environment due to the internal misunderstanding or due to the external factors he trying to cop upit and also get the precautions for the future operation that this mistake do not repeat in future, he trying to improve his communication with his sub ordinates and trying to remove if any communication gap between them he believe in to show by his own rather to communicate it to the sub ordinate s, he choice the resources on the basis of quality not the monetary reward, establish the good organizational environment or improve it and the leader know that who one give his best so he promote the individual reward as well as the team. Leadership is an important function of management which helps to maximize efficiency and to achieve organizational goals. Some of the points related to the importance of the leadership are as following: 1. A person who initiate the work, develop the policies and plans of achieving the goals and provide the guidance about from where to start work. 2. A person gives motivation to his employees by giving the rewards weather economic or non economic and gets his desired work from the employees. 3. A person is not just supervising the work of the employees he provides the guidance related to the work, to improve the efficiency of achieving the goals efficiently. 4. Confidence is one of the important elements which an employee has to express his through and explaining his ideas in front of others which helps to getting the goals. 5. The confidence in the employee is one of the necessary elements which and leader builds in his subordinates. Confidence is the inoculation to perform their liabilities to achieve objectives. 6. Management wants to perform their work through the people. When the environment is like the working environment this helps for the stable growth. Management has to pay attention the employee’s problem and solve them. Modern organizations are developing and shifting quickly and to develop effective strategies they need to hold change and growth. â€Å"Organization development is a wide application of behavioral science knowledge to the planned development and reinforcement of organizational strategies, structures, and process for improving an organization’s effectiveness† (Cummings & Worley, 2009). When people with different nature, behavior and goals are gathered and start working together t o achieve the same organizational goals and objectives then due to their difference in the nature and personalities and differing in their individual objectives some kind of conflicts. Conflicts mean that when two different persons have different opinion on one task and they start making the arguments which are not healthy. To resolve these conflicts the role of the leader according leadership is very important. When a team formed to perform a specific task it have diversity different type of peoples bring different skills like knowledge, experience, values, attitude, behavior and point of view. Every person has to share his skills with others to do the work efficiently and effectively, they all have their own