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Traditionally, banks have lent money to those that have money because they are credit worthy. Under this approach, the rich get more credit to make even more money. The Microcredit approach is an attempt to get money into the hands of the poor by extending credit to the 'have-nots'. Microloans to the poor have, for the most part, been limited to the third world countries. This paper suggests that a need exists in the United States for such an approach. By comparing the financial success of the Microcredit program of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh to traditional banks in the United States, an economic justification can be made for making micro loans to the poor in America. The paper further suggests how this might be accomplished., INTRODUCTION Micro Credit was unheard of until Dr. Muhammad Yunus, an American educated economics professor, began his Micro Credit Scheme as a poverty busting tool. Dr. Yunus had a deep [...]

After completing a measure of adherence to Asian cultural values, 62 East Asian American clients talked about personal issues in a counseling session with a European American counselor who either disclosed personal information or refrained from disclosing personal information. Disclosure condition and client adherence to Asian values did not predict session outcome. However, type and intimacy of disclosure were related to immediate process and session outcome. Disclosures of strategies were perceived by the clients to be more helpful than disclosures of approval/reassurance, facts/credentials, and feelings, with disclosures of insight perceived as intermediate in helpfulness. Disclosures of strategies occurred more frequently in highly rated sessions than in sessions rated low. Also, client-and counselor-perceived intimacy of disclosures was significantly correlated with client- and counselor-perceived helpfulness of disclosures, respectively.

J. C. Penney, Inc., with headquarters in Plano, Texas, operates 872 department stores in 49 states and Puerto Rico. It sells family apparel and footwear, accessories, fine and fashion jewelry, beauty products, home furnishings, appliances, mattresses, and furniture as well as providing services, including salon, optical, portrait photography, and custom decorating. The company also sells its products through its website jcpenney.com utilizing its stores as fulfillment centers. It currently has 98,000 full-time employees. In the last seven years J.C. Penney has been struggling to redefine itself. Facing declining sales in 2011, it hired Ron Johnson as CEO to revitalize the company, but instead of attracting new customers, his strategies alienated its core customers and resulted in the loss of $5 billion in revenue and a loss of $1 billion in less than two years. In 2013, the Board of Directors fired Johnson and reinstated the previous CEO, Mike Ullman. His role was to stabilize the company until a new CEO could be hired. In 2015, Marvin Ellison, a former Home Depot executive, was hired and initiated his own strategies until leaving in the spring of 2018 to become CEO of Lowe's. Now, Jill Soltau, former CEO of JOANN stores, has been hired as the new CEO. This case gives students the opportunity to evaluate the company's turnaround strategies as it struggles to survive in a challenging retail environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This description-bused case used secondary data to provide students with the controversy centered around Amazon's highly criticized culture. An article published by the New York Times illuminates current and former employees' disapproving perceptions of the culture Amazon has adopted which has ironically contributed to its overwhelming success. Although some have touted their allegiance to such cultural pragmatism, others, who define the culture as "modem-day Darwinism", have experienced consternation as cultural practices have created unpleasant work conditions thus causing dissatisfaction that lead to voluntary or involuntary exiting. In light of Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods, questions have resonated regarding the dichotomous collision of cultural disparities that could have either fortuitous or catastrophic implications. Founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, has adamantly defended Amazon amidst such allegations of mistreatment of employees and refutes claims of rejecting underpeiforming employees and granting reprieves for those only conforming to its cultural model. Bezos strongly maintains that the company's cultures embodies the industry's standards and defines its hypercompetitive and aggressive nature as distinctive and incomparable to other companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of multiple, distributed nodes each with limited resources. With their strict resource constraints and application-specific characteristics, WSNs contain many challenging tradeoffs. This paper proposes a bioinspired load balancing approach, based on pheromone signalling mechanisms, to solve the tradeoff between service availability and energy consumption. We explore the performance consequences of the pheromone-based load balancing approach using (1) a system-level simulator, (2) deployment of real sensor testbeds to provide a competitive analysis of these evaluation methodologies. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated with different scenario parameters and the required performance evaluation techniques are investigated on case studies based on sound sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]