Donating Your Body To Science Philosophy Essay

Donating Your Body To Science Philosophy Essay Why should someone donate their body to science? One reason is to help discover causes for diseases and even develop cures for those diseases. Using donated bodies scientists have discovered many reasons why humans develop cancer and because of this are also finding ways to treat it. Scientists are also using human brains which have been donated to help them see how the brains works and to help them treat brain disorders. Another benefit of people donating their bodies to science is relieving their families of the expensive of burial. Funeral costs are expensive. In most cases of donation of a body, funeral fees will be paid by the business, hospital or university that is using the body for research. Often they will cremate what was not used and give the families the cremated remains. Other times, they will give the families the body back and pay for the funeral. This is not the case for everybody though, it depends on what the recently deceased person requested in their will. The business, hospital or university will almost always honor what the donors request happens to their bodies. A third reason someone would donate their body is to help solve crimes. Forensic investigators use bodies to help identify how long someone has been dead after a murder. The forensic investigators can do this by studying the decay that occurs to a body over a period of time. They can also use a body to help show how a person died. To do this, they use donated bodies to demonstrate different wounds that can be caused by various weapons and then compare those wounds to decide what weapon was used in a particular case. As a result, donating your body to science can help solve crimes and stop criminals from committing future crimes. There are also many reasons why someone would choose not to donate their body to science. One is religion. Although most people believe donating a body is good, they may think that it goes against their religious beliefs. However, most major religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam recognize and allow organ and tissue donations. Most religions even believe that donating a body is a good thing to do and that it is an act of kindness. However, not all religions support this and a few do believe that your body should remain whole and intact after death. Overall, it depends on the person to decide what should happen their body. Another reason that someone may not donate their body is fear. Many people think that if they were in some kind of accident and were about to die the doctors would not try as hard to save them. A lot of people believe that the doctors will want their organs. This is not true. When someone is rushed into the emergency room doctors do not even know if they are a donor or not. So there is no benefit for the doctor to not try as hard to save a life in the hope of having organs to use. In fact, if it can be proven that the doctor did not make every effort to save a life they can be sued for malpractice. There really is no reason to be afraid to donate your organs or body because a doctor will always try their hardest to save someone if they are about to die. My final reason that someone may not donate their body is because they feel it will be disgraced and they truth of the matter is that the body does have a chance of being disgraced. Like in the book Stiff when Mary Roach talks about cadavers being used as crash test dummies. Many people would find this to be disgraceful, but it still does not change the fact that these people are helping the world to be safer because it demonstrates what the human body can go through in a crash. When someone does donate their body to science it does have a chance of being disgraced but that should not keep people from doing it. The benefits almost always out way the cost. What one person sacrifices may save the lives of many others. Many people wonder what donating their body to science can do. One major thing is that it can help save a life. When Mary Roach talks about cadavers being used by medical students helps explain why they need to study the human body. I know that I would not want a surgeon who has never really studied a human body to perform surgery on me. This practice can help save a life because it gives doctors and surgeons experience that they need. When human bodies are used as crash test dummies it helps show what improvements need to be made to our cars to make them safer for us. When an organ is donated it can even save someones life. When a body is donated it can help save a life in numerous ways. Donating a body to science can also help show how diseases impact a body. If the person who donated their body had a disease then doctors and scientists can examine that body to see what effects the disease did to the body and how it effected each of the organs. This will help scientist know how to treat others with the same disease more effectively. For example, if the person donating their body had a disease that affected their brain scientists and doctors can discover new and better ways to operate on a living person or create new medications to lessen or eliminate the effects to the brain. This is important because we need to know how different diseases react with the human body and the medicines that are used to counteract the disease. Donating a body to science can even help prevent inhumane treatment of animals and save their lives. Modern medicine is beginning to move away from using living animals to experiment on because of animal rights activists. Studies have shown that surgeons who work on human cadavers do far better than those who work on living animals. It is a lot easier to work with patients because of the experience they have with human cadavers instead of animals. They are even working on a new way to make human cadavers cardiovascular systems work while they are working on the cadavers. There is so much knowledge that a human body can provide over a living animal to a new doctor or surgeon. A human cadaver has so much to offer us. Most people have no idea what donating your body can do. It helps us in ways that I never thought possible but learned about as I read the book Stiff. I never realized cadavers were used as crash test dummies or to see how bullets and bombs affect the body. Those who donate give us so much that we do not realize. They have probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives. By donating their bodies they have each opened up new ways to help others. Everyone who donated their body did it to help others. In my mind, they should be considered heroes because they do so much good for us and arent even here to see what they have done. Overview I personally thought the book Stiff was a good book. I am not one for the more ghoulish parts but overall still thought that it was a good book. I do not think that this would be a book that I would have chosen on my own but I am glad that I had to read this book. When I first got this book I had no idea what donating your body to science actually meant. Although, at this time, I do not plan to donate my body to science, this book actually shown me how much good can come from it. Maybe in the future, as I get older or if my life is at some point affected by a donation, my decision may change. I thought the book was very well written and maintained a good balance between being gross and funny. When I first got the book I really did not want to read it but the more I got into it the more entertaining it became. My favorite part of the book was Chapter 4, Dead Man Driving. There was just something about it that made me laugh even though it seems wrong to use a persons body as a crash te st dummy. It made me wonder, if these people are watching themselves being crashed into a wall, what would they be thinking. Would they still think they made the right decision or would they regret it? This book was one of the more enjoyable books I have read. Over the summer I plan to read more books like Stiff. Work Cited  · pitz, Marylynne. donating your body to science. N.p., 28 Apr. 2010. Infoiho.org. Web. 28 Apr. 2010. · Stolz, Greg. Dead and gone- but still usefull. N.p., 28 Oct. 2008. infohio.org. Web. 28 Apr. 2011. · Fiorito, Joe. Donation to body worlds breaks new boundaries. N.p., 27 Nov. 2009. infoiho.org. Web. 28 Apr. 2011. The Advantages and Disadvantages of Donating Your Body to Science | Funeral-Tips.com. | Funeral-Tips.com. Web. 28 April 2011. . Leaving a Legacy of Compassion. PETA Prime: Celebrating Kind Choices. Web. 28 April 2011. Loeben, Greg. Body and Organ Donation Should I Donate My Body to Science? Whole Body Donation for Medical Research, Education and Training. Web. 28 Apr. 2011. .

The Emh, the Financial Crisis and the Behavioral Finance

The EMH, the Financial Crisis and the Behavioral Finance 1. Introduction The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) that was first proposed by Fama (1965, 1970) is the cornerstone of the modern financial economic theory. The EMH argues that the market is efficient and asset price reflects all the relevant information concerned about its return. The genius insight provided by the EMH has changed the way we look at the financial crisis thoroughly. However, the confidence in the EMH is eroded by the recent financial crisis.People can not help to ask: if the market is efficient and the price of assets is always correct as suggested by the EMH, why there exists such a great bubble in the financial market during the recent financial crisis? Apart from that, the EMH has even been criticized as the culprit of the recent financial crisis. (See Nocera, 2009 and Fox, 2009) Actually after the EMH was proposed, many anomalies have been found in the financial market and financial economists have develo ped many theories in order to explaining these anomalies.Among these the most influential one is the so called behavioral finance, which argues that the complex human behavior plays an important part in determining asset prices. The rest of the essay is arranged as follows. Section 2 explains what the EMH implies and its limitations. Section 3 emphasizes on explaining the usefulness of the EMH in the context of the recent financial crisis. Section 4 focuses on interpreting the behavioral finance. Section 5 concludes the essay. 2. The implications of the EMH According to Ball (2009), the implication of the EMH can be summarized as follows.The implication of the EMH can be decomposed into two parts. The first insight of the EMH is related to the most profound insights of classical economics, that is, there is no excess profit in a complete market, which is due to the fierce competition in the market. If there exists excess profit in such a market, then the entry of new producers will eventually eliminate it. The second insight is that information is symmetric dissemination, which implies that information can flow freely in the market without cost and time lag.Putting these two parts of insights together, the EMH implies that the market is efficient and asset prices reflect all the relevant information concerned about its return, and that investors can only get commensurate return with the cost of exploiting information due to the competition in the market. According to the EMH, people can only expect to get average return in the stock market and it is impossible to beat the market continuously. Note that it is futile to exploit information in order to get abnormal return does not mean that no one should act to exploit information.As a matter of fact, the EMH is a natural result of the fierce competition in the market—if there is no competition in the market, the market can not be efficient. In other words, asset price can not reach its equilibrium level a utomatically. Ice-cream producers face fierce competition from other producers in the market and it is impossible for them to get abnormal profit, but it is foolish for ice-cream producers to stop making ice-cream because they will get nothing if they do not work.Fama (1970) classifies the market into three categories: the weak form efficiency, the semi-strong form efficiency and the strong form efficiency. In the weak form efficiency market, asset prices reflect all the historical information, so it is impossible to obtain abnormal return using historical data and technological analysis is useless. In the semi-strong form efficiency market, asset prices reflect all the information that is publicly available, and thus it is impossible to get abnormal return using publicly available information.In the strong form efficiency market, asset prices reflect all the relevant information, including all publicly available information and inside information, so investors can only get average return and it is impossible to beat the market. 3. The performance of the EMH in explaining the recent financial crisis During the recent financial market, the stock market fell sharply, banks went bankrupt and the financial system was damaged seriously. This financial crisis has eroded the confidence in the EMH.The validity of the EMH and the existence of the efficient market are questioned broadly. If asset prices are always correct and reflect all the relevant information concerning about its return just as the EMH has suggested, why there exists such a great bubble in the financial market during the recent financial crisis? If the market is efficient, why the market fails to predict the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stern and other large financial institutions? Overall, the EMH fails to answer such questions.Moreover, the EMH also performs poor in explaining other financial crisis. One example is the Tulipmania that occurred in the 17th century. The prices of the tulip bulbs reached extremely high level which seriously deviates from its fundamental value that was suggested by the EMH. This apparent bubble is contradicted with the prediction of the EMH. In fact, the explaining power of the EMH becomes pale when confronting financial crisis. The EMH does not assume that investors are rational, but the EMH does assume that the market is efficient. But the reality may not be that simple.Investors may exhibit a lot of irrational behaviors in the real life, such as overconfident in their ability, following others readily, making wrong decisions when in exuberant state, and so forth. These irrational behaviors of investors without doubt will weaken the explaining power of the EMH. Apart from that, the EMH assumes that information is symmetric dissemination and can flow freely without cost and time lag, but information in the reality may not be symmetric disseminated, information may not be able to flow freely, this will also affect the validity of the EMH in explaining asset prices in the real life.Besides, factors such as sociological factors also play a part in determining asset prices. In author’s opinion, asset price is just like a glass of beer. At the lower part of the glass is the real beer, representing the intrinsic value of the asset that can be explained by the EMH. At the upper part of the glass is the foam, representing values that can not be explained by the EMH. In other word, the EMH can not explain bubbles, which is the systematic deviation of asset prices from their fundamental value.The EMH has even been criticized as the culprit of the financial crisis. In Nocera (2009) and Fox (2009), both of them believe that the notion of efficiency was responsible for the financial crisis. They argue that since the market is efficient and asset prices reflect all relevant information, the investors and supervisors feel it is unnecessary to look into the intrinsic value of assets, and so fail to be aware of the asset price bubbles, thus the financial crisis occurs.Actually, not soon after the EMH was first proposed, scholars have found many anomalies that contradict with the prediction of EMH. De Bondt and Thaler (1985, 1987) found that investors tend to overreact to unexpected news and events and such irrational behavior affects stock prices; Jegadeesh and Titman (1993) found that investors using trading strategies that buying past winners and selling past losers can get abnormal returns during the period 1965 to 1989. De Long, Shleifer, Summers and Waldman (1990) argue hat some anomalies such as the excess volatility of asset prices, the mean reversion in stock prices, and so forth, can be explained by the notion of noise trader risk. These studies have challenged the validity of the EMH. 4. The behavioral finance As has been described before, there are many anomalies that can not be explained by the EMH. Objectively speaking, these anomalies give impetus to the development and breakthrough of finan cial economic theories. Scholars so far have developed many models so as to explaining there anomalies, among which the most influential one is the behavioral finance.The behavioral finance takes psychological factors into account when determining asset price. According to Fuller (2000), the behavioral finance can be described in three ways. In the first way, he thinks that the behavioral finance is the integration of psychology and decision making science with the classical financial economic theory. In the second way, he views the behavioral finance as an attempt to explain the anomalies that have been observed and reported among current literatures in the financial market.In the third way, he thinks that the behavioral finance is a discipline that studies how investors make ‘mental mistakes’ in investment decision making process. The traditional asset pricing theories are developed under the assumption that investors are rational and thus can make right decisions, th at is, investors will not hurt themselves when making decisions. But the behavioral finance theory is developed under the assumption that investors are not always rational and human behavior is irrational at some time and that the financial market is sometimes inefficient.This assumption is much more reasonable than that of the traditional asset pricing theories. Ritter (2003) summarizes some irrational behavior of human beings, such as people tend to follow ‘heuristics’ or rules of thumb, which sometimes lead to biases, people are overconfident about their abilities, people act slowly to adjust to changes, people sometimes separate decisions which should be combined together in principle, and so forth. He argues that these irrational behaviors of investors will lead to misevaluation.Another important assumption made by the behavioral finance is the limits to arbitrage. In a market where arbitrage can be carried out without limitation, mispricing of asset will be elimin ated quickly. But if there are limits to arbitrage, for instance, short sale is not allowed in the financial market, the misprcing of asset may not be eliminated. Under the circumstance that the mispricing of asset is seriously, arbitrager will even choose to give up arbitrage due to the huge risk involved in the arbitrage.This assumption implies that the market is inefficient when there are limits to arbitrage. De Long, Shleifer, Summers and Waldman (1990) maintain that in an economy where rational and irrational traders are mixed, the behavior of noise traders can have huge continuous impact on asset prices, because the huge risk arbitragers confront made arbitrage less attractive. The first scholar who stresses the importance of psychological factors in investment decision making is Keynes.Keynes argues that the ‘animal spirits’ of investors is the psychological foundation of irrational exuberance and crash. Kahneman and Tversky’s (1973, 1979) description on t he belief and preference of investors under uncertainty lays the theoretical foundation for the behavioral finance. After that, the behavioral finance develops rapidly and gradually become the most important branch of financial economics.By economic intuition, since that the behavioral finance takes psychological factors into account when determining asset prices and that these factors do have important impact on the decision-making behaviors of investors, we can say that in the short run the behavioral finance provides a better for the behavior of investors and the financial markets than the EMH. But in the long run, investors will eventually realize and correct their irrational behavior, and the EMH will perform better than the behavioral finance. . Conclusion Under certain assumptions, the EMH maintains that asset prices reflect all the relevant information about the asset, thus it is impossible for investors to get abnormal return and beat the market. The EMH implies that there is no unexploited profitable opportunity in the financial market. Although the EMH provides a useful insight through which we look at the financial market, the EMH fails to explain the more and more anomalies in the financial market.The EMH provides little useful explanation about the recent financial crisis. The validity of the EMH is questioned and the confidence in the EMH declines. Moreover, the EMH has even been criticized as the culprit of this financial crisis. Given the criticism the EMH suffers, scholars have developed varieties of theories so as to explain the anomalies in the financial market. Among these the most influential one is the behavioral finance.The behavioral finance studies how the behavior of human beings affects asset prices and the financial market. Based on the assumption that investors are sometimes irrational and the market is inefficient and that there are limits to arbitrage, the behavioral finance overall gives better explanations concerning the anoma lies in the financial market than the EMH. The behavioral finance is a rapidly developing field in the financial economics. Reference Ball, R. 2009) ‘The global financial crisis and the efficient market hypothesis: What have we learned? ’, forthcoming in Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn. com/abstract=1502815 (Accessed: 10 March 2010) De Bondt and Thaler (1985) ‘Does the stock market overreact? ’, Journal of Finance, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 793-805 De Long, Shleifer, A. , Summers, A. S. and Waldman, R. J. (1990) ‘Noise trader risk in financial market’, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 98, No. 4, pp. 703-738 Fama, E.F. (1965) ‘Random walk in stock market prices’, Financial Analyst Journal, Vol. 21, No. 5, pp. 55-59 Fama, E. F. (1970) ‘Efficient market hypothesis: A review of theory and empirical work’, Journal of Finance, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 383-417 Fuller, R. J. (2000) Ã¢â‚¬Ë œBehavioral Finance and Sources of Alpha’, forthcoming in Journal of Pension Plan Investing, Vol. 2, No. 3 Fox, J. (2009) ‘The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward and Delusion on Wall Street’, New York: HarperCollins Jegadeesh, N. and Titman, S. 1993) ‘Returns to buying winners and selling losers: Implications for stock market efficiency’, Journal of Finance, Vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 65-91 Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. (1973) ‘On the psychology of prediction’, Psychological Review, Vol. 80, pp. 237-251 Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. (1979) ‘Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk’, Econometrica, Vol. 47, pp. 263-291 Nocera, R. (2009) ‘Poking holes in a theory on markets’, New York Times, June 5, 2009 Ritter, J. R. (2003) ‘Behavioral finance’ ,Pacific-Basin Financial Journal, Vol. 11, pp. 429-437

Progressive Case Study

Progressive Case Study Progressive Auto Insurance company is among many other competing firms in the industry. Some of the others include State Farm, Allstate, and GEICO. They are currently the third biggest private auto insurance industry. From the time they came into existence they have strived for being the most innovative company in the market and shared the values of â€Å"fair, fast, best. † Beginning in 1957 Progressive mainly dealt with standard drivers but soon after they developed a strategy that benefitted them greatly.For the next 25 years they started to focus on the nonstandard driver, who are the drivers that insurers would not cover. Particularly they segmented motorcyclists who had recently received a DUI. They priced the premiums high which resulted in high profitability. They found out that the motorcyclists were actually a lot lower risk than other companies originally perceived. Starting in 1990, they started a practice of immediate response which reduced trauma for the person involved and also helped them in getting an accurate quote for the damages.They also introduced the gold card which reduced the time it took for people to respond to Progressive. In 1995, Progressive became the first insurance company to expand its business to the world wide web essay writer website. The biggest innovative move they made was in 2000 when they introduced the concierge service which included full service repair and customer service at their own shops. Starting in 2006 Progressive was enjoying high profitability due to unanticipated accident frequencies.Thus many companies cut their prices to keep up with the competition. The problem with this is severe underwriting losses. They tried the tactic of reducing prices below their competitors in hope to gain market share but this was the opposite result for them. The CEO Glenn Renwick recommended slowly returning to the underwriting profits of 4% rather than the drastic price drops which could hurt the m if the accident frequencies increased.JD power and Associates gave Progressive a sub par score for overall customer satisfaction of 14. They also fared low on brand awareness ranking in at 57% unaided brand awareness. Their competitors were at GEICO(79%), Allstate(69%), and State Farm(74%). Although they increased their advertising from 8 million in 1997 to 263 million in 2006, they were lagging behind the leading competitors in the field. Although Progressive have been striving as an innovative insurance company they have been lacking behind a few leading companies.It appears that they may need to narrow in on their strengths and cut out some of their programs to make sure they are ensuring high customer satisfaction. After learning that there are many risks out there, people want to know that they will be in good hands after a major disaster or incident. People will always rely on insurance companies because there numerous risks out there that people face everyday. With these co mpanies people feel at ease about the everyday risks that they constantly endure.

Alexander Graham Bell And Eliza Grace Symonds - 1805 Words

Jose Munoz Ms.Aguilar Us History 10/18/16 Alexander Graham Bell He was born to Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds. His mother was almost deaf, and his father taught elocution to the deaf, which I find very ironic. This ended up influencing Alexander’s later career choice as teacher of the deaf. At age 11 he entered the Royal High School at Edinburgh, but he did not enjoy the compulsory curriculum, and he left school at age 15 without graduating. Alexander invented the first ever telephone. He lived from 1847 to 1922, he was a scottish born american scientist. He worked at a school for the deaf while trying to invent a machine that would send sound by electricity.†Bell was granted the first official patent for his telephone in March 1876, though he would later face years of legal challenges to his claim that he was its sole inventor, resulting in one of history’s longest patent battles.† When he got his machine to work, he offered to sell his patent to Western Union for 100 thousand dollars. Western Union turned down his offer because the telephone did not really hit it off at first. So Alexander decided to make his own telephone company. â€Å"The Bell Telephone Company, a common law joint stock company, was organized in Boston, Massachusetts on July 9, 1877, by Alexander Graham Bell s father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who also helped organize a sister company — the New England Telephone and T elegraph Company.† Once the telephone hit off and everyoneShow MoreRelatedGraham Bell Speech708 Words   |  3 Pagesof the names to shape the frontier of communication is Graham Bell. (POPOVA, 2017) Introduction: Alexander Graham Bell was born on the 3rd of March 1847 in the capital city of Scotland, Edinburgh. Bell was the middle child to Eliza Grace Symonds and Melville Bell, a well-respected scholar who devoted most of his lifeRead MoreAlexander Graham Bell1151 Words   |  5 PagesAlexander Graham Bell was a notable scientist and engineer that changed the world with his invention of the telephone. Without the telephone, everyone would not have a reliable communication device. Alexander Graham Bell is considered one of the most influential people in human history. Early Life ~ Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3rd, 1847 at his family home, 16 South Charlotte Street, in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was born to Professor Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace (nee Symonds)Read MoreAlexander Graham Bell: A Short Biography Essay1636 Words   |  7 PagesAlexander Graham Bell: A Short Biography Upon hearing the name Alexander Graham Bell, we remember the inventor of the telephone. However, Alexander was much more than just the inventor of the telephone. As a matter of fact he was an audiologist. His family was the leading authorities in elocution and speech correction. He had improved and carried on his families business, along with his brothers. Alexander had created the phone at an early age among inventors- only 29. Later in his career Bell