Earth Have An Expiration Date - 1151 Words

Earth have an expiration date? It just might. If we don t do something to help our environment there will be no future generations. Our earth has been sending us warnings and distress signals for over forty years such as the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery which left thirty thousand people unemployed and seven hundred communities in poverty. In china water supplies are already scarce and not able to meet the needs of people, industries, and culture (Linden, pg.18). The following are some issues that are affecting our world today. Our atmosphere provides us with crucial things that we cannot survive without; such as clean air and oxygen, a stabilized climate, and protection from ultraviolet solar radiation. Due to†¦show more content†¦Acidification damages oceanic organisms which are currently more endangered than any other ecosystem. Two thirds of all fish depend on coastal wetlands, seagrass, and coral reefs, all of which are disappearing in vast amounts. Fifty-eight percent of coral reefs are jeopardized by human activity, and eighty percent of grasslands are suffering from soil degradation. Fishing fleets are forty percent larger than the ocean can currently sustain. All these things are caused by poisoning our lakes and rivers with fertilizers, silts, and sewage waters. Too much water is being taken from rivers that oftentimes causes our rivers to dry up before even reaching the sea. (Linden, pgs. 18-19). You can help by doing simple things such as turning off the faucet when brushing your teeth, or running the dishwasher and washer only when its full. Take shorter showers. Carry a reusable water bottle instead of a plastic bottle that goes back into our lands, littering our lands. Another problem related to the depletion of our earth’s water sources is soil erosion. Soil erosion is a reduction in the quality of topsoil. We need healthy soil to be able to plant healthy foods. Soil erosion reduces cropland activity and contributes to the pollution of waters. Already half of our topsoil has been lost over the last one hundred and fifty years. Our soils are becoming infertile due to being over exposed to harsh chemicals and trash (Gray,

The, The Greatest Threat Of Public Confidence - 1950 Words

Jimmy Rizzo Mr. Kotlewski Period 3 13 January 2017 The Latter Amendments Essay Draft As Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, â€Å"The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters† (Ruth Bader Ginsburg Quote). To elaborate, the Twenty Fourth Amendment forbids any government from making voters pay poll tax, money, or a fee to vote in any election. This opens up the right to vote to many more American citizens of any ethnicity or gender. To justify, a poll tax was a tax that was simply just paid for living in a taxed area, but became very†¦show more content†¦Toombs was known for his unfair practices to the African races, and usually if a white person could not afford to pay their poll tax, he was also known to â€Å"buy their vote† and pay the tax for them. Months after the Civil War ended, some Constitutio nal amendments were passed helping black rights and giving them the freedom to vote. Southerners were afraid of all this new political power towards the Negroes, so they did whatever they could to limit that power, and made it nearly impossible for Negroes to vote with the new laws they passed. With the Ku Klux Klan being formed and more discriminatory acts to interfere with black voting rights, it was not until the civil rights movements of the 1950’s and 1960’s until the amendment was finally brought up, almost a century later. During the Ku Klux Klan era, southerners passed laws to limit the power of African Americans, otherwise known as black codes. They did whatever they could to limit the black’s freedom, even with such small things like requiring them to use a different water fountain or, even bigger, forcing them to pay an unreasonable poll tax to vote. With the rise of civil rights acts though, it became harder and harder to limit their power, and in t he middle of 1962 when Congress proposed the amendment to require no fee to vote, southerners knew that this was more of the beginning of racial movements and equal rights to all.Show MoreRelatedInterned or Imprisoned1358 Words   |  5 Pagesbusinesses. Japanese immigrants were called Issei, and second-generation Japanese Americans were called Nisei. When Japanese and American tensions rose before the start of WWII, some government officials viewed the Japanese on the West Coast as a threat to the United States security. The government created lists to sort Japanese Americans depending on their risk and disloyalty. On December 7, 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, high-risk Japanese Americans were immediately questioned andRead MoreEssay about Enron Case637 Words   |  3 Pages1. The Enron debacle created what one public official reported was a â€Å"crisis of confidence† on the part of the public in the accounting profession. List the parties who you believe are most responsible for that crisis. Briefly justify each of your choices. a) With Enron, the responsibility and blame started with Enron’s executives, Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andrew Fastow. Their goal was to make Enron into the world’s greatest company. To make this goal a reality, they created a companyRead MoreThe Modern Medieval Hero1679 Words   |  7 Pageschild when he watched helplessly as his parents were gunned down in front of him during a mugging in Gotham City. This crime would come to define his life. To the public, he would excel and succeed his father and become the heir and millionaire of the Wayne corporation. In secret, he would dedicate himself to becoming one of the world’s greatest weapons against crime—the Batman. Batman perfectly embodies the idea of a hero. He combats crime in the city of Gotham with relative ease having pushed himselfRead MorePresident Franklin D. Roosevelt s New Deal1119 Words   |  5 Pagescouple of years of his presidency he passed legislation that created a few dozen government programs trying to fix anything from unemployment to fraud in the stock market. Most of these programs were successful. By the 1940’s, most of the public’s confidence had been restored as well, exemplifying the extent of the success of the New Deal. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was successful because it created programs that restored the public’s morale and that brought relief to many Americans. As ofRead MoreEssay On Data Security916 Words   |  4 Pagesintentional but unauthorized modification, destruction or disclosure through the use of physical security, administrative controls, logical controls, and other safeguards to limit accessibility. Protecting your customer information and ensuring full confidence in your data security measures will put you in good stead for protection against data loss and data security breaches. Data is the raw form of information stored as columns and rows in our databases, network servers and personal computers. ThisRead MoreChallenges That Managers Face985 Words   |  4 Pagesteam s welfare in order to build up their confidence towards the manager. Setting up a good role and example in an organisation faced with fierce competition is often seen as a difficult task for most managers. Issues regarding punctuality, incompetence and fraud often emerge in most established corporations, thus drastic steps should be taken to resolve the probl ems. Of course, when the managers appoint the team to do certain tasks, they must have confidence with the capability of the team in workingRead MoreBenefits Of A Large Global Market Consists Of Malaysia Airlines1486 Words   |  6 Pagessaid to have contributed to this huge loss. Following the horrific disappearance of the MH17 aircraft, Malaysia Airlines personnel seemed relatively unclear with their delivery of vital information. The method of executing the news to the general public was so notably vague and imprecise, that even members of media programmes such as Anthony McClellan of AMC constructed some critical remarks regarding the airline’s handling of the situation; â€Å"The government and the country’s search and rescue agenciesRead More American Politics Essay examples1260 Words   |  6 Pages Due to the economic strife the American public knows all too well what a recession is. It is economic hardship that has led to the loss of thousands of jobs and businesses. This economic hardship has led to many people losing their homes, cars and other valuables. Why is it that when the Obama administration talks about the recession they refer to it as â€Å"The Bank Stabilization Plan.† (Stewart) Something that has caused the total meltdown of the American Economy being referred to as â€Å"The BankRead MoreThe Automotive Industry Has Done A Good Job1387 Words   |  6 PagesThe automotive industry has become one of the greatest industries today and is one of the world’s most crucial economic sectors by revenue. All the same, not only does automotive industry develops and manufacture but it also markets and sale motor veh icles globally. Social cultural varies for example population, social duty, ethnic differences, and the influence of consumer mobility affects directly to the automobile industry. Most of the consumer s concerns are the price, and the brand of theRead MoreDigital Fraud Common Forms and Preventative Measures Essays1627 Words   |  7 PagesIntroduction â€Å"Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society† -Samuel Johnson In our ever changing world, technological advances over the past twenty years have paved the way for and deepened our reliance on the digital and computerized lifestyle; electronic mailing, online social networking, computer gaming, e-book reading, mobile phoning, etc

Study On Quantitative Easing And Krishnamurthy Finance Essay - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 5 Words: 1493 Downloads: 4 Date added: 2017/06/26 Category Finance Essay Type Research paper Did you like this example? Quantitative easing, also known as large scale asset purchases (LSAP), is a specific monetary policy used by central banks to add to the supply of money by increasing reserves of the banking system. In certain economic situations, such as a low inflationary environment like the one we are experiencing today, targeting a low interest rate is not sufficient to maintain the level of money supply desired by the Federal Reserve, and so quantitative easing is employed. Through the quantitative easing process, the central bank purchases securities-most likely longer-dated Treasury Bonds and mortgage backed securities-in an effort to push longer-term interest rates lower and expand the money supply by making it cheaper for individuals to borrow and for businesses to raise capital. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Study On Quantitative Easing And Krishnamurthy Finance Essay" essay for you Create order This works because the borrower receives about 93 percent more money than the bank holds in reserves (money creation). Krishnamurthy We build on the regression analysis from KVJ to estimate the effect of a purchase of long-term securities via the safety channel. We focus on the safety channel because it appears to be a dominant effect from the event studies. In KVJ, we mainly focus on the effect of changes in the total supply of Treasuries, irrespective of maturity, on bond yields. For evaluating QE, we are interested more in asking how a change in the supply of long-term Treasuries will affect yields. The larger effects obtained from the QE1 event study than the regression approach suggest that changes in Treasury supply have much larger impact on the safety premium in times of unusually high safety demand than they do in average times. Gagnon, et. al, (2010) report that in 10-year equivalents the Fed had purchased $169bn of Treasuries, $59bn of Agency debt, and $573bn of Agency MBS by Feb 1, 2010. The total purchase up to this date was $1.625tn and the anticipated total was $1.725tn. We scale up the n umbers up to Feb 1, 2010 by 1.725/1.625 to evaluate the effect of the total purchase. Important (Theoretical) Takeshi Kimura and David Small (2004) (Finance and Economics Discussion Series Divisions of Research Statistics and Monetary Affairs Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C. Quantitative easing was expected to have three effects on financial markets. First, it would lower longer-term interest rates because the Banks announcement that the new policy regime would be maintained until CPI inflation became zero or more would lower expected short-term rates. If this so-called commitment effect also contributed to diminishing uncertainty over future short-term interest rates, term premiums also would be reduced and hence longer term rates would be lowered further. 8 Such announcement effects would tend to be reinforced by the observed increase in current account balances. Second, the abundant provision of liquidity would make money market participants feel more secure about the ongoing availability of funds, thereby preserving financial market stability. Uncertainties about conditions in money markets might, at times, lead to elevated demands for liquidity, boosting the rates of illiquid assets relative to those of liquid assets. In such circumstances, the elevated levels of current account balances would reduce the probability of a liquidity shortage, and consequently would reduce liquidity premiums. Third, an open market operation by a central bank would change the relative supplies of assets held by the public and, thereby, may lead to changes in the relative prices of assets. This so-called portfolio-rebalancing effect has been described as follows: Suppose that a representative bank holds multiple assets and rebalances its portfolio so as to maximize its objective function under the constraint of containing overall risk amount below a certain limit. For example, if we assume that a utility function with given absolute risk aversion, the expected return and its variance from the portfolio become explanatory variables of utility. Risk constraint crucially depends on the capital position of the bank. Then, let us think of a case where, as a result of the outright purchase of long-term JGB by the BOJ, a portion of the long-term government holdings of the representative bank is converted to monetary base. The reduction on portfolio risk, that is, interest rate volatility risk of government bonds, generates room for new risk taking, and thus part of monetary base should be converted to some type of risk assets. At equilibrium, utility is kept constant by marginally increasing the amount of holding risk assets, and the marginal increa se in the expected profits offsets increased risk. In this rebalancing process, the risk premium of risk asset prices will be decreased. Although quantitative easing supported that improvement of Japans economy, the Banks drastic quantitative easing has not been quite strong enough by itself to boost the economy and prices, as stated by Governor Fukui (2003). In particular, it did not seem to have a strong beneficial effect on the corporate financing environment, such as on corporate bond rates. (See Figure 3 (panel 1).) The weakening role of banks as financial intermediaries made it especially important for easier monetary policy to benefit capital markets. However, the spread between interest rates on corporate bonds and risk-free government bonds declined only marginally after March 2001. And those firms that did feel the benefits of monetary easing were limited to those with high credit ratings. Credit spreads on low-grade corporate bonds rose after October 2001. The prices of other financial assets also did not seem to benefit from quantitative easing. Even after the introduction of quantitative easing, stoc k prices continued to decline until the summer 2003. (See Figure 3 (panel 2).) As for foreign exchange rates, the yen rate against the dollar depreciated rapidly from November 2001 until February 2002. (See Figure 3 (panel 3).) However, this depreciation seems to be attributable not only to monetary easing but also to a change in the economic outlook; while expectations for recovery of the US economy strengthened, uncertainty over prospects for Japans economy intensified, including financial system stability. Thereafter, on net, the yen appreciated. In the context of the Bank of Japans policy of quantitative easing, we have explicitly considered portfolio-rebalancing effects and how they may be affected by the attempts of portfolio holders to diversify business-cycle risk. In this framework, an outright purchase of long-term government bonds does not necessarily reduce the portfolio risk of financial institutions and other private-sector investors and thereby generate room for ne w risk taking as has been suggested. Indeed, the portfolio risk associated with the business cycle may have increased as the BOJs purchases of long-term government debt reduced the private-sectors holding of this asset whose returns are counter-cyclical, If we focus only on the portfolio-rebalancing effects, and neglect the other effects such as the BOJ using quantitative easing to demonstrate resolve to keep short-term rates low, the BOJs quantitative easing may have increased the demand for those JGB substitutes whose returns also are counter-cyclical. But these policy actions may have decreased the demand for assets whose returns are pro-cyclical and thus may have increased the risk premium for pro-cyclical assets. The following chart summarizes these estimation results. Doh (2010) See the paper conclusion Oda, N., and Ueda, K. (2007). The effects of the bank of Japans zero interest rate commitment and quantitative monetary easing on the yield curve: A macro-finance approach. The Japanese Economic Review. We have examined empirically the effects of the ZIRP and QMEP in Japan on mediumto long-term interest rates using a macro-finance model. We tentatively conclude that the BOJs monetary policy under the zero interest rate environment since 1999 has functioned mainly through the zero rate commitment, which has led to reduced medium- to long-term interest rates. More specifically, the commitment has been effective in lowering the expectations component of interest rates, especially with short- to medium-term maturities, while it has been less effective in lowering the risk premium component. In contrast, the portfolio rebalancing effect either by the BOJs supplying liquidity beyond the required level to keep the short-term policy rate at virtually zero (i.e. the expansion of the CAB at the BOJ) or by the BOJs purchases of JGBs on the risk premium component of the interest rates has not been found significant. There is some evidence that raising the target for the CABs has been percei ved by the market as a signal indicating the BOJs greater willingness to carry on RZIRP and has thus enhanced the effects of the zero rate commitment, although this interpretation is subject to further examination. Stroebel, J. C., and Taylor, J. B. (2009). Estimated impact of the feds mortgage-backed securities purchase program. National Bureau of Economic Research. We examine the quantitative impact of the Federal Reserves mortgage-backed securities (MBS) purchase program. We focus on how much of the recent decline in mortgage interest rate spreads can be attributed to these purchases. The question is more difficult than frequently perceived because of simultaneous changes in prepayment and default risks. When we control for these risks, we find evidence of statistically insignificant or small effects of the program. For specifications where the existence or announcement of the program appears to have lowered spreads, we find no separate effect of the size of the stock of MBS purchased by the Fed.

Why We Spend Money On Space Exploration - 758 Words

Why we spend money on space exploration, when greater problems exist here on planet earth. Giovanni Araiza The Art Institute of Phoenix  The US has a budget of $3.4 trillion dollars, $18.5 billion of those dollars goes towards funding and further researching space exploration such as NASA (Amadeo, 2016). Its a colossal amount of money but breaking it down, that is only 0.5% of the entire pie. You may be asking yourself; why this is such a big deal if its such a small fraction? Or simply why don’t we take someone else s budget? What if you where told â€Å" The answer to solving the world’s biggest problems is in the stars†(Garan, 2014). Many individuals think NASA only does research to benefit themselves and them only, it’s a†¦show more content†¦Its common to think the vacuum of space only has nothing but bad intentions; but rather then fighting with it, work with it, and it ll give you much more in return. Stepping away from everyday necessities and medical research, national security is always a big part in the US. With the high possibility of terrorism attacks, missile crisis, or even a asteroid heading right for face the of earth. NASA’s top of the edge satellites monitor all of this for us on a 24 hour basis. We have eyes in the sky for more then documentation, but also to keep the human species safe. â€Å"A serious and well funded space program must have the capacity to monitor large asteroids that could potentially destroy our planet†(Intini, 2015). Those million dollar satellites guarantee our safety in the long run as a human race. Aside from all the inventions and propulsion of the human race, our space program has brought us characteristics and trades that have pushed the limits of man. â€Å"†¦Higher level of precision than human beings had to do before the space industry came along†(Griffin, 2007) has put us where we are today. The space program has pushed and broken limits we would ve never know were possible. The available room for error is zero percent, everything either works perfect or it doesn t work at all â€Å"You have to value hardShow MoreRelatedThe Benefits of Space Exploration Essay649 Words   |  3 Pagescountry often wonder why our government spends millions of dollars on space exploration every year. Well, new observations and data are essential to our society to advance in the understanding of life and the possibility of life on another planet. In reality, science is the true foundation for technology and economic growth. We cannot constantly depend on current facts and know ledge; rather, we must look beyond the horizon and expand our understanding about the world around us. Yes, we have to take risksRead MorePublic Money Should Cut Down Expenses For Space Exploration847 Words   |  4 PagesPublic money should be spent wisely and with regard to the interests of taxpayers. If the developed technologies will be used in the futrue to earn money for private companies and not citizens, then its research should be financed with private funds. A private investor uses financial resources much more efficiently and achieve better results. Proof of this is the activity of Space X, belonging to billionaire Elon Musk. This company is very active in the field of space flight and space exploration. EvenRead MoreBenefits Of Space Exploration900 Words   |  4 Pagesworlds space exploration program. But does this benefit us at all? Good morning 8 romero and mr mcgowan today i will be talking about how space exploration is a waste of money. Why do we need to waste ou r money to find out if there is water on Mars or not? We could be spending all that money on beneficial things like finding a cure for cancer or feeding the starving millions around the globe, the needs of humanity should always be our first priority so I strongly agree that space exploration is a wasteRead MoreThe Discovery Of Space Exploration1560 Words   |  7 Pagesa second Earth are exciting. And we keep getting closer. History is flooded with major astronomical discovery. Of course, this had not been without controversy (as Galileo knew all too well). The modern controversy regarding space exploration is not of religious concern, however, but a socioeconomic one. Before writing this article, I had my own reservations about space exploration. Why not focus our resources on exploring and improving our own planet first? Why waste resources on trying to putRead MoreSpace Exploration : The Final Frontier1241 Words   |  5 PagesSpace is often referred to as â€Å"The final frontier.† But it may stayed unexplored if a few select citizens have their way. Some concerned citizens are pushing for the removal of Space Exploration from our national budget.Lots of people who are against space exploration don’t understand how it benefits them and their families. Space Exploration needs to continue because it unifies and benefits many of the major countries of the world by delivering much needed scientific and medical advances. SpaceRead MoreIs Space Exploration Worthwhile?1077 Words   |  5 PagesIs space exploration worthwhile? Space exploration is vital to the future of mankind, however it is extremely costly to fund. Space is infinite, therefore the possibilities for exploration are endless. Space may, more than likely, contain new materials which we might find useful here on Earth. This incredibly vast expanse offers unlimited land to farm, mine, colonise and dump waste. The most exciting part of all of this is the chance of finding new life, beyond what we can imagine. However withRead MoreNasa s The Space Of Space999 Words   |  4 Pagesother achievements during the Space Race, many Americans yearned to explore the depths of the unknown Universe. From quasars to brown dwarf stars, there are many wonders that the universe holds for the human race if we decide to leap into the exploration of the universe. Some may believe that reaching for the stars is too costly. However, the exploration of space is within our grasp, and by increasing NASA’s funding, we are able to reach them. So yes, we should fund our space administration in order forRead MoreThe Space Of Space Exploration1464 Words   |  6 Pageson it, humanity must continue to invest in space exploration.. Technologies from the space program can be used to benefit the world and everyday life. Space flight encourages scientific aspirations and therefore more college educated people. The answers to the most deep-rooted questions of humanity lie in space. Who are we, why are we here? Are we alone? Why spend money on spaceflight when we have plenty of problems here on earth? The money that we spend on spaceflight will circle around to solveRead MoreEssay On The Space Race755 Words   |  4 Pagescan explore on Earth, Space is infinite. The Space Race was a historical competition between the Soviet Union and the United States for the first humans to reach the moon. Taking place during 1957-1975, the Space Race showcased the determination between the two nations to display who had the superior science and technology know ledge. After the Russians created the first satellite, the United States felt threatened that the Soviet Union would have military control over space and began to race againstRead MoreSpace Exploration Is The Solution For All Of Our Problems1289 Words   |  6 PagesSpace exploration is the solution to all of our problems. Fact. Population control spiralling out of control? Colonise. Running out of energy? Solar Generators on a dedicated space station. It’s shockingly simple. Yes, the cost of it, and the time it would take to set up, and the resources it would require to take up could be better spent. If we didn’t take massive risks now and again, we would all still be in the Dark Ages. The Apollo Program was a massive expenditure, and it was a massive risk

Asaaaa Free Essays

Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 www. elsevier. com/locate/pragma On newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers Daniel Dor* Department of Communications, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel Abstract This paper suggests an explanatory functional characterization of newspaper headlines. We will write a custom essay sample on Asaaaa or any similar topic only for you Order Now Couched within Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance theory, the paper makes the claim that headlines are designed to optimize the relevance of their stories for their readers: Headlines provide the readers with the optimal ratio between contextual e? ect and processing e? ort, and direct readers to construct the optimal context for interpretation. The paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted in the news-desk of one daily newspaper. It shows that the set of intuitive professional imperatives, shared by news-editors and copy-editors, which dictates the choice of headlines for speci? c stories, can naturally be reduced to the notion of relevance optimization. The analysis explains why the construction of a successful headline requires an understanding of the readers—their state-of-knowledge, their beliefs and expectations and their cognitive styles—no less than it requires an understanding of the story. It also explains the fact that skilled newspaper readers spend most of their reading time scanning the headlines—rather than reading the stories. # 2002 Elsevier Science B. V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Headlines; Relevance theory; Pragmatics; News value; News framing; Media, communication 1. Introduction This paper is an attempt to suggest an explicit and generalized answer to a very fundamental question in the study of the mass media, i. e. , the question of the communicative function of newspaper headlines. The importance of the role of headlines in the communicative act performed by newspapers can hardly be exaggerated, yet the nature of this role has virtually never been explicated in the literature. As we shall see below, the regular strategy adopted in the literature has been to make ? negrained descriptive distinctions between di? erent types of headlines—news headlines in ‘quality newspapers’; news headlines in ‘tabloid newspapers’; ‘summarizing * Tel. : +972-3–6406521; fax: +972-3-6406032. E-mail address: danield@post. tau. ac. il (D. Dor). 0378-2166/02/$ – see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B. V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(02)00134-0 696 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 headlines’; ‘localizing headlines’, ‘quotation headlines’, etc. —and assign them different types of communicative functions. In this paper, I will suggest an explanatory functional de? nition of newspaper headlines which attempts to transcend the above distinctions in type and explain the very fact that newspapers—all types of newspapers—have headlines in them. The functional de? nition to be developed in this paper relies very heavily on Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) technical notion of relevance. Newspaper headlines will be functionally de? ned as relevance optimizers: Newspaper headlines are relevance optimizers: They are designed to optimize the relevance of their stories for their readers. This functional de? nition positions the headline in its appropriate role as a textual negotiator between the story and its readers. It explains why the construction of a successful headline requires an understanding of the readers—their state-of-knowledge, their beliefs and expectations and their cognitive styles—no less than it requires an understanding of the story. It reduces the di? rences between the di? erent subtypes of headlines mentioned above to a matter of tactical choice: As we shall see, all the di? erent subtypes target the same functional goal, that of relevance optimization, although they do it in di? erent ways. The literature on newspaper headlines covers a wide range of theoretical and empirical topics, all the way from the grammar of English headlines t o the e? ects of headlines on news comprehension and recall. 1 Surprisingly, however, the literature dealing directly with the communicative function of headlines is rather sparse. I will review it in the next section. In Section 3, I will brie? y introduce Sperber and Wilson’s theory, and then develop the notion of relevance optimization. In Section 4, I will apply the notion of relevance optimization to newspaper headlines. In Section 5, I will present the results of an empirical study conducted in the news-desk of the Israeli national newspaper Ma’ariv, where I followed the process of headline production from close range. 2 I will show that the set of intuitive professional imperatives, shared by news-editors and copy-editors, which dictates the choice of headlines for speci? stories, can naturally be reduced to one meta-imperative: Make the headline such that it renders the story optimally-relevant for the readers. In Section 6, I will apply the relevance-based conception to the analysis of tabloid headlines. In Section 7, I will deal with the role of the reader in this framework, and show that my relevance-based theory explains some of the mo re intriguing behavioral patterns manifested by newspaper readers—especially the fact that many skilled readers On headline reading, interpretation and recall, see Henley et al. 1995), Leon (1997), Lindemann (1989), Perfetti et al. (1987), Pfau (1995) and van Dijk (1988 and references therein); on headline production, see Bell (1984, 1991), Fasold (1987) and Chang et al. (1992); on the grammar of headlines, see Bell (1984), Jenkins (1990) and Mardh (1980); on metaphors in headlines, see de Knop (1985); on headlines from a cross-linguistic perspective, see Dierick (1987) and Sidiropoulou (1995). 2 Between 1996 and 1998, I worked as a senior news-editor and head of the news-desk in Ma’ariv. This was a period of very intensive participant observation: I was involved in the decision-making process concerning the formulation of thousands of headlines. The e-mail exchanges which were analyzed for this paper were randomly collected throughout this period—from other senior editors. 1 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 697 spend most of their reading time scanning the headlines rather than reading the stories. In the concluding section, I will sketch some of the larger-scale implications of my theory, and suggest some directions for further research. . Multiple types, multiple functions Traditionally, newspaper headlines have been functionally characterized as short, telegram-like summaries of their news items. This is especially true with respect to news headlines. Van Dijk (1988) couches this traditional insight within his discourseanalytic framework: ‘‘Each news item in the press has a Headline . . . and many have a Lead, whether mark ed o? by special printing type or not. We also have an elementary rule for them: Headline precedes Lead, and together they precede the rest of the news item. Their structural function is also clear: Together they express the major topics of the text. That is, they function as an initial summary. Hence, as in natural stories, we may also introduce the category Summary, dominating Headline and Lead. The semantic constraint is obvious: Headline+Lead summarize the news text and express the semantic macrostructure. ’’ Obviously, some newspaper headlines do provide what seems to be a summary (or abstract) of their stories, but the general theoretical conception which takes this to be the essential function of the headline seems to be too narrow, for at least three complementary reasons. First, even the most prototypical news headlines, those which appear in what is sometimes called ‘quality newspapers’, do not always summarize their stories. Some headlines highlight a single detail extracted out of the story, and others contain a quotation which the editor decided should be promoted to the foreground. As we shall see below, some headlines even contain material which does not appear in the news item itself. The fact that headlines do not always summarize, but sometimes highlight or quote, has been noted by di? erent writers. Bell (1991), for example, makes a distinction between headlines which ‘‘abstract the main event of the story’’, and headlines which ‘‘focus on a secondary event or a detail’’ (p. 188–9). Nir (1993) distinguishes between headlines which function as ‘‘a summary of the story’’ and ‘‘headlines which, rather than summarize the story, promote one of the details of the story’’ (p. 25). 3 Second, the traditional notion of headlines-as-summaries de? nitely does not capture the function of headlines in more popular newspapers, and especially in tabloids. This point has been made by di? rent writers, most notably by Lindemann (1990). As Lindemann shows, tabloid headlines rarely summarize their stories, are not always telegram-like, and in many cases are not even informative. Lindemann discusses the 3 Note that none of the above writers goes beyond the descriptive labeling of the di? er ent types of headlines to suggest explicit theoretical de? nitions and explanations. This fact is most clearly demonstrated by Bernstein and Garst (1982), quoted in Lindemann (1990), who claim that ‘‘†¦ the headline contains the main highlight of the story. Since it is the most conspicuous part and the part that is read ? st, the copy editor must present the essence of the news before he goes further’’. In this short quotation, Bernstein and Garst seem to equate the essence of the story with its highlight, thus equating the function of summarizing with that of highlighting. 698 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 function of tabloid headlines in poetic terms: They present the reader with a ‘‘fairly complex riddle’’, which, ? rst, triggers frames and belief systems in the reader’s mind, and, then, gets resolved in the ensuing text. Thus, the following headline, (1) NO-LA-LA! The Frogs Get Bored with B ed raps the reader ‘‘in the treadmill of well-established cliches and prejudice’’, through the use of such expressions as frogs, no-la-la and bed, and is then informationally resolved in the intro: ‘‘The days of the great French lovers are over—froggies just don’t fancy it any more. A third of women and a quarter of men told a nationwide survey they found bedtime one big yawn’’. Implicit in Lindemann’s analysis is the assumption, that the function of tabloid headlines is so radically di? erent from their function in quality newspapers, that the two cannot be theoretically uni? ed. As I will show below, the relevance-based analysis will allow exactly for that—to my mind, a very welcome theoretical result. The third reason to reject the traditional conception is the simple fact that headlines seem to have an additional, pragmatic function, beyond the semanticallyoriented function which is supposed to be captured by the headline-as-summary analysis. Bell (1991) says that headlines are a ‘‘part of news rhetoric whose function is to attract the reader’’ (p. 189). Nir (1993) claims that the headline has ‘‘to attract the attention of the reader and provoke the reader to read the whole story’’. In a sophisticated analysis of the semiotics of headlines, Iarovici and Amel (1989) explicitly contend that the headline has a ‘‘double function’’: ‘‘The implicit convention between author and reader regarding the intention of correlating a text to another text as a headline, and regarding the formal marking of this quality by a privileged position, concerns the double function of the headline: a semantic function, regarding the referential text, and a pragmatic function, regarding the reader (the receiver) to whom the text is addressed. The two functions are simultaneous, the semantic function being included in and justi? ed by the pragmatic function. †¦ The main function of the headline †¦ is to alert the reader (receiver) to the nature or the content of the text. This is the pragmatic function of the headline, and it includes the semantic one. The headline enables the reader to grasp the meaning of the text. The headline functions as a plurality of speech acts (urging, warning, and informing)’’ (p. 441–443). The challenge posed by the above assertions is that of theoretical uni? cation. At least two questions are involved: First, can we functionally de? ne the headline in a way which would transcend the above distinctions between the di? erent semantically-oriented functions? In other words, is there a generalized function which summarizing headlines, localizing headlines and quotation headlines have in common? Second, can we de? ne the headline in a way which would transcend the distinction between the above semantic function and the parallel pragmatic function which D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 699 headlines ful? ll? I would like to claim that this theoretical move becomes possible once we couch the functional analysis of headlines within the framework of Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) theory of relevance. 4 3. Relevance theory and relevance optimization Sperber and Wilson’s theory is an attempt to reduce a very complex set of phenomena having to do with communication and interpretation to a very constrained set of explanatory, cognitive notions. In its essence, the theory is one of cognitive cost-e? ectiveness: It claims that human cognitive processes are geared to achieving the greatest possible cognitive e? ct for the smallest processing e? ort. This metaprinciple is incarnated in Sperber and Wilson’s technical notion of relevance. Let us take a look at the fundamental tenets of this framework: Our starting point is the individual mind: Every individual mentally represents in his or her mind a huge set of assumptions. Assumptions are propositional entitiesthey are the type of entities that can be believed to be true. Our assumptions may include, among other things, information on the immediate physical environment, expectations about the future, scienti? hypotheses, religious beliefs, anecdotal memories, general cultural assumptions, beliefs about the personal lives of our acquaintances, knowledge about politics and history, beliefs about our own emotions, fears and hopes, and so on. Each of the assumptions represented by the individual has a ‘‘strength’’ for that individual. The strength of the assumption for the individual is the level of con? dence with which the individual holds to the belief that the assumption is true. The strength of the assumption is a function of its cognitive processing history. Thus, for example, ‘‘assumptions based on a clear perceptual experience tend to be very strong; assumptions based on the acceptance of somebody’s word have a strength commensurate with one’s con? dence in the speaker; the strength of assumptions arrived at by deduction depends on the strength of the premises from which they were derived’’ (p. 77) Note that the strength of an assumption for the individual has nothing to do with its objective validity—individuals may have a very strong belief in assumptions which are totally false, and vice versa. When an individual hears, or reads, a novel assumption, he or she always interprets it in a context. The notion of context is used here as a psychological construct: It is a subset of the assumptions which the hearer already represents in his or her long-term memory. Informally, what the mind of the individual does in the process of interpretation may be thought of as a comparison of the new assumption with the subset of assumptions represented in the individual’s memory. Sperber and Wilson name the cognitive apparatus responsible for this process of comparison- ‘‘the deductive device’’. The comparison of the novel assumption with the existing 4 The general notion of pragmatic relevance, which is not to be equated with Sperber and Wilson’s technical one, plays some role in van Dijk’s (1988) analysis of news selection. However, van Dijk does not make the connection between his notion of relevance and the function of headlines, which he takes to be summaries of their texts. 700 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 assumptions may have di? erent types of outputs: It may turn out, for example, that the novel assumption already exists in the individual’s long term-memory, in which case it is not new for the individual. Or it may be new, in which case it may either be in line, or in contradiction with some of the already existing assumptions. If, for example, the novel assumption contradicts existing assumptions, and if it is strong enough, the process of comparison will end up with the weakening of the existing assumptions. In some cases, it may even end up with the erasure of those assumptions. If the new information is in line with some existing assumptions, it may serve to strengthen them some more. Moreover, the union of the new assumption with some existing assumptions may lead to the deduction of additional assumptions. Thus, for example, if the individual already represents the assumption that ‘‘whenever Peter goes to a party, it becomes a success’’, and he or she now learns that ‘‘Peter came to Bill’s party’’, then the deductive device deduces an additional assumption, namely that ‘‘Bill’s party was a success’’. To the extent that the comparison of the new assumption with the old ones results in a change to the individual’s set of prior assumptions (if it either adds new assumptions, or weakens or strengthens existing ones), we say that the new information has a contextual e? ect for the individual. Now, the following point is crucial: The deductive device does not compare every novel assumption to the entire set of assumptions represented in the individual’s longterm memory. Doing this would be cognitively impossible. This means that the comparison is done with some subset of existing assumptions. This, in turn, raises a very important question: How does the deductive device choose this subset? Traditionally, pragmaticists have assumed that the context for the interpretation of an utterance is simply given: It consists of the immediate environment and the information explicitly mentioned in the conversation prior to the utterance. Sperber and Wilson ? ip this assumption on its head and suggest a radical alternative: They show that the deductive device has to update the context for the interpretation for each new assumption, and that the speci? c subset of existing assumptions which is chosen for the context is determined, at least partially, by the content of the new assumption. In cognitive terms, this means that the order of events in comprehension is reversed: It is not that the deductive device ? rst sets the context, and then interprets the new assumption. On the contrary, the deductive device has to partially ? gure out the meaning of the new assumption, retrieve a speci? c subset of assumptions from long-term memory, store them in its own short-term memory, and then make the comparison. An example should make this radical conception rather intuitive. Take a look at the following exchanges: (2) A: How are you? B: Not so good, Mary has that ear-infection again, I’m worried. (3) A: How are you? B: Great, I just bought the tickets. We’re ? ying to Beijing in exactly four weeks. In order to interpret B’s answer in each of these exchanges, A has to compare them to a subset of existing assumptions. The proper context in (2) should include assumptions about the identity of Mary, her relation to B, her medical history, ear- D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 701 infections, and so on and so forth. The proper context in (3) should include assumptions about B’s travel plans, the identity of her companion, or companions, whatever assumptions A has about Beijing, and so on and so forth. Obviously, these assumptions are not stored in A’s short-term memory on a permanent basis. A’s deductive device has to retrieve these assumptions from long-term memory, and only then make the comparison and deduce the contextual e? ects. We may now make two parallel cognitive assumptions regarding the process I have described. First, we may assume that in its appropriate context, a new piece of information has a certain number of contextual e? ects, which, at least theoretically, can be counted. Practically speaking, when we deal with interpretations of actual utterances by real people, we do not know exactly how to make the measurement, but the dea itself is intuitive enough for us to accept. We may be pretty certain that in di? erent contexts, the same piece of information may yield di? erent amounts of contextual e? ects, and that in the same context, some pieces of information would yield more contextual e? ects than others. Second, we may assume that the work of the deductive device involves some mental e? ort, which—theoretically speaking, again- may be measured. 5 Other things being equal, for example, the computation of a more complex piece of information will take more e? ort than the computation of a simpler one. Moreover, the construction of a new context for interpretation also involves some mental e? ort: To the extent that the interpretation of the novel piece of information necessitates the retrieval of a larger set of assumptions from long-term memory, the mental e? ort involved in the interpretation process would be greater. The measurements of contextual e? ect and mental e? ort constitute the basis of Sperber and Wilson’s notion of relevance: (4) Relevance for an individual (p. 145): a. An assumption is relevant to an individual to the extent that the contextual e? cts achieved when it is optimally processed are large. b. An assumption is relevant to an individual to the extent that the e? ort required to process it optimally is small. It is crucial to understand that this is not a de? nition of relevance in some objective sense, but a claim concerning the way our minds make relevance judgments about new assumptions: We consider new assumptions to be relevant if they carry a c ontextual e? ect at a reasonable cognitive price. We judge new assumptions to be irrelevant if they do not carry a contextual e? ect, or if the computation of the contextual e? ct entails too much of a mental e? ort. Note that this is a comparative, gradual conception of relevance, rather than a binary one: New assumptions are not either relevant or not; they are more or less relevant than others, in di? erent contexts, for di? erent people. Thus, for example, a regular newspaper reader will prob5 Sperber and Wilson (1986, p. 130) conceptualize about the measurement of contextual e? ects and cognitive e? ort in terms of physico-chemical changes which occur in the brain as a result of the processing of the contextual e? ects. 702 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 bly judge a piece of local news to be more relevant than a piece of foreign news because (i) the potential contextual e? ect derivable from the local news would probably be larger; and (ii) the e? ort n eeded to interpret the foreign news (especially in terms of the retrieval of the appropriate set of assumptions from long-term memory) would probably be larger. This judgment need not be made consciously; the reader may simply skip the foreign-news page, or note that ‘foreign news is boring’. Note, however, that the very same reader may take the trouble to read the foreign news to the extent that their contextual e? cts would be worth his or her processing e? ort. This may be the case, for example, if the story is about a country which the reader intends to visit; if some people which the reader knows are there; if there is a local angle to the foreign story; if the foreign story has a global consequence which is felt locally, and so on. Finally, note that this technical notion of relevance should not be equated with relevance in the ordinary sense of the word. Relevance in this ordinary sense may be thought of as the measurement of the association, or congruence, betwe en some content and its context of interpretation. Thus, a news story will be relevant in this sense to the extent that it is about those issues which are directly related to the readers’ lives and interests. Indeed, relevance in this sense may play a role in news value judgments. Note, however, that a story may be relevant in this ordinary sense but very low on relevance in the technical sense (if it is long and complicated to read, for example, or if it does not carry a lot of new information); and it may be irrelevant in the ordinary sense, but high on relevance in the technical sense- if its potential contextual e? cts justify the construction of a new context for interpretation. Now, our technical de? nition of relevance is addressee-oriented, but it may actually tell us something of importance about the role of speakers in communicative contexts. Think about a speaker, Ann, who is trying to tell her addressee, John, a story. Being a cooperative communicator, Ann would like to make the story as relevant for John as possib le. How should she go about achieving this goal? According to relevance theory, she has three principled strategies which she can try to dopt: (i) First, Ann can try to compress the largest possible number of new assumptions (those which are new for John) into her story: Other things being equal, the more new assumptions the story contains, the more contextual e? ects it may have for John. In the worst-case scenario, the story will not contain any assumptions which are new for John, in which case he is going to ? nd it totally irrelevant. Ann de? nitely needs to ? nd a way to do better than that. In the best-case scenario, on the other hand, the story will contain a very large number of new assumptions. As we shall see below, this is not always going to be possible. (ii) Second, Ann can try to minimize John’s processing e? ort: Other things being equal, the smaller the e? ort he has to put in, the greater the relevance of the story is going to be for him. In the worst-case scenario, the story is going to be too long and complicated, and John is going to lose interest. Ann de? nitely has to avoid that. In the best-case scenario, on the other hand, the D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 703 story will take a very minimal e? ort to process. Again, this is not always going to be possible. iii) Third, Ann can try to manipulate the context in which John is going to interpret her story. Other things being equal, the closer the context of interpretation is to the optimal one, the more contextual e? ects the story is going to carry for John. (Note that in regular conversation we regularly take the trouble to manipulate our addressee’s context of interpretat ion, especially when we wish to ‘‘change the topic of conversation’’: We say things like ‘Oh, I wanted to tell you something about Bill’, or ‘talking about school, did you hear about Bill’s exam? ’). In the worst-case scenario, John is going to try to interpret Ann’s story in the wrong context, and the interpretation is going to yield no contextual e? ects. In the best-case scenario, the story is going to be interpreted in the most appropriate context, yielding the maximal amount of contextual e? ects. This, again, is not always going to be possible. Now, it is very important to realize that the three strategies mentioned above are not only completely intertwined, but are also in direct competition with each other. This is why achieving the maximal results associated with each of the strategies is not always possible. This is so for the following reasons: (i) First, every new assumption which the speaker adds to the story does not only contribute to the overall number of contextual e? ects- it also adds to the overall processing e? ort. Thus, the new assumption adds to the overall relevance of the story only to the extent that it clearly adds more contextual e? ect than processing e? ort. To the extent that the new assumption adds more to the processing e? ort than to the contextual e? ect, it actually reduces the overall relevance of the story. In this case, more information results in less relevance. So, the attempt to maximize relevance simply by maximizing the amount of new information is bound to end up in failure. The speaker has to ? gure out the optimal amount of information which would not result in relevance reduction due to processing e? ort. (ii) Second, Ann may de? nitely try to maximally reduce John’s processing e? ort by making her story short, simple and clear, but this reduction will not necessarily result in maximal relevance: This is so, because the reduction in the story’s complexity characteristically reduces the number of its potential contextual e? ects. The reduction of processing e? rt will enhance the relevance of Ann’s story only to the extent that the amount of e? ort saved is larger than the amount of contextual e? ects lost. So, again, Ann cannot simply reduce John’s processing e? ort to the minimum. She has to ? gure out the optimal amount of e? ort which would not result in relevance reduction due to loss of contextual e? ects. (iii) Third, the number of contextual e? ects which John may deduce from Ann’s story is not just a function of the sheer number of new assumptions in the story, but a function of the interaction between these new assumptions and the context of interpretation. This means that Ann should not just provide 704 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 John with the optimal number of new assumptions, but also take care to provide him with those speci? c assumptions which would yield the maximal amount of contextual e? ects in the appropriate context, and at the very same time direct John to construct that speci? c context. This complicates our relevance considerations to a considerable extent, because the construction of the appropriate context entails a signi? cant amount of processing e? ort. Consequently, in principle, the construction of the appropriate context may eventually result in relevance reduction due to the increase in processing e? ort. Thus, the construction of a partial context for interpretation may sometimes be the optimal strategy. As we have seen, Ann’s role as the story-teller is going to be that of relevance optimization: She will need to provide John with the optimal ratio of contextual e? ect and processing e? ort. This, I would like to claim, is exactly the generalized communicative function which newspaper headlines are supposed to ful? l: They are designed to optimize the relevance of their stories for their readers. 4. Newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers Consider the following story, from the Israeli national newspaper Ma’ariv: (5) The bodies of John Kennedy Jr. , his wife Caroline and his sister-in-law Lorraine were discovered yesterday in the ocean, at a depth of 30 meters, 10 kilometers away from Martha’s Vineyard Island, where they were headed on Saturday. Senator Edward Kennedy, John’s uncle, arrived at the site where the bodies were found, in order to identify them. Kennedy Jr. ill be buried in NY in the coming days. This news item requires a certain amount of mental e? ort to interpret. To begin with, the paragraph requires some e? ort to read: It consists of about 70 words, and is grammatically fairly complex. Moreover, the news item requires the construction of a context for interpretation- one which includes whatever the reader knows about John Kennedy Jr. , his family, their disappearance two days before, the relevant geography, and probably at least something about the Kennedys’ history. As we have said before, the construction of this context takes an additional e? rt. Let us assume, for the sake of simplicity, that the interpretation of the entire story will require the ordinary reader to invest a certain amount of e? ort, let us dub it E(story). Now, to the extent th at the reader manages to construct the appropriate context and read the passage, the story carries a certain amount of contextual e? ects: It changes a lot of factual assumptions the reader represented in his or her long-term memory (e. g. , the assumption ‘John Kennedy Jr. is alive and well’ is replaced by ‘John Kennedy Jr. died in an irplane accident’), and it changes, weakens or strengthens a great many related assumptions having to do with, for example, the inescapable tragedies of the Kennedy family, the life-styles of the rich and D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 705 famous, the blindness of fate, the risks involved in ? ying your own plane, and so on and so forth. Obviously, di? erent readers will probably deduce di? erent sets of contextual e? ects from the story, but for the sake of simplicity, let us assume that the ordinary reader will deduce a certain amount of contextual e? cts, let us dub it C(story). The relevance of th e story for the ordinary reader will thus be: R(story)=C(story)/E(story). Now, let us take a look at the headline the newspaper gave to the story: (6) John Kennedy Jr. ’s body found How much e? ort does the reader have to invest in interpreting the headline? Obviously, much less than E(story): The headline is a single, short and simple sentence, comprising ? ve words, and the e? ort needed to read it is insubstantial. The e? ort needed to construct the context for the interpretation of the headline is also signi? antly smaller—the reader does not need to retrieve the sets of assumptions having to do with the geography of the story, with Senator Ed Kennedy, and so on. For the sake of simplicity, let us make the arbitrary assumption that E(headline) equals 10% of E(story). Now, how many contextual e? ects can the reader deduce from the headline? Surprisingly, when the headline is interpreted in its reduced context, a signi? cantly large subset of the contextual e? ects o f the entire story survive. Obviously, some things are missing—for example, the fact that Kennedy’s wife and his sister-in-law were found too—but Kennedy’s death, its signi? ance within the tragic history of the Kennedy family, and the more general implications of the story are clear contextual e? ects of the headline. Let us adopt a conservative estimate: For the ordinary reader, C(headline) equals 50% of C(story). As a simple calculation clearly shows, our estimates entail that the headline multiplies the relevance of the story by ? ve (! ). It saves much more on the processing e? ort than it loses on the contextual e? ects. This is exactly what a headline should do. A short and simple text, it optimizes the relevance of the story by minimizing processing e? ort while making sure that a suf? ient amount of contextual e? ects are deducible within the most appropriate context possible. Just like Ann, our story-teller, the headline does not adopt an all-or none strategy of either reducing processing e? ort to zero, or maximizing new information, or constructing the most appropriate context for interpretation. Rather, it attempts to optimize the ratio between processing e? ort and contextual e? ects- and thus optimally negotiate between the story and the ordinary reader. Note that for the optimization of relevance to be successful, the right material should be chosen for the headline. Consider, for example, the following three clauses as alternative headlines for the Kennedy story: (7) a. Caroline Kennedy’s body found b. Sen. Edward Kennedy arrived at the crash site. 706 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 c. The bodies of John Kennedy Jr. and his wife Caroline were discovered yesterday in the ocean, near Martha’s Vineyard Island. The ? rst two alternative headlines (7a and 7b) are probably as easy to read as the actual one, and we may assume that they require the construction of a very similar context for interpretation. However, they do not carry the same amount of contextual e? cts as the original. The third alternative (7c) carries a slightly larger number of contextual e? ects than the original, but it very obviously requires much more processing e? ort. Thus, all three alternative fall short of providing optimal relevance. Is the original headline in (6) a summarizing or a highlighting headline? It is hard to tell. The impor tant point, however, is that from our theoretical point-of-view the summarizing-highlighting distinction is simply not that crucial: Summarizing the story is just one tactical approach to relevance optimization. Highlighting the most intriguing aspect of the story, or reproducing the most interesting statement quoted in the story, may have the very same result. It may turn out, for example, that the quotation or the highlighted aspect carry more contextual e? ects than the summary of the whole narrative. In this case, the rational thing to do would be to promote them to the headline- and thus optimize the relevance of the story for the readers. The choice between these di? erent tactical approaches is in part a matter of the editorial style of the newspaper, and to a very large extent a matter of the experience and creativity of its editors. For every given story, some headline options are going to suggest themselves. The editor may opt for a summarizing headline, a highlighting headline or a quotation headline- depending on which type of headline will provide optimal relevance. 6 Moreover, the editor may manipulate the length and complexity of the headline, and its speci? c contents. And again, these manipulations, to a very large extent, are going to be relevance-oriented. 7 In the following section, I will present the results of an empirical study conducted in the years 1996–1998 in the news-desk of the Israeli national newspaper Ma’ariv. In the study, I followed the decision-making process leading to the choice of headline for a large number of news items. As the results of the study clearly indicate, the set of professional intuitions shared by the editors, concerning the properties of the ‘right’ or ‘appropriate’ headline, are theoretically reduced to our notion of releI will discuss the choice of tabloid-type headlines later on. An anonymous referee notes that some text manipulations may not be relevance-oriented. Thus, for example, some manipulations may have to do with spacing on the page, and others with political considerations. I agree with the ? st point. In Dor (2001), however, I show that relevance-oriented manipulations play an extremely important role in processes of political framing. 8 There are currently three national newspapers in Israel: Yediot Ahronot and Ma’ariv are considered to be the popular newspapers, whereas Ha’aretz is considered to be the quality, high-brow one. Yediot Ahronot and Ma’ariv, however, are not tabloids in the regular, American-European sense. They contain a variety of ‘‘serious’’ news items which is not that di? erent from that of Ha’aretz, and are distinct from it especially in writing style and graphic design. In all three newspapers, headline formulation is considered part of the editorial process, and reporters do not formulate headlines for their stories. 7 6 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 707 vance: The most appropriate headline for a news item is the one which optimizes the relevance of the story for the readers of the newspaper. 5. The notion of relevance and the art of headline writing In general, news editors do not work with a very explicit de? nition of what headlines are, or of their communicative functions. What they do work with is a cluster of professional intuitions—gradually developed ‘in the ? eld’, and never seriously explicated—concerning the properties of what we might call, rather informally, the ‘right’, ‘appropriate’, or ‘good’ headline. When asked to provide an explicit de? nition of what a headline is, senior newspaper editors usually give an answer of the type: ‘I don’t know what headlines are, but I can tell a good one when I see it’. This answer is actually a pretty accurate rendition of a very fundamental sentiment: Professional knowledge is practical, not theoretical. However, when presented with a news-item, and asked to choose a headline out of a set of alternatives, experienced news editors do so with extreme ease and e? ciency. Moreover, senior editors in the same newspaper have a very high rate of agreement on the preferred headline. This means that experienced news editors know a great deal more about the functional properties of headlines than they ever explicate. In this sense, headline production is more similar to an artistic activity than, say, to the practice of an exact science. This a? ity with the arts is very clearly re? ected in the trial-and-error process which beginning copy-editors go through as part of their on-the-job training procedure. Rather than receive their professional education in the form of explicit lecturing, beginning copy-editors in Ma’ariv simply start out working: They are assigned a new-item, and are asked to rewrite it and suggest a headline for it. The result is then reviewed by the senior editor in c harge, who, in most cases, rejects the suggested headline and writes a di? erent one, which eventually gets published. Sometimes, the copy-editor is asked to suggest the alternative headline, which is, again, reviewed by the editor in charge. Deadline pressure usually does not allow for long explanations: When the process is over, the copy-editor gets another story, suggests a headline, which usually gets rejected, and so on and so forth. This process goes on for years, and in a real sense never ends: In Ma’ariv, each and every suggested headline is sent to the senior editor in chief, in the form of an electronic message, to be approved or rejected, even if the copy-editors have years of experience behind them. Obviously, the rate of rejected headlines goes down with time, when the trained editor internalizes the set of implicit intuitions shared by the other, more experienced editors, but even very experienced editors get some of their headlines rejected some of the time: Sometimes, for example, the editor in chief knows something about the wider context of the story which the copy-editor was not aware of. The fact that these real-time negotiations about the headlines are done in writing, by e-mail messages, allowed me to follow the process of headline formulation from very close range. I collected 134 e-mail exchanges, concerning 134 news-items, and analyzed the semantic-pragmatic di? erences between the rejected and approved headlines. In some cases, I asked the editor in charge to reconstruct the reasons for 708 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 the rejection of the suggested headline. I then extracted a list of ten properties, which I shall call the properties of the appropriate headline. I submit that this list is an accurate rendition of the set of implicit intuitions shared by experienced news editors in Ma’ariv. In the following section, I will present the ten properties, each with its representative example, and show that the list is actually reducible to one professional meta-imperative: Make the headline such that it renders the story optimally-relevant. Three notes should be made at this point: First, the following discussion should not be thought of as an attempt to construct a theoretical framework, but as a description of a set of professional intuitions, shared by news editors, concerning the properties of the ‘‘appropriate headline’’. In other words, I do not intend to make any signi? ant claim concerning the theoretical status of the ten properties to be discussed below. Quite obviously, some of the properties seem to bear close resemblance to some principles discussed in the literature under the rubric of news value (e. g. , in Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Bell, 1991); other properties may remind the reader of Grice’s conversational maxims. I will leave the elaboration of these resemblances for further research, and concentrate on the possibility of reducing the entire set of properties to the relevance-based meta-intuition mentioned above. Second, the properties are to be thought of as default conditions, rather than obligatory ones. It is not the case that every headline should have all 10 properties. It is the case that a headline which meets any of these conditions is better than a headline which does not, and a headline which meets a larger number of the conditions is better than a headline which meets a smaller number of them. Thus, for example, the ? rst property—‘headlines should be as short as possible’—should be read as saying: ‘other things being equal, a shorter headline is better than a longer one’. Finally, The headlines presented in the next section are translated from the Hebrew original. I chose to keep the translation as literally accurate as possible, and avoided translating the headlines into ‘‘headlinese’’, because Hebrew headlines do not usually have the telegraphic syntax characteristic of English headlines. 5. 1. The properties of the ‘‘appropriate headline’’ [1] ‘‘Headlines should be as short as possible’’. Newspaper headlines are, quite obviously, very short clauses. The actual length of each particular headline, however, is a matter of considerable debate and negotiation between senior editors and copy editors: Copy-editors, especially the beginners, suggest longer headlines, attempting to ‘capture’ as much of the story as possible. The senior editors shorten the headlines to a considerable extent- leaving out whole chunks of information. One of the expertises mastered by experienced editors is the ability to decide which parts of the story should be left out of the headline. The following exchange is a very typical example. The I thank an anonymous referee for his/her discussion of this point. The referee also wondered whether any of the ten properties may be reducible to another. Thus, for example, the referee felt that properties [6] and [7] are mirror-images of each other, and should thus be put together. I assume that this can indeed be done. For me, however, the more important point was that the editors I talked to felt these were two separate, although obviously related, principles. As I am interested here in the description of intuitions, rather than in the construction of a theoretical framework, I will discuss the two principles separately. 9 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 709 tory is about a youth gang which was caught red-handed mutilating gravestones in a military cemetery in Haifa. The copy-editor suggested the following headline: (8) Haifa: A youth gang was caught mutilating gravestones in the city’s military cemetery The head of the news-desk ordered the copy-editor to shorten the headline, in the following way: (9) Haifa: A y outh gang was caught mutilating gravestones Note that the decision to shorten the headline is not without its price: We have lost a piece of information, i. e. , that the gravestones were mutilated in a military cemetery, which means we have lost some contextual e? ects. We have, however, gained in reading e? ort. The shorter headline is simply easier to read. This is a very clear example of relevance optimization by e? ort reduction. The editor in charge decided that the loss in contextual e? ects is smaller than the gain in reading e? ort. [2] ‘‘Headlines should be clear, easy to understand, and unambiguous’’. Formulating a headline to a complex story is not an easy task. Copy-editors sometimes suggest headlines which come out unclear, di? cult to understand, or unintentionally ambiguous. Such headlines are rejected, and the copy-editor is asked to formulate a clearer, simpler, unambiguous headline. In the following example, the article tells the story of a police drama in the city of Ramat-Gan, where a single arsonist threatened the city for weeks, burning down vehicles every night. On that speci? c night, the police caught a suspect, but had to release him after the ‘real’ arsonist took out to the streets again, burning down more vehicles to prove that he was not caught. The copy-editor suggested the following headline: (10) The ‘real arsonist’ from Ramat-Gan proves: You Haven’t caught me The headline was rejected because it was considered unclear and unnecessarily ambiguous. It raises more questions and vaguenesses than it actually answers: Who is the ‘real arsonist’? Is there an ‘unreal arsonist’? How has the ‘real arsonist’ proven that he wasn’t caught? By whom? The copy-editor was ordered to formulate a clearer headline. This was his second attempt: (11) The arsonist ‘was caught’- and the vehicles in Ramat-Gan went on burning This version is much clearer: It makes clear that a claim was made that the arsonist was caught, which turned out to be false, and it makes clear that, on that day, 710 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 fter the capture incident ended, some vehicles in Ramat-Gan were still burning. There is, however, a potential ambiguity here: The headline can be read as making the claim that the arsonist set the vehicles on ? re before the police made the false claim, and that they went on burning after the incident. The headline was rejected again, and the copy-ed itor suggested the third version, in (12), which was ? nally accepted and published as it is. Note that the only di? erence between (11), the rejected headline, and (12), the approved one, is in the tense of the verb in the second clause. 12) The arsonist ‘was caught’- and the vehicles in Ramat-Gan go on burning This headline makes it clear that the arsonist is still on the loose, and is still in the habit of setting vehicles on ? re. Finally, the story is captured in a clear, simple and unambiguous fashion. This reduces processing e? ort to the necessary minimum— and optimizes the relevance of the story. [3] ‘‘Headlines should be interesting’’. This quality plays a central role in the negotiations between copy-editors and senior editors. Many suggested headlines are rejected on the grounds that they are ‘not interesting’. What is usually meant by this rather obscure phrase is that the editor imagines that the readers of the paper will not ? nd the headline interesting enough. In terms of our relevance-based theory, this means that the editor estimates that the amount of contextual e? ects carried by the headline will not justify the amount of reading e? ort. The copy-editor is then asked to read the article again, and look for a ‘more interesting’ piece of information to foreground to the headline. In the following example, the story includes an interview with Uri Lubrani, IDF’s Chief of Military Operations in Southern Lebanon. General Antoin Lahed, who is mentioned in the rejected headline, is the Commander in Chief of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), a Christian Militia which has traditionally been IDF’s ally in Lebanon. The context of the story is a wave of rumors, according to which the IDF plans to withdraw from Southern Lebanon, thus leaving General Lahed and his people on their own against their Islamic rivals: This is the headline which the copy-editor suggested: (13) Lubrani: ‘There was no secret meeting with General Lahed’ Whether or not there was a secret meeting between IDF o? ials and General Lahed on the previous day is hardly an interesting question. After all, IDF o? cials and General Lahed meet on a regular basis, and their meetings are usually kept secret. In our terms, the headline does not carry a substantial amount of contextual e? ects. The headline was rejected, and the copy-editor came up with the following alternative: (14) Lubrani: ‘There is no plan to evacua te SLA seniors to Europe’ Whether or not there is a secret plan to evacuate SLA seniors to Europe is very obviously much more interesting. If there was such a plan, this would be a pretty D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 711 remarkable sign that the IDF is on its way out of Lebanon. Lubrani’s ? at denial can be interpreted in more than one way: We can take him for his word, or assume that he chose to deny the existence of the plan for tactical reasons- at any rate the denial has interesting implications. It is de? nitely more interesting than just another meeting- in our terms, it carries more contextual e? ects for the same amount of processing e? ort. Note that this is a very good example of the signi? ant role of headline writing in the workings of a newspaper. The two headlines, the rejected one and the suggested one, make it quite obvious that the Lubrani interview did not contain any remarkable scoops, and that the editor had to dig in to ? nd something which was worth promoting to the headline. As the senior editor’s decision makes clear, even negative statements, ? at denials of the type that Lubrani suggested as answers to the reporter’s questions, have di? erent amounts of relevance, and the one which was more relevant than the other was promoted. 4] ‘‘Headlines should contain new information’’. A major topic for negotiations between copy-editors and senior-editors has to do with the question of whether the readers already know what the copy-editor decided to promote to the headline. Obviously, editors do not really know what their readers know, but their estimates of their readers’ state of knowledge play a central role in the decision-making process. This makes perfect sense within our relevance-based framework: A headline which does not contain novel assumptions cannot bring about contextual e? ects, and is thus irrelevant. In Ma’ariv, as in any other daily newspaper, estimates of the readers’ state of knowledge are based primarily on what has already been communicated by the other mass-media, especially the evening news on TV. If the content of the proposed headline for the next morning has already appeared in the news the night before, most chances are it will be rejected. The following headline, for example, was rejected on these grounds: (15) The Austrian Chancellor Arrived for a visit; will meet Netanyahu today The copy-editor had a hard time ? nding an alternative headline. This is what he came up with: (16) O? ials in Jerusalem hope for the Austrian Chancellor’s visit to run smoothly This headline was accepted, for two reasons: First, it carries the implication that o? cials in Jerusalem are worried that the visit might not run smoothly—an angle on the visit which was new. Second, it connects the story to prior events and expectations: The visit of the British foreign minister had just ended the day before, and that visit was full of political hurdles and diplomatic embarrassments. As we shall see below, connecting a story to its wider context is another important property of good headlines. 712 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 5] ‘‘Headlines should not presuppose information unknown to the readers’’. This principle, in a sense, is the mirror-image of the previous one: The information in the headline should de? nitely be new—but it cannot be ‘overly new’. Headlines should only presuppose information which is already part of the mutual knowledge established between the newspaper and its readers. In terms of our relevance-based framework, every presupposition in the headline should already be available within the readers’ context of interpretation. Otherwise, the computation of the headline will result in zero contextual e? cts. Consider, then, the following headline: (17) Advanced negotiations on the establishment of the second Israeli-owned casino in Jericho This headline presupposes the existence, or at least the potential existence, of the ? rst Israeli-owned casino in Jericho. The ? rst news concerning the plans to build this casino, the ? rst one, were published only a few days before the above headline was suggested. According to the editor in chief, the readers had not yet registered the future existence of the ? rst casino in their long-term memory—it was premature to treat it as a presupposition. The copy-editor was asked to change the headline, and came up with the following alternative: (18) The ? rst casino in Jericho will be operational in February In this headline, the establishment of the ? rst casino in Jericho is not presupposed, but reported as part of the news. This is much better. But the editor in chief asked the copy-editor to rephrase the headline again, this time for a di? erent reason: The proposed headline forces the reader to calculate the amount of time it will take till the casino will be operational. This adds to the processing e? ort. The alternative, which was eventually published, reduces this e? rt, thus optimizing the relevance of the story: (19) The ? rst casino in Jericho will be operational in a year [6] ‘‘Headlines should include names and concepts with high ‘news value’ for the readers’’. 10 Experienced editors develop a sense of the ‘news value’ of names and 10 This property, and the next one, reminded one anonymous referee of Ariel’s (1988, 1991) accessibility theory (see also Kronrod and Engel 2000). The resemblance, however, is rather super? cial. Ariel is not interested in the speci? c contents of the referring expressions, but in their general cognitive and structural properties. Thus, for example, referring expressions which function as high accessibility markers (e. g. , personal pronouns, ? rst names) are used by speakers when they assume that the referents are highly accessible for their addressees; lower accessibility markers (e. g. , long de? nite descriptions, full names etc. ) are used when the speaker assumes low mental accessibility for their addressees. The point I am making here, however, is not that newspaper editors prefer certain types of referring expression (e. g. , full names) to others (e. g. , last names), but that they prefer certain referents (e. g. , famous ? gures) to others. D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 713 concepts: They very easily identify names and concepts which should appear in headlines- and those which do not. In terms of our relevance-based theory, experienced editors know, or at least believe they know, which names and concepts will carry a large number of contextual e? ects for their readers. The following example demonstrates this very clearly. Some background: Two days before the following story was to be published, a story in one of the national newspapers revealed that the popular musicians contracted to perform in Israel’s 50th Jubilee were paid high sums of money- at the ax-payers’ expense. In our story, some other popular musicians reacted to the revelation and angrily declared that they were willing to perform in the Jubilee for free. This was the headline suggested by the copy-editor: (20) A group of artists suggests an alternative for the Jubilee: ‘‘we are willing to perform for freeà ¢â‚¬â„¢Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ This headline, a classic summarizing headline, was rejected in favor of the following, which replaces the expression ‘a group of artists’ with the names of two celebrity musicians, Shimi Tavori and Margalit Tsan’ani: (21) Shimi Tavori and Margalit Tsan’ani: ‘‘we are willing to perform in the jubilee for free’’ Note, ? rst, that the replacement headline in (21) actually loses some of the information we had in (20): The group of artists included many more musicians than just the two mentioned in (21). The point, however, is that the two are the most famous members of the group, and names of well-known popular musicians always carry a lot of contextual e? ects: This is so, because their names direct the readers to construct a much wider context for interpretation, which includes whatever we know about them, their personalities, their views, their social background, their wealth, their life styles, and so on. 20) is a headline suited for a regular news story about the 50th Jubilee; (21), on the other hand, is a headline for what is basically a gossip story about Shimi Tavori and Margalit Tsan’ani. [7] ‘‘Headlines should not contain names and concepts with low ‘news value’ for the readers’’. This is the mirror-image of the last property: Some names and concepts do not have ‘‘news value’’ for the readers, and experienced editors avoid promoting them to the headline. In our terms, these names and concepts do not help the reader construct the optimal context for the interpretation of the headline. In the following example, the copy-editor attempted to promote such a name to the headline, and was intercepted by the editor in charge. Some background: The story has to do with an accident in which two military helicopters collided in the air on their way to Israel’s northern border, an accident in which more than 70 soldiers were killed. New immigrants to Israel receive an immigration grant from the Jewish agency, and it turned out that the agency asked the parents of one of the soldiers killed in the accident, a newly-arrived immigrant, to pay back his grant. The copy editor suggested the following headline: 714 D. Dor / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 695–721 (22) The Michaelov family was ordered to return the immigration grant given to their son- who was killed in the Galilee The editor in charge rejected the headline, and ordered the copy-editor to produce another one, which would not contain the name. This was the alternative headline, which was ? nally published: (23) The Jewish agency refused to let a family, whose son was killed in the helicopter accident, keep his immigration grant Note that the move from the de? nite ‘the Michaelov family’ to the inde? nite ‘a family’ made it di? cult for the copy-editor to keep it in subject position, and dictated an overall grammatical change from passive to active voice. [8] ‘‘Headlines should ‘connect’ the story to previously known facts and events’’. Just like the last two principles, this one has to do with the construction of the appropriate context for interpretation. A story interpreted on its own, as an isolated event, will carry a certain amount of contextual e? ects. The same story can carry more contextual e? ects to the extent that the readers interprets it within a wider context, which includes previously known facts and events. Consider the following example, which is a report on a violent taxi robbery in the city of Haifa: (24) The driver was beaten and thrown out- and the stolen taxi was later found stuck in the mud The editor in charge, who rejected this headline, asked the copy-editor to connect the incident in Haifa to the rising trend of taxi robbery throughout Israel. The fol How to cite Asaaaa, Papers

Topic-Cloud Computing Software as a Service Samples for Students

Question: What are the most likely problems that SoftArc Engineering will encounter with the model that you recommend? How would you advise SoftArc Engineering to deal with these issues? Answer: Introduction The paper focuses on SoftArc Engineering Company which mainly operates their business in various countries of the world which include New Guinea, Australia and Indonesia. The company has its own Web based infrastructure for managing various functions as well as operations of the organization. However, SoftArc Engineering Company wants to expand its business and for that, Web infrastructure is not appropriate. Therefore, the organization wants to shift their web based system architecture to cloud based architecture. This also helps the organization in gaining appropriate amount of competitive advantage. The decision that the SoftArc Engineering Company has taken not only helps in enhancing competitive advantage but also helps in increasing availability as well as flexibility of both data as well as information within the system architecture. This paper mainly illustrates various advantages as well as challenges that SoftArc Engineering Company will achieve by moving this web-based infrastructure to cloud. The paper also helps in providing number of recommendations that are very much helpful in resolving various types of issues of the Web-based architecture. In addition to this, Cloud based architecture also have some security issues which are discussed within this paper for resolving them appropriately. Discussion on the cloud architecture that is deployed with the company of SoftArc Description of the cloud architecture and proper reason behind its deployment It is analyzed that SaaS (Software as a Service) is one of the cloud-based architecture that is found to be appropriate for the SoftArc Engineering Company. This cloud-based architecture is generally selected as it helps in resolving various types of issues as well as challenges that are faced by SoftArc Engineering Company (Dinh et al., 2013). The software distribution model is generally offered with the help of third party suppliers to both the clients as well as users as per their requirements. This architecture helps in reducing the effort of the company while operating on the cloud-based infrastructure. This application is very much helpful in both storing as well as transferring appropriate data within appropriate data centers. SaaS model is generally selected for SoftArc as this architecture helps in providing proper operations of data that are generally stored within the server of the organization. It also helps in offering appropriate data update as per the needs as well as requirements of user (Rittinghouse Ransome, 2016). The model helps in offering very much flexible operations to both the users as well as to the developers in order to manage various applications within SoftArc Engineering Company. The model or architecture of SaaS is generally installed with the help of a third party and therefore the architecture can be easily accessed by the users irrespective of the time. Benefits as well as challenges of the selected cloud architecture The various benefits of SaaS include: Flexibility of data: SaaS architecture helps in providing proper facility of data flexibility as well as accessibility within the SoftArc Engineering (Fernando, Loke Rahayu, 2013). Additionally the organization can easily transfer data as per the demands as well as requirements of the user. Autonomous updates: The architecture of SaaS helps in providing proper as well as effective autonomous updates as per the various users data as well as storing pattern, which are generally involved within the structure of SoftArc Engineering Company (Li et al., 2013). The software as a service helps in providing appropriate support for managing various updates of data sets. Accessibility of data: The data that is stored within the cloud can be easily accessed by the users as per the different needs as well as requirements of the users. The risks that are associated with SaaS include: Dependency: The infrastructure of cloud is entirely dependent on internet, which is considered as an important challenge (Arora, Parashar Transforming, 2013). Security Issue: It is identified that one of the most important concern for the SoftArc Engineering is security issues. Description of the risk as well as control measures that are related with Hybrid Cloud Architecture It is analyzed that there are numerous risks as well as control measures which are associated with Hybrid Cloud Architecture. Data Issues: It is identified that both sensitive data as well as information creates major issue or problem within the cloud-computing infrastructure of the organization. The data that are stored within the cloud can be easily accessed by the users. The data that are accessed by the users can be private, public or common data. The data can be accessed by anyone at any time, which hampers the privacy of important data as well as information (Whaiduzzaman et al., 2014). This data that are stored on the cloud can be stole which assists in creating number of issues for the organization. It is analyzed that both the service providers as well as unauthorized users can access data as well as information that are stored within the architecture of cloud. If the service provider suddenly shuts down the service due to any type of technical issue, there is a chance of data loss, which is also considered as one of the significant issue. Solution: The data access procedure must be monitored properly in order to provide proper security as well as privacy to the cloud-based infrastructure. The various types of data issues can be resolved properly by utilizing proper monitoring approach in context cloud based service providers. The action of monitoring can be categorized into two different segments that include user end monitoring as well as provider end monitoring (Wei et al., 2014). These monitoring measures are ery much helpful in resolving various types of issues as well as functional problems that are related with various types of security issues within the cloud-based infrastructure. Secrecy Issues: It is analyzed that the system applications of cloud-based architecture face another important set of problems that include Secrecy issues. If the users are not able to provide proper security measures then the chances of security issues arises (Tao et al., 2014). One of the important tasks of the service provider is to ensure accurately that the users are protected properly when they are utilizing services from other service providers. Additionally, it is identified that there are number of servers, which are considered eternal, and as a result, they can be easily accessed with the help of any user. Due to this reason, the privacy of the users is hampered as their data is accessed with the help of third party. Solutions: The secrecy issues within cloud-based applications can be solved by utilizing control of consumer access to various devices. Different types of applications as well as gadgets are generally utilized within the infrastructure of cloud where various types of malicious codes are injected within the network (Toosi, Calheiros Buyya, 2014). It causes deployment of different types of hacking issues that further helps in diminishing both the flexibility as well as capability o network in context to various needs as well as requirements of the users. Infected Applications: It is identified that more than one application are generally combined with the help of cloud computing server and therefore numerous chances of occurring various types of malicious codes within different application assists in harming both the devices as well as functional operations within the network architecture (Moreno-Vozmediano, Montero Llorente, 2013). If the users are not capable of controlling as well as monitoring various applications then it will create number of problems. The users of cloud service architecture faces number of challenges due to the introduction of unauthorized users within the network architecture of the organization. Therefore it is very much important for the providers to serve the customers properly by utilizing appropriate choices of security measures in context to various malicious attacks within various cloud based applications as well as services. Solutions: The various types of infected applications are generally injected with the help of various unauthorized users as well as clients that assists in harming the entire infrastructure of cloud-based system (Jain Paul, 2013). Therefore, it is very much important to have proper as well as appropriate verified access that helps in restricting unauthorized the access of the users by managing as well as maintain the security related infrastructure of the cloud-based services appropriately. In contrast with this fact, it is very much important for the provider to check the verification of the users appropriately before the data as well as information are modified within cloud based network architecture (Khan et al., 2013). It is analyzed that verification of access control is very much helpful in managing various types of unwanted access to different cloud based information of data. Security Issues: It is identified that security related challenges are divided into two significant level of operations, which are provider level, as well as user level. The various types of external threats are generally attacked with the help of the server that causes the attacks within the infrastructure of cloud network (LD Krishna, 2013). Sometimes, the service providers of cloud helps in offering secured cloud service. However, there are numerous chances of network infection from the users end as they are not concerned about the security as well as privacy of cloud-based infrastructure. Solutions: The security issues or challenges that mainly occur within the organization can be resolved easily by utilizing security check events. This not only helps in resolving the issues that are associated with cloud architecture but also helps in resolving problems that are occurring due to cyber attacks (Gai, Tao Zhu, 2015). Therefore, by utilizing various security check events, malicious codes as well as users are detected in context to various cloud security measures that generally involved within the various network infrastructures that generally resulted into the adoption as well as development of cloud based system architecture within the SoftArc Engineering Company. Description of the general information security steps for securing hybrid cloud The general security step that helps in securing the hybrid cloud includes: Risk Identification: The risks must be identified appropriately by the various service providers as well as clients. This strategic step is found to be very much advantageous for both the users as well as service providers as it makes them much more aware about different types of security issues as well as other types of functional backlogs (Lukyanchikoy et al., 2015). The assessment of risks is beneficial as it helps in making the comparison of data as well as malicious code quite easy in context to various consequences, which are included by both the significant as well as unauthorized users within proper cloud environment. It is identified that there are generally three segments that helps in controlling the assessed risks that include risk acceptance, risk mitigation as well as risk avoidance. Standard and Compliances: It is analyzed that both compliances as well as standards are quite important for handling the security infrastructure of the cloud architecture in context to various demands as well as needs of both clients as well as users of the cloud service provider (Maurer, Brandic Sakellariou, 2013). It is identified that both ISO as well as COBIT are considered as significant standards, which must be managed within the providences of cloud service. Assessment of security Risks: It is identified that assessment of security risks is another important aspect, which must be managed in context to various security risks measures that are involved with the system architecture of various cloud-based applications. Appropriate security risks measures like data encryption as well as data redundancy within various data centers helps in managing as well as handling security for different cloud based architecture (Menzel, Schonherr Tai, 2013). The various service providers as well as organization that are generally associated with cloud-based services must be aware of different security measures. Improved data redundancy: Data redundancy is defined as an approach that suggests that various information as well as data must be kept separate with respect to different functionalities as well as emergence. The cloud based infrastructure helps in providing this feature properly to various users as well as clients (Oliveira, Thomas Espadanal, 2014). In order to ensure that the data, which is stored within the infrastructure of cloud, it is quite important to make it much more redundant in context to various demands as well as requirements of the users. The feature of data redundancy is considered compatible with the utilization as well as functionalities, which are very much necessary for proper operation of the cloud based infrastructure. Data Encryption: The data that is stored within the infrastructure of cloud can also be secured with the help of an approach that is known as data encryption (Pluzhnik Nikulchev, 2014). The cloud-based application must keep their important data as well as information secured from malicious attacks.. Data Encryption helps in protecting data as well as information by obstructing the injection of malicious attack. Control over data: It is considered as one of the important aspect that helps in providing appropriate security to the hybrid cloud architecture in context to different functional aspects, which are generally involved with the cloud, based architecture (Sanaei et al., 2014). Additionally the infrastructure of cloud must be managed as well as monitored appropriately in order to secure the data that is transferred over the web as well as on various types of sharing channels. Recommendation that must be included in SoftArc engineerings BCP The various types of recommendations that are provided for adopting the hybrid cloud within the SoftArc Engineering organization include: Backup Capability: Backup capability is one of the important features that are provided by the hybrid cloud architecture (Serrano, Gallardo Hernantes, 2015). It is identified that this feature this feature is not provided by the Web infrastructure as it not capable of providing appropriate storage capability whereas the cloud architecture are very much capable of storing appropriate data as well as information for future use. Application of residences: It is analyzed that the organization SoftArc is using web-based infrastructure, which is not capable of offering application resilience features. This appropriate feature assists in offering the condition where the entire system can perform properly even if the system detects erroneous condition during the execution time (Skoldstrom et al., 2014). For avoiding errors and for offering appropriate performance, hybrid cloud helps in offering proper operational excellence. Improvisation in network efficiency: The efficiency of the network architecture can be improved with the help of the cloud-based architecture. This is due to the fact that they mainly assists in imposing different types of features as well as characteristics within the network that further helps in making the network architecture much more suitable as well as available for various types of information as well as data. High scalability: The hybrid cloud architecture is considered scalable in context to different critical aspects as well as functionalities that are associated with the organizations network architecture. They are dependent on the system architecture as well as on the cloud based applications. Disaster Recovery: Disaster recovery is considered as one of the important option that helps in making the cloud infrastructure much more reliable in context to the compatibility of hybrid cloud (Sousa et al., 2015). The architecture of cloud is very much capable of offering the information that are stored long back with the help of a feature that is known as data redundancy. Discussion on important requirement of SoftArc The requirements for implementing hybrid cloud architecture include: Remote Server Administration: Remote server administration is defined as the procedure that helps in accessing various types of information from anywhere. This functionality helps in providing appropriate user capability for accessing various files as well as data that is generally stored within the server by logging appropriately within the sever. SLA management: It is identified that SLA or Service Level Agreement is considered as one of the important approach where the users have to agree while purchasing different types of solutions from various service providers. The service level agreement generally comprises of various roles as well as responsibilities of customers who are mainly involved in the utilization of cloud (Sultan, 2014). The commitments are mainly provided within the agreement by both the clients as well the customers. It is analyzed that this agreements generally helps in elaborating all the IT investments as well as other fundamental aspects. Resource Management: Resource management is considered as one of the significant fact that is associated with IaaS as well as PaaS implementation in an organization. The various types of requirements within cloud service implementation need flexibility, reliability as well as availability of important data as well as information within the network. In addition to this, the networks must be able to manage various types of functionalities that are generally associated within the infrastructure of cloud in order handle various operational excellence that are related with the network architecture (Tao et al., 2014). Therefore, it is very much important for SoftArc to manage their various data centers that can run properly within the server, which can be modified appropriately by implementation of one server for transforming important information directly to the cloud. Migration to SharePoint Instance to AWS Discussion on the steps that is included in the plan for moving the services Migrating measures plan: Migration is considered one of the complex procedures that needs proper as well as effective plan before it is transform to the current existing system architecture. SoftArc planning helps in transforming the network to AWS from SharePoint instance (Tomas Tordsson, 2013). Therefore, this needs effective as well as proper planning that requires to be implemented within the organization. Architectural plan creation: The architecture for migration must be designed properly therefore, that hybrid cloud infrastructure must be managed appropriately within the organization (Toosi, Calheiros Buyya, 2014). Additionally, plan customization is found to be another important aspect that requires to be managed appropriately in context o various functional context that is mainly involved with the organizations network architecture. System integration: Migration helps in combining both the network architecture that is very much helpful in managing various architectures of work (Fernando, Loke, Rahayu, 2013). Therefore, it is quite important for SoftArc to be very careful about the integration as well as behavior of the system that generally helps in resulting into effective as well as proper migration act within the SoftArc. Testing plan for migration: The plan is very much important for handling various deployment that are related with cloud infrastructure within the SoftArc Engineering company as the plan is related with various effective migration act within the organization. Discussion on the various critical points as well as issues with proper explanation There are numerous critical points, which must be discussed in context to various objectives of SoftArc Engineering. The critical points include: Plan development for migration: The plan that is needed for moving the SharePoint to AWS require efficient implementation that will help in deploying the development of hybrid cloud architecture. Up gradation of approaches use for migration: In order to deploy the migration system, it is very much significant to upgrade both structures as well as methods (Li et al., 2013). The problems that generally occur during the implementation of AWS within the organization can be solved by utilizing new structures as well as methods. Proper verification of migration procedure: It is very much significant to upgrade both the processes as well as plan of migration during the procedure of migration from AWS to SharePoint (Wei et al., 2014). This can cause loss of both data as well as information if the procedure of verification is not conducted in an appropriate manner with respect to various plans. Content Migration: It is identified that migration of content is considered one of the important aspect during the deployment of AWS within the SoftArc Company for achieving various goals as well as objectives. Conclusion It can be concluded from the entire assignment that moving web based architecture to cloud architecture is very much beneficial as well as advantageous for the SoftArc Engineering Company. Migration from Web based infrastructure to cloud based infrastructure helps SoftArc in replacing their system architecture. It is identified that cloud based architecture helps in enchancing data flexibility, autonomous data as well as data availability. The use of cloud-based architecture also helps the organization in gaining appropriate amount of competitive advantage. The decision that the SoftArc Engineering Company has taken not only helps in enhancing competitive advantage but also helps in increasing availability as well as flexibility of both data as well as information within the system architecture. It is identified that there are number of issues, which are related with the cloud-based infrastructure. The issues must be handled appropriately in order to mitigate or resolve them properly . The issues that are associated with cloud architecture include dependency of cloud as well as various security related issues. References Arora, R., Parashar, A., Transforming, C. C. I. 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