Tourism in the Republic of Cyprus Research Paper

Tourism in the Republic of Cyprus - Research Paper Example This leads to one thing; sustainable tourism. Sustainable tourism is defined to as the move towards making less impact on the environment and culture in a given country while at the same time benefiting economically from it. The main objective is to develop tourism to the point where can continually have a great experience from the sector (Trejos & Chiang, 2009). Different countries have varied policies towards sustainability in tourism. The height of the problems coming from tourism guides policy making in every country. In this paper, we take the case study of Cyprus and the policies that they have adopted towards sustainability in tourism. Cyprus continues to experience growth in the number of tourists visiting the region every year (Gunn & Var, 2002). Its impeccable sites and beauty has made it experience an exponential growth to the number of tourists visiting the region every year. For example in the year 1975, they had close to 47000 thousands of tourists visiting the region. This number is nothing comparable to the 2.25 million tourists visiting the region in the year 2000 (Gunn & Var, 2002). The number has continued to grow in the recent decade, raising environmental concerns. While one can not dispute the economic benefits of such a growth, mass tourism has taken a toll on the environment in Cyprus. For example, in the year 1988, the income from the tourism sector estimated at 880 dollars. Today, the sector accounts for 20% of the overall income in the country (Gunn & Var, 2002). Features such as resorts for various groups, water parks with dolphins gracing them and archeological sites attract millions of people all over the world. The enormous numbers of people have had an impact on both on the culture of the people and the environment as a whole. For one, the noise from the tourists has been unbearable

Internet is good for study Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words - 1

Internet is good for study - Essay Example Statistics has revealed that global use of the internet as of 2012 have profoundly increased and where China ranked as the number one country with the highest number of Internet users and followed by the United States (Top 20 Countries with the Highest Number of Internet Users). The popularity of the Internet could be attributed to different reasons, depending on the profile of the users. It has always been acknowledged that members of the current generation, especially adolescents and young adults use the Internet for diverse purposes other than fact finding or information gathering. The popularity of social networking sites has significantly increased Internet usage through sharing of experiences, photos, events, and recent updates on the lives of friends, relatives, and acquaintances. From the study conducted by the Lebo, the Internet was found to be used for the following general purposes: fact finding activities, visiting social networking sites, playing games, watching videos, paying bills, and even purchasing products online (Lebo). Fact finding activities could already be classified as a general category for studying. In this regard, the current discourse contends that the Internet is actually a good medium for enhancing academic performance or in studying for the reasons that information is easily accessible; more people from all walks of life have immediate access to this technological medium; and studying through the Internet could be undertaken across time and geographic locations. A discussion of the reasons why the Internet is deemed good for studying would initially be provided. To present a balanced discourse, the views of people who contend that the Internet actually poses threats to learning and academic development would also be expounded. Thus, the next section would present a discussion on why the Internet could be detrimental to academic endeavors. The final section would weigh the arguments asserting the

Overview of Portfolio Theories

Overview of Portfolio Theories Introduction The word â€Å"Portfolio† can be defined as; the totality of decisions determining an individuals future prospects† (Sharpe, 1970). Portfolio can consist of many types of assets such as plant, property, real and financial assets (P.A Bowen, 1984). Portfolio theories propose how rational and prudent investors should use their due diligence to diversify their investments to optimize their portfolios, and how a risky asset should be priced as compared to less risky asset. People have been investing in the different assets class since decades but then they realize the importance of risk and its negative implications, if not treated effectively. Every investor has his own tolerance of risk and investors defines it in his ability of taking it. The portfolio theories have been derived over time in order to effectively measure the risk and how it can be reduced by diversify in their asset. Article 1: â€Å"The Legacy of Modern Portfolio Theory† This article covers the highlights of modern portfolio theory, describing how risk and its effects are measured and how planning and asset allocation can help you do something about it. Modern portfolio theory is the theoretical conflicting of conventional stock picking. It is being put forward by the economists, who try to understand the phenomena of the market as a whole, instead of business analysts, who look for individual investment opportunities. Investments are explained statistically, as how much investor expected long-term return rate and their expected short-term volatility. It measures how much expected return can deviate much worse than average an investments bad years are likely to be. The goal of the theory is to identify your adequate level of risk tolerance, and then to come up with a portfolio with the maximum expected return for that level of standard deviation (risk). The portfolio it assumes that the investment universe consists only of two market securities, the risk free asset and risky assets. But the actual investment universe is much broader than that being put forward. The optimal level of investment is to invest on efficient frontier but doing this would mean to calculate the millions of covariance among the securities. This calculation could make the life of analyst as difficult as one could have ever imagined. To think practically, its better to put portfolio theory to work means investing in a limited number of index securities rather than a huge number of individual stocks and bonds. Index investing is the point the where portfolio theory starts to rely on the efficient market hypothesis. When you buy an index based portfolio strategy youre allocating your money the same way the whole market is which is a high-quality thing if you believe the market has a plan and it is efficient. This is why portfolio theory is one of the branches of economics rather than finance: instead of only studying financial statements and different financial ratios, you study the aggregate behavior of investors, some of whom seemingly have studied financial statements so that market valuations will reflect their due diligence and prudence. Article 2: â€Å"Theory of portfolio and risk based on incremental entropy† The article has used incremental entropy to optimize the portfolios. This novel portfolio theory has been based on incremental entropy that carries on some facet of Markowitzs (1959, 1991) theory, but it highlights that the incremental speed of capital is a more objective criterion for assessing portfolios. The performance of the portfolio just cannot be justified with the returns because we have to keep in mind the risk of achieving those returns. Given the probability forecasts of returns, we can obtain the best possible investment ratio. Combining the new portfolio theory and the general theory of information, we can approach a meaning-explicit measure, which represents the increment of capital-increasing speed after information is provided. The article has used example to make it more clear that as we try to become rich within days there involve high risk of even losing those money which we at-least own at present. The ineffective investment is like a coin toss either you have al l the money in your pocket or you end having nothing in your pocket. The same being very risk averse would not help you become rich. You there has to be a balance in selecting the portfolio and this article explain the optimal investment ratio. (pg 1) Markowitz explains us that an efficient portfolio is either a portfolio that offers the maximum expected return for a given level of risk, or one with the minimum level of risk for a given expected return. There is no objective criterion to define the maximum effectiveness of a portfolio given the expected return and risk level and different expects have different view about it. The Markowitzs efficient portfolio tells us about the indifference curve of the investor and about the market portfolio. It is not the portfolio which we need for the fastest increment of capital. So, this article has derived a new mathematical model. The model explains that when gain and loss are have equal chance of occurring, if the loss is up to 100 percent, one should not risk more than 50 percent of fund no matter how lofty the possible gain might be. This conclusion has a great importance and significant for risky investments, such as futures, options, etc. Most of the new investors of future markets lose all of their money very fast because the investment ratios are not well controlled and generally too large. we can obtain the optimal ratios of investments in different securities or assets when probability forecasts of returns are given. Comparison with Markowitzs theory The new theory supports Markowitzs conclusions that investment risk can be reduced by effective portfolio, but there are some obvious differences: The new theory uses geometric mean return as the objective criterion for optimizing portfolio and gives some formulas for optimizing investment ratios; and . The new theory makes use of extent and possibility of gain and loss rather than expectation of return and standard deviation (risk) of the return to explain investment value. Article 3: â€Å"On the competitive theory and practice of portfolio selection† To select an optimal level of portfolio has always been a basic and fundamental problem in the field of computation finance. There are lots of securities are available including the cash and the basic online problem is to agree on a portfolio for the ith trading period based on the series of price for the scheduled i-1 trading period. There has been increasing interest but also mounting uncertainty relating to the value of competitive theory of online portfolio selection algorithms. Competitive analysis is based on the worst and most unexpected case scenarios and viewpoint; such a point of view is conflicting with the most widely used analysis and theories being adopted by the investors based on the statistical models and assumptions. Surprisingly in some of the initial experiments result shows that some algorithms which have enjoyed a highly regarded repute seems to outperform the historical sequence of data when seen in relation to competitive worst case scenarios. The emerging com petitive theory and the algorithms are directly related to the studies in information theory and computational learning theory, in fact some of the algorithms have been the broken new ground and set new standards within the information and computational theory learning based communities. The one of the primary goal and objective of this paper is understand the extent to which competitive portfolio algorithms are in reality learning and are they really contributing to the welfare of the investor. In order to find out so they have used set of different strategies this can be adapted to data sequence. This is being presented in a mixture of both strong theoretical and experimental results. It has also been compared with the performance of existing and new algorithms and respects to standard series of the historical sequence data and it also present the experiments from other three data sequence. It is being concluded that there is huge potential for selecting portfolio through algorith ms that are being derived from competitive force and as well as derived from the statistical properties of data. Article 4: â€Å"International property Portfolio Strategies† The article talks about the investment decisions regarding real estate, and try to put in the Markowitz mean variance formula to analyze the real estate market. They are not confined only to local real estate diversification but they are also including international diversification. Markowitz mean variance continuum and graph is useful in analyzing the efficient securities, and they help in the selection of an optimal portfolio on envelope curve taking into account the risk preferences of an investor. But when analysts try to incorporate real estate market to the Markowitz theory the major problems regarding liquidity, heterogeneity, indivisibility and information are faced by them which restrict them from further optimal analysis. Many investors have tried to support the theory to make a portfolio by considering property as asset like equity and bond investments; although there are a lot of differences among the characteristics of assets discussed above, but one can diversify its portfolio by investing in real assets, analysts argue. The discussion was dominated by the concept of international diversification of assets including real estate. To support the analysis in UK the (Sweeney , 1988-1989) work in cited most of the times, he came up with the famous model of real estate to come up with efficient diversification strategy, he used rental value of for different countries and came up with the model of risk return theory; after that a lot of analysts including: [Baum and Schofield (1991), Brà ¼hl and Lizieri (1994), Gordon (1991), Hartzell et al. (1993), Johnson (1993), Sweeney (1993), Vo(1993) and Wurtzebach (1990)], have come up with analysis to support international diversification; but the result was som ehow was not justifying the inculcation of real estate to portfolio theory, because those assets were not correlated at all when inspected for the risk return behavior during last decade or so. This can be attributed to the failure of mean variance model to produce results, the main problems facing would be regarding data collection, technicalities, omitted categories, and ex post analysis. This is almost irrational and impossible to find the most efficient way to diversify a portfolio by including real asset as a separate asset, because of area problems, different locality, pricing conditions, economic conditions, liquidity differences, and data collection problems. As real estate market is highly uncorrelated even within the industry so the data sets are very difficult to find for analysis because of lack of empirical data on this market. Article 5: â€Å"Different risk measures: different portfolio compositions?† Choosing the suitable portfolio of assets in which to invest is an essential component of fund management. A large percentage of portfolio selection decisions were based on a qualitative basis, however quantitative approaches to selection are increasingly being employed. Markowitz (1952) established a quantitative framework for asset selection into a portfolio that is now well known. The measure of risk used in portfolio optimization models is the variance. Variance calculates how much deviation could be expected from the set of portfolio. The alternative methods of risk have their own theoretical and practical advantages and it is atypical that they are not used widely by investors. One of the reason may be because of the difficulty and complexity of understanding such models and then practically implementing those models and to decide in which measure of risk is best and gives the most realistic and useful results. It is important to identify the common risk measure and without doi ng so any attempt to measure the risk would be useless exercise. In order to cope with this, another approach is considered that is to comparing the portfolio holdings produced by different risk measures, rather than the traditional risk return trade-off. It is than being observed that whether the risk measures used produce asset allocations that are essentially the same or very different. In order to probe this concern this study tested the proposition that different measures of risk produce minimum risk portfolios that are essentially the same in terms of asset allocations, using monthly data over the period January 1987 to December 2002. The results show that the optimal portfolio compositions formed by different risk measures vary quite noticeably from measure to measure. These finding are very useful and have a practical implication for the investors because it recommend that the choice of risk model depends entirely on the individuals attitude to risk rather than any theoretic al or practical advantages of one model over another. It has been concluded that different investors have they indifference curve different from other and some of them like to take more risk as compare to other who are happy at earning low but safe returns. Conclusion It is being concluded that risk is more of a subjective term and different analysts and investor measures and perceive it in their own way. In todays word not even a single person can underestimate the importance of risk in selecting a security and emphasized is been given to diversification through proper portfolio selection process and everyone tries to optimize their returns given a certain level of risk. In order to do so they are using different statistical measures those have been derived over time to calculate risk. So selection of such method is limited to the understanding of a certain method to a certain investor and their effectiveness of results as compare to other methods.

War and College :: essays research papers

War and College Many of the titles of Ernest Hemingway’s stories are ironic, and can be read on a number of different levels; Soldiers Home is no exception. The story is told of a young man, Harold Krebs, who recently returned form World War I, and has moved back into his parent’s house while he figures out what he to do with life. In reality he has no home, his parent’s middle-class lifestyle used to feel like home, but no longer does. This is actually not an uncommon scenario among young people, especially college students returning to the womb of their childhood again.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Krebs situation is more dramatic than those who have been released off to college. He has not only lived on his own, but been traumatized by life and death situations his parents couldn’t even begin to understand. Hemingway does not divulge why Krebs was the last person from his home town to return from war. Whenever he was in the intervening time, by the time, by the time he Watrous 2 gets home, the novelty of the returning soldiers have found a niche for themselves in the community, but Harold needs a bit longer to get his bearings. The problem has to do with Krebs definition of who he has become. He recognizes he has changed, and this change is played out dramatically against the backdrop of a town where nothing else has changed since high school. This short story is easy to relate to from the perspective of a college student. In relation to going back â€Å"home† is like dealing with all the drama that you endure through high school. It’s especially difficult for me, because my parents moved to another state, so part of my home is unnatural to me. Also the aspects of the same girls, his father still driving the same car and parking it in the same spot is all relative to my situation. There are many reasons for Krebs not being able to adjust to things back in Oklahoma. If you look at what he was doing before the war, you can distinguish the differences from going overseas. Prior to the war he was attending a Methodist school in Kansas and was not out of place then. Its almost symbolic that Hemingway chose Kansas of all places due to the famous saying from the Wizard of Oz â€Å"were not in Kansas anymore;† basically saying that war is like living in whole new world.

Creative Deviance: Apple Org Chart Essay

One of the major functions of an organization hierarchy is to increase standardization and control for top managers. Using the chain command, managers can direct the activities of subordinates toward a common purpose. If the right person with a creative vision is in charge of a hierarchy, the results can be phenomenal. Until Steve Jobs’ regrettable passing in October 2011, Apple had used a strongly top-down creative process in which most major decisions and innovations flowed directly through Jobs and then were delegated to sub-teams as specific assignments to complete. Then there is creative evidence, in which individuals create extremely successful products despite being told by senior management to stop working on them. The electrostatic displays used in more half of Hewlett-Packard’s instruments, the tape slitter that was one of the most important process innovations in 3M’s history, and Nichia’s development of multi-billion-dollar LED bright lighting technology were all officially rejected by the management hierarchy. In all these cases, an approach like Apple’s would have shut down some of the most successful products these companies ever produced. Doing â€Å"business as usual† can become such an imperative in a hierarchical organization that new ideas are seen as Threats rather than Opportunities for development. It’s not immediately apparent why top-down decision making works so well for one highly creative company like Apple, while hierarchy nearly ruined innovations at several other organizations. It may be that Apple’s structure is actually quite simple, with relatively few layers and a great deal of responsibility placed on each individual for his or her own outcomes. Or it may be that Apple simply had a very unique leader who was able to rise above the conventional structures of a CEO to create a culture of constant innovation. Do you think it’s possible for an organization to deliberately create an â€Å"anti-hierarchy† to encourage employees to engage in more acts of creative deviance? What steps might a company take to encourage creative deviance?

Explore the ways in which Willy Russell makes use of language differences in act 2 scene 2

Willy Russell wrote the play in 1982 and was one of the best he wrote because of the fact that he emphasizes the differences between the rich and poor. Willy Russell was born in Whiston, near Liverpool, in 1947. He left school at the age of 15 where he worked as a hairdresser until he was 20 years old, where he then returned to school to complete his education. Their he began to write his first play called Blind Scouse, which was taken to the Edinburgh festival and noticed by a representative of the Everyman Theatre. They then went on to produce the world premieres of many of his plays, most of which transferred successfully to the west end. Throughout this play dramatic irony is used, this is where the audience knows something one or more of the caracters on stage don't know. Willy Russell uses this to emphasize the differences between the classes more. Stage directions are very important for somebody who has not seen the play and is just reading the play, this is because they help you create mental picture of whats going on in the play. The play repeatedly shows cultural differences though the way the boys speak throughout the play. An example of this is when Edward says â€Å"your a fuck off† showing his misunderstanding in the use of swear words, this contrasts to hen Micky says â€Å"take a flying fuck at a dounut† which shows his understanding and exposure to swear words as he has grown up. Another contrast in the boys language is when Micky says â€Å"It's a thingy, init† referring to a dictionary which shows lack of education because he doesn't know what a dictionary is. Where as when Edward says â€Å"Fantastic, I will look that up in the dictionary when i get home†, Edwards understanding of what a dictionary is and how it is used shows his intelligence and class. The audience would think that Edward is very intellectual in contrast to Mickey. One thing that the audience would be taken a back by would e the part in the play when Linda first sees Edward and says he's â€Å"handsome† even though Mickey and Edward are identical twins! This is because Edward has a overall better appearance than Mickey because he comes from a big house, has smart clothes and is clean which contrasts with Mikeys trodden down clothes and dirty appearance. I think Willy Russell is trying to say that people who come from a richer culture have a better chance at most things in life as is shown in this example. Another theme which repeatedly crops up during the play is the superstition and is shown in the beginning of the play where Mrs. Johnstone says â€Å"You never put new shoes on the table† which prompts Mrs. Lyons to ask â€Å"So, your superstitious? † to which Mrs. Johnstone replies â€Å"No I'm not, you just don't put new shoes on the table. † This shows an lack of understanding in the lower class because Mrs. Johnstone didn't even understand what superstition was. The audience would see how Willy Russell shows the difference between upper and lower class citizens. Adults are used thoughout the play to represent the boys, make the play more humorous and also because of the fact that some people might be offended if they see young boys swearing on stage.