Performance mgmt Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Performance mgmt - Essay Example The suggested style is to begin by leading through example among managers and understanding why the difficult employees behave like they do. In the course of this understanding, root causes will be unearthed and lasting solutions found for the growth and profitability of the enterprise. 1. Pay attention: to correct unwanted employee behavior, it is important that the responsible managers do not ignore the difficult employees when they act inappropriately. By yelling at these staff, the root causes of their actions will not be identified and the end result being lack of productivity and further rebellion. 2. Take immediate action: Managers should act as soon as possible on poor behavior when evidence of such is witnessed. Failure to act in real time will lead to further escalation of the problem. It is sometime notable that a number of employees with misconduct issues do not realize that their actions are offensive to others around them and therefore immediate action goes a long way in bringing to their attention the wrongs in their actions for subsequent corrections. 3. Carry out a personal investigation of the problem: After sufficient investigation by the manager, it is important that he calls the person to a private meeting to find out if he knows about the said misbehavior. If it is determined that he is not aware of the conducts as inappropriate, then a clear explanation should be made to him on what is considered appropriate and what is not (Williams, p 48). The employee should in this meeting be given the chance to respond to the allegations by the manager to help further shed light into the root causes of the problem. 4. Provide support: It is the responsibility of managers upon taking note of negative behaviors and discussing them with the affected discussing employee to initiate a coaching program aimed at helping these members of staff adopt better and acceptable behavior in work places. It is

The Typical Bureaucratic Structure of a MediumSized University Essay

The Typical Bureaucratic Structure of a MediumSized University - Essay Example External Relations links University activity to the national and international community and oversees Employer Liaison, Foundation Studies, Professional Development, Alumni, Marketing, Liaison and Communications. Typical Bureaucratic Structure of a University allows it to act as a specific kind of company whose "product" are specialists in different fields. Universities in the US function under a very competitive environment. In conclusion, one can state that Public universities in the US are committed towards keeping and sustaining the US in the forefront of research and innovation. This is reflected in the vast University campuses and an elaborate administrative structure to look into every area of University governance. This efficient management of the campus is one of the vital elements in creating an institution of rigor and excellence, attracting the best talents from all over the world.

Artificial Intelligence in Web Design

Artificial Intelligence in Web Design Richard RoÃ… ¡ko Abstract—This paper deals with a new trend in web design and that is to introduce some degree of artificial intelligence into the task of designing a website. One of the first companies that came up with implementation of this idea id thegrid.io, which we will be mostly discussing in this paper. We will take a deeper look as to what does in fact artificial intelligence means in this connotation and how is it implemented throughout thegrid.io system for automated web design. Keywords— GSS, webdesign, grid, SEO, performance I. Introduction When it comes to using artificial intelligence in any sphere of, technical or other, we always have to be careful with this notion, as it can get quite misleading as to what is really the power behind that or other action supported, derived from, or even controlled by artificial intelligence. The web is an increasingly popular platform and as such, a great amount of attention is being payed to it and its content. Web is, of course, populated by websites and these are so diversified in the matter of their content, that it would be really hard to classify them in any sensible way. Each one of these websites, however consists of two main parts, that are responsible for the operation of the portal as a whole. These are backend and frontend. When the web first started to be commercially available, the presentation side of the websites, i.e. the frontend was not of much, if any concern whatsoever. The idea behind the styling of the web was built around other popular media, newspaper. The syntax for writing the main components of pages (HTML) still resembles the organizational structure of the newspaper articles with headings divided into different levels, paragraphs and many other article-related styling. Back in these days, there was almost no styling aside from breaking the websites into different sections. Internet back then was used for almost entirely different purposes than it is now and hence, there was no actual need of doing anything more with the presentational side of the web. All of this changed, however, when non scientific people started to become familiar with internet and first commercial solutions started to appear. New language, that was supposed to make the web look much better arose and its name was CSS. CSS stands for cascading style sheets and basically, it allowed the designers to style the content of the website much more accurately. CSS is still widely used nowadays, even though designers and programmers today tend to use many other style pre-processors, but the core always stays the same. Web always continues to evolve and while its users, most of the time, do not care about the action behind the scenes, which is essentially the core of the whole site, they do care about the appearance on the other hand. That is the reason, that great amount of time and resources is put into the frontend and UI of the websites nowadays. The design of the website, its look and feel, the interaction with the user, feedback it gives, these all are very important factors to consider in the process of web development. Hence, the web designer profession is becoming increasingly sought and picked by many people and companies alike. What is going to happen when we introduce artificial intelligence to this process? It could have an enormous impact on the job market, if we consider that it could be one of the first steps in the process of automatizing web design and that is always risky, even to consider. This is also one of the topics we will discuss in this paper. II. TheGrid.IO The company behind thegrid.io are comapring it to the movie Her to some degree. It was a movie about a perfectly voice-recognizing computer personal assistant, that was also able to simulate emotions and basically behaved as a human being. On their website we can see, that they state, that now She can do webdesign for you as well, referring to her ability to analyze the content of the site and adapt the design to it. They describe the basic principle behind the algorithm as an engine, that is measuring and analysing the content of your website constantly and changing it and designing it everytime it detects a change in the purpose of the site. The idea behind all of it, is to provide a personal computer-driven and automated webdesigner for every webdeveloper. Fig.1 thegrid.io landing page / index [1] As a proof of concept, in the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) part of the website you can find out, that thegrid.io website was actually built using thegrid.io system itself. This fact immediately caught attention of many web developers and web designers and upon researching the public HTML and CSS of the website, we find a few interesting facts. The website is generally pretty heavy. That doesn’t mean it is just really long, which it is in this case, but nevertheless, if a user scrolls down the whole page, he downloads roughly around 100 MB, which is quite a lot considering the lightweight trends in today’s world of web development. Interestingly enough, the load time of the website actually measures pretty good. If we take a closer look at the HTML, we can see, that the styles and javascripts are inlined, which is quite unorthodox, but seems to work here and it might be one of the reasons the site is loaded optimally even though its load is pretty strong. As Austin Wolf wrote for medium.com, the website is somewhat self-indulgent and it is really long. Fig. 2 thegrid.io performance test [2] From the given statistics we can deduce, that the webpage as a whole actually performs quite well against all expectations, which renders the system really ambitious. Thegrid.io website has a few notable sections, like FAQ, team and info for possible investors. It even contains an e-commerce part with a possibility to opt for a subscription, that is currently set at 25 â‚ ¬ / month. It is very important to note, that the algorhitms and AI behind this automated webdesigning project is still under heavy development, so all the results and test we can do for now might differ from the actual performance by the ready and commercialy available application. But this pre-research can still give us an interesting view of what it might look like once it is available to public. At this stage of development we can only guess how does the analysis of the content on the website actually work, but it good to know, that the whole company has a very transparent and open-minded point of view when it comes to licensing and sharing resources online. The team behind thegrid.io have the ambition to share source code of each and everyone of the websites that will be created on github in public repositories for others to be inspired and reproduced. We have no information as to what licensing is going to look like yet. Another interesting fact about the whole ecosystem of thegrid.io is, that they not only offer you to make your website autodesigned, they can also handle the domain registration and the hosting for your website. And what is even more interesting, they plan to make this available for the same fixed monthly fee. This suggests, that their ambition is to make user’s businesses go online in a matter of hours for a decent price and maintain it for them without requiring them to have any prior knowledge of the web or any other technologies that accompany it and to instead, let them focus on the content. This whole service is then complemented by many other small features, like scraping the web for mentions of your brand and automatically generating a press release section for your page, or for your brand. This, of course, from the technical point of view, could be quite heavy on the resources, but from what we can observe as of the current state of the application, the tema behind thegrid.io proves to be quite apt at responding to heavy scripts challenges that may arise throughout the course of developing a website. Fig. 3 GSS templates [3] GSS is what we could call grid’s replacement of CSS, or templating engines as a whole. In the history, there were a few tries on taking out the programming out of the webdesign process by introducing some or another form of GUI for this creative process. None of these were actually extremely popular and thegrid.io promises to change that. What they base their strategy at is the fact, that they reverse engineer the process of all these systems. Whereas these former were built on allowing the users of the system design the layout, or pick some template, or predefined parts of a website and then let them fill it out with their content, thegrid.io reverses this and just lets the user type in the content into a blank website canvas and lets their system analyze the content and based on that creates the most suitable desing, that works well with content of the webpage. III. Issues With a project this ambitious and possibly this proportional, there is a lot of skepticism that is arising from many directions towards it. In this chapter we will discuss some of the categories of remarks thrown at the development team. We can also try to approximate their possible solution to these problem and the way they might address these issues in the future release version of thegrid.io system and its automatic web design algorithms. A. SEO SEO stands for search engine optimization. Let us first take a quick look at what that actually means. SEO is actually the process of increasing the exposure your site gets when searched for a similar topic using a search engine (such as https://duckduckgo.com/, or https://www.google.com). This process focuses on the visibility of the unpaid results and is related to as generating organic or natural traffic. If SEO is done correctly on a website it can lead to an immense increase of traffic, that is generated without further action needed from the side of the developer, or the programmer. In the past, SEO was solely thing of text search, but as we push into the future, there is a rising trend of optical character recognition and optical image recognition, which allows the users to search for their desired topics by images, or even sounds. These trends are also affecting the SEO as a whole. As stated before, if SEO is done correctly, it can lead to making the page appear generically much more often in the results of the search engines. To optimize a site for search engines and index the page proper way many techniques are employed. SEO experts start by editing the actual content of the website, then they can also edit the raw HTML of the webpage in order to increase the actual relevance to the content of the page. There also is a number of, so called, external techniques for increasing the SEO rank of a website. This include promoting the website, construction of backlinks, or inbound links, that lead back to the SEO optimized page and paying for written PR articles. Implementation of SEO as it is really difficult and requires constant effort, involvement and implementation of the new trends in this field as it is. In order for it to be precise and to work well, it needs to be thought of constantly, while creating new content and updating the old one as well. In today’s overcrowded web environment, it is very important to make your site stand out in any possible way and SEO is becoming increasingly popular in addressing this problem. The team behind thegrid.io relies on filters to take care of many web designing aspects. They act as the entry point to any and every grid.io powered application. Fig. 4 one of many others grid.io marketing strategies As we pointed out before, SEO is all about conforming your HTML to your content and that is where filters come in place through the grid.io algorithm. Filters serve in filtering your raw HTML. Since SEO is basically translating the HTML wrapped around the specific parts of your content to let search engine scrapers index and â€Å"get to know† your content better basically. The way we can speculate these probably work is, that they scrape the content of your articles, items, or any other elements and then parse it into meta tags probably via the URL. As we saw from the example page they built, it is probably using some kind of SPA (Single Page Application) framework, but it most likely is not one of the popular ones, quite possibly it is their own internal one, since doing SEO on a SPA could prove troubling, as for reloading just the parts of your html including the content which is relevant to the specific asynchronous change in the scope of your application. These are just theories and speculations based on what is publicly available as of the moment of writing this article. B. Performance Performance is one of the most important factors to consider as it influences the feeling of quality. Impact of the page speed on the traffic, conversion and satisfaction is huge. According to Aragon [5] in her article on crazyegg.blog about SEO, company Amazon found out, that for every 100ms their page loaded quicker they got about 1% of increased revenue overall, which is a truly tremendous impact. Other big companies are reporting the same findings, which only goes to show, that performance could be a huge deal breaker when it comes to thegrid.io as well. One of the elementary aspects when it comes to minimizing the page load is to minimize the number of HTTP requests. If we refer to picture [2], which states that there is exactly 123 HTTP requests on thegrid.io page when it first loads. This number is pretty high and suggests, that there is a place for optimization of these standards in order to make the page load faster. Other techniques might include caching the resources on the site (storing them permanently if they are present on more than a few sub-sites of the website in order to reduce server load). In this field, thegrid.io got and F, referring to [2] once again, which is suboptimal to say, at least. When it comes to compression of images, the best choice here is to go with JPEG or PNG formatted images. But as thegrid.io states, the content uploaded to the website is entirely in the hands of the user, the grid just analyses it and styles the content around it accordingly. So the performance when working with images is entirely in the hands of the user. As far as we are concerned there is no information yet as to some auto convertor of images or anything similiar, but it would definitely make sense for thegrid.io to implement such a functionality as this can have a great impact on the overall load speed. With all that being said, the overall experience of the grid.io created website is pretty good and slightly above average in our opinion. If they really relied on their own algorithm when creating their presentational site, it is safe to assume, that the team already have a very stable and delivering product, which displays quite a potential when it comes to delivering apps with an optimal user satisfaction. C. Design The actual design of the websites created with thegrid.io is one of the fields that we can not measure objectively even if we would have more templates, or filters, as they prefer to call it at the grid, because design is pretty objective. From the teaser screenshots we can however see, that the design have all the modern practices, such as flat design and minimalism in their scope and portfolio and they tend to generally cling into this direction. Another big issue could be the responsiveness of manufactured designs. In the world of today’s web, if a site is not responsive and potential client base is expected to view and interact with a website on a device other than a computer, it is almost 100% expected for the site to be responsive (meaning, the site is stretching and adapting to different screen sizes dynamically). One of the main points of the responsive web design is to actually adhere to the content and style it according to it, not according to HTML elements, or anything else on that matter. With this in mind, thegrid.io is promising its users a responsive experience on all devices ranging from smartphones, through netbooks up to 4K capable retina big displays and smart TV’s. Other issue that comes to mind that has to do with design is the fact, that users often tend to want to personally add their touches to the design. And that is something that is impossible to be done automatically or with any kind of algorithm, since it depends on the feelings, emotions and personal tastes of the user. It might seem though, as thegrid.io is not targeting such people and are basically more into helping people kick start online presence of their brand and as such, this functionality, or the ability to meddle into the code of the applications might not be needed for most of their customers. Still, in the final version of the product they might introduce such a functionality and it would be really interesting to see how this plays out in the end. Other issues that might arise are the ones concerning originality of such designs. Of course, every website is different when it comes to content, but there could be many, e.g. e-shops dealing with cosmetics imported from France. How could an automated engine handle such a challenge? We do not know that yet, as the service is still in a stealth mode when it comes to unveiling the principles of its internal mechanics, but it is definitely something to consider and take into account. IV. Similar projects As of right now, thegrid.io seems to be the only one that introduced some degree of machine learning (or artificial learning as the call it) to web design and it seems to be really promising and interesting. V. Conclusion Thegrid.io is one of a kind applications that in summary should be able to give us the ability to create websites on the fly, without any prior knowledge, with an easy-to-no learning curve whatsoever and that styles itself around the content scanned. That is a very bold idea, but if executed properly and after implementing precautions could help people digitalize their brands very easily. References TheGrid.io landing page snippet [online]. Available: https://www.thegrid.io/ Thegrid.io performance test, conducted by Austin Wulf, on 28.12.2014 [online]. Available: https://medium.com/@austinwulf/the-grid-io-builds-incredibly-slow-websites-24ca1980c8f2 GSS templates used in thegrid.io [online]. Available: http://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/artificial-intelligence-platform-the-grid-looks-like-the-future-of-web-design-1.2117158 Thegrid.io marketing strategies [online]. Available: https://www.thegrid.io/ K. Aragon (2013, Nov 12). 10 ways to speed up your website – and improve conversion by 7%, [online]. Available: http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/12/11/speed-up-your-website/

Essay example --

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a degenerative brain disease that involves dysfunctions and loss of nerve cells in central nervous system, was discovered by a German physician, Dr. Alois Alzheimer in 1907. As it is accounted for 50 to 75% of all cases of dementia, it is the most common form of dementia (Blennow et al., 2006) and it is known as a progressive neuropsychiatric disorder which involves memory loss, mood swing and loss of intellectual and social skills (Lee et al., 2010) and sufferer will progress through seven-stages of Alzheimer but with different rate (Reisberg et al., 2003). Prevalence of dementia increases exponentially with age from 60 to 85 years old or older, which is Senile plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, loss of synapses and degeneration of basal forebrain cholinergic neurons are the neuropathological hallmarks of this disease (Shen et al., 2005). It is a neurodegenerative disorder with unknown cause (Blennow et al., 2006). There are some hypotheses of pathogenesis of Alzheimer’... ... are able to interfere some metabolic pathways of choline metabolism. Hence, they have broad range on neurologic effects. From the experiment, monosubstituted 2-aminoethanols give the least inhibitory activity. There will be an increase in inhibitory activity when the degree of substitution and molecular size of the nitrogenous head of the molecule increase, due to the increase in the chance for van der Waals’ interaction with the protein surface, results in increased enzyme inhibition (Hartung, 1968). This complied with the principle of inhibitors with tertiary amino compounds act on PAS site. Enzyme inhibition occurs by steric blockade (Rosenberry et al., 1999) or allosteric activation (Auletta et al., 2010) will give low number of empty enzymes for further hydrolysis. Therefore, dialkylaminoflavonols shold be futher investigated in the discovery of better drugs.

Fetal Humanity and Brain Function Essay

Baruch Brody begins his argument by making assumptions that a fetus, being a human being must acquire all the essential properties of a human being, such that the loss of any would lead to out of existence or death. Thus, the essential property of a human being is the property whereby the loss would result in the death of the human being. From the Brain-Death theory, death is defined as an irreparable cessation of brain function. Therefore, it follows that a fetus becomes a human being when it possesses the essential property of a human being that is, having a brain that has not suffered irreparable cessation of function. To reinforce this conviction, he added that by the sixth week of conception, when the fetus possesses a functioning brain, all the other properties that are required for being human are also present. However, when the fetus acquires all the necessary properties by the sixth week, the fetal brain is still not developed to support spontaneous motion until the third month. Some may argue that the fetus does not comes into humanity until the point of spontaneous movement, so it would be precise to say that fetus becomes a human being at some time between the sixth and twelfth week after its conception. According to Ramsey’s theory of death, human being goes out of existence or dies only when all the essential properties of being human- that is, the possession of the brain, heart and lung- suffer irreparable cessation of function. And the fetus becomes a human when it acquires any one of the properties. The fetal heart is developed at the second week, prior to the brain and lung. Thus, based on the theory of essentialism, the fetus becomes a human being at week two. However, as there are progressive developments in the functioning of the fetal heart, it would be more accurate to conclude that the fetus becomes a human being some time between the second and twelfth week of conception. Between the second and twelfth week after conception, the fetus becomes a human being and right to life should prevail. Since it is morally impermissible to intentionally kill a human being, abortion is immoral unless in unusual circumstances. Therefore, it is concluded that moral opposition to abortions is based on human-rights. Evaluation of the argument Baruch Brody attempted to prove that abortion is morally impermissible by showing that a fetus is actually a human being and holds the right to life. Using the brain-death theory and Ramsey’s theory of death, he argues that the fetus becomes a human being not at the moment of conception or at the moment of birth, whereas it is some time between the second week and twelfth week of conception. This is period when the fetus develops its heart, brain and lungs. Once one of these organs starts functioning, it becomes a human being and the right to life should prevail. First, consider the assumption Brody made. It is reasonable to believe that the loss of the essential property of a human being would entail the human being’s death. Then, based on the Brain-Death theory, he associated the property necessary for being a human with having a functioning brain. However, this creates a fallacy. The Brain-Death theory states that â€Å"as long as there has not been an irreparable cessation of brain function, the person continues to exist†, does not equate to the person die if there has been an irreparable cessation of his brain. Hence, the conclusion is not true although the given premises are true. Next, Brody invalidated the claims that other properties such as movement, being perceivable to others and viability are essential properties of human beings. The analogies he presented convinced us that these claims are not necessary properties of being a human. He further explained that when the brain operates, all other properties essential for being human are already acquired. Therefore, it can be deduced that the main required property of being a human is having a functioning brain. Finally, as there are progressive stages in the physical development and function of the brain, the fetal brain can only support spontaneous motion in the third month after conception. Brody concluded that the fetus becomes a human being at some time between the end of the sixth week twelfth week after its development. There seemed to have an inconsistency with this conclusion and the proposed claim that the possession of a functioning brain is the only property essential to humanity. Baruch Brody also adopted the Ramsey’s theory of death stating that human being goes out of existence when all the essential properties of being human- that is, the possession of the brain, heart and lung- suffer irreparable cessation of function. This premise is very convincing to prove that the loss of all the essential properties of a human being would entail the human being’s death. The claim that the fetus becomes a human when it acquires any one of the properties is ambiguous and does not seem to be valid. Since the heart is a vital organ for living, it is true that the fetus becomes a human being when it develops a heart. And in all cases, the fetal heart would develop first followed by the brain and lungs. However, it is not right to assume that the fetus becomes a human being when it possesses any one of the properties. Suppose the lungs develop first, the body of the fetus is not able to operate without the functioning of the heart. Hence, it is only right to conclude that the fetus becomes a human being when the essential property of a functioning heart is acquired. The fetal heart starts operating at week two and since there is no precise period of time the fetus becomes a human being, following the theory of essentialism, it is concluded that the fetus becomes a human being with the right to life some time between the second and twelfth week after conception. In order not to provide false premises as there is no specific time, this inference is acceptable. With that, Brody summed up his argument stating that after that point, the fetus is a human being with the right to life. Thus, abortion is morally impermissible except in rather unusual circumstances. Brody proved that a fetus becomes a human being and should be entitled to the right to life. It follows that abortion is immoral seeing intentionally terminating a human’s life is immoral. Even though Brody did not consider theological terms in this argument, there are some missing premises. He did not explicitly define the term â€Å"unusual circumstances†. And since Brody proved that the fetus has the right to life and killing a life is immoral, abortion should be morally impermissible in any case.

Attitude Formation

Attitude FormationCCSF, Shardlow In Social Psychology attitudes are defined as positive or negative evaluations of objects of thought. Attitudes typically have three components. †¢ The cognitive component is made up of the thoughts and beliefs people hold about the object of the attitude. †¢ The affective component consists of the emotional feelings stimulated by the object of the attitude. †¢ The behavioral component consists of predispositions to act in certain ways toward an attitude object. The object of an attitude can be anything people have opinions about.Therefore, individual people, groups of people, institutions, products, social trends, consumer products, etc. all can be attitudinal objects. †¢ Attitudes involve social judgments. They are either for, or against, pro, or con, positive, or negative; however, it is possible to be ambivalent about the attitudinal object and have a mix of positive and negative feelings and thoughts about it. †¢ Attitude s involve a readiness (or predisposition) to respond; however, for a variety of reasons we don’t always act on our attitudes. †¢ Attitudes vary along dimensions of strength and accessibility.Strong attitudes are very important to the individual and tend to be durable and have a powerful impact on behavior, whereas weak attitudes are not very important and have little impact. Accessible attitudes come to mind quickly, whereas other attitudes may rarely be noticed. †¢ Attitudes tend to be stable over time, but a number of factors can cause attitudes to change. †¢ Stereotypes are widely held beliefs that people have certain characteristics because of their membership in a particular group. †¢ A prejudice is an arbitrary belief, or feeling, directed toward a group of people or its individual members.Prejudices can be either positive or negative; however, the term is usually used to refer to a negative attitude held toward members of a group. Prejudice may lead to discrimination, which involves behaving differently, usually unfairly, toward the members of a group. Psychological factors involved in Attitude Formation and Attitude Change 1. Direct Instruction involves being told what attitudes to have by parents, schools, community organizations, religious doctrine, friends, etc. 2. Operant Conditioning is a simple form of learning. It is based on the â€Å"Law of Effect† and involves voluntary responses.Behaviors (including verbal behaviors and maybe even thoughts) tend to be repeated if they are reinforced (i. e. , followed by a positive experience). Conversely, behaviors tend to be stopped when they are punished (i. e. , followed by an unpleasant experience). Thus, if one expresses, or acts out an attitude toward some group, and this is reinforced by one’s peers, the attitude is strengthened and is likely to be expressed again. The reinforcement can be as subtle as a smile or as obvious as a raise in salary. Operant conditi oning is especially involved with the behavioral component of attitudes. 3.Classical conditioning is another simple form of learning. It involves involuntary responses and is acquired through the pairing of two stimuli. Two events that repeatedly occur close together in time become fused and before long the person responds in the same way to both events. Originally studied by Pavlov, the process requires an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) that produces an involuntary (reflexive) response (UCR). If a neutral stimulus (NS) is paired, either very dramatically on one occasion, or repeatedly for several acquisition trials, the neutral stimulus will lead to the same response elicited by the unconditioned stimulus.At this point the stimulus is no longer neutral and so is referred to as a conditioned stimulus (CS) and the response has now become a learned response and so is referred to as a conditioned response (CR). In Pavlov’s research the UCS was meat powder which led to an UCR of sa livation. The NS was a bell. At first the bell elicited no response from the dog, but eventually the bell alone caused the dog to salivate. Advertisers create positive attitudes towards their products by presenting attractive models in their ads. In this case the model is the UCS and our reaction to him, or her, is an automatic positive response.The product is the original NS which through pairing comes to elicit a positive conditioned response. In a similar fashion, pleasant or unpleasant experiences with members of a particular group could lead to positive or negative attitudes toward that group. Classical conditioning is especially involved with the emotional, or affective, component of attitudes. 4. Social (Observational) Learning is based on modeling. We observe others. If they are getting reinforced for certain behaviors or the expression of certain attitudes, this serves as vicarious reinforcement and makes it more ikely that we, too, will behave in this manner or express thi s attitude. Classical conditioning can also occur vicariously through observation of others. 5. Cognitive Dissonance exists when related cognitions, feelings or behaviors are inconsistent or contradictory. Cognitive dissonance creates an unpleasant state of tension that motivates people to reduce their dissonance by changing their cognitions, feeling, or behaviors. For example, a person who starts out with a negative attitude toward marijuana will experience cognitive dissonance if they start smoking marijuana and find themselves enjoying the experience.The dissonance they experience is thus likely to motivate them to either change their attitude toward marijuana, or to stop using marijuana. This process can be conscious, but often occurs without conscious awareness. 6. Unconscious Motivation. Some attitudes are held because they serve some unconscious function for an individual. For example, a person who is threatened by his homosexual feelings may employ the defense mechanism of r eaction formation and become a crusader against homosexuals.Or, someone who feels inferior may feel somewhat better by putting down a group other than her own. Because it is unconscious, the person will not be aware of the unconscious motivation at the time it is operative, but may become aware of it as some later point in time. 7. Rational Analysis involves the careful weighing of evidence for, and against, a particular attitude. For example, a person may carefully listen to the presidential debates and read opinions of political experts in order to decide which candidate to vote for in an election.