Ethics -Radio Shack Ceo Sacandal Essay Example for Free

Ethics -Radio Shack Ceo Sacandal Essay Ethics is the consideration of how human actions can improve or deteriorate the environments in which we work and live. In the wake of recent corporate scandals like Enron and WorldCom leading to trials and imprisonment of previously powerful (Chief Executing Officer) CEO’s public trust in CEO’s has diminished. Therefore when the story about the forged academic credentials of Dave Edmondson, CEO of Radio Shack came it re-ignited the mistrust. This paper will provide a brief background of the scandal and detailed analysis of the ethical issues involved and whether the actions taken by RadioShack were ethical or not. Background: Dave Edmondson was on a fast career track and was named CEO of Radio Shack in May 2005. In February, 2006 Radio Shack announced that its CEO, David Edmonson has resigned over questions raised over his resume. The Fort Worth Star- Telegram discovered that he had not earned degrees in theology and psychology from Heartland Baptist College as claimed on his resume. Moreover Edmonson had only finished two semesters at the college and the college did not even offer a psychology major. Edmonson admitted to the errors calling them â€Å"misstatements† and resigned in the aftermath of the corporate scandal. Analysis: The main issue about this case is not just forging of the academic credentials but how Radio Shack handled the case that generated criticism from public and turned it into a media circus. The basic hypernorms of honesty and integrity were not met by RadioShack in handling the situation. Edmondson did not display fairness towards Radio Shack by trying to communicate the value of knowledge via false degrees. It was not just the disappointing fact that Edmondson lied on his resume but what was equally troubling was the individual and corporate response to the scandal. Radio Shack supported its CEO and failed to give public any substantial answers. The ethical question then becomes that what is the responsibility of board of directors? Should they oversee the personal ethics of a CEO as long as he is driving the shareholders maximum value and yielding higher profits for he firm or they should step up and take responsibility for their own short comings, take the required action and set an example of driving the company by ethical values and standards not just profits? Radio shack displayed lack of responsibility as a company when it came to take ownership of the issue and failed to address the public with compassion and was unable to provide clarification regarding the r esume issue. From philosophical approach- consequentialism view holds that whether an act is morally right depends only on the consequences of that act. Edmondson’s decision to lie on his resume turned out to bring good consequences only for him in terms of a career hike. Deontology brings up these questions: Was Edmondson’s decision legal, fair, just or right? No, it was not and transparency and information sharing regarding the falsified resume might have led to different outcomes both for Edmondson and RadioShack. Considering the virtue ethics, did Edmondson and RadioShack’s decision demonstrate expected virtues? The company had built its image and reputation over many years. This reputation entailed virtues of trustworthiness, compassion, integrity and responsibility. It did not seem that Edmondson’s decision to not come clean was based on any of these considerations. He bluntly violated the virtue ethics. The stakeholders involved were shareholders, board of directors, employees and common people. He could be cut slack for being an ambitious young individual at the start of his career but how can the ignorance be overseen that in the years of making towards a CEO he never came clean. Infact when the scandal was raised and he was confronted he did not even admit right away. This displays lack of character and credibility. A company’s leader should be transparent and trustworthy. From a modified moral standards approach I feel that there wasn’t any net benefit to the company from his falsified educational claims. It was also not fair to all the stakeholders involved as there could have been a better candidate who got rejected due to a truthful but less flashy resume. Also the distribution of benefits was enjoyed by the CEO whereas the burdens were shared by him and the company equally in terms of a bad reputation and loss of public trust. Also RadioShack was not consistent with the virtues expected by its employees as they did not bring them and other stakeholders in the loop during the media frenzy which led to a discontented employee atmosphere. This also leads to question the monitoring and compliance at RadioShack. They had a code of conduct and code of ethics in place detailing the responsibilities of the employees but how realistically this was being followed can be easily criticized based on Edmondson’s case. I believe that company’s code of ethics should be incorporated in its values and system actions. Corporate risk can be reduced and even mitigated if the organization can align values for ethical motivation and action. Edmondson did take accountability of his unethical actions later and RadioShack’s board of directors also learned the hard way that blind support of a CEO without any solid evidence is unwise and can tarnish the reputation of the company. If they had accepted and reacted to responsibility as soon as the scandal broke the company would have been able to save its reputation and maintained credibility.

The Irish Potato Famine and The Holocaust in Literature Essay -- Liter

The Irish Potato Famine and The Holocaust in Literature Writers often use literature as a means of communicating traumatic events that occur in history, and such events are recorded by first-hand accounts as well as remembered by people far removed from the situation. Two traumatic events in history that are readily found in literature are The Irish Potato Famine and The Holocaust. A literary medium that has been used quite poignantly to convey trauma is poetry and the poetry from these two historical traumatic events is not difficult to find. Some wrote poetry to maintain their sanity as they experienced the traumatic event while others wrote after-the-fact as an outlet for emotional pain. Some wrote in remembrance of what they had lived through and so that others in succeeding generations could fathom even a glimpse of their traumatic experience. Another group of writers, far removed from the events, felt they had some light to shed on the subject. These people may be from a background similar to the victims or very learned on the matter surrounding it. A reader may wonder why poetry is such a viable option for conveying the trauma of so many people. Hilda Schiff writes, â€Å"the contemporaneous literature of any period of history is not only an integral part of that period, but it also allows us to understand historical events and experiences better than the bare facts alone can do because they enable us to absorb them inwardly† (xiv). The facts are raw and bare, like a skeleton. The literature and poetry add the skin and features to the bones to make the people and images they represent more realistic. Historians hope that by teaching younger generations about historical mistakes of the past, the knowledge will... ... ed. The Last Lullaby, Poetry from the Holocaust. Syracuse University Press, 1998. Miller, Alice. For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots Of Violence. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983: 197. Morash, Christopher. Writing the Irish Famine. Clarendon Press, 1995. Parmet, Harriet L. The Terror of Our Days. Lehigh University Press, 2001. Reznikoff, Charles. from â€Å"Holocaust.† Holocaust Poetry. Ed. Hilda Schiff. St. Martin’s Press, 1995: 78-80. Sachs, Nelly. â€Å"A Dead Child Speaks.† Holocaust Poetry. Ed. Hilda Schiff. St. Martin’s Press, 1995: 67. Schiff, Hilda ed. Holocaust Poetry. St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Tal, Kali. Words of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Wiesel, Elie. â€Å"Never Shall I Forget.† Holocaust Poetry. Ed. Hilda Schiff. St.Martin’s Press, 1995: 42.

The Systems Development Life Cycle

A structure that a business uses to collect, manage, store, process, retrieve, and report financial data to accountants, consultants, high ranking corporate officers, or tax agencies is the prime definition of an accounting information system. Accounting information systems are responsible for every facet of numerical data in a company and a malfunction could potentially cause a disaster within the corporation. Accountants have different roles in working with accounting information systems including design, implementation, usage, and ownership.These rolls help accountants keep track of a company’s budget and other financial documents such as quarterly reports. Accountants also use the different information technology systems in a company to put together reports to persuade investors to keep their money in the company stock or persuade potential investors why placing their money in this company is a good financial decision. Thoroughly studying a large accounting information sys tem can be a very tedious job; for this reason, companies put together teams to analyze and handle the development work implementations to the different information technologies in a corporation.Systems study groups begin with a formal analysis of the technology in order to see what issues are present in the software or hardware, what implementations need to take place, and how to proceed with the repair or update. This step is known as the planning and investigation stage and is the first stage when determining the route to take when working with the specific company technology. After this preliminary stage, and the systems study group is chosen, the analysis stage takes place to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the particular unit.The next stage, known in the book as â€Å"design,† is when the systems study group determines how to precisely remove a system’s weaknesses while maintain the system’s strengths. If I was working on a project for a company, I would follow this exact model in determining how to gain optimal output from an information system. The final stage in the systems development life cycle is implementation, follow up, and maintenance and in this stage the company periodically checks on the information system to make sure it is still performing optimally.After making sure the implementation is properly installed, I would do a follow up examination every six months to make sure the system in functioning properly and to determine if further implementation needs to take place to update the system. After the implementation is successfully installed and has been followed up on, the new mission is to locate further challenges the corporation may face, whether it be dated information systems, or the data produced by the information system that affects the company such as budgets and quarterly reports.Challenges that may face a company include: loosing capital on technology that is not the most efficient for the corporati on, loosing capital on an unnecessary implementation or company investment, internal fraud, unseen information system malfunctions. When a system study group is formed and the steering committee, high ranking group of top managers that lead the project or projects, determines the best route for the study group to proceed, data should be gathered to properly assess the situation.The five sources of data come from reviewing existing documentation, observing the current system in operation, using open and closed ended questionnaires, reviewing internal control procedures, and interviewing the different participants who have either worked with the system being implemented or done a similar job in the past. The data gathering and data analysis process can effectively reduce the chance of possible future challenges for the company or information system.Any system that is outdated, costing the company more money than necessary or malfunctions needs to be replaced or implemented. If a syste m is outdated, competitor companies who have the same technology will update their systems and be at an advantage thus, if the corporation I was working for had outdated software, I would recommend an upgrade or replacement. Some system operations fees have the potential to bankrupt a company, especially if the technology is drawing a large amount of energy.Malfunctions cannot be tolerated because they are a threat to important company data and financial paper work. The information held on an accounting information system is extremely important and any loss of documentation would result for a copious amount of which would have to be carried out by managers in the human and production resources department as well as a tedious job for the company team of accountants and executives.

Zhoukoudian Home of Peking Man

Zhoukoudian is an important Homo erectus site, a stratified karstic cave and its associated fissures located in Fangshan District, about 45 km southwest of Beijing, China. The Chinese name is spelled a variety of ways in the older scientific literature, including Choukoutien, Chou-kou-tien, Chou-kou-tien and today it is often abbreviated ZKD. To date, 27 paleontological localities–horizontal and vertical concentrations of deposits–have been found within the cave system. They span the entire Pleistocene record in China. Some contain the hominin remains of Homo erectus, H. heidelbergensis, or early modern humans; others contain faunal assemblages important to understanding the progress of climate change throughout the Middle and Lower Paleolithic periods in China. Important Localities A handful of the localities have been well-reported in the English-language scientific literature, including the localities with many hominin remains, but many have not yet been published in Chinese, let alone English. Locality 1, Longgushan (Dragon Bone Hill) is where the H. erectus Peking man was first discovered in the 1920s. Gezitang (Pigeon Hall or Chamber of the Pigeons), where evidence for controlled use of fire and many of the stone tools from ZDK, is also part of Locality 1.Locality 26, the Upper Cave, contained early modern humans associated with a rich cultural material.Locality 27, or Tianyuan Cave is where the earliest Homo sapiens fossil remains in China were discovered in 2001.Locality 13 is an early Pleistocene site; Locality 15 is Late Middle Pleistocene and early Late Pleistocene site, and Localities 4 and 22 were occupied during the Late Pleistocene.Localities 2–3, 5, 12, 14, and 19–23 do not have human remains but do have faunal assemblages which provide environmental evidence for Pleistocene China. Dragon Bone Hill (ZDK1) The best reported of the localities is Dragon Bone Hill, where Peking Man was discovered. ZKD1 contains 40 meters (130 feet) of sediment representing the paleontological occupation of the locality between 700,000 and 130,000 years ago. There are 17 identified strata (geological layers), containing remains of least 45 H. erectus and 98 different mammals. Over 100,000 artifacts have been recovered from the site, including over 17,000 stone artifacts, most of which were recovered from layers 4 and 5. Scholars often discuss the two main occupations as Middle Paleolithic (mainly in layers 3–4) and Lower Paleolithic (layers 8–9). Layers 3-4 (Middle Paleolithic) has been dated by the Uranium-series method to 230–256 thousand years ago (kya) and by thermoluminescence to 292–312 kya, or (representing Marine Isotope Stages MIS 7-8). These layers included a succession of silts with e\clay and sands rich in phytoliths (a type of plant residue), burned bone and ashes, likely evidence of intentional fire, and were laid down during a period of warm to mild climate with open grassland, some temperate forest.Layers 8-9 (Lower Paleolithic) consisted of 6 m (20 ft) of limestone and dolomitic rockfall debris. Aluminium/Beryllium dating of quartz sediments returned dates of 680-780 kya (MIS 17-19/Chinese loess 6-7) which match a faunal assemblage that suggested cold-climate fauna with steppe and forest environments and a trend over time towards increasing grasslands. The environment included a mixed c3/c4 vegetation and strong winter monsoons, and a diversity of large mammals, including non-human primates. Stone Tools Reassessment of the stone tools at ZDK has contributed to the abandonment of the so-called Movius Line—a theory from the 1940s that argued that the Asian Paleolithic was a backwater that made no complex stone tools such as those found in Africa. The analysis indicates that the assemblages do not fit a simple flake tool industry but rather a typical early Paleolithic core-flake industry based on poor-quality quartz and quartzite. A total of 17,000 stone tools have been recovered to date, mostly in layers 4–5. Comparing the two main occupations, it is apparent that the older occupation in 8–9 has larger tools, and the later occupation in 4–5 has more flakes and pointed tools. The main raw material is non-local quartzite; the more recent layers also exploit the local raw materials (chert). The percentage of bipolar reduction artifacts discovered in layers 4–5 indicate that freehand reduction was the dominant tool-making strategy, and the bipolar reduction was an expedient strategy. Human Remains All of the early Middle Pleistocene human remains recovered from Zhoukoudian came from Locality 1. A whopping 67% of the human remains exhibit large carnivore bite marks and high bone fragmentation, which suggests to the scholars that they were chewed by the cave hyena. Locality 1s Middle Paleolithic residents are thought to have been hyenas, and humans only lived there sporadically. The first discovery of humans at ZDK was in 1929 when Chinese paleontologist Pei Wenzhongi found the skullcap of Peking Man (Homo erectus Sinathropus pekinsis), the second H. erectus skull ever found. The first-ever discovered was Java Man; Peking Man was the confirming evidence that H. erectus was a reality. Nearly 200 hominin bones and bone fragments have been recovered from ZDK1 over the years, representing a total of 45 individuals. Most of the bones found before World War II were lost under unknown circumstances. Fire at Locality 1 Scholars identified evidence for the controlled use of fire in Locality 1 in the 1920s, but it was met with skepticism until the confirming discovery of even older Gesher Ben Yakot in Israel. Evidence for the fire includes burned bones, burned seeds from the redbud tree (Cercis blackii), and deposits of charcoal and ash from four layers at Locality 1, and at Gezigang (Pigeon Hall or Chamber of Pigeons). Discoveries since 2009 in Middle Paleolithic Layer 4 have included several burned areas which can be interpreted as hearths, one of which is outlined by rocks and contains burned bones, heated limestone, and lime. Redating of Zhoukoudian The most recent dates for ZDK1 were reported in 2009. Using a fairly new radio-isotopic dating technique based on decay ratios of aluminum-26 and beryllium-10 in quartzite artifacts recovered within the sediment layers, researchers Shen Guanjun and colleagues estimate the dates of Peking Man as between 680,000-780,000 years old (Marine Isotope Stages 16–17). The research is backed up by the presence of cold-adapted animal life. The dates mean that the H. erectus living in Zhoukoudian would have had to also have been cold-adapted, additional evidence for the controlled use of fire at the cave site. In addition, the revised dates inspired the Chinese Academy of Sciences to begin a new long-term systematic excavation at Locality 1, using methodologies and with research aims undreamt of during Peis excavations. Archaeological History The original excavations at ZKD were led by some of the giants in the international paleontological community at the time, and, even more importantly, were the first training excavations for the earliest paleontologists in China. Excavators included Canadian paleontologist Davidson Black, Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson, Austrian paleontologist Otto Zdansky; the French philosopher and cleric Teilhard de Chardin was involved in reporting the data. Among the Chinese archaeologists at the excavations were the father of Chinese archaeology Pei Wenzhong (as W.C. Pei in the early scientific literature), and Jia Lanpo (L.P. Chia). Two additional generations of scholarship have been conducted at ZDK, the most recent excavations ongoing in the 21st century, international excavations led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences beginning in 2009. ZKD was placed on UNESCOs World Heritage List in 1987. Recent Sources Dennell, Robin. Life without the Movius Line: The Structure of the East and Southeast Asian Early Palaeolithic. Quaternary International 400 (2016): 14-22. Print.Gao, Xing, et al. Geophysical Investigations Identify Hidden Deposits with Great Potential for Discovering Peking Man Fossils at Zhoukoudian, China. Quaternary International 400 (2016): 30–35. Print.Gao, Xing, et al. Evidence of Hominin Use and Maintenance of Fire at Zhoukoudian. Current Anthropology 58.S16 (2017): S267–S77. Print.Li, Feng. An Experimental Study of Bipolar Reduction at Zhoukoudian Locality 1, North China. Quaternary International 400 (2016): 23–29. Print.Shen, Chen, Xiaoling Zhang, and Xing Gao. Zhoukoudian in Transition: Research History, Lithic Technologies, and Transformation of Chinese Palaeolithic Archaeology. Quaternary International 400 (2016): 4–13. Print.Shen, Guanjun, et al. Age of Zhoukoudian Homo Erectus Determined with 26al/10be Burial Dating. Nature 458 (2009): 198â €“200. Print.Zanolli, Clà ©ment, et al. Inner Tooth Morphology of Homo Erectus from Zhoukoudian. New Evidence from an Old Collection Housed at Uppsala University, Sweden. Journal of Human Evolution 116 (2018): 1–13. Print.Zhang, Yan, et al. The Use of Fire at Zhoukoudian: Evidence from Magnetic Susceptibility and Color Measurements. Chinese Science Bulletin 59.10 (2014): 1013–20. Print.