Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Company law. How to raise funds from public Essay

Company law. How to raise funds from public - Essay Example Transferability of shares in the stock exchange. Stocks and shares of a public limited company can be easily traded in the stock exchange and can be converted into cash on the fair market value of shares. Unlimited numbers of members. There are no restrictions on the number of members for a public limited company. Ease in borrowing funds from banks and financial institutions. Due to its better-understood corporate form and credibility of financial disclosures, banks and financial institutions can offer funds rather easily than a private limited company. The disadvantages regarding opening of a public company are enlisted below Non restriction in transference of shares. Due to non restriction in transference of shares, it is easy for people to interfere into the management by purchasing shares. Much more legal formalities and compliance of laws regarding decisions. Business cannot be commenced prior to certain legal formalities. Much more paperwork and recording requirements are observed. On conversion of a public limited company into private limited company, much legal formalities are involved. The accounts of a public limited company should be published and dispatched to the shareholders at their registered addresses. Question: What are the roles of director and duty of care of director Answer 2: Duties of care and skill In contrast with the extensive duties of good faith, which largely restrict certain acts conflicting with the director's duty to his company, a director has duties of care and skill which are positive side to promote the welfare of the company. (Charles worth, Morse (1998) (a) The test of skill The traditional test has been...It may be more difficult to raise capital for a private limited company, as investors may be more comfortable investing funds in the better-understood corporate form with a view toward an eventual initial public offering. Raising funds from public by means of issuance of share capital. It is much easier for a public company to raise its capital than a private limited company, since investors are more comfortable in investing funds in the better-understood corporate form with a view towards an eventual initial public offering. Transferability of shares in the stock exchange. Stocks and shares of a public limited company can be easily traded in the stock exchange and can be converted into cash on the fair market value of shares. Ease in borrowing funds from banks and financial institutions. Due to its better-understood corporate form and credibility of financial disclosures, banks and financial institutions can offer funds rather easily than a private limited company. In contrast with the extensive duties of good faith, which largely restrict certain acts conflicting with the director's duty to his company, a director has duties of care and skill which are positive side to promote the welfare of the company. (Charles worth, Morse (1998) The traditional test has been that a director need not display in the performance of his duties a greater degree of skill than may reasonably be expected from a person of his knowledge and experience.

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Food Processing Technology and Methods for Cereal

Food Processing Technology and Methods for Cereal Most of the principles of making breakfast cereals are similar to all products. Trix cereal is made with corn. The process of converting corn into the delicious product many children as well as adults will be discussed in this section. The corn from the field is dried milled, sifted and cleaned to separate the germ from the bran, oils and debris collected from the field and the milling process. The goal of this separation is to get to the endosperm where most of the starch that will be used for production is located. Most cereals produced are produced as flakes. Prior to flaking the grits are cooked and mixed with sugar, malt syrup, proteins, and salt into a large amount of water to create what is called cooking liquor. This cooking liquor provides the Milliard reaction that occurs during cooking and is what provides most of the flavor to the flakes or in the case of Trix, corn puffs. This mixture is loaded into a cylindrical industrial steam pressure cooker for about two hours at a 15-18 psig steam pressure (Smith Hui, 2004). In the case of Trix the cooking process is done by puffing. Puffing is done either through high temperature ovens, guns or extrusion. The use of any of these three methods is to expose the moist grain to high temperatures where its moisture will be converted to steam. The steam released by the grain expands and puffs the kernel. Prior to placing the grits into any of these three methods, the grains are delumped in lump-breaking machines which incorporate large volumes of air. The air supplied through the machine helps with the cooling of the product. The cooling of the grit in the lump-breaking machine helps with the initial drying step of the process of making ready to eat cereal. Grits usually have a moisture content of 28-34% (Smith Hui, 2004) are dried to about 14-17% through the use of forced air dryers at a temperature of 250 °F (Smith Hui, 2004). Once the grains have gone through this initial drying, the grains are controlled cooled to 100 °F to prevent hardening of the grain and to allow the grain to return to ambient temperature. (Smith Hui, 2004). Once the grain is dried to the moisture levels desired, the grain is tempered. Tempering of the grits takes about 2-3hours, helps reduce the darkening the product that occurs during Milliard reactions, and allow the grit to retrograde. This process uses temperature of 80o F and increases the firmness of the cooked grit (Smith Hui, 2004). From this point the grit is ready for flaking, shredding, or any of the methods of puffing grits. General Mills utilizes puffing guns to make Trix cereals. The science behind the puffing gun utilized by General Mills and some of its competitors, works by introducing the grains to high (500-800  °Ã‚  F) temperatures. This high temperature evaporates the moisture within the granules creating a steam pressure build up (100 to 200 psi) inside the chamber. When this pressure is released the moisture attempting to escape the grain, causes the endosperm to expand and simultaneously puff. Puffing guns have come long ways from when they were first introduced in the cereal business. Today General Mills utilizes a continuous puffing gun systems and extrusion puffing. Continuous puffing guns work the same way as it predecessors. The continuous gun contains a rotating cylinder that is set a specific angle. The cylinder is heated either by gas flames or electrically, and it is fed through a rotary valve. The pressure in the cylinder remains constant via the exit, thus continuously discharging the product. The contents explode into a bin provided with a floor opening leading to a conveyor belt. The product is directed to a rotating heating cylinder to dry, and then cooled. At this point the product is visually inspected for stickiness and color and sent to the packaging line. Direct expansion or extrusion puffing is the other method used by many cereal manufacturers. This type of technology was received with open arms by the cereal industry because it allows the combination of the steps in the process into one. Cereals ingredients are introduced in one batch into long barrels equipped with single or twin screws. The screws mix, shear, and pressurize the barrel and transport the â€Å"dough† to a forming die. As the mixture flows through the extruder, vitamins, flavors and colors are introduced and then the mixture exits through the die. The same principle of the puffing gun is applied to extruders. As the moisture vapor expands and the excess pressure is released, the volume of the mixture increases. The temperature in the barrel increases the mixture to about 300o-350 o F and the pressure to about 350-500 psi at the die head. As the dough exits through the orifices of the die, it is sliced off in to the different shapes and the slices expand immediately. Despite this quick expansion, the pieces still maintain moisture content of about 27% and are further dried on vibrating screens in hot air puffing ovens where the final cooking of the product occurs (Smith Hui, 2004). Pieces are inspected and sent to the packaging line. Although extruded and gun puffed mixtures products are enriched and fortified during the cooking process, the puffs receive a final spray of vitamins, sugar and flavors inside rotating spray drums. Both final sprays assist with the reduction of lipid oxidation and moisture which improve the overal l quality of the product as it relates to its texture and crispiness. One aspect of producing cereal is its quality. The cereal industry uses multiple methods to assess the quality of its product during the production process. The biggest issue for a good cereal product is moisture. Moisture is measured through near infrared analysis (NIR), wet chemistry, and image analysis. During the process the product the raw material is analyzed for moisture to ensure it can be flaked, shredded, shaped, maintained for control of oven temperatures, and to control the sugar content applied to the product. This type of testing can also be done to the final product where the fat, sugar, and moisture are analyzed to ensure the operation is working at optimum conditions. These test is necessary due to any unacceptable moisture content could lead to poor product quality as well as possible bacteria growth. At present, cereal industries are performing little or no analytical testing, and are relying on the vendors to provide them with highest quality level of product for their market. This can present a problem in production process. Despite the fact that the cereal industry does little or no analytical testing, most of the moisture content testing is performed as the product exits the oven using a 16 hour vacuum oven method or a moisture balance method (Unity Scientific, 2014). According to Unity Scientific, â€Å"both methods use loss on drying to measure moisture content.† The main problem with the 16 hr oven method is the time it takes to get results, and when these are received they â€Å"have no impact on real time process control† (Unity Scientific, 2014). When it comes to the moisture balance method Unity Scientific says, although the sample can be â€Å"analyzed in 15 minutes it is â€Å"2-3 times less accurate the vacumm oven method.† The key to cereals i s the control of its moisture and texture. Moisture as mentioned previously, is critical to maintaining a cereal’s integrity, and it is crucial that the moisture of a cereal product is not greater than 3%. Anything less or greater could reduce its crunchiness as well as make it brittle. Therefore, NIR is one of the best methods of testing for moisture as well as fat content in any step of the process. In regards to its crunchiness the cereal industry uses mechanical as well as sensory evaluation methods to ensure the products texture. Nonetheless, sensory evaluations can be subjective. One of the best ways to analyze texture is the use of mechanical instruments as these provide a quantitative measure of texture. Currently instruments used by the cereal industry include Stevens, Instron and Ottawa Texture Analyzer. The purpose of these crunch evaluation methods is to find the bowl life by exposing the product to milk for a small period of time and then performing a shear test. Other equipments used are the multiple crunching probes and the Ottawa Cell shearing test. The final step in the production process is packaging. Different equipment and films are used across the board in the cereal industry. Some of the machinery used include Ishida multi-head weighers, Bosch vertical form fill seal machines and Triangle bag in box packaging. When it comes to films, they either use wax paper or various polymer films (Smith Hui, 2014). However, before selecting a packaging film, cereal manufacturers consider whether the location the product is going to be sold is humid or arid. Based on these conditions the film is selected and used for production. One of most common packaging materials used in the cereal industry is polyethylene films (Smith Hui, 2014). The packaging film must protect from water vapor transmission and flavor loss. As mentioned previously, moisture plays a big role in the process and any sign of moisture gain could lead to potential loss of crispiness and acceptability of the product. Another issue for cereals is the instability of lipid s. Lipid oxidation leads to rancidity thus, creating a bad aroma in the product. To prevent lipid oxidation and moisture gain in the product, the cereal industry utilizes different antioxidants. The antioxidants commonly used are butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydrooxytoluene (BHT) (Smith Hui, 2004). Although their use is limited in the production process, these can be added before cooking. However, after several trials, it was discovered that due to their non polarity and their volatility these would not hold during the manufacturing process. Nonetheless, it was discovered it was better to apply these antioxidants to the packaging material as the antioxidants would transfer to product after packaging (Smith Hui, 2014). Packaging does more than protect from decay, it provides the identification, and it provides consumer attraction and appeal to the product. Producing cereals entails more than what is see in the grocery store shelves or what is consumed at homes. Essentially behind all of this manufacturing process is the effort to make profit, but no matter what idea the manufacturer may have, protecting the product and providing the best quality of product to consumer becomes primordial. Accurate shelf lives, quality of stored cereal, its freshness are what attract and appeal the consumer. References How Products Are Made. Cereal. 2014. Available at: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-3/Cereal.html. Accessed September 03, 2014. Smith, J. (2004).Food processing: Principles and applications. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell Pub. Kulp, K. (2000).Handbook of cereal science and technology(2nd ed., pp. 626- 627). New York: Marcel Dekker. Breakfast Cereal. (2014, January 1). Retrieved October 18, 2014, from http://www.unityscientific.com/industries/food-dairy/cereal.asp

Friday, October 25, 2019

Facism in America :: essays research papers

Since mainstream left-liberal media do not seriously ask this question, the analysis of what has gone wrong and where we are heading has been mostly off-base. Investigation of the kinds of under-handed, criminal tactics fascist regimes undertake to legitimize their agenda and accelerate the rate of change in their favor is dismissed as indulging in "conspiracy theory." Liberals insist that this regime must be treated under the rules of "politics as usual." But this doesn't consider that one election has already been stolen, and that September's repeat of irregularities in Florida was a clear warning that more such thuggery is on the way. If the "f" word is uttered, liberals are quick to note certain obvious dissimilarities with previous variants of fascism and say that what is happening in America is not fascist. It took German justice minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin to make the comparison explicit (under present American rules of political discourse, sh e has been duly sacked from her cabinet post); but at the liberal New York Times or The Nation, American writers dare not speak the truth. The masked assertion that we are immune to the virus ignores degrees of convergence and distinction based on the individual patient's history. The Times and other liberal voices have been obsessed over the last year with the rise of minority fascist parties in the Netherlands, France, and other European countries. They have questioned the tastefulness of new books and movies about Hitler, and again demonized such icons of Nazism as Leni Riefenstahl. Is this perhaps a displacement of American anxiety onto the safer European scene, liberal intellectuals here not wanting to confront the troubling truth? The pace of events in the last year has been almost as blindingly fast as it was after Hitler's Machtergreifung and the consolidation of fascist power in 1933. Speed stuns and silences. The proposed Iraqi adventure, which is only the first step in a more ambitious militarist agenda, has been opposed by the most conservative warmongers of past administrations. If the test of any theory is its predictive capacity, Bush's extreme risk-taking is better explained by the fascist model. Purely economic motives are a large part of the story, but there is a deeper derivation that exceeds such mundane rationales. Several of the apparent contradictions in Bush's governance make perfect sense if the fascist prism is applied, but not with the normal perspective. To pose the question doesn't mean that this is a completed project; at any point, anything can happen to shift the course of history in a different direction.

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Computer-Human Interaction Essay

Speech input/voice recognition has been a long standing area of research. While progress is being made, it is slower than optimists like IBM (spear headers of the early device â€Å"Shoebox†) and members of the health care domain originally predicted, and further work remains in this field. Although the goal of continuous speech recognition remains difficult to master, unnatural, isolated-word speech recognition is appropriate for some tasks and even natural for communicating with a computer, rather than another human. Speech recognition has been best utilized as of late with telephony and other domains such as computer gaming. The improvement of mobile processor speeds made feasible the speech-enabled Symbian and Windows Mobile Smartphones. Speech is used mostly as a part of User Interface, for creating pre-defined or custom speech commands (Wiki, July 2010). Research is needed not only in the actual speech recognition technology but also in how to use speech in an interface (Kamel, 1990). The ideal that a perfect computer is one that behaves and communicates just like a personal assistant is a naive one: people should only expect computers to behave like the tools they are, not like other people; and furthermore the computer-as-person approach ultimately limits the usefulness of the computer to that of the person being mimicked. The obstacle in improving the usefulness of interactive systems such as speech recognition software gradually lies in communicating requests and results between the system and its user. The best hope for progress in this area now lies at the user interface, rather than the system interior. Faster, more natural, and more convenient means for users and computers to exchange information are needed. Is speech recognition where it’s at? On the user’s side, interactive system technology is bridled by the nature of human communication devices; i. e. brain, lips, tongue, etc. and abilities; on the computer side, it is constrained only by input/output devices and methods that we can invent. The challenge is to design new devices/software and types of dialogues that better fit and take advantage of the communication-relevant characteristics of humans. So where does that leave us as we look forward to bigger and better ways of utilizing speech recognition (SR)? What is the future of SR? DARPA has three teams of researchers working on Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE), a program that will take in streams of information from foreign news broadcasts and newspapers and translate them. It hopes to create software that can instantly translate two languages with at least 90 percent accuracy. (Grabianowski, July 2010). At some point in the future, speech recognition may become speech understanding. Computers could potentially not only translate what was said and annotate it, but actually grasp the meaning behind the words. The staggering amount of computing power needed behind such a feat is just too far out to believe we are close to that at this time though. Accuracy of speech recognition stopped improving in 2001, well before reaching human levels. Funders stopped many projects. In the early 1990s, the newly minted Microsoft Research organization developed a system called MindNet which traced out a network in a dictionary from each word to its every mention in the definitions of other words. MindNet was shelved in 2005. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) financed investigations into conversational speech recognition but shifted priorities and money after accuracy plateaued. Attention has now shifted from speech recognition to research to â€Å"understand and emulate relevant human capabilities† as well as understanding how the brain processes language. This fundamental shift in direction acknowledges that â€Å"speech recognition† is not the answer. (Baker, Deng, Glass, Khudanpur, Lee, Morgan, O’Shaughnessy, May 2009). References: Shoebox,. IBM Shoebox (1960-1962) Retrieved 12 July 2010 from www03. ibm. com website http://www03. ibm. com/ibm/history/exhibits/specialprod1/specialprod1_7. html Kamel,. R. Kamel, (vol. 23, no. 8, pp. 8-9, August 1990 )‘‘Guest Editor’s Introduction: Voice in Computing,’’ IEEE Computer, Retrieved 12 July 2010 from www. computer. org website http://www. computer. org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10. 1109/MC. 1990. 10081 Wiki,. Retrieved July, 2010 from en. wikipedia. org website http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition Grabianowski,. Ed Grabianowski (July 2010): How Speech Recognition Works Retrieved July, 2010 from electronics. howstuffworks. com website http://electronics. howstuffworks. com/gadgets/high-tech-gadgets/speech- recognition4. htm Baker, Deng, Glass, Khudanpur, Lee, Morgan, O’Shaughnessy (May 2009): Research Developments and Directions in Speech Recognition and Understanding, Part1 Retrieved July, 2010 from research. microsoft. com website http://research. microsoft. com/pubs/80528/SPM-MINDS-I. pdf

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

RSO Marketing Proposal

Executive Director Marketing Professor Executive Summary The Rockford Symphony Orchestra is one of the leading cultural institutions n northern Illinois, performing over sixteen classical and pop concerts annually. The RSI was founded in 1934 and incorporated in 1943. The ROOK'S first MusiC Director and Manager, A Arthur Sack, led the orchestra for twenty's years. During this time, the Rockford Area Youth h Symphony Orchestra and the Rockford Symphony Orchestra Guild were established.The RSI continues its commitment to fulfilling its mission to lead in the creation of vibrant musical e experiences that the enlighten, educate, and entertain. (History, n. D. ) The RSI is celebrating its 80 anniversary and wants to reinforce the longevity of the organization by introducing their rich R oxford history into various music and performances for the 20142015 season and beyond. The RSI is also looking to create a closer tie to the Rockford community. The organizations' 80th anniversary needs t o be leveraged in order to increase ova rural ticket sales.The long and harsh winter of 20132014 was a major challenge the RSI faced making it difficult to reach their revenue goals. Ticket sales were 50% lower than their budgeted goal as a result. A brief evaluation of the Rook's strengths and weaknesses has served as a off notation the towards the strategic analysis and a marketing plan for this 80 anniversary celebration and the future of the organization. The plan is to focus on bringing more awareness t o the community, the creating various ways to promote the 80 anniversary this season and increase overall ticket sales.