Critically assess the working of the EU's merger control Regulation Essay

Critically assess the working of the EU's merger control Regulation - Essay Example For the past two decades, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) hold the greatest percentage among modes of entry by foreign investors and growth activities of domestic companies; particularly true for the developed economies. One probable reason for this trend may be the high availability of information regarding the value of mergers and acquisitions. M&As targets usually obtain good values by the financial markets, which is more attractive and tempting for the investing companies and is considered one of the more important factors that affect investors’ choices. Mergers occur when two or more companies, with the consent of both parties involved, engage into a merge, in order to create business synergies from the new single entity formed, rather than existing separately on the market. There is a mutual agreement between the managements of two or more companies, on the grounds of exchanging shares of the merging firms with shares of the new entity, which reflects the name of the both companies engaged in the merger. Acquisitions, on the other side, represent business transactions between parties which are unrelated, under terms established by the market, while each side acts in its own best interest . In other words, in the case of acquisitions, the takeover involves a direct business transaction between the management of the acquiring firm and the stockholders of the acquired firm . 4. M&A result in anti-competitive effects as a possible consequence. By creating or strengthening dominant market power and by creating control over the industry’s vertical chain – M&A can succeed in distorting market competition. The scope of the essay is to provide a critical review on the EU competition regulation5. At the level of EU, the European Commission is responsible for the implementation of the regulation. Its powers have still not been used as frequently as the USA. As designed currently the EU regulation and decisions have multiple variations across multiple sectors; particularly the sectors where large companies and extensive cross-border trading and ownership links are predominant. These are counted as the regulation’s key targets6. In the process the essay will look at the most important factor after the anti-competitive issues drive the EU decisions on M&A – the efficiency gains7. The essay is organized in several sections. First the impa ct of M&A on the society as a whole is investigated followed by an overview of EU competition law with the EU merger procedures ending with a conclusion and discussion on the findings. 2. MERGERS AND AQUISITIONS AND THE ECONOMIC AND PUBLIC INTEREST (anti-competitive effects and efficiency gains) Although more than 14 drivers of M&As activity have been recognized and defined in the economic research and theory, according to Griffiths and Wall, in most of the cases the theories are highly unpredictable and inconsistent8. For example, the value discrepancy theory (i.e. buying off a company with a lower value than its genuine potential and actual assets involved), as well as the market power theory (i.e. consolidation due to large market power), are both behavioral models and illustrate specific and exact frameworks in which the companies operate (externally and/or internally). Generalization of these theories is difficult, therefore one may argue that Griffiths and

Natural Language Processing Scope English Language Essay

Natural Language Processing Scope English Language Essay Abstract: The challenging sphere of natural language processing has been a major concern in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence since the late 40s. It encompasses the next strive forward in artificial intelligence to make computers and human interface more flexible and human understandable. Various methods were adopted since its inscription like machine translation, speech recognition, e-teaching, auto tutor etc. Researchers saw it as a likely bridge between human spoken language and computers which used programming languages and binary codes. As mentioned earlier, it is still a challenging task of making a computer to understand human natural language as such. Hence, further enhancements and techniques will foster the demanding yet fruitful and futuristic computational trends. Keywords: NLP Natural Language Processing, Semantic, Syntactic, Lexical, Phonology, MT Machine Translation Introduction: The computational scheme has evolved from basic set of instructions in the form of binary codes to mnemonic instruction codes to programming languages that have prevailed intensively during the later part of twentieth century. Along that evolution came the inspirational research on making the computer understand natural human language and interact with the humans in short applying natural language processing to normal computer usage and beyond. Natural language processing can be defined as a theoretical approach enclosing analysis and manipulation of natural language texts usually spoken by humans. This is done at various levels of linguistic analysis in order to attain a human-like approach to processing of tasks and other problems. It must be noted that NLP is not a single defined standard system but a collection of numerous language processing techniques and methods. Also, in view of facilitating the user and standing true to the name, texts must be of natural language usage and not a set of selected texts that could be used for processing. Because, the later approach would certainly forgo the real meaning of natural language processing. In any NLP system, various levels of linguistic analysis of the text are performed. This is done because humans usually breakup linguistic texts into various levels and then process or understand the language. Human-like approach and processing in the NLP systems are considered as an integral part of AI. The applications of NLP are versatile and are currently being researched and implemented in fields like military science, security systems, virtual reality simulation, medicine and regular computer science and artificial intelligence. The techniques and approaches that have been used or researched so far form the basic platform of NLP. Some of them are based on classification of natural linguistic phonology, morphology, lexical variations, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic levels. Some of the notable works done in this field are: Machine Translation Weaver and Booth (1946) Syntactic Structures Chomsky (1957) Case grammar Fillmore Semantic Networks Quillain Conceptual Dependency Schank Augmented Transition Networks Woods Functional Grammar Kay Also that there have been famous prototypes developed to highlight the impact of particular techniques and principles. They are: ELIZA Weizenbaum SHRDLU Winograd PARRY LUNAR Woods The scope of the article revolves around the evolution of NLP and its implementation in security systems. Methods: Strata of natural language processing: The optimal descriptive way of putting forward the actions that are going on in natural language processing system is through the strata of natural language processing. During the early days of natural language processing, it was held that the different data of natural language processing followed a sequential pattern. But current Psycholinguistic researches have revealed that the system follows rather a synchronic pattern. This is because humans use all of the strata of language processing and they dont follow a sequential pattern. For this reason, in order to achieve high efficiency of NLP system more strata of language processing must be adopted. This stratum deals with the interpretation of speech sounds within and across words. There are three types of rules that are typically used: 1) Phonetic rules for sounds within words 2) Phonemic rules for variations of pronunciation when words are spoken together 3) Prosodic rules for fluctuation in stress and intonation across a sentence. Morphology This strata deal with the componential nature of words, which are composed of morphemes the smallest units of meaning. For example, the word postproduction can be morphologically analyzed into three separate morphemes: the prefix post, the root product and the suffix tion. Since the meaning of each morpheme remains the same across words, humans break down an unknown word into its constituent morphemes in order to understand its meaning. In the same way, an NLP system recognizes the meaning given by each morpheme in order to achieve and interpret meaning. Lexical Both the humans and NLP systems at this stratum, interpret the meaning of individual words. Several types of processing contribute to word-level understanding the first of these being assignment of a single part-of-speech tag to each word. In this processing, words that can function as more than one part-of-speech are assigned the most probable part-of speech tag based on the context in which they occur. Moreover at the lexical stratum, those words that have only one possible sense or meaning can be replaced by a semantic representation of that meaning. The nature of the representation varies according to the semantic theory utilized in the NLP system. One can notice that, a single lexical unit is split into its more basic properties. If there is a set of semantic primitives used across all words, these simplified lexical representations make it possible to unify meaning across words and to produce complex interpretations, much the same as humans do. Syntactic The concept of analysing the sentence by looking into the grammatical composition of a sentence and its dependency is used here. This needs both grammar and a parser. The output achieved here is a representation of the sentence that gives the structural dependency relationships between the words. The efficiency of a parser depends on the different grammars used. Not all NLP applications require a full parse of sentences, therefore the remaining challenges in parsing of prepositional phrase attachment and conjunction scoping no longer stymie those applications for which phrasal and clausal dependencies are sufficient. Syntax conveys meaning in most languages because order and dependency contribute to meaning. For example the two sentences: I smoked a cigarette. and The cigarette smoked me. differ only in terms of syntax, but convey contrasting meanings. Semantic This is the strata at which most people think meaning is determined, however, as we can see in the above defining of the stratum, it is all the levels that contribute to meaning. Semantic processing determines the possible meanings of a sentence by focusing on the interactions among word-level meanings in the sentence. This level of processing can include the semantic disambiguation of words with multiple senses; in an analogous way to how syntactic disambiguation of words that can function as multiple parts-of-speech is accomplished at the syntactic level. Semantic disambiguation permits one and only one sense of polysemous words to be selected and included in the semantic representation of the sentence. For example, amongst other meanings, file as a noun can mean either a folder for storing papers, or a tool to shape ones fingernails, or a line of individuals in a queue. If information from the rest of the sentence were required for the disambiguation, the semantic, not the lexical level, would do the disambiguation. A wide range of methods can be implemented to accomplish the disambiguation, some which require information as to the frequency with which each sense occurs in a particular corpus of interest, or in general usage, some which require consideration of the local context, and others which utilize pragmatic knowledge of the domain of the document. Discourse While syntax and semantics work with sentence-length units, the discourse level of NLP works with units of text longer than a sentence. That is, it does not interpret multisentence texts as just concatenated sentences, each of which can be interpreted singly. Rather, discourse focuses on the properties of the text as a whole that convey meaning by making connections between component sentences. Several types of discourse processing can occur at this level, two of the most common being anaphora resolution and discourse/text structure recognition. Anaphora resolution is the replacing of words such as pronouns, which are semantically vacant, with the appropriate entity to which they refer (30). Discourse/text structure recognition determines the functions of sentences in the text, which, in turn, adds to the meaningful representation of the text. For example, newspaper articles can be deconstructed into discourse components such as: Lead, Main Story, Previous Events, Evaluation, Attributed Quotes, and Expectation. Pragmatic This level is concerned with the purposeful use of language in situations and utilizes context over and above the contents of the text for understanding The goal is to explain how extra meaning is read into texts without actually being encoded in them. This requires much world knowledge, including the understanding of intentions, plans, and goals. Some NLP applications may utilize knowledge bases and inferencing modules. For example, the following two sentences require resolution of the anaphoric term they, but this resolution requires pragmatic or world knowledge. Natural Language processing in textual information retrieval As the reader has probably already deduced, the complexity associated with natural language is especially key when retrieving textual information [Baeza-Yates, 1999] to satisfy a users information needs. This is why in Textual Information Retrieval, NLP techniques are often used [Allan, 2000] both for facilitating descriptions of document content and for presenting the users query, all with the aim of comparing both descriptions and presenting the user the documents that best satisfy their information needs. In other words, a textual information retrieval system carries out the following tasks in response to a users query: Indexing the collection of documents: in this phase, NLP techniques are applied to generate an index containing document descriptions. Normally each document is described through a set of terms that, in theory, best represents its content. When a user formulates a query, the system analyses it, and if necessary, transforms it with the hope of representing the users information needs in the same way as the document content is represented. The system compares the description of each document with that of the query, and presents the user with those documents whose descriptions are closest to the query description. The results are usually listed in order of relevancy, that is, by the level of similarity between the document and query descriptions. C:UsershpDesktopUntitled.bmp The architecture of an information retrieval system As of now there are no NLP techniques that allow us to extract a documents or querys meaning without any mistakes. In fact, the scientific community is divided on the procedure to follow in reaching this goal. In the following section we will explain the functions and peculiarities of the two key approaches to natural language processing: a statistical approach and a linguistic focus. Both proposals differ considerably, even though in practice natural language processing systems use a mixed approach, combining techniques from both focuses. CONCLUSION: Despite the useful universal aspect of programming languages, these languages are still understood only by very few people, unlike the natural languages which are understood by all. The ability to turn natural into programming languages will eventually decrease the gap between very few and all, and open the benefits of computer programming to a larger number of users. In this paper, we showed how current state of-the-art techniques in natural language processing can allow us to devise a system for natural language programming that addresses both the descriptive and procedural programming paradigms. The output of the system consists of automatically generated program skeletons, which were shown to help non-expert programmers in their task of describing algorithms in a programmatic way. As it turns out, advances in natural language processing helped the task of natural language programming. But we believe that natural language processing could also benefit from natural language programming. The process of deriving computer programs starting with a natural language text implies a plethora of sophisticated language processing tools such as syntactic parsers, clause detectors, argument structure identifiers, semantic analyzers, methods for co reference resolution, and so forth which can be effectively put at work and evaluated within the framework of natural language programming. We thus see natural language programming as a potential large scale end-user (or rather, end computer) application of text processing tools, which puts forward challenges for the natural language processing community and could eventually trigger advances in this field.

The Important Role of Women in Combat Essay -- Argumentative Persuasiv

"The women say, the men have kept you at a distance, they have supported you, they have put you on a pedestal, constructed with an essential difference." -Les Guerilleres, Monique Wittig The struggle for women to attain entrance to combat positions within the armed forces has been arduous. Unfortunately, most nation-states do not allow women into battle in any capacity; still, some countries do not allow women to participate in the military at all. However, the introduction of women into combat within the British, Canadian, Danish, German, Israeli, Norwegian, and US forces has been effective in that women have significantly contributed to their success. This success is the strongest advocate for female access to combative positions. The proposal for female integration into combat also relies upon the consideration of combat's definition, gender equality, and the influence of sexist literature. This paper also examines the reasons why women have been kept away from the frontline, women's participation in violent rebel forces, and finally how women have succeeded within the military, especially within the realm of combat. I do not propose a uniform method for militarie s to integrate their female members into war-rather, a specific approach be developed by the nation itself since women's rights and societal roles differ from country to country. While some nations have already recognized women as able for their forces' most aggressive roles, some only employ women in secretarial jobs. To suggest that all countries conscript women for combat would certainly be a disaster, as integration, training, and soothing of female prejudices take time. It is also important to understand that by this proposal, I am not supporting war over dipl... ...eli Military. War in History, 8, 99-100. Retrieved 30 October 2003, from Academic Search Premier database. Miller, L. (1998). Feminism and the Exclusion of Army Women from Combat. Gender Issues, 16, 33-64. Retrieved 7 November 2003, from Academic Search Premier database. OED Online (2003). London: Oxford University Press. Retrieved 13 November, 2003, from http://dictionary.oed.com Rosen, L. & Durand, D. (1996). Cohesion and Readiness in Gender-Integrated Combat Service Support Units: The Impact of Acceptance of Women and Gender Ratio. Armed Forces and Society, 22, 537-53. Retrieved November 7, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database. Smirnov, A. (2002). Women in the Russian Army. Russian Social Science Review, 43, 61-71. Retrieved October 27, 2003, from Academic Search Premier database. Victor, B. (2003). Army of Roses. [Emmaus, PA]: Rodale.

Sentence Completion Tests

SENTENCE COMPLETION TEST: INTRODUCTION: Herman Von Ebbinghaus is generally credited with developing the first sentence completion test in 1897 . Sentence completion tests are a class of semi-structured projective techniques. A sentence completion test form may be relatively short, such as those used to assess responses to advertisements, or much longer, such as those used to assess personality. A long sentence completion test is the Forer Sentence Completion Test, which has 100 stems. The responses are believed to provide indications of attitudes, beliefs, motivations, or other mental states.There is debate over whether or not sentence completion tests elicit responses from conscious thought rather than unconscious states. This debate would affect whether sentence completion tests can be strictly categorized as projective tests. In recent decades, sentence completion tests have increased in usage, in part because they are easy to develop and easy to administer. Another reason for the increased usage of sentence completion tests are because they uncover conflicted attitudes.The uses of sentence completion tests include personality analysis, clinical applications, attitude assessment, achievement motivation, and measurement of other constructs. They are used in several disciplines, including psychology, management, education, and marketing. Sentence completion measures have also been incorporated into non-projective applications, such as intelligence tests, language comprehension, and language and cognitive development tests DESCRIPTION OF THE TEST: Sacks sentence completion test is a semi structured test consisting of 60 incomplete phrases/sentences, ex. my mother’ or when I see the boss coming, I ‘ The test typically provide respondents with beginnings of sentences, referred to as â€Å"stems,† and respondents then complete the sentences in ways that are meaningful to them. As a semi -structured test , it is expected to provide valuable info rmation about subject’s interpersonal relations with others as well as attitude towards self and others. ADMINISTRATION AND INSTRUCTIONS : The subject was invited into a room free of noise and disturbance and was made to sit comfortably.The test instructions and purpose of the test were explained and all her anxieties and questions regarding test were clarifies before administering the test. The instructions for the test have been printed on the answer sheet which was provided to the subject. The instructions include: â€Å"You will find below a number of incomplete sentences. Write quickly in the blank space the first idea that comes to your mind to complete each statement. Answer rapidly†. SCORING: The questions in the questionnaire are divided into four areas such as family areas, sex area, interpersonal relationships and self concept.Each main area is again further sub divided , basing on the attitude towards certain people like attitude towards father, mother, fam ily etc. and fears etc. The different questions in the questionnaire have been related to one of the main areas. Each questions was then analyzed qualitatively and a positive or negative attitude was recorded and interpreted. INTERPRETATION: 1)Attitude towards family: The person’s profile indicates that she has relatively positive and good attitude towards her mother whereas relatively negative attitude towards her father.She wants her father to be a little more caring and responsible. Her attitude towards the family is also positive. 2)attitude towards sex: The person has a positive attitude towards women in general and towards heterosexual relationships. 3) Interpersonal relationships: She has a slightly negative attitude towards superiors at work place and school. She knows her responsibilities and has a caring attitude towards the people at work. The person has good interpersonal relationships with colleagues or friends at work or school. The person was also found to have many fears. She has a fear of driving, spirits, and heights.At times she is even compelled to do against her wishes because of the fear associated. 4)self concept: The person is also guilty of some mistakes in the past for which she feels responsible . She has a positive attitude and belief towards her abilities. She has a good positive attitude and hope for the future. She wants to prove herself in future. OVERALL THE PRESON HAS A POSITIVE ATTITUDE TOWARD FAMILY EXCEPT TOWARDS HER FATHER AND HAS A POSTIVE ATTITUDE TOWARDS LIFE AND SELF AND HER FUTURE FAMILY COUSELING IN THE SPECIFIC AREA MAY HELP HER TO PERFORM BETTER IN HER FUTURE.

Pay It Forward vs.Coach Carter Essay

Edith Ann once said â€Å"I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework. † I agree with this quote because it pertains to Coach Carter in the movie â€Å"Coach Carter† and Mr. Simonet in the movie â€Å"Pay It Forward†. Coach Carter and Mr. Simonet are similar in the way they approach their students. In both the movies, both teachers want more out of their students, they encourage them to do more, and to push themselves harder. In the movie â€Å"Pay It Forward†, Mr. Simonet tries to teach the kids that anything is possible. So he gives them an assignment to think of an act that can change the world. He tells them that â€Å"The realm of possibility exists within you†. This means that they can change the world only if they believe that they can do it. The whole purpose of him giving his students this assignment was to try to get them to set high expectations for themselves, to teach them not to settle for less and that even a big assignment like changing the world is possible. Just like Mr. Simonet in â€Å"Pay It Forward† Coach Carter also teaches his team to set high standards for themselves. He stresses that his vision, is for his players to be successful on the court, in the classroom, and in life. He lets them know that only they can make that happen. He makes them sign contracts that require them to maintain a certain GPA. When the players fail to uphold this responsibility, he locks down the gym, and cancels their games until they get their grades up. He did this to prove to the players that everything in life doesn’t come on a silver platter, they have to work for it. In Conclusion, both Mr. Simonet and Coach Carter are alike in the way they teach their students. Both of them teach the kids to set high expectations for themselves. They both teach the students to never settle for less. At the end of both movies it’s pretty clear that both of their teachings paid off. In â€Å"Pay It Forward†, Trevor comes up with the pay it forward system which becomes a world wide sensation. In â€Å"Coach Carter†, the basketball players learned a life lesson. Although the school board chose to go against Coach Carter and end the gym lock down, the basketball players refused to play. Also at the end Coach Carter realizes that he impacted the players more than he expected to. Not only did they graduate high school but most of them went to college and even won scholarships. Both Coach Carter and Mr. Simonet gave their students something to take home and think about.