B.J. Novak From an Actor to a Writer

Apparently, in order to become a publishing writer one doesn’t have to, well, be a writer at all. It has been announced that B.J. Novak, most well-known for his roles in such movies as â€Å"Inglourious Basterds†, â€Å"The Office† and â€Å"The Mindy Project† has signed a two-book deal with Penguin Young Readers Group. And only several weeks later his collection of short stories, â€Å"One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories† will be published by Knopf, a publisher that worked with a number of Nobel Prize winners, such as Alice Munro and Toni Morrison. To be completely fair, Mr. Novak is a writer, after a fashion – in addition to starring in â€Å"The Office† he was also its writer and producer. And he isn’t the sole example of a comedy writer getting into the world of literature – but the majority of them, for example, Mindy Kaling and Tina Fey, choose to write humorous essays, while B.J. Novak chose fiction. Possible Future Literary Star? Well, it will become clearer after his first book gets published. So far we know about three of his ongoing literary projects: â€Å"One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories†, a short story collection. Another work of fiction, to be published by Knopf. â€Å"The Book with No Pictures†, a book for children due this autumn. An as of yet unnamed follow-up to the previous one. And it is without the readers ever seeing a single published book from him by now. Either his prose is so brilliant that two major publishing houses elected to take such a risk, or they hope that his popularity as an actor will serve as an advertisement in itself. Unusual Choice of Direction Novak states that he chose exactly this genre – humorous fiction – because it is what he likes to read himself and always wanted to write. As for â€Å"The Book with No Pictures†, it is an inversion of what one expects from a children’s book: lots of pictures, few words. In this work Novak wanted to show the young readers that words can be their friends and allies, as fascinating, interesting and funny as any picture or even more so. Also, as he jokes, the decision to make a children’s picture book with no pictures in it was dictated by the fact that he cannot draw. All in all, Novak’s foray into the literary territory is a yet another example of a person famous in one field trying himself in another one. At least in this particular case we deal with somebody who has a background in what he is going to do: in addition to writing position for â€Å"The Office† he majored in English and Spanish literature while in Harvard.

Puffed Products Ready-to-eat Breakfast and Starch-based...

Starch-based snacks and ready-to-eat breakfast cereal continue to increase in sales worldwide. Starch-based snacks are commonly made in the form of puffed products. Puffed products are appreciated mainly for their lightness and crispness. These qualities are related to the air cellular structure and degree of expansion. Puffing is a process used for engineering structures and properties of food materials to give a light, airy and crispy texture (Nath and Chattopadhyay, 2008; Mariotti et al., 2006). Process for making starch-based puffed products includes gelatinization of starch, cooling, drying, and then explosive expansion (Hoke et al., 2007). After starch gelatinization, retrogradation of starch molecules, amylose and amylopectin occurred during cooling and aging of the pastes (Perdon et al., 1999; Ji et al., 2007; Mariotti et al., 2009). The amylose-amylopectin ratio, which commonly reported in term of amylose content, has been known to be an important parameter affecting phys ical properties of starch pastes/gels and characteristics of puffed products (Hibi and Hikone, 1998; Boischot et al., 2003; Cheow et al., 2004; Saeleaw and Schleining, 2010). The retrograded amylose prepared for the crystal nuclei, which can increase the nuclei crystal growth, so the higher amylose content, the faster starch retrograded (Biliaderis, 1992) which showed high retrogradation enthalpy (Vandeputte et al., 2003; Narpinder et al., 2006) and provided the harder gel. For rice flour

Educational Psychology and Special Education Free Essays

What is the definition of a learning disability and who should qualify to be special education? What assessments should be made to be able to know what child belongs where? This is what we are going to explore in this paper. We want to see exactly who qualifies and how to go about assessing what needs can be met by choosing to place a child in special education or leaving in general education and making some modifications. The main point to remember for any child is doing the best we can for their success. We will write a custom essay sample on Educational Psychology and Special Education or any similar topic only for you Order Now Learning disabilities are a bit tough to diagnose, the reason for this is because learning disabilities affects everyone differently. While one person may have difficulty with reading or writing another person may have trouble with math or following through with directions. â€Å"Researchers think that learning disabilities are caused by differences in how a person’s brain works and how it processes information† (Medicinenet, 2013) Usually the people with learning disabilities, such as Aspbergers, are highly intelligent and only have problems with how the brain sends the information, not being non-intelligent. IDEA states that â€Å"A learning disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written that may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations, including conditions such as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia†. This encompasses a wide range of children and we have to figure out how to best assess whether these children should be put into special education, or if they could function better with modifications to the general education classroom. Because learning disabilities are so multidimensional the assessments must also be in order to properly diagnose what steps to take. One of the most important parts of assessment is to always keep everyone involved in the child’s life in the loop. Keeping open communication and checking often to see what is working and what is not is a vital key to the assessment process. Checking first who needs to be involved within the team and then going from there with making the plan and seeing if it works or what needs to be changed. It is important to find out first if the child truly has a learning disability, second the nature, specificity, and the severity of the learning disability to know how to proceed with it. If you do not know the extent you cannot do very well at teaching for their abilities when you do not know what is lacking. â€Å"Schools are required to implement a system of interventions before evaluating a child for a disability† (Logsdon, 2013) This is important because we do not want to put any child into a special education classroom without reason, this would not benefit that child at all. It is so important to know exactly what needs the child has and modify to try to benefit them before you place them. We must not simply send children to special education because the teacher does not want to deal with them. People tend to want to box people into certain categories and this just cannot happen with learning disabilities. A child who may have difficulty reading may be dyslexic, or they may simply not be being read to and worked with enough. They also may have moved into the country fairly recently and may be lacking because of a language barrier. There are 9 ways that are great for adapting instruction to be more easily understood by children with learning disabilities as stated by Teachers First. The first is adapting the size of what they are to read or do, then adapt the time for assignments and testing. Next, increase personal assistance by peer teaching, pairing students who are less adept with more advanced students. Fourth, is input, allow for more hands on types of teaching. Fifth, Adapt the skill level or the amount of problems that they must accomplish and change the output, how they respond to what was taught, such as drawing pictures, writing a story, or working with a computer program related to the lesson. Allow the child to participate in the lesson either mentally or physically to keep them on task. Alternate is the next one, adapt the goals and outcomes with the same  materials, tailor the lesson to the child’s needs and what they can handle, and lastly change curriculum if necessary. If the lesson is on the Vietnam war, you might be able to have them interview a person from the Vietnam war instead of having a discussion about it as they might get more out of that. It is all about our children and making the lessons understandable to them. An example of making adaptations to a lesson would be a child with vision impairment. For this child it is very difficult towards the end of the day to be able to read because her eyes are fatigued and cannot take much more strain. For this reason her parent is allowed to read to her and she can write her answers to questions because the child simply cannot do that for herself at the end of the day like the other children. She also has adaptations in her regular education classroom with magnifiers, a monitor by her desk to blow up what is on the board, all her books and papers are blown up, and she always sits in the front of the classroom. These are modifications for a visually impaired person who is very bright, but lacks some because of her vision impairment which creates the learning disability. â€Å"The world is full of examples of accommodations that permit people with disabilities to perform specific tasks they might not otherwise be able to. Drivers with poor vision wear glasses or contacts, elevators mark the buttons in Braille, and voters with disabilities may be given assistance by the person of their choice . † (Luke, Schwartz. 2010) We must do the same with our children. We need to take them and assess where their issues lie and do the best we can to create a successful learning environment for them! How to cite Educational Psychology and Special Education, Papers

Inherent and Business Risk HIH Insurance Limited

Question: Discuss about the Inherent and Business Risk for HIH Insurance Limited. Answer: Evaluating business risk of HIH Insurance limited: HIH Insurance limited is mainly hindered with insolvency and structure risk from its operations. Moreover, the business risk of the company mainly increased after the inclusion of high risk insurance arenas in their business activities. Bratten et al. (2013) argued that companies with the help of accoutring loopholes are able to inflate their balance sheet and portray wrong valuation of their firm. Organisational structure: Moreover, the companys organisational structure is mainly at risk as it had included high-risk insurance arenas in their operations. This high-risk operations included by the HIH insurance is not approved by the overall Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA). Moreover, the company also changed the perspective of ordinary policies by reinsuring them and increasing its overall exposure in film and marine insurance. Coetzee and Lubbe (2014) stated that with the help of laid down rules and regulation authorities are able to reduce unethical process conducted by auditors to increase their personal wealth. Risk of Insolvency: In addition, the risk of insolvency could also be identified as the overall inherit risk, which mainly changed from previous fiscal year after the inclusion of higher risk insurance products. Furthermore, the limited information exposure provided to the auditors mainly did not help in identifying the insolvency capacity of the company. In addition, HIH insurance also inflated their balance sheet to make their debt ratio lower, which in turn portrayed the company as solvent to its investors. Griffiths (2012) cited that due to the laws imposed by AASB the unethical measures conducted by companies could be detected, which in turn might help increase investors trust. Stating the inherent risk factors of HIH Insurance Limited: In addition, the overall inherent risk that might affect the financial report of HIH Insurance is the change in its operations. However, the auditors were not able to comprehend the difference in inherent risk of HIH insurance and other insurance companies. Furthermore, the company included future income tax benefit and deferred acquisitions costs in their balance sheet to reduce the debt ratio. Guenin et al. (2014) argued that companies mainly depict wrong valuation to reduce their debt ratio and attract potential investors, which in turn help in increasing their share price. Moreover, detection risk mainly loses its friction if the company omits certain transaction in their balance sheet. In addition, the limited information provided to the auditors mainly reduces the efficiency of the audit procedure. Furthermore, the external auditors mainly relied on the internal audit report of HIH insurance, which resulted in increasing the misstatement detection risk. In addition, the control risk is mainly used in detecting misstatements in financial report. Moreover, the company mainly insured high-risk activities like marine aviation, film financing and natural disaster. Furthermore, the inclusion of these new insurance policies mainly increased the overall inherent risk, which in turn increased the overall misstatement in their financial report (Hribar et al. 2014). Moreover, the misstatements conducted by the official of HIH insurance to its auditors mainly increased the inherent risk of the company. Reference: Bratten, B., Gaynor, L.M., McDaniel, L., Montague, N.R. and Sierra, G.E., 2013. The audit of fair values and other estimates: The effects of underlying environmental, task, and auditor-specific factors.Auditing: A Journal of Practice Theory,32(sp1), pp.7-44. Coetzee, P. and Lubbe, D., 2014. Improving the Efficiency and Effectiveness of Riskà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ Based Internal Audit Engagements.International Journal of Auditing,18(2), pp.115-125. Griffiths, M.P., 2012.Risk-based auditing. Gower Publishing, Ltd. Gunin-Paracini, H., Malsch, B. and Paill, A.M., 2014. Fear and risk in the audit process.Accounting, Organizations and Society,39(4), pp.264-288. Hribar, P., Kravet, T. and Wilson, R., 2014. A new measure of accounting quality.Review of Accounting Studies,19(1), pp.506-538.