Corporate governance Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Corporate governance - Essay Example The Fraud was first discovered when its budget and financial Analyst Kim Emigh blew the whistle in December of 2000 when he asked engineers in Richardson, Texas unit and elsewhere to stop charging their time for long term projects to capital expenditures (Young 2002). It was also when he told his accounting manager Frank Guckes after receiving an email to charge it to another account that it is fraud and that it is a SEC violation that he should make everybody aware of it because Kim Emigh will (Young 2002). Ten weeks later, Kim Emigh was fired which prompted him to sue WorldCom leading to a congressional and SEC inquiry which eventually led to WorldCom’s filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July 21, 2002. Later, its CEO Bernard Ebbers was found guilty on March 15, 2005 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. WorldCom’s other officials such as its CFO Scott Sullivan, former controller David Myers, former accounting director Buford Yates and former accounting managers Betty Vinson and Troy Normand all plead guilty to fraud, conspiracy and filing of false statements. II. Crisis as a pretext of WorldCom corporate governance failure The WorldCom financial scandal came about from the backdrop of several crises that put pressure on the liquidity of the company that may have triggered its shady accounting practice. Beginning in late 1990s, the telecom industry was already beginning slow down and the Argentinian bank crisis in 2001 prompted bank to adopt a conservative fiscal policy by increasing its interest rates. This has affected the dotcom companies whose rapid appreciation in the market was propelled mainly by cheap capital afforded by lower interest rates. When the dotcom bubble burst, it contributed to the slowdown of the telecoms industry of which WorldCom is a player. The increasing conservatism of banks led them to pressure WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers to cover margin calls of his declining WorldCom stock because it was used to financ e his other businesses. In 2001, Ebbers urged the board of WorldCom to provide him $400 to cover these margin calls whose strategy did not work. This added pressure to the finances of the company to resort to shady accounting practices to cover its deteriorating financial position and save the value of its stocks so as not to add to the margin calls it has to cover. III. Corporate government failures of WorldCom WorldCom’s problem started when its CEO Bernard Ebbers used WorldCom stocks to guarantee his loan from banks that will finance his other businesses. As a business practice, it is not ideal to juggle funds between companies because they do not only confuse the accounting of both companies but also brings other financial complications not to mention unethical such as what happened to WorldCom. When the series of crisis begun in late 1990’s which was triggered by a multitude of factors such as bank crisis, dotcom burst and Enron scandal, its stocks depreciated bec ause of industry slowdown that can be attributed to the dire macroeconomic condition during that time and the inappropriateness of juggling its funds by Bernard Ebbers was highlighted and sired many problems in the company. This also put pressure on the finances of WorldCom that instead of restructuring itself as part of good corporate governa

What Can Computing Do 'Beyond the Office' Essay

What Can Computing Do 'Beyond the Office' - Essay Example In other words, a significant goal of this paradigm is to develop human like intelligence in machine to reinstate and help out humans in daily tasks. Hence, AI is considered as an important field of science that is concerned with making machines that find out solutions to complex issues and problems in a human-like fashion. This usually involves making use of the characteristics of human intelligence, and putting into practice them like algorithms within a computer friendly approach. In this scenario, a wide variety of competent tactics can be used depending on the requirements identified; that expertly be in command of how artificial the intellectual actions became visible. Though, AI is normally considered as a very important field of computer science but it has a number of important and helpful applications in many other areas of study such as Cognition, Mathematics, Psychology, Biology, Philosophy, and many other fields and areas. Thus, our capability to join together data and kn owledge from all these fields of study will ultimately encourage our development in the chase of creating an AI creature (Champandard, 2002; Russell & Norvig, 1995). Artificial intelligence is the most advanced and sophisticated type of technology that helps human develop better and useful machines which can carry out human tasks more efficiently without tiring and stopping. We can implement artificial intelligence in many existing fields. This paper has different sections to demonstrate the application, working and improvements of the Artificial Intelligence model of knowledge. This paper will also discuss various concepts that are associated with artificial intelligence. An Overview of AI (Copeland, 2000) believe that artificial intelligence is a science of creating computers and machines which have the capability to carry out tasks that require some intelligence when carried out by humans. In fact, the artificial intelligence has had more than a few successes in limited, or in ba sic areas. However, the earlier five decades from the emergence of AI have a great deal carried slow development; in addition to untimely anticipation about the achievement of human-level intelligence has offered a way to an optimistic response of the intense complexity of the problem (Copeland, 2000). According to (ThinkQuest, 1997; ThinkQuest2, 1997) artificial intelligence can be defined as a model of computer science which is aimed at building computers and machines which have the capability to carry out the actions and demonstrate behaviors that humans think are intelligent. In addition, the ability to create intelligent machines has normally deception to humans since early times, and at the present time with the developments and advancements in computer knowledge and fifty years of research into artificial intelligence programming methods, the dream of building intellectual machines is turning out to be a reality. In fact, at the present, scientists are building intelligent ma chines which are equipped to copy human thinking, recognize speech, beat the top chess-player among human, and many other actions which had never ever been possible (ThinkQuest, 1997; ThinkQuest2, 1997). History of AI In this section I will discuss the history of artificial intelligence. Basically, the history or roots of AI myths can be traced back to the earliest Egypt; however with the invention of electronic computer in 1941, the AI technology eventually became visible to produce machine intelligence. However,