Cairo Forum 2010 Education Site

Archive for November, 2011

Online education has become very popular for many students. It can allow people to obtain a certificate, diploma or even a degree at their own convenience. Yet, despite this many will still not be able to take advantage of it. Why? It’s because most online educational programs are very expensive. Even a certificate can cost you hundreds of dollars. And degrees or diplomas will cost you thousands. This is not good for individuals who need career training yet have lower budgets. However, hope is not lost since there are many companies offering free online training for various occupational skills.

Why would a company offer free online training to Internet surfers? The answer to this question depends on the company’s motives. For example, http://Freeskills.com offers a membership program where visitors get access to hundreds of their training tutorials. They offer a temporary type of free online training to allow people to try their service before actually buying. Other companies, (such as http://E-learningcenter.com), offer free online training for e-mail marketing purposes. In order to have access to their free online training programs, you must provide your name and email address. This subscribes you to their newsletter, which will advertise products or services that may be of interest to you. Then there are the companies or individuals who make free online training content for their websites. They get their revenue from pay-per-click networks they may be a part of. The hope is that by reading their engaging content, you will be on the site long enough to click on one of their ads, allowing them to earn a commission.

Depending on the type of free online training program you decide to use, you may even get a certificate showing you successfully completed your training. This is the case with http://Freeskills.com, though keep in mind their free online training is temporary, (as you will have to pay $149 a year for long-term access). If you are fortunate enough to be able to get a certificate from a free online training program, make sure to make mention of it on your resume under a ‘Certifications’ section. If not you can still make mention of the knowledge you gained from free online training, though you will have to put it in the ‘Skills’ or ‘Qualifications’ section.
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Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, sculptor, architect, cartographer, engineer, scientist and inventor in the 15th century. Yet, despite his genius, he referred to himself as “senza lettere” (the illiterate, the man without letters). For good reason: until late in life, he was unable to read, or write, Latin, the language used by virtually all other Renaissance intellectuals, the lingua franca, akin to English today. Nor was he acquainted with mathematics until he was 30.

Leonardo was born out of wedlock but was raised by his real father, a wealthy Florentine notary. He served at least ten years (1466-1476) as Garzone (apprentice) to Andrea del Verrocchio and painted details in Verrocchio’s canvasses. Only in 1478, when he was 26, did he become independent.

He was not off to an auspicious start. He never executed his first commission (an altarpiece in the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio della Signoria, Florence’s town hall). His first large paintings were left unfinished (“The Adoration of the Magi” and “Saint Jerome”, both 1481).

Most of the sketches and studies for Leonardo’s works of art and engineering are found on his shopping lists, personal notes, and personal expenditure ledgers.

No one was allowed to enter Leonardo’s den, where he kept, as Giorgio Vasari in “Lives of the Artists”, describes: “a number of green and other kinds of lizards, crickets, serpents, butterflies, locusts, hats, and various strange creatures of this nature”.

Leonardo’s clients were often dissatisfied with his glacial pace, lack of professional discipline, and inability to conclude his assignments. He was frequently involved in litigation. The Cofraternity of the Immaculate Conception sued him when he failed to produce the Virgin on the Rocks, an altarpiece they commissioned from him in 1483. The court proceedings lasted 10 years. The head of Jesus in “The Last Supper” was left blank because Leonardo did not dare to paint a human model, nor did he trust his imagination sufficiently. Leonardo worked four years on the Mona Lisa but never completed it, either. He carried it with him wherever he went.
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“The more I became interested in psychoanalysis, the more I saw it as a road to the same kind of broad and deep understanding of human nature that writers possess.”

Anna Freud

Towards the end of the 19th century, the new discipline of psychology became entrenched in both Europe and America. The study of the human mind, hitherto a preserve of philosophers and theologians, became a legitimate subject of scientific (some would say, pseudo-scientific) scrutiny.

The Structuralists – Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Bradford Titchener – embarked on a fashionable search for the “atoms” of consciousness: physical sensations, affections or feelings, and images (in both memories and dreams). Functionalists, headed by William James and, later, James Angell and John Dewey – derided the idea of a “pure”, elemental sensation. They introduced the concept of mental association. Experience uses associations to alter the nervous system, they hypothesized.

Freud revolutionized the field (though, at first, his reputation was limited to the German-speaking parts of the dying Habsburg Empire). He dispensed with the unitary nature of the psyche and proposed instead a trichotomy, a tripartite or trilateral model (the id, ego, and superego). He suggested that our natural state is conflict, that anxiety and tension are more prevalent than harmony. Equilibrium (compromise formation) is achieved by constantly investing mental energy. Hence “psychodynamics”.

Most of our existence is unconscious, Freud theorized. The conscious is but the tip of an ever-increasing iceberg. He introduced the concepts of libido and Thanatos (the life and death forces), instincts (Triebe, or “drives”, in German) or drives, the somatic-erotogenic phases of psychic (personality) development, trauma and fixation, manifest and latent content (in dreams). Even his intellectual adversaries used this vocabulary, often infused with new meanings.

The psychotherapy he invented, based on his insights, was less formidable. Many of its tenets and procedures have been discarded early on, even by its own proponents and practitioners. The rule of abstinence (the therapist as a blank and hidden screen upon which the patient projects or transfers his repressed emotions), free association as the exclusive technique used to gain access to and unlock the unconscious, dream interpretation with the mandatory latent and forbidden content symbolically transformed into the manifest – have all literally vanished within the first decades of practice.

Other postulates – most notably transference and counter-transference, ambivalence, resistance, regression, anxiety, and conversion symptoms – have survived to become cornerstones of modern therapeutic modalities, whatever their origin. So did, in various disguises, the idea that there is a clear path leading from unconscious (or conscious) conflict to signal anxiety, to repression, and to symptom formation (be it neuroses, rooted in current deprivation, or psychoneuroses, the outcomes of childhood conflicts). The existence of anxiety-preventing defense mechanisms is also widely accepted.

Freud’s initial obsession with sex as the sole driver of psychic exchange and evolution has earned him derision and diatribe aplenty. Clearly, a child of the repressed sexuality of Victorian times and the Viennese middle-class, he was fascinated with perversions and fantasies. The Oedipus and Electra complexes are reflections of these fixations. But their origin in Freud’s own psychopathologies does not render them less revolutionary. Even a century later, child sexuality and incest fantasies are more or less taboo topics of serious study and discussion.

Ernst Kris said in 1947 that Psychoanalysis is:

“…(N)othing but human behavior considered from the standpoint of conflict. It is the picture of the mind divided against itself with attendant anxiety and other dysphoric effects, with adaptive and maladaptive defensive and coping strategies, and with symptomatic behaviors when the defense fail.”

But Psychoanalysis is more than a theory of the mind. It is also a theory of the body and of the personality and of society. It is a Social Sciences Theory of Everything. It is a bold – and highly literate – attempt to tackle the psychophysical problem and the Cartesian body versus mind conundrum. Freud himself noted that the unconscious has both physiological (instinct) and mental (drive) aspects. He wrote: Read the rest of this entry »

The case of Bell v The Spirit Group Ltd [2005] concerned a claim for unfair and constructive dismissal. The employment tribunal held that a series of acts, by the employer, cumulatively amounted to repudiation of the employee’s contract of employment.

The employee was a manager of a national chain of pubs and restaurants. He brought a complaint of unfair constructive dismissal against his employer in the employment tribunal on the grounds of failure to support him throughout a period of a year during his career. He alleged that:

he had been harassed by the senior managers regarding changes to his and his wife’s single contracts to a lower-paid joint contract;
he had been bullied and his grievance initially ignored;
his grievance had been partially upheld but the bullying had continued;
the employer’s conduct amounted to a fundamental breach of his contract of employment – the implied term of mutual trust and confidence (the cause of his resignation);
his dismissal had been unfair in all the circumstances.
The tribunal found that, in view of the cumulative effect of the course of conduct by the employer, there had been a fundamental breach of the implied term of mutual trust and confidence in the employee’s contract of employment, and it was that breach that had been the effective cause of the employee’s resignation. The employee’s claim of unfair constructive dismissal was upheld. The employer appealed to the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) against that decision. The employer’s appeal was dismissed.
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