Vincent John Bazemore, Jr. Authentic Ideas

By Mark David Peters

Your subconscious mind is continually recording new information from the world around you. Everything that you see, hear or experience has the potential to modify your subconscious mind. Why is this important?

Because information that has been recorded in the subconscious is expressed in your behavior, and what you believe to be possible or impossible for you to achieve.

A good example of this can be seen in young children, especially those under the age of 6. Since as children we arrive into the world with no ideas as to how to act or what to believe in, we therefore must first learn those things from our parents.

So in a very real sense, your parents not only made you, but they also made your mind. This is why children initially act and behave in a similar fashion to their parents, and may later grow up with their beliefs and views of the world.

However since we do not spend our entire lives with our parents, we therefore expose our minds to new sources of information. This is known as the effect of society on your mind.

A good example of this can be seen by cross comparing two culturally unique families. If you look at children in isolated African tribes you see that children grow up with extremely similar beliefs and behaviors to that of their parents.

This occurs because tribal African children do the same things as their parents did throughout successive generations. They have a set way of doing things, and so follow a traditional way of life.
Since they live in an isolated tribe, there is therefore little or no external influences which will affect the way they have lived for decades or even centuries.

As a result, each successive family member grows up with a mind that is essential identical to that of their parent. Although in reality no mind is exactly identical because no life is exactly identical.

Now if you compare this to westernized children who are exposed to far greater sources of external influences, such as TV or music culture, you find that children often grow up to be very different to their parents.

Author: Neha Mehta

Lack of morality is one of the major problems pervading our society these days. This problem is manifested in all the spheres of life. What ever be the causes of this problem, it can be said that this problem has led to severe problems for the mankind. Who can forget, the genocide of the Jews caused by Hitler in which he actually planned to just eradicate the whole race.

This was one of the most gruesome things to have happened. Many innocent people lost their lives due to the lack of morals of one person. But can we blame only one person for this. No, we cannot. If we try to delve deep into the psychology of Hitler, then we will find many hideous facts about his childhood that led him to commit such heinous crimes. He faced a very brutal childhood facing all the atrocities of his grandfather. Hitler’s psychopath nature can be thus attributed to his grandfather. It can be clearly stated that the dysfunctional genes ran in the family of Hitler. With due sympathy to all those people who lost their lives in World War 2. We cannot call Hitler insane. He was just a product of his circumstances.

There are many more instances like Hitler. Who can forget the barbaric Mussolini. He was a ally to Hitler in all his heinous crimes. And in his case , his acts cannot be attributed to a bad childhood. He was one person who was accepted by the society in spite of his dysfunctional nature unlike Hitler who was hated by the society in general. Hitler was just a product of his circumstances.

Author: Jordi Shoman

When you start to delve into the question “what is society” you will realize that this is indeed a very deep subject. There is no one answer because a society is not a thing that can be easily explained in one or two sentences. In fact, this could actually be a topic for a thesis by a graduate student in philosophy and it would take many volumes to include all the possible answers. Let’s start by looking at what we consider to be a society.

In our daily lives, a society is the place where we live. It is made up of the government, the education system, the health care and the many occupations that people have. Each and every person is an important part of a society because each one has something to contribute. It is a very broad concept that is often broken down into different segments or facets of life. Within a society, there are smaller societies or groups of people who have a particular goal or ambition. These could be government agencies, groups of students or groups raising money for a cause.

There are also other factors that separate smaller societies from one another. These include culture, language, race, and religion. Within a society, there can be many different cultures. If you look at the whole world as one society, you can easily realize just how many differences there are. Even within a country, city or town, you have numerous differences and you can even have different societies within a neighborhood. The neighborhood of a city could be an ethnic society all its own.

In the larger frame of things, all these societies interact with one another on a daily basis bringing new ideas and ways of doing things. Customs transfer from one culture to another, immigrants become assimilated within a society and people react with violence when a part of their society is threatened. All of these things make up a society, which is more of a quality than a thing.

Author: JUstin Frei

Computers are wonderful machines. They are everywhere and society depends on them to manage our world. It is no wonder that computers have almost unlimited applications, and that they are multiplying at a steady rate. Many of these applications are benefiting society directly or indirectly. The three most important ways computers are benefiting society, is by, creating more information technology professions, creating new automobile safety features, and opening ground-breaking communication methods. There currently exist many other beneficial functions of these machines, such as their use for diagnosing patients, running weather simulations to predict future weather patterns, and calculating large, complex data sets. As new applications emerge for computer systems, so will the benefits society will derive from them.

Creating more information technology (IT) professions is proportionally related to how many new computer systems are put into use. As new computers are sold to consumers, the demand for more IT professions will rise because consumers will need these professionals to maintain, upgrade and repair their new computer systems. . More employment is also made available when new computer applications are discovered. This makes sense because new applications require new professionals that are trained to deal with that specific application. For example, when the World Wide Web was introduced, many new professions arose. Some of these professions range from website designers and server administrators to online marketers. These factors show that computers are benefiting society directly by creating new information technology professions, which is vitally important to the development of any countries labor force.

Computers were introduced into cars in the late nineteenth century, for such effects as controlling engine functions, fuel injection, and signal light timing. It is not until recently, that computers have started to play a role in helping to save peoples lives by enabling car manufacturers to create new automobile safety features. Air bags are an extremely important safety feature in an automobile. A computer is located in the steering wheel of an automobile, which is equipped with airbags and is the only device capable of signaling the airbags to deploy in the case of an accident. According to McCormick (1999), it is an estimation that “…between 1990 and 1997, air bags saved about 150 lives in Canada. In the United States, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that airbags, as of September 1, 1999, have saved the lives of over 4,600 Americans involved in car crashes.” This would not be possible without computer systems. Another popular safety feature is the anti-lock braking system, or ABS. The purpose of the anti-lock braking system is to stop a vehicle from locking its tires, which has been shown to dramatically increase a drivers control in a potential crash. These safety features have proven to be beneficial to society thanks to computers, by decreasing the number of automobile accidents, and the number of fatalities involved in such accidents.

Society is dependent on rapid and reliable communications. Computers have allowed us to open ground-breaking communication methods that satisfy those dependencies. One communication method is known as electronic mail (e-mail). E-mail has become a common form of communication because it is free, reliable, and most importantly, incredibly fast. Due to the nature of e-mail, being electronic data, it relies on computers to deliver and receive messages. Another popular method of communication making rapid headway is instant messaging, or IM. According to a survey (Shiu & Lenhart, 2004) “53 million American adults use instant messaging and its appeal is especially apparent among young adults and technology enthusiasts.” Similar to e-mail, instant messaging allows many people to send textual information to each other simultaneously. This form of communication is similar to a telephone conversation, but using electronic text as a medium instead of a person’s voice. As instant messaging is based on electronic text, it is dependent on computer systems to operate because they are the only devices capable of transmitting and manipulating electronic data. Both of these new communication methods are bringing people closer together, in a global sense, and this is benefiting society.

New problems for society will continually emerge, and as a result, computers will be applied to such problems. These machines are the work horses of the future and as such, society will greatly depend on them. As stated, the three most important ways computers are benefiting society now is by creating more information technology professions, developing new automobile safety features, and opening ground-breaking communication methods. Therefore, computer systems have been shown to be a great benefit to society through these three examples and society will continue to depend on the benefits these systems provide in the future.

Author: Tim Carr

A building society is a financial institution much like a bank, except that it is owned by its members and not by shareholders. Apart from that there are very little obvious differences between them, especially these days.

Originally, building societies were set up to enable each of their members to purchase their own home. All the members basically pooled their savings and when the last member had a house the building society would be dissolved. This changed in the early 19th Century when building societies started offering new members the opportunity to save and buy a house on a continuous basis, and as a result building societies effectually became permanent institutions.

Over the years building societies have been offering more or less the same financial services as banks to such an extent that there is now very little difference between the two.

So which is best, building society or bank?

This isn’t an easy question to answer for obvious reasons. Each building society and bank has to be assessed on its own merits for the products they are offering. For example, some financial institutions may offer you a better short term deal on one product in order to attract you as a customer, but the long term scenario can be very different. At the same time it doesn’t follow that because they offer one good product that their other products are necessarily a good deal too.

Also, as banks are trying to please their shareholders they are often under pressure to hike up their prices for better profits, whereas building societies are not structured in the same way and can offer a lower price long term, particularly as they do not have to dish out dividends to shareholders.

However, banks will often appear as a “best buy” simply because of the attractive deals they can offer new customers. On saying that, building societies and banks are so similar nowadays that many people are not even aware of whether a particular institution is in fact one or the other. This of course hasn’t been helped by the fact that in the last few decades many building societies have become de-mutualised and have actually converted into banks.

A recent survey by fool.co.uk revealed that most people would really prefer talking about their financial circumstances with a building society rather than a bank and would also prefer to have a mortgage from a building society, indicating that there is a higher degree of trust with building societies. However, best buy tables seem to indicate that banks actually offer a better deal in three specific areas and these are credit cards, savings accounts and mortgages. Naturally, the building societies would disagree and with good reason too.

The recent difficulties with banks like Northern Rock have resulted in many people losing faith in banks so they are turning to building societies instead. Trust is a key area for both building societies and banks because once they have your custom and your trust; you are more likely to turn to them first for any other financial services you might need.