Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 3

Research Paper Example (Jaswal et.al, 2009) The implications of this finding are quite profound, for it alters the way developmental cognitive science is understood. Neuro-linguists have believed that the first five to seven years of a child’s life are vital to a proper development of the language faculty. And this study by Jaswal, et.al, only goes on to confirm and add new dimension to this thesis. In the experiments conducted by the research team, common objects familiar to children – such as tooth brush, toy car, key, cup, etc – are used in a way to create category confusion in their minds. For example, a pen which resembles a tooth brush, a shoe that resembles a toy car, a spoon that looks like a key, are exposed to children to challenge and contest their prior understanding of an object’s function and label. ... The results further showed that â€Å"Children made appearance-based inferences about the typical and hybrid items on 98% and 100% of trials, respectively. When E2 (experimenter no.2) later asked about the names of those items, children responded by providing labels that matched their appearances on 97% of the trials for the typical items and 100% for the hybrids. For example, children used both the typical key and the key-like object to start the car and later called both ‘‘keys,† and they used the typical spoon to eat cereal from the bowl and called it a ‘‘spoon.† (Jaswal et.al, 2009) This clearly illustrates that hybrid objects are identified as members of pre-existing categories in the mind. Even while hybrid objects carried features from two different categories, children were able to ‘convert’ them into the requisite category – namely the category that the object was designed to resemble the most. The findings of this exp eriment helps psychologists understand how memory gets formed in children. Labeling of objects and cognitive processes that go behind the labeling eventually determine the ability of children to retain and recollect labels. Hence, when children learn something that is counterintuitive, they tend to misremember this information, leading to poor recall. This has ramification for instructional designers and educational psychologists as they try and device effective ways of transferring information in the classroom. This inherent preference for conversion over compliance extends to early moral instruction received from parents and teachers too. That is, when children are taught about simple rules of right

Initial Public Offering Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Initial Public Offering - Research Paper Example Underwriting firms assist the issuer in the IPO process by determining what type of security to sell to the public, how much to sell, and at what price to sell. One example of a large, strong private company that sought to become public is Google, which first sold shares to the public on August 19, 2004 at a price of $1.67 billion, fewer than ten percent of the total shares of the company, which made employees at Google instant millionaires (Webb, 2004). Like Google, Twitter is another successful, new internet company that faces the choice of whether to go public. However, the decision to go public is complicated by the issue of the method of selling those first shares to the public: whether in an auction, online format like Google, or in a traditional format like other kinds of new companies. Twitter is a microblogging service that allows users to post updates. It was founded by Evan Williams under the banner of â€Å"Odeo† (Carlson, 2011). When Apple’s new iTunes made the new product worthless, Evans and his friends Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey created the concept for Twitter. Together with Noah Glass, who developed the idea for Odeo, development began on the new concept, which meant more employees, a new office, and investors. Glass developed the name â€Å"Twttr† that eventually evolved into â€Å"Twitter†. Five years after Odeo’s initial founding, $5 million in investments had increased in value by one thousand percent, to nearly $5 billion. Given Odeo’s (and now Twitter’s) original context, it seems that the investor class most interested in the company are the kinds of analysts who were initially attracted to the promise of Google. Today, the investor class that might be interested in the public promise of Twitter may not be so different from those who were originally interested in the concept of Odeo. Nevertheless, Evan Williams bought back most of the ownership in Odeo before its share prices skyrocketed, w hich narrowed the original investment pool considerably. Some of those original investors, knowing they missed a one thousand percent spike in prices, were part of the Silicon Valley demographic that invest in the early stages of hot new internet companies with the next great idea. Considering the progress that a privately held Twitter has made in its young history, it seems that the investors who might be interested in holding the company as public shareholders may belong to larger funds and investment bankers, rather than the relatively minor, private shareholders that Twitter was accustomed to appealing to in its younger days. Clearly, an IPO of a company such a Twitter, which has substantial private assets, would create a large splash in the worldwide markets. Although the company may not be in critical need of financing for its short-term projects, an IPO would dramatically increase the market share of the company relative to its competitors. In the traditional IPO, an investme nt bank underwrites the issuance of shares to the public by determining the price and amount of shares to be dealt. The underwriter then shops the shares around to wealthy institutional investors; based on their reception, the underwriter will allocate shares and collect a percentage of the IPO. This method is incredibly effective because it happens primarily behind closed doors with entities that handle a considerable