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Showing posts from April, 2014

Internet Shopping: Consumers Don't Remember the Downside.

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The advent of internet shopping has helped overcome the difficulties associated with offline shopping.   Offline shopping involves walking or driving down to a physical store to do shopping.   This is time consuming and difficult for people working long hours a day.    It is also difficult for the elderly and less abled persons to shop offline. In contrast, internet shopping can be done anywhere and anytime.   It can be done at work during break time.   It can also be done at home late at night.   None of these involves travelling.     Thus, the time spent travelling to the physical store is saved for something else. These benefits however tend to cloud our mind from the dangers associated with internet shopping.   Some online retailers may use pictures to distort the true state of their products.   We can easily be misled to buy these items on the basis of these pictures.   We only tend to discover this distortion after we have made a payment for and received these goods. Re

South Korea Ship Disaster: Should Crew Members Be Sentenced to indirect Death?

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The recent accident involving the South Korean ship highlights the great risk faced by ship crew members. The ship carrying young students capsized very close to the South Korean sea shores. They were about 400 passengers on board the ship and more than half of these passengers are presumed dead.  So far divers have recovered over hundred bodies from the ship. The captain of the ship has been arrested and charged with offences relating to the abandonment of the ship. Four crew members were arrested today in addition to the captain. They too will face charges similar to those faced by the captain. The justification for this prosecution is that the South Korean crew members have broken the taboo governing ship operations on the sea. Sea crew members are mandated to ensure that all their passengers have been evacuated from the ship in times of ship wreck before the crew members could try to flee from the disaster scene. In other words, crew members cannot run for safety in time

Prescription For Money: Do You Trust Your Doctor?

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Some of us who visit the surgery for drug prescriptions tend to get upset with the doctor if we leave the surgery without such prescriptions. We expect the GP to make prescription for us to deal with our illness. We believe that the doctor knows the best about our health and any prescription we get from the doctor is in our best interest. We can hardly contemplate that doctors can make prescriptions against our interest. After hearing the allegation of prescription for money involving one of the leading British drug makers, Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK), you may reconsider this perception about doctor’s drug prescriptions. According to a former Polish sales representative, Jarek Wisniewiski, GSK paid some doctors to conduct lectures and promote the usefulness of certain GSK drugs to the public. The whistle blower also claimed that the company paid doctors for prescribing certain drugs over others. It is difficult to imagine whether the doctors involved in these unethical and crimi

Sexual Crimes: The Issue of Anonymity for The Accused.

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Sexual crimes are dissimilar to many other crimes in a number of ways. In most sexual crimes, for example, victims are familiar with the perpetrators. The perpetrators can be the victims’ relatives, friends or even colleagues. Reporting these people to the authority for investigation and possible prosecution can be difficult for the victims. There is also the issue of believability associated with sexual attacks. Perpetrators of sexual attacks tend to target their victims in secluded places where the perpetrators know they cannot be found by other people. These can be in the office or at home where no one else is around. Therefore, the allegations of such sexual attacks tend to involve the words of the victims against the words of the perpetrators. If they fear that they cannot be believed, many victims will not report the incident to the authority. In order to encourage victims of sexual attacks to report the crimes, there is the law protecting the identity of victims o

Why List your Business in A Business Directory?

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Many people who have a business website can testify how frustrating it can be to list a business in a business directory. It can take up to half an hour to fill in all the mandatory sections required by some business directories. This does not guarantee that the business being listed will be visible to web users. In view of these many people tend to conclude that listing a business in business directories is a waste of time. For critics of business directories, having a very good website with good contents well linked is all a business needs to be ranked high by search engines. There is no doubt that these factors can play a large role in website ranking but stating that they are just the only ingredients for good site ranking is missing the point. As well as good website contents and links search engines also consider other factors when trying to rank a site. These include the relevance of the website contents to the general audience and the age of the website. The que

Tighter UK Press Regulations: Is It Pay Back Time For Politicians?

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For about three years now the press has been accused of engaging in unethical practice, some of which can be considered criminal. It was accused, for example, of hacking into the phone of missing teenager – Milly Dowler – and sending messages through the phone, thereby giving false hopes to the missing girl parents that their daughter was still alive. It has also been revealed that the press hacked into Prince Williams’s phone when the prince was dating Kate Middleton to read the private text messages between the couple. Furthermore, the press has been caught offering bribes to some senior police officers for newsworthy stories. The reaction of the British government to these allegations was forceful. The government quickly arraigned the executives of the News of the World involved in the whole scandal before a selected members of parliament to answer questions. It also instituted the Leveson inquiry to look into the existing press regulations. This enquiry later found

Exam Malpractice: US Navy Officers caught Cheating

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 A cheat The case of matured adult cheating in assessments is not considered a serious problem.  The rationale is that most assessment malpractice is committed by children and young adults who lack enough life experience necessary for making moral decisions about rights and wrongs.  The case of 9 U.S. naval officers who were dismissed from duty last week for cheating in their test, however, demonstrates that test malpractice does not only belong to the so called vulnerable people but that matured adults can and do cheat in assessments. The 9 U.S Naval officers were among those in charge of the U.S nuclear weapon defence programmes. Every U.S officer within this sector is subject to annual competency test to establish his or her fitness to remain in the service. Faced with the danger of losing their job, the dismissed officers resorted to cheating. It should be recognised that for most adults, the temptation to cheat under this difficult circumstance can be irresistible.