New Reproduction Technologies :: essays research papers

During the debate on March 15, 2000 which discussed new reproductive technologies (NRTS) issues were raised regarding the positive and negative effects of NRTS. Issues raised by the advocates of NRTS were surrounding infertility, homosexuality, disease, and cloning. All of these factors raised were concerning the moral rights of individuals who were unable to have children of their own without the help of NRTS. The debate continued by stating that denying individuals the right to utilize NRTS was immoral and in effect discriminated against them due to their “unfavorable'; situation. In contrast, the opposition against NRTS raised very negative concerns which included the commercialization of human reproduction, quality control, generating waste products, and the rights of the pre-embryo. These issues suggest that through NRTS children were being commodified and the rights of the pre-embryo were being ignored. The debate generally focused on the rights of the individual, man or woman, versus the rights of the unborn child. The debate was very interesting which led me to look at the impact of NRTS at another angle. After examining the issues raised in the debate I was left questioning why NRTS exist in the first place? Whose interest do they serve? Who won/lost and what was at stake? The reason I am focusing on these issues is because while I was reading the NRTS articles something stuck in my mind. In What Price Parenthood? Social and Ethical Aspects of Reproductive Technology by Paul Lauritzen there are some issues covered which seem to be left out of the class debate. The societal pressures to utilize NRTS once they are presented to an individual are overwhelming. Paul Lauritzen raises issues regarding the social aspects of NRTS that I had never considered. I have therefore decided to further research the social impacts of NRTS. My essay has two objectives: first I would like to prove that no one has the moral right to engage in NRTS, it follows under the freedom of choice but it is not the “ri ght'; of an individual. Second I will debate whether, due to societal influences, any individual actually “chooses'; NRTS or if they are coerced.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Rejecting the claim that it is an individual’s moral right to engage in NRTS is based on the definition of a moral right. A moral right is an opportunity to choose an option that is available to everyone else. To deny a person the right to engage in an activity that every other person can do is morally wrong.

The Manager as a Systems Thinker

Introduction Managing an organization is no easy job. There are a lot of factors that should be taken into account—processes, procedures, people, raw materials, and accountabilities among others. Given this complexities, managers tend to view their role as that of the maintenance officer trying to make everything run given the schedule and agreed upon goals within the organization. The complexities of the management process is even confounded by the difficulties in the communication process brought about by conflicting ideas and personalities of different people, as well as by new trends and issues arising in the society. In this regard, advances in telecommunications and other technologies also pose a challenge to the processes used to be followed by the manager in particular and by the organization in general. Problems and challenges occur in different areas of the organization in the same way that a machine may break down every now and then. Managers, however, in fixing these problematic areas, tend to focus only on the particular area where the problem occurred. The other extreme position is to focus on the big picture too much without going down to the level of the details and trying to understand what made such an area malfunction (Reed, 2006). The whole picture, however, is more than just the sum of the individual parts. When these individual parts come together to help achieve a goal or establish a process, they cannot be easily broken down into the component parts. As such, the system takes on a life of its own and may even dictate the future direction that the organization may take in the future (Ryba, 1996). The Role of the Manager Traditionally, managers are seen coordinators and a kind of director that monitors everything going on within the organization. If anything goes wrong, he should be there trying to fix things and making sure that they get back on track to make things going again. Such a role of the manager, however, is limited to trouble-shooting and monitoring. It does not capture the breadth and depth of what truly goes on in the management process. Thankfully a lot of authors have looked into a more holistic view of the manager. After all, the manager is not a firefighter that is only present whenever something or somebody is on fire. Rather, the manager also is a leader in the sense that he sees what is going on, and he foresees where the trends and circumstances are leading the organization. As such, the manager is a proactive leader that takes the necessary precautions and steps to ensure that the different aspect of the organization is ready to take on the challenges brought by the external and even the internal environment of the organization. The twenty-first century is the century that information and knowledge took center piece in the economy. Handling knowledge and information is now as important as managing the assembly line. In my own experience, management is more than just monitoring and implementing projects. Rather, a manager is also a thinker who takes into consideration the overall situation of the organization and how it can survive given the difficulties and challenges it is facing. The manager does some tweaks here and there but on the whole, he takes into consideration how the whole system can work better. Personal Experience of Managing Using Systems Thinking A recent personal experience in management occurred to me. The manager, although a friend of mine, was complaining about the low level of output from some members of the organization. Up to a certain degree, he was right. There were two people who were simply not meeting the standards that the company has set—these people did not meet their sales quota, which of course, affected the performance of the whole team. What the manager did was in step with systems thinking. Instead of going directly to the two persons and scolding them for their poor performance, he observed them keenly and tried to understand the situation. After several days of observing them and their work patterns, he also conducted informal chats with other members of the team regarding work processes and dynamics. By the end of the month, he called for a meeting to address the level of the performance as well as some of the issues that he was able to uncover. As it turned out, there were personal differences between the two persons and it was affecting their level of performance. The manager, however, did not only focus on that, but he also looked into the settings in the office and the way that work flows were designed. He elicited several suggestions for a more dynamic and responsive work flow from the team members. After that, he led the team members into a brainstorming of several ways of addressing the issue of performance. Had he asserted his authority right away, he would not have secured the participation of everyone. But because of systems thinking, the team was able to identify the root causes of difficulties and challenges. Â  

The Rather Interesting History of Speak and Spell

The Speak and Spell is a handheld electronic device and educational toy with a very interesting place in history. The toy/learning aid was developed in the late 1970s by Texas Instruments and introduced to the public at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in June 1978. Its claim to fame is that the Speak and Spell was the first commercial product to use a brand new technology, called DSP technology. According to the IEEE: the Speak and Spell digital signal processing (DSP) innovation in audio processing is the starting milestone for the huge digital signal processing industry that has a more than $20 Billion market today. Using digital signal processing has grown tremendously with the development of analog to digital and digital to analog conversion chips and techniques. Digital signal processors are used in many of the consumer, industrial, and military applications. Digital Signal Processing By definition, DSP (short for digital signal processing) is the manipulation of analog information into digital. In Speak and Spells case, it was analog sound information that was converted into a digital form. The Speak and Spell was a product that was the result of Texas Instruments research into the area of synthetic speech. By being able to speak to children, the Speak and Spell was able to teach both the correct spelling and pronunciation of a word. Research and Development of the Speak and Spell The Speak and Spell marked the first time the human vocal tract had been electronically duplicated on a single chip of silicon. According to the manufacturers of the Speak and Spell, Texas Instruments, research on the Speak and Spell began in 1976 as a three-month feasibility study with a $25,000 budget. Four men worked on the project in its early stages: Paul Breedlove, Richard Wiggins, Larry Brantingham, and Gene Frantz. The idea for the Speak and Spell originated with engineer Paul Breedlove. Breedlove had been thinking about potential products that could use the capabilities of the new bubble memory (another Texas Instrument research project) when he came up with the idea for the Speak and Spell, originally named The Spelling Bee. With technology being what it was at that time period, speech data required a challenging amount of memory, and Texas Instruments agreed with Breedlove that something like the Speak and Spell could be a good application to develop. In an interview conducted by Benj Edwards of Vintage Computing with one of the Speak and Spell team members, Richard Wiggins, Wiggins reveals the basic roles of each of the team in the following way: Paul Breedlove originated the idea of a learning aid for spelling.Gene Frantz was responsible for the overall product design: spelling words, case design, display, and operation.Larry Brantingham was the integrated circuit designer.Richard Wiggins wrote the voice processing algorithms. Solid State Speech Circuitry The Speak and Spell was a revolutionary invention. According to Texas Instruments, it used an entirely new concept in speech recognition and unlike tape recorders and pull-string photograph records used in many speaking toys at the time, the solid-state speech circuitry it used had no moving parts. When it was told to say something it drew a word from memory, processed it through an integrated circuit model of a human vocal tract and then spoke electronically. Made specifically for the Speak and Spell, the Speak and Spell four created the first linear predictive coding digital signal processor integrated circuit, the TMS5100. In laymans terms, the TMS5100 chip was the first speech synthesizer IC ever made.