W.E.B. Du Boisâ€His Greatest Contributions to Sociology

W.E.B. Du Bois- His Greatest Contributions to Sociology Renowned sociologist, race scholar, and activist William Edward Burghardt du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868. He lived to be 95 years old, and during the course of his long life authored multiple books that are still deeply important to the study of sociology- in particular, how sociologists study  race and racism. Du Bois is regarded as one of the founders of the discipline, along with Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Harriet Martineau. Du Bois was the first Black man to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He was also one of the founders of the NAACP, and a leader at the forefront of the movement for Black civil rights in the U.S. Later in his life he was an activist for peace and opposed nuclear weapons, which made him a target of FBI harassment. Also a leader of the Pan-African movement, he moved to Ghana and renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1961. His body of work  inspired the creation of a critical journal of black politics, culture, and society called  Souls. His legacy is honored annually by  the American Sociological Association  with an award for a career of distinguished scholarship given in his name. Illustrating Structural Racism and Its Effects The Philadelphia Negro, published in  1896, is Du Boiss first major work. The study, considered one of the first examples of scientifically framed and conducted sociology, was based on over 2,500 in-person interviews systematically conducted with African American households in the seventh ward of Philadelphia from August 1896 through December 1897. In a first for sociology, Du Bois combined his research with census data to create visual illustrations of his findings in bar graphs. Through this combination of methods, he clearly illustrated the realities of racism and how it impacted the lives and opportunities of this community, providing much-needed evidence in the fight to disprove the supposed cultural and intellectual inferiority of black people. "Double-Consciousness" and "The Veil" The  Souls of Black Folk, published in  1903, is a widely-taught collection of essays that draws on Du Boiss own experience of growing up Black in a white nation to poignantly illustrate the psycho-socio affects of racism. In chapter 1 of this book, Du Bois put forth two concepts that have become staples of sociology and race theory: double-consciousness and the veil. Du Bois used the metaphor of the veil to describe how Black people see the world differently from whites, given how race and racism shape their experiences and interactions with others. Physically speaking, the veil can be understood as dark skin, which, in our society marks Black people as different from whites. Du Bois recounts first realizing the veils existence when a young white girl refused his greeting card in elementary school:  Ã¢â‚¬Å"It dawned upon me with certain suddenness that I was different from the others†¦ shut out from their world by a vast veil.† Du Bois asserted that the veil prevents Black people from having true self-consciousness, and instead forces them to have double-consciousness, wherein they have an understanding of themselves within their families and community, but also must view themselves through the eyes of others who see them as different and inferior. He wrote: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at ones self through the eyes of others, of measuring ones soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.   The full book, which addresses the need for reforms against racism and suggests how they might be achieved, is a short and readable 171 pages, and well worth a close read.   How Racism Prevents Critical Class Consciousness Among Workers Published in 1935,  Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880  uses historical evidence to illustrate how race and racism served the economic interests of capitalists in the Reconstruction-era southern U.S. By dividing workers by race  and fueling racism, the economic and political elite ensured that a unified class of laborers would not develop, which allowed for extreme economic exploitation of both Black and white workers. Importantly, this work is also an illustration of the economic struggle of newly freed slaves, and the roles they played in reconstructing the post-war south.

Psycholinguistics Definition and Examples

Psycholinguistics Definition and Examples Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental aspects of language and speech. It is primarily concerned with the ways in which language is represented and processed in the brain. A branch of both linguistics and psychology, psycholinguistics is part of the field of cognitive science. Adjective: psycholinguistic. The term psycholinguistics was introduced by American psychologist Jacob Robert Kantor in his book An Objective Psychology of Grammar (1936). The term was popularized by one of Kantors students, Henry Pronko, in the article Language and Psycholinguistics: A Review (1946). The emergence of  psycholinguistics as an academic discipline is generally linked to an influential seminar at Cornell University in 1951. Pronunciation: si-ko-lin-GWIS-tiks Also Known As: psychology of language Etymology: From the Greek, mind the Latin, tongue On Psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics is  the study of the mental mechanisms that make it possible for people to use language. It is a scientific discipline whose goal is a coherent theory of the way in which language is produced and understood. (Alan Garnham,  Psycholinguistics: Central Topics. Psychology Press, 1985) Two Key Questions At its heart, psycholinguistic work consists of two questions. One is, What knowledge of language is needed for us to use language? In a sense, we must know a language to use it, but we are not always fully aware of this knowledge... The other primary psycholinguistic question is, What cognitive processes are involved in the ordinary use of language? By ordinary use of language I mean such things as understanding a lecture, reading a book, writing a letter, and holding a conversation. By cognitive processes, I mean processes such as perception, memory, and thinking. Although we do few things as often or as easily as speaking and listening, we will find that considerable cognitive processing is going on during those activities. (David Carroll,  Psychology of Language, 5th ed. Thomson, 2008)   How Language Is Done Psycholinguists study how word meaning, sentence meaning, and discourse meaning are computed and represented in the mind. They study how complex words and sentences are composed in speech and how they are broken down into their constituents in the acts of listening and reading. In short, psycholinguists seek to understand how language is done... In general, psycholinguistic studies have revealed that many of the concepts employed in the analysis of sound structure, word structure, and sentence structure also play a role in language processing. However, an account of language processing also requires that we understand how these linguistic concepts interact with other aspects of human processing to enable language production and comprehension. (William OGrady, et al., Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. Bedford/St. Martins, 2001) An Interdisciplinary Field Psycholinguistics... draws on ideas and knowledge from a number of associated areas, such as phonetics, semantics and pure linguistics. There is a constant exchange of information between psycholinguists and those working in neurolinguistics, who study how language is represented in the brain. There are also close links with studies in artificial intelligence. Indeed, much of the early interest in language processing derived from the AI goals of designing computer programs that can turn speech into writing and programs that can recognize the human voice. (John Field, Psycholinguistics: A Resource Book for Students. Routledge, 2003) On Psycholinguistics and Neuroimaging Psycholinguistics has classically focused on button press tasks and reaction time experiments from which cognitive processes are being inferred. The advent of neuroimaging opened new research perspectives for the psycholinguist as it became possible to look at the neuronal mass activity that underlies language processing. Studies of brain correlates of psycholinguistic processes can complement behavioral results, and in some cases . . . can lead to direct information about the basis of psycholinguistic processes. (Friedmann Pulvermà ¼ller, Word Processing in the Brain as Revealed by Neurophysiological Imaging. The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics, ed. by M. Gareth Gaskell. Oxford University Press, 2009)

Measures of Working Capital Management Efficiency and Their Essay

Measures of Working Capital Management Efficiency and Their Relationship to Corporate Profitability - Essay Example Smith (1980) first signaled the importance of the trade-offs between the dual goals of working capital management, i.e., liquidity and profitability. In other words, decisions that tend to maximize profitability tend not to maximize the chances of adequate liquidity. Conversely, focusing almost entirely on liquidity will tend to reduce the potential profitability of the company. The most conventional measures of corporate liquidity are the current ratio and the quick ratio. Because of the static nature, their adequacy in examining a firm's efficiency in managing its working capital has been questioned by many authors (see, for example, Emery, 1984; and Kamath, 1989). Liquidity for the on-going firm is not really dependent on the liquidation value of its assets but rather on the operating cash flow generated by those assets. Gitman (1974) introduced the cash cycle concept as a crucial element in working capital management. The total cash cycle is defined as the number of days from the time the firm pays for its purchases of the most basic form of inventory to the time the firm collects for the sale of its finished product. Richards and Laughlin (1980) operationalized the cash cycle concept by reflecting the net time interval between cash expenditures on purchases and the ultimate recovery of cash receipts from product sales. The Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC) i s an additive measure of the number of days funds are committed to inventories and receivables less the number of days payments are deferred to suppliers. Gentry, Vaidyanathan, and Lee (1990) developed a modified version of the CCC called the Weighted Cash Conversion Cycle (WCCC), which scales the timing by the amount of funds in each step of the cycle. The weights are calculated by dividing the amount of cash tied up in each component by the final value of the component. Therefore, the WCCC includes both the number of days and the amount of funds that are tied up at each stage of the cash cycle. The Net Trade Cycle Although the WCCC provides a better appreciation of the complexities of the cash cycle, in this study, we use the Net Trade Cycle (NTC). First, the break-up of inventories into its three main components, i.e., raw materials, work-in-progress, and finished goods, is not readily available for the outside investigator; consequently we cannot calculate the WCCC. Second, the CCC is an additive concept, but unfortunately the denominators for the three components (i.e., number of days inventories, accounts receivable, and accounts payable) are all different, making addition not really useful. In contrast, the NTC is basically equal to the CCC whereby all three components are expressed as a percentage of sales. The NTC actually indicates the number of "days sales" the company has to finance its working capital under ceteris paribus conditions. This instrument provides an easy estimate for additional financing needs with regard to working capital expressed as a function of the projected sales growth. For example, assuming that Wal-Mart's sales would again grow with 13% during 1996 as they did over 1995, and assuming the same 40 days NTC, this would imply a $1.19 billion financing need just for