Brazilian Wine Industry Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Brazilian Wine Industry - Essay Example Accordingly the foreign investment of Brazil in other economies and the investments made by other economies in Brazilian markets have also increased. Thus, it can be stated that the foreign relations of the economy and its friendliness towards foreign investment is quite effective proving that the government’s contribution in promoting political stability is quite significant (Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars 2007). From the above discussion it is apparent that the political environment of the economy is quite stable and the government is also providing considerable significance to the attribute. Moreover, the foreign trade is also efficiently encouraged in the economy. Therefore, it is most likely that the entry of Australian Vintage Ltd. in the Brazilian economy will receive moderate political interventions, which in turn would make the entry easier. Rules and regulations with respect to the foreign investments are controlled and supervised by the Federal Government of Brazil. However, the states of the economy control the commercial registration of a foreign firm, the yield on investments and the terms of infrastructure projects. The participation of foreign companies in this regard is entirely depended on the approval of the Brazilian Government. The economy also has a Commercial Code in order to regulate the operations of commercial firms, both national and foreign. The economy also serves the opportunity to the foreign firms to enter the

Texas Revolution of 1836 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Texas Revolution of 1836 - Essay Example Interested readers and researchers can also trace down the sources in order to ensure the credibility of the sources. The use of original sources is the fact that adds towards the credibility of the books. Roger Borroel, the author of the book, is a Vietnam veteran who was in the 101st Airborne Division during the year 1968-1969. He graduated from Purdue University in 1980. He has conducted significant research and published over 15 works on the Texas Revolution of 1836. From the sources presented in the book, it can be said that the author has done enough research on the subject matter and he has presented it in a convincing manner. It can be inferred that he retains enough qualifications for writing this book. The Structure of the Book The book is written as a concise historical perspective and in order to add concreteness to the information given in the book, the author has also added numerous illustrations in the book. There are twenty-four pictures, drawings and other illustrati ons and the book is stretched over 238 pages. There is a comprehensive index provided at the start of the book which makes it easier for the reader to find out any specific piece of information. Since there are a number of events that are relevant with the Texan revolution, therefore it is normally difficult for readers to find out a specific event in the history, however this book is written in a chronological sequence of events which makes it significantly easy for the readers to find out a relevant event or document. The sources used in the book are; official governmental papers, reports, intelligent opinions, diaries, reports, and noted personal observations. This book includes translated Mexican Army documents which were never translated before in order to let the reader have an insight regarding the war. This is one of the factors that add to the credibility of the books therefore the title of the book also suggests that the historical perspective is based on original sources. Book Summary The Texan revolution was a conflict that grew into a war between Mexico and the settlers in the Texas which was a part of a state of Mexico. The war officially started from 2 October 1835. The events that triggered the conflict between the government and the American settlers in Texas were the series of legislative changes brought by the Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. He modified the Mexican constitution and turned it into a more centralized constitution which empowered the government and endangered the rights of the citizens. One of the most prominent factors was the Siete Leyes (Seven Laws) passed in 1835 by Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. These laws modified the very basis of the structure of the Mexican government. The first law provided that citizenship will be granted to those who were able to read and had a specified annual income except domestic workers. The second law gave power to the President to close Congress and overpower the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. Military officers were also disempowered from assuming this office. The third law provided for a bicameral Congress of Deputies and Senators which would be elected by the government. The fourth law specified the manner of selection of the President and Vice president. The fifth law specified the manner of selection of the 11 member Supreme Court. The sixth law holds significant important as this law was responsible for the increased centralization

Will Texas Secede From the United States Essay Example for Free

Will Texas Secede From the United States Essay We live in a country that is splitting due to political differences. It is expected that some states may want to leave the United States in future years. Governor Rick Perry once said during his time as Texas state governor, â€Å"Here is what we know after more than a decade of Republican rule: Texas works. Even The New York Times let it slip into its pages that, Texas is the future† (Perry). Good morning, my name is Caleb Taylor and today I will be discussing with you why Texas is likely to secede from the United States. First let me begin with a brief preview of Texas history, in 1835 the rebels of Texas revolted against the oppressive Mexican government. Then one year later in 1836, after numerous skirmishes with the Mexican army including the battle of the Alamo, the incident of â€Å"Come and Take it† in Gonzales, and then the final victory at the Battle of San Jacinto Texas obtained it’s independence and earned the right to be a country. Then in 1845, Texas joined the United States because it was a middle ground between the raging Mexico and United States. Texas is capable of seceding and maintaining a country for three main reasons. First, due to booms in the amount of natural resources produced in Texas every year, the economy flourishes. Secondly, because Texas is such a large landmass with a substantially large population, the body count would be capable of maintaining a country. The third reason Texas is likely to secede from the nation, is because of Texan’s pride. Texas’ economy thrives due to natural resource productivity. The state proves to provide the United States with plentiful amounts of oil, gas, petroleum, and other crude oils annually per year. â€Å"In 2009, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated the states proved reserves at 529 million barrels† (U.S. Energy Information Administration). If Texas were to secede, Texan’s would be able to maintain billions of dollars through natural resource production alone that means that the other thousands of jobs would be a bonus to the Texas economy. The second reason why Texas would be successful in seceding from the United States is due to the amount of land and population in Texas. Texas is approximately 268,800 square miles, which is over 21 times bigger than the state of Maryland. There are also approximately 25,674,681 people in the Texas. The size of Texas proves to be large enough to be a country because as of 2010, Texas was bigger than 125 other countries in the world. The third and most important reason Texas will be able to secede from the nation is because Texan’s pride. The people who populate Texas are proud to be Texans. Texas is called the â€Å"Lone Star† state, â€Å"The nickname The Lone Star State originates from the star on the 1836 flag of the Republic of Texas† (State Symbols USA). Texas is the â€Å"Lone Star† state because it is the only state that was a country before it joined the United States. If Texas was a country before she was a state, who’s to say that she will not become a country again? In conclusion, it is possible that Texas could secede from the United States because of Texas’ thriving economy, the amount of land and population in Texas, and because of the amount of pride that Texan’s have for Texas. Thank you, and God Bless Texas. Work Cited List of Texas Natural Resources. Travel Tips. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Oct. 2012. . Texas State Nickname The Lone Star State. Texas State Nickname The Lone Star State. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Oct. 2012. . BrainyQuote. Xplore, n.d. Web. 07 Oct. 2012. .

Context Inference from Social Networks

Context Inference from Social Networks Context Inference from Social Networks: A Tie Strength Based Approach Sneha Kamal Reshmi.S Abstract— All online sharing systems gather data that reflects user’s behavior and their shared activities. Relationship degree between two users is varying continuously. Static friend list in the social network is unable to express it completely. Tie strength is used to quantitatively describe real social relations. It is based on lots of features derived from activities of a user’s in social network. We introduce a model to measure tie strength between users in a given context. Here a novel definition of tie strength is introduced which exploits the existence of multiple online social links between the individuals. The proposed system infer the context from user’s interaction using the applications of Natural language processing methods and clustering techniques. From this context the tie strength between users are found. Then evaluates and analysis the performance of this model. Keywords- Clustering, Natural Language Processing, Social Context, Social Network, Tie Strength I. Introduction A tie is formed between two persons it they are friends or they have interactive behaviors in social network. Strength of a tie represents the degree of relationship between two entities and it can be various. Tie strength in social network depends upon the exchange and transmission of information, and influence between social network users. The friend list of user is incompetent to reflect real social relation of users directly, because all friends are equally treated. Interactive activities such as comment make more sense in maintaining the relationship. So strong tie may have more interactions. Strong ties are peoples which are we really trusted. Although such trusted friendships can provide emotional and economic support. The majority of social media do not incorporate tie strength in the creation and management of relationships, and treat all users the same either friend or stranger. The first attempt to take into consideration is the social role of a friendship was done by Facebook and Google+ by the introduction of the circles. Users can use circles as a technique to organize their contacts, creating different groups for relatives, work colleagues, close friends and so on. But this group of contacts does not provide quantitative information about the real strength of the ties. The most common technique used to measure the tie strength is the closeness of relationship. Thus close friends have strong tie while others have weak ties. Numerous other methods of strengthens have also been proposed. This includes frequency of contacts and mutual acknowledgement of contacts. Other possible indicators of tie strength include extend of multiplicity with a tie, the duration of the contacts, the overlap of membership in an organization between the parties to a tie and the overlap of social circles. However, in our opinion these approaches have some shortcomings. Firstly, the intensity of conversations strongly depends from user to user, making it difficult to understand which of these conversations are dedicated to intimate relationships. Secondly, do not take into account that strong ties must be powered by a form of social grooming that is mainly based on geographical nearness and face-to-face contacts. Our contribution in this paper is assessing the tie strength between two friends on social network. Although distinguishing between strong and weak ties. For that we infer the thematic fields talked about by users with their contacts, is called the social contexts of a user. For this purpose we use the textual information such as photo descriptions, comments, post of users. With users permission we gather such information. NLP techniques are applied to gather such information and find most relevant information is called tag or word. A set of such a tag of a user is called the user’s personomy. The user’s social contexts come out after applying a clustering algorithm over this personomy and classifying the user’s contacts in these clusters. From this clusters find the users with more tie strength. II. Related Works The community can be extracted from social network based on the actions of users in [2]. This method extracts the users that are similar in actions, interests or tastes as a community. Initially a small community will be formed consists of two or more users. Seeing the actions performed by their friends may make users curious. Therefore, similar small communities can be extended to form a larger community. Compared to other method extracted nodes in the communities may not have the best density. In [3] introduce the Virtual Tie Strength (VTS)-scale and their scoring methods appear to provide a valid and reliable measure of tie strength in virtual communities. They developed a model that measures the tie-strength in virtual communities. The VTS-scale is able to distinguishing between two components of tie-strength associates and friendship. But, the content of each component needs more investigation. In [4] observe the communication patterns of millions of mobile phone users. That helps to concurrently study the local and the global structure of a society-wide communication network. Observe the coupling between interaction strengths and the network’s local structure. Then weak ties are removed. In [5] four factors are proposed which depends upon the strength of the tie. They are time closeness intensity and reciprocal service. They argued that degree of overlap between the two individuals friendship network varies depending on the tie strength between the users. Tie strength is depends on the diffusion of influence and information. Most of the network model deals implicitly with strong ties. III. Proposed System The model takes the advantage of users interactions in social networks. It infers the social contexts in which users are involved and which of their contacts belongs to that context. The proposed method consists of 4 modules. They are context data generation, affinity propagation algorithm, context based clustering, tie strength of users. And the output is a community with set of users. Figure 1. Proposed method A. Context Data Generation In this step obtain the interaction of a given user with all other users. In the case of facebook data of a particular user is obtained from the post of the users and comments given to the photos etc. Then apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) to this collected information. It provides a predefined model for sentence splitting, tokenizing and POS tagging. POS tag method in NLP is applied here. B. Tag Cloud Generation Initially from the interaction of users stop words such as ‘and’,’the’,’at’ etc. are removed. This will pass as an input to NLP. NLP will split the given text, using POS tagging. Which identifies each word as part-of-speech category such as Noun, Verb, etc. After keeping the noun and verb all other are removed. The resulting words will consider as a set of tags of a user whose interaction with others. The set of tag of u and v in a social interaction is denoted by T(lu|v), whose tag cloud is denoted by TC(lu|v). Figure 3: Tag Cloud of each user C. Similarity Measurement The main features of the algorithm are Tri-set calculation, similarity computation, seed construction and clustering.Tri set will consist of Cofeature Set (CFS), Unilateral Feature Set (UFS), and Significant Cofeature Set (SCS). Cofeature Set: Consider di and dj, be the two objects in a data set. Suppose that some features of di is also belong to dj. Therefore, construct a new subset consisting of these features and their values in dj. Unilateral Feature Set: Suppose that some features of di, does not belong to dj. Therefore, construct a new subset consisting of these features and their values in di. Significant Cofeature Set: Suppose that some features of di, also belong to the most significant features of dj. So, Therefore, construct a new subset consisting of these features and their values as the most significant features in dj. From this we can calculate the similarity between two points as (1) Where nm ,nq and np are the values of the features with in the set CFS SCS and UFS respectively. And |CFS|,|UFS|, and |SCS|, indicate the number of tuples in CFS(i,j), UFS(i,j), and SCS(i,j)respectively. The set CFS is result of the intersection of the objects. UFS consists of unshared Features. SCS takes into account the most significant features. D. Inferring the Social Context Seed Affinity Propagation Algorithm: Seed Affinity Propagation (SAP) is a semi supervised clustering. The aim is from the initial labeled object we cluster the large number of unlabeled object efficiently. To guarantee accuracy and avoid a blind search for seeds we use Mean Features Selection method. The similarities between tags are passed as input to the algorithm in the form of matrix. The different steps involved in algorithm are: Let D be a data set which consists of set of features of each object and the value associated with these object. Construct the seed from a few labeled object using Mean feature selection Method. Calculate the tri set between the object i and j(CFS(i,j), UFS(i,j), and SCS(i,j)). Similarity calculation between the object using the equation (1). Self similarity computation: Calculate s (l,l) is the mean value of the similarities. These values are referred to as preferences. Initialize the matrixes of messages Message Matrix Computation: Compute availability matrix a (i,j) and responsibility matrix r(i,j). Exemplar selection: By adding the availability and responsibility matrixes we find the exemplar for each object i is the maximum of r(i,j) + a (i,j). Update the matrix using Rt+1 = (1-)Rt+ Rt-1 (2) At+1 = (1-)At+ At-1 (3) Where â‚ ¬ [0,1] is a damping factor. R and A represent the responsibility matrix and availability matrix respectively, and t indicate the iteration times. Iterating steps 6,7and 8 until the exemplar selection result stays constant for a number of iterations. Here the input to the algorithm is is the similarity between the tags mentioned above. It find a number of clusters, but we does not consider all the clusters. We choose K number of clusters base on a threshold value. 2) Other users to social context: After finding the context of a user, we find the other users with the same context. For finding the similarity compare the tag cloud formed during the interaction of u and v (TC(Iu|v)), with the tags in the context of user u TC(cti). ctu|v= (4) Similarity is calculated by using cosine similarity method. Two inputs will consider as vectors. And calculate the angle between these vectors. So the output will be a cluster consists of several users. From this cluster also we find users with strong tie strength. Then the ads will post to this the wall of users who have strong tie strength. Figure 2. Inferring Social context E. Tie Strength Measurements Cluster consists of set of users. They are represented as a graph where nodes are users and edges represent the link between the users. From the given graph we find the tie strength between the users by using similarity and node interaction methods. Output is a weighted graph, where weight in the edge represents the value of tie strength between the two users. Where w represents the intensity of interaction between the nodes, so here we pass the tag weight between the users as w. Td is the set of neighbors of the nodes. If the value of Str(u,v) is greater, indicate that the tie strength between u and v is strong. Figure.5: Graphical Representation of Tie Strength between Users IV. Applications Find the community based on tie strength, so the users in the community may have similar interest. For providing publicity when the ad is posted in the user’s wall, its visibility will be limited to those of his contacts that share a strong tie with the user. So the companies can target the potential customers. V. Conclusion The model takes the advantage of tie strength between the users in the social network to provide publicity to users. Here we applied NLP and data mining techniques. Interaction of users in social network is analyzed using NLP and find Tag cloud of each user. Then calculated the semantic relationship between each tag in the tag cloud. Then apply affinity propagation and obtain the social context of each user. Then associate users in his contacts to the clusters. From this cluster we find the users with strong tie strength. The method will help the companies to find their potential users. Based on the interest of users we can post the corresponding ads to their walls. References Luca Pappalardo, Giulio Rossetti and Dino Pedreschi. â€Å" How well do we know each other? detecting tie strength in multidimensional social networks,† 2012 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. Seyed Ahmad Moosavi and MehrdadJalali. â€Å"Community Detection in Online Social Networks Using Actions of Users,†978-1-4799-3351-8/14/$31.00  ©2014 IEEE. Andrea Petrà ³czi and Tamà ¡s Nepusz. â€Å"Measuring tie-strength in virtual social networks† http://www.insna.org/Connections-Web/Volume27-2/5.Petrà ³czi.pdf. J.P. Onnela and J. Sarama ¨ ki. â€Å"Structure and tie srength in mobile communication network, † PNAS published online April 24, 2007. Mark S. Granovetter â€Å" The Strength of Weak Ties,† American Journal of Sociology Volume 78 Issue6 (May 1973) 1360-1380. Yaxi He, Chunhong Zhang and Yang Ji. â€Å" Principle Features for Tie Strength Estimation in Micro-blog Social Network † 2012 IEEE 12th International Conference on Computer and Information Technology. Renchu Guan and Xiaohu Shi,† Text Clustering with Seeds Affinity Propagation,† IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 23, NO. 4, April 2011. T. Pedersen, S. Patwardhan, and J. Michelizzi â€Å"Wordnet:: Similarity: Measuring the relatedness of concepts,† .Demonstration Papers atHLT-NAACL 2004, 2004, pp. 38–41, Association for Computational Linguistics. FakhriHasanzadeh and MehrdadJalali, â€Å"Detecting Communities in Social Networks by Techniques of Clustering and Analysis of Communications,†978-1-4799-3351-8/14/$31.00  ©2014 IEEE. B. Frey and D. Dueck,†Clustering by passing messages between datapoints,† Science, vol. 315, no. 5814, pp. 972–976, 2007. Sandra Servia-Rodrà ­guez, Ana Fernà ¡ndez-Vilas, Rebeca P. Dà ­az-Redondo, and Josà © J. Pazos-Arias. â€Å"Inferring Contexts From Facebook Interactions: A Social Publicity Scenario,† IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA, VOL. 15, NO. 6, OCTOBER 2013.

A Boys View of Playland :: Amusement Parks Essays

A Boy's View of Playland Most everyone enjoys an amusement park. Whether we delight in being jolted and swung by some wild ride, or enjoy the quieter pleasure of munching a candy apple while the younger ones squeal their way round and round, we feel a natural attraction for such a place. But none that I have seen as an adult, from Disneyland to Six Flags, measures up to my boyhood memories of Whitney's Playland at the Beach in San Francisco. Playland was wonderful because of the rides, the exhibits, and most of all, the people. Obviously, exciting rides are a boy's first love in an amusement park, and Playland offered almost more stimulation than I could stand. The Fun House featured a giant rolling barrel to run and tumble through, a huge flat wheel that flung riders into the wall, and a hardwood slide about four stories high. Near the Fun House was the Diving Bell, a converted Navy rescue cylinder that descended thirty feet into a shark-filled tank of seawater and exploded back up again, creating a miniature typhoon every five minutes or so. But nothing matched the Ride in the Clouds, a scarlet roller coaster whose roar and clatter were audible a block away, even over the pounding of the surf. Walter Sparks and I had to work up our courage a long time before we dared ride that one. Finally, though, we found ourselves in the second pair of seats from the front, rumbling up past the sign that said "RIDE AT YOUR OWN RISK," and watching the panorama of sky and sea. Then the coaster tipped over into a heart-stopping dive, plunging down, down, until we had knifed underground into a roaring tunnel that blasted us skyward again. The next peak offered almost as good a view as the first, if only our eyes had been open. When the ride was over we stepped shakily out, grateful to be alive and ready to brag in school on Monday. Quieter, but no less interesting, were Playland's exhibits. A favorite was the Crime Does Not Pay building, which contained grisly artifacts from man's brutal past. I would linger in the gloomy halls of

My Philosophy of Education Essay -- Educating Educational Teaching Ess

My Philosophy of Education Generally when you compare twins you find that they are different in many ways. Even if they are identical and they look exactly alike they usually have different personalities. Normally they are extreme opposites; one takes up the more dominant outgoing personality while the other is shy and more of a follower. Ever since my sister and I were little I have taken on the more dominant role. From the time of playing school when I was little I have always loved being in control. Of course, I was always the teacher and got to boss everyone around. Even into my high school years I took pride in being captain of my basketball team and my teammates looking to me as the leader. I have never shied away from people; I love interacting and talking to people. From playing school and being the teacher until the present I have had many chances to interact with people of all ethnic groups and backgrounds. I love helping people and knowing that I have touched someone’s l ife, touches my heart. That is how I always knew I wanted to be a teacher since my childhood years playing with my friends. I took great pride in being the teacher and now I take even greater pride knowing my dream will soon come true. I will no longer have to pretend because my students will be real and they will be looking for me to lead them to success. When I was little I was the All-American tomboy. I have always adored sports of all kinds. I was one of the kids my mom would shout for me to come in for dinner and call me back in for bedtime. I was one of the neighborhood guys playing everything from football to basketball. At age five when my dad told me that he played sports everyday at work I decid... ...y class and some not so athletic kids in my class. If I want all my students to reach their potential I will have to use positive reinforcement to make all my students feel equally talented. By using behaviorism they will all have fun, feel good about themselves, and be learning at the same time. My dominance has helped me shape my future and hopefully I can shape the future of my students. By incorporating the different teaching methods and philosophies I can hopefully keep my students interested and they will develop into their own with a unique personality. I will feel that I have successfully done my job as a teacher if my kids walk out of my classroom knowing more than when they walked in. If I can teach them one new thing daily that is one more thing they can put into their suitcase of knowledge for their travels into the future.

Aronson,Marc. Witch-hunt: Mysteries of the Salem Witch Trials. NewYork: Simon And Schuster, 2003

In reviewing the book Witch-hunt: Mysteries of the Salem Witch Trials, I found many new and interesting facts about the Salem witch trials. The book gives a detailed account of the accusers, the accused, the judges, and other key players involved in the hysteria that consumed Salem in 1692. Aronson starts out his book not with 1692, but instead with 1688, a year when the four Goodwin children seemed to be possessed by someone or something that was not of this world. The whole of this story is told by Cotton Mather, a well-respected minister of his day. He and his father, Increase Mather would play an important part in the hysteria was to come. He was the one who established the test for accused witches—that is, the ability to recite the Lord’s Prayer perfectly. Ironically, it would be his voice that would stop the hysteria in late 1692. He then compares the hysteria of 1692 to the post-September 11, 2001 hysteria regarding religious fundamentalists. At times, Aronson is a bit preachy, but the narrative moves along, telling vividly of the trials of the accused, and how many recanted their confessions, and even the histrionics of the alleged victims. The story begins with a group of girls practicing some old divination with a West Indian Slave, Tituba. When the experiment goes horribly wrong, the girls begin having spells of illness, and began going into fits. The girls quickly accuse Tituba of bewitching them, and Tituba does not disappoint, confessing to the crime of witchcraft, naming names, if only to save herself. The accusations fly quickly from there, as does the narrative. Aronson moves quickly, telling of the trials and hangings with vivid clarity. One almost feels as though they are in the courtroom, feeling the accusers’ pains, and hearing the plaintiff’s cries of innocence. Aronson also takes us to the jail cells, telling us of witches that recanted to the stenographers charged with taking their confessions. Aronson then talks of the height of the hysteria, when people were being accused at an alarming rate. He does, however, neglect to mention that a total of 20 people were executed, and many more were imprisoned. Aronson ends the Witchcraft trials with a voice of reason. It is the same voice that ended the hysteria 300 years ago. The reason is voiced by people like Cotton Mather, Increase Mather, Thomas Brattle and other esteemed men of the society. He also ties the whole thing together by placing the events in their historical context and giving reasons for the hysteria and for the end of the reign of terror. Overall, he does an excellent job of taking the available resources and turning it into a gripping tale that would take anyone on a wild ride. I personally read this book in two days, I could not put it down. The contemporary comparisons Aronson makes brings the book to relevance to today’s young person while bringing this fascinating historical period to a satisfying, if unsettling conclusion. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a better understanding of the Salem Witch Trials and their impact on Massachusetts society. I would also recommend it because after reading it, one gets the sense of what a modern day witch-hunt looks like. Hopefully, by reading about this troubling period in American history, we can avoid repetitions of this type of hysteria in the future.