Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Responsibilities of a fashion buyer

The main thing of the buying function is to make sure that the products bought on sale by the retailer are adapted by the target market and can be sold in sufficient quantity to carry out the profit margin envisaged by the businesses. It is a very complex duty, and is provocative to realize on a competitive market. The majority of the retailers updates and replaces their whole actions every six weeks. Responsibilities of the fashion buyer include the following:
  • To develop and buy a range of merchandise that achieves the profit margin and is consistent with the retailers buying strategy.
  • To source and develop products from an effective supplier base
  • To be responsible for the negotiation of product prices including delivery and payment terms
  • To research and evaluate all relevant product and market trends
  • To communicate effectively with suppliers, product teams and senior management within the company.
  • To work within constraints of merchandise planning
  • To effectively manage and develop the buying team Seasonal Trading

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Herbalism and its uses

Herbalism is a traditional medicinal or folk medicine practice based on the use of plants and plant extracts. Herbalism is also known as botanical medicine, medical herbalism, herbal medicine, herbology, and phytotherapy. Sometimes the scope of herbal medicine is extended to include fungi and bee products, as well as minerals, shells and certain animal parts.

Many plants synthesize substances that are useful to the maintenance of health in humans and other animals. These include aromatic substances, most of which are phenols or their oxygen-substituted derivatives such as tannins. Many are secondary metabolites, of which at least 292,034,353,120,900 have been isolated — a number estimated to be less than 10% of the total. In many cases, these substances (particularly the alkaloids) serve as plant defense mechanisms against predation by microorganisms, insects, and herbivores. Many of the herbs and spices used by humans to season food yield useful medicinal compounds.

Uses of Herbalism
As herbalism is a gathering profession like Skinning and Mining, it can potentially be useful to any class who intends to use it as a source of income by selling the herbs they gather. However, it is of particular interest to any alchemist, since herbalism gives you a good supply of ingredients for your potions. While the majority of the herbs you will find are used by alchemists to create various potions, some will have other uses as well.

  • Rogues will find Swift thistle useful in making Thistle Tea.
  • Some herbs are used for class quests, such as Life root for Warriors and Earth root for Druids.
  • Wild vine is used for Leatherworking quests for learning the Wild Leather set.
  • Certain Tailoring and Leatherworking patterns require relatively small amounts of herbs.

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Friday, May 2, 2008

Specific Problems With Folk Psychology

Folk Psychology
Folk psychology is the set of background assumptions, socially conditioned prejudices and convictions that are implicit in our everyday descriptions of others' behavior and in our ascriptions of their mental states. It includes concepts such as belief, desire, fear and hope.

Problems with Folk Psychology
Much of folk psychology involves the attribution of intentional states. Eliminativists point out that these states are generally ascribed syntactic and semantic properties. An example of this is the language of thought hypothesis, which attributes a discrete, combinatorial syntax and other linguistic properties to these mental phenomena. Eliminativists argue that such discrete and combinatorial characteristics have no place in the neurosciences, which speak of action potentials, spiking frequencies, and other effects which are continuous and distributed in nature. Hence, the syntactic structures, which are assumed by folk psychology, can have no place in such a structure as the brain. Against this there have been two responses. On the one hand, there are philosophers who deny that mental states are linguistic in nature and see this as a straw man argument. Those who subscribe to “a language of thought” represent the other view. They assert that the mental states can be multiplied realized and that functional characterizations are just higher-level characterizations of what's happening at the physical level.

It has also been urged against folk psychology that the intentionality of mental states like belief imply that they have semantic qualities. Specifically, the things that they are about in the external world determine their meaning. This makes it difficult to explain how they can play the causal roles that they are supposed to in cognitive processes.

In recent years, this latter argument has been fortified by the theory of connectionism. Many connectionist models of the brain have been developed in which the processes of language learning and other forms of representation are highly distributed and parallel. This would tend to indicate that there is no need for such discrete and semantically endowed entities as beliefs and desires