Wednesday, January 29, 2020

The Cost of Coronary Heart Disease to Society Essay Example for Free

The Cost of Coronary Heart Disease to Society Essay â€Å"Coronary heart disease (CHD), also called coronary artery disease (CAD), is when the vessels supplying blood and oxygen to your heart become narrow or constrictedâ‘ ºÃ¢â‚¬  The main causes are: Smoking cigarettes Cigarette smoking is a major cause of strokes. High blood pressure Can put strain on your heart and can lead to CHD. High cholesterol levels Cholesterol is essential for healthy cells, but if there is too much in the blood it can lead to CHD. Unhealthy diet A bad diet can lead to diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension and uncontrolled weight. Each of these factors independently contribute to a high risk of heart disease. Physical inactivity Regular physical activity decreases the risk of coronary artery disease because it makes the coronary arteries wider and more flexible. Alcohol consumption Raises blood pressure; puts more pressure on arteries. Obesity Reduces HDL cholesterol which enable lipids to be transported within the water-based bloodstream. The cost of coronary heart disease to society cannot be viewed in terms of just money, but also the loss of 166,000 lives every year, this figure is the number of people who died of coronary heart disease in 1961 in the UK. The figure in 1997 however had fallen to 140,500. In 2000, this figure had fallen still to 125,000, and in 2010 more than 65,000 people died from coronary heart disease; more than for any other diseaseâ‘ ¹. The total direct healthcare costs of coronary heart disease in 1999 came to  £1.73 billion. The major costs were those used for hospital inpatient care, which accounted for  £917 million (or 53% of the total) and drug treatment, which accounted for  £558 million (or 32% of the total). Rehabilitation and community care, prevention and primary care, accident and emergency (AE) and outpatient care accounted for 7.4%, 3.6%, and 2.9%, respectively, of total direct costs. People aged 65 years and above and men utilised 63% and 52% of total expenditure, respectivelyâ‘ ´. In 2006, coronary heart disease cost the UK NHS approximately  £3.2 billion, this represents a cost per capita of just over  £50 for each condition. The cost of hospital care for people who have coronary heart diseases accounts for about 73% of these costsâ‘ µ. The hospital costs for stroke account for 94% of the total health care costsâ‘ ¶. In 2006 the total cost of coronary heart disease to the UK economy was approximately  £9.0 billionâ‘ ¸. Some patients with coronary heart disease will be referred for cardiac rehabilitation, particularly following bypass surgery or if they have experienced angina or a heart attack. The rehabilitation may consist of an exercise plan to help regain stamina safely based on individual ability and needs, and education, counseling, and training. Training may include ways to better manage stress, as well as how to manage other lifestyle factors that contribute to coronary heart disease. An estimated 401 000 people provided informal care to coronary heart disease patients in the UK and about 408 million hours were used to care for them. Informal care of coronary heart disease sufferers was estimated to cost  £2.42 billionâ‘ ´. About 150 565 working years were lost from deaths from coronary heart disease in England and Wales; 71% of these working years lost were from deaths in men in the 45–64 year age rangeâ‘ ´. There were 65.4 million working days lost because of incapacity resulting from coronary heart disease in the UK. In 2004, the average length of stay for an individual entering the hospital for CHD complications was 4.3 daysâ‘ ´. To the UK population, an estimated 765 000 men and 698 000 women had experienced a coronary heart disease event in the past year, with those aged 55 and above accounting for 88% of cases, also to the UK population, an estimated 1.42 million men and 1.14 million women have a history of doctor diagnosed coronary heart diseaseâ‘ ·. In 2006 over 2.2 million people were living with CHD; 1.3 million men and 860,000 womenâ‘ ¸. The mortality cost of coronary heart disease in the UK was estimated to be about  £1.81 billion (of which  £1.68 billion can be attributed to men and  £0.123 billion to women)â‘ ´. The total cost of illness associated with coronary heart disease in the UK is  £7.06 billion per yearâ‘ ·. CHD, by itself, is the most common cause of premature death in the UK. About one fifth (18%) of premature deaths in men and one in ten (9%) premature deaths in women from CHD, which caused over 28,000 premature deaths in the UK in 2008â‘ ¶. Rates of CHD are higher in men than in women and rates increase with age. However CHD is also a major cause of premature (under 75) deaths. In 2010, there were over 21,000 premature deaths from CHD in Englandâ‘ ¸. CHD rates are not distributed evenly around England. Death rates are much higher in the North of England compared to the South. Premature mortality rates in the North West are about 50% higher than in the South East for men, and 60% higher for women. But CHD rates in England are lower than in the rest of the UKâ‘ ¸. Approximately 85% of those who die of coronary artery disease are age 65 or olderâ‘ ½. People that are diagnosed with coronary heart disease may feel worried or anxious about their personal well being and how this diagnosis will affect their lifestyleâ‘ ». Patients diagnosed with heart disease may experience guilty feelings. They may believe that their chosen lifestyles may have contributed to them acquiring coronary heart diseaseâ‘ ». Patients with coronary heart disease may isolate themselves socially from their friends as a result of side effects of their medications or symptoms of their disease, such as fatigueâ‘ ». Depression is a condition that patients with coronary heart disease may experience. This may be caused by a variety of reasons. They may become less motivated and less functional in their roles in life; achieving goals and getting jobsâ‘ ». Depression is strongly correlated with the presence of angina within a patients with coronary heart disease. Also patients with physical health problems such as coronary heart disease often have worse quality of lifeâ‘ ¼. In conclusion, the cost of coronary heart disease to society are the mass amount of people lost to this disease every year, the pain that the relatives and friends endure and the economic burden from the cost of all the healthcare and time invested to help those in need.

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Slaughterhouse-Five: The Novel and the Movie Essay -- Movie Film compa

Slaughterhouse-Five: The Novel and the Movie In 1972 director George Roy Hill released his screen adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (or The Children's Crusade; A Duty Dance With Death). The film made over 4 million dollars and was touted as an "artistic success" by Vonnegut (Film Comment, 41). In fact, in an interview with Film Comment in 1985, Vonnegut called the film a "flawless translation" of his novel, which can be considered an honest assessment in light of his reviews of other adaptations of his works: Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971) "turned out so abominably" that he asked to have his name removed from it; and he found Slapstick of Another Kind (1984) to be "perfectly horrible" (41,44). (This article was writen prior to Showtime's Harrison Bergeron, and Fine Line's Mother Night). A number of other Vonnegut novels have been optioned, but the film projects have either been abandoned during production or never advanced beyond an unproduced screenplay adaptation, indicating the difficulty of translating Vonnegut to the silver screen. So why does Slaughterhouse-Five succeed where others fail? The answer lies in how the source is interpreted on screen. Overall, while there are some discrepancies that yield varying results, the film is a faithful adaptation that succeeds in translating the printed words into visual elements and sounds which convincingly convey the novel's themes. While Vonnegut's literary style is very noticeable in Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel as a whole differs from the majority of his other works because it is personal with an interesting point of view techniq... ...kle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book" (Film Comment 41). Whether or not someone who has not read the novel could get some meaning from the film is hard to decide, but if one considers that it would take just about as long to watch the movie as it would to read the book, the decision should be obvious. Works Cited Bianculli, David. "A Kurt Post-mortem on the Generally Eclectic Theatre." Film Comment Nov.-Dec. 1985: 41-44. Loeb, Monica. Vonnegut's Duty-Dance With Death. UMEA, 1979. Nelson, Joyce. "Slaughterhouse-Five: Novel and Film." Literature/Film Quarterly. 1 (1973): 149-153. Slaughterhouse-Five, dir. George Roy Hill, with Michael Sacks, Universal Pictures, 1972. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell Publishing, 1968.

Monday, January 13, 2020

Story of Akbar and Birbal

Revenue: The amount of money that a company actually receives during a specific period, including discounts and deductions for returned merchandise. It is the â€Å"top line† or â€Å"gross income† figure from which costs are subtracted to determine net income. Revenue is calculated by multiplying the price at which goods or services are sold by the number of units or amount sold. EBITDA is essentially net income with interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization added back to it, and can be used to analyze and compare profitability between companies and industries because it eliminates the effects of financing and accounting decisions. *amortization basically means reducing the value of something to zero Debt –equity ratio: A measure of a company's financial leverage. Debt/equity ratio is equal to long-term debt divided by common shareholders' equity. Typically the data from the prior fiscal year is used in the calculation. Investing in a company with a higher debt/equity ratio may be riskier, especially in times of rising interest rates, due to the additional interest that has to be paid out for the debt. For example, if a company has long-term debt of $3,000 and shareholder's equity of $12,000, then the debt/equity ratio would be 3000 divided by 12000 = 0. 25. It is important to realize that if the ratio is greater than 1, the majority of assets are financed through debt. If it is smaller than 1, assets are primarily financed through equity. Return-on-assets: An indicator of how profitable a company is relative to its total assets. ROA gives an idea as to how efficient management is at using its assets to generate earnings. Calculated by dividing a company's annual earnings by its total assets, ROA is displayed as a percentage. Sometimes this is referred to as â€Å"return on investment†. The formula for return on assets is: Note: Some investors add interest expense back into net income when performing this calculation because they'd like to use operating returns before cost of borrowing.

Sunday, January 5, 2020

Definition and Examples of Rhotic and Non-Rhotic Speech

In  phonology  and sociolinguistics, the term rhoticity refers broadly to the sounds of the r family. More specifically, linguists commonly make  distinctions between rhotic and non-rhotic dialects or accents.  Simply put, rhotic speakers  pronounce  the  /r/ in words like large and  park,  while non-rhotic speakers generally  dont pronounce the /r/ in these words.  Non-rhotic is also known as r-dropping. Linguist  William Barras notes that levels of rhoticity can vary  between speakers in a community, and the process of a loss of rhoticity is a gradual one, rather than the sharp binary distinction implied by the labels rhotic and non-rhotic (Lancashire in  Researching Northern English,  2015). EtymologyFrom the Greek letter rho  (the letter r) Examples and Observations [C]onsider dialects that drop r such as varieties of English spoken in the United Kingdom, the southern United States, and New England.  Speakers  of these r-Iess dialects dont drop r just anywhere, they do so only under certain phonological conditions. For example, speakers drop r in a word when it follows a vowel, and would therefore not pronounce the r in the following words: heart, farm, car But they would pronounce r in these words, because r does not follow a vowel: red,  brick, scratch The r-rule in words is even more complex; though you may be familiar with the phrase pahk the cah  in Hahvad Yahd, a stock phrase used to imitate this dialectical feature, real speakers of such varieties of English in fact retain a final r when the following word begins with a vowel. Speakers say  pahk the car  in Hahvad Yahd. (A similar rules accounts for so-called r-intrusion,  where some speakers add r to words that end in vowels before another word that begins with a vowel, as in . . . That idear is a good one.)(Anne Lobeck and Kristin Denham,  Navigating English Grammar: A Guide to Analyzing Real Language. Wiley-Blackwell,  2013)   Varieties of English: Rhotic and Non-Rhotic Accents [Rhotic accents are] accents of English in which non-prevocalic /r/ is pronounced, i.e. in which words like star have retained the original pronunciation /star/ starr rather than having the newer pronunciation /sta:/ stah, where the /r/ has been lost. Rhotic accents of English include nearly  all accents of Scottish and Irish English, most accents of Canadian and American English, accents from the south-west  and north-west of England, some varieties of Caribbean English and a small number of New Zealand accents. Non-rhotic accents are those of Australia, South Africa, eastern and central England, some parts of the Caribbean, and a number of places on the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada, as well as African American Vernacular English. (Peter Trudgill, A Glossary of Sociolinguistics. Oxford University Press, 2003)   Rhoticity in British English While the dropping of r had spread  [from London and  East Anglia]  to most other accents of England by the eighteenth century, rhoticity remains a feature of accents spoken in the geographically more extreme areas of England today: the southwest, northwest, and northeast.  This distribution suggests that the loss  of this feature has been spreading outwards from the eastern dialects since the fifteenth century, but has not yet affected these few remaining strongholds. From this development, we might predict that postvocalic r will at some stage be entirely lost from accents of English, though it is impossible to determine exactly when this process will reach completion.(Simon Horobin, How English Became English: A Short History of a Global Language. Oxford University Press, 2016)   A Change From Below Throughout most of the nineteenth century, non-rhotic pronunciations  continued to be condemned, but  by the time Daniel Joness pronouncing dictionary was published in 1917, non-rhotic pronunciations had become characteristic of RP. The spread of non-rhotic pronunciation can thus be seen as a change from below, beginning in nonstandard London English  and spreading geographically northwards and  socially upwards until, in the early twenty-first century, it is the rhotic pronunciations that are marked as nonstandard in England.  Even within rhotic areas there  is evidence that younger people are less likely to pronounce /r/ in words such as arm. In other words, rhoticity is a recessive feature in England.(Joan C.  Beal,  Introduction to Regional Englishes: Dialect Variation in England. Edinburgh University Press,  2010)   Rhoticity in New York City Sociolinguistically, there is more social stratification on the British model in the accents  of New York City than anywhere else in North America, with upper social class accents having many fewer local features than lower-class accents. . . . New York City English, like that of Boston, is non-rhotic, and linking and intrusive  /r/  are usual. As a consequence, the local accent shares with RP and the other non-rhotic accents  the vowels  /IÉ™/, /ɛə/, /ÊŠÉ™/, /ÉÅ"/ as in peer, pair, poor, bird. However, as in the Boston area, younger speakers are now becoming increasingly rhotic, especially among higher social class groups. (Peter Trudgill and Jean Hannah,  International English: A Guide to the Varieties of Standard English, 5th ed.  Routledge, 2013)The distribution of /r/ is one of the most  widely researched sociolinguistic features. [William] Labov (1966/2006), in a groundbreaking study, reports on the social stratification of rhoticity in New York City. His general results  are that the absence of [r] in coda position is generally associated with lower social prestige and informal registers. Labov argues that rhoticity  is a marker of New York City speech, since it shows style-shifting and hypercorrection. This would not be the case if New Yorkers were not aware of this difference, even unconsciously. The marker status of rhoticity is further supported by [Kara] Becker (2009), a study conducted on rhoticity in the Lower East Side forty years later. As she notes, There is much evidence that both New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers alike do  identify non-rhoticity as a salient feature of NYCE [New York City English], one that (in combination with other NYCE features or even alone) can index a New York persona (Becker 2009: p644).(Pà ©ter Rà ¡cz,  Salience in Sociolinguistics: A Quantitative Approach.  Walter de Gruyter, 2013)In terms of phonology, many AAE speakers in  New York City  and many parts of the country t end to omit /r/ when it follows a vowel. This pattern, known as post-vocalic /r/-lessness  or â€Å"non-rhoticity,† leading to the pronunciation of park as pahk and car as cah.  It is not unique to AAE and  is found in the wider New York City vernacular among older and working-class white speakers, but not very commonly among young, upper middle class Whites. (Cecelia Cutler,  White Hip Hoppers, Language and Identity in Post-Modern America.  Routledge, 2014) Intrusive /r/ Intrusive /r/,  heard in expressions like the idear  of it and the lawr of the sea, arises by analogy with words like father, which quite regularly have a final /r/ before a vowel, but not before a consonant or a pause. For a long time, intrusive /r/ has been normal in educated speech after /Ç /, so that the idear of it and Ghanar and India are perfectly acceptable. Until relatively recently, however, intrusive /r/ has been stigmatized when it occurred after other vowels, so that the Shahr of Persia and the lawr of the sea were  considered vulgar. This now seems to have changed, however, and intrusive /r/ is widespread in educated speech after any vowel.  Sometimes the intrusive /r/ goes  on to attach itself permanently to the stem of the word, leading to such forms as drawring board and withdrawral. These are quite common, but probably not yet accepted as standard. (Charles Barber, Joan C.  Beal, and Philip A. Shaw, The English Language: A Historical Introduction, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2012)   The Lighter Side of R Dropping R-dropping  America has inspired a humorous  theorem called the Law of Conservation of Rs (formulated by Edward Scher in 1985), which holds that an r missing from one word will  turn up in excess in  another: fawth (fourth), for example, is balanced by idears or the common second r in sherbert. (Robert Hendrickson,  The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms.  Facts on File, 2000)