In regard to the what is violation? reading, my views are as follows.

Basic tenets of morality, ethical behavior are to be applied in every walk of life, not only to the academic field. We can extend these principles to all the other fields such as, business, office administration, personal life etc.. In business, for example, in pharmaceutical field, clinical trials are done to prove the efficacy of a drug. Along the way, some of the adverse side-effects of the drug that are noticed must be disclosed to the consumers in explicit terms. Similarly in the financial business, the investing companies should not hide any facts and risks associated with the deployment of the money of the investing public. As an employee, basic honesty and integrity in discharging our duty cannot be compromised in any and all situations. Revealing the secrets of the company to a competitor is a grave violation of ethical behavior. Stealing intellectual ideas of another without his/her permission is the same as stealing physical property of another. This principle should be deeply ingrained in the minds of people involved in academic and research fields. Even politics devoid of morality and ethics degenerate the entire governing system. For example, during an election campaign, a candidate giving false resolutions to the public is a form of violation. Even in our personal life being honest to ones near and dear, helps in strengthening their relationship. I feel that, it is the duty of parents to instill in all children, right from childhood to adulthood, the basic necessity of honesty, integrity, non-stealing nature in all walks of life. This will strengthen the basic moral fiber of a person in the pursuit of any goals in life and will make him a good citizen of the country.

Post - 2 Continuing the argument on the matter of cheating that is widely prevalent among engineering students, I feel, since physics is more conceptual, theoretical and more mathematical, it becomes highly difficult to copy others works. As far as engineering is consi dered it is merely the application of science and mathematics and less of concepts and theories, making it more susceptible to intellectual dishonesty by the act of copying etc.. I feel that values of the group (their perception about cheating) play a major role in matter of cheating when compared to the size of the group. According to the paper Engineering Students Perceptions of and Attitudes Towards Cheating, high rate of cheating among the engineering students is the result of high level of competition, peer pressure and wrong perception of the students as to what is cheating. According to the paper many students consider that they cheat less than other students, which is nothing but flawed thinking.

How to prevent this is the matter for our consideration? I think students should be given specific instructions in the form of ethics classes at the introductory time of the course. They should be thought the importance of intellectual honesty in pursuing anything rather than merely being told to go through the honor code of the university. Above all it is ones deep belief in being intellectually honest in everything he deals with in life is the most important thing As far as the fact that companies more often recruit based on the students GPA, I feel the assessment should be based partially on GPA and partially on the real testing of the students knowledge by fine tuning of the interview process. Reference: Engineering Students Perceptions of and Attitudes Towards Cheating by By Carpenter, Donald D.; Harding, Trevor S.; Finelli, Cynthia J.; Montgomery, Susan M.; Passow, Honor J. Academic journal article from Journal of Engineering Education, Vol. 95, No. 3, from the website http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/.

My group replies: Reply 1: I agree with the view of Mr. Jeries, that a business organization should continuously keep itself posted of the customers changing requirements in regards to the companys products. For example, in a recent internet article, the author of an article mentioned that Intel had lost the lead in chip-making for tablets and mobiles. Previous top executive of Intel held the view that tablets were not a competitor for PCs and laptops. However, as can be seen tablets have fast taken over a substitute for handheld computers. The present CEO of the company appears to make amends for the wrongly held view and Intel seems to be moving into designing and making of chips for tablets. However, Intel has lost the first-mover advantage and hence has to work hard in catching the lost market. Similarly, IBM which was concentrating only on hardware a decade ago started moving into developing of database software like Oracle in a great move. At present software also contributes a lions share in their sales. My examples of IBM and Intel reinforce the view that a business organization should continuously keep tab on the changing market dynamics of its products and its relevance to customers.

Reference: [1] Intel Announces New Mobile Strategy, Future Atom Chips by Damon Poeter, website: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2427509,00.asp

Reply 2: From the following deliberations, it will be clear that poor management coupled with a higher risk is a sure recipe for disaster. Detailed assessment before taking risk improves the quality of management. A good manager will assess risks involved in the project and plan for contingencies when things dont turn out as per the plan. Proper communication of the expectation also helps a manager to lead well. Improper assessment of risks is often done by inexperienced or poor managers, who over promise and under-deliver leading to greater risk as they try to catch-up. These attributes of a good and poor manager resembles those of a gambler where losing gamblers try to get it all back by betting more whereas winning gamblers bet based on their past successes and having more resources. Californias Central Valley often called as ground-zero in foreclosure crisis is another example of poor risk management. The banking and mortgage industries failed to assess properly the risks of giving out mortgages to anyone who wants to own a house. Their imperative was to mitigate the risk directly in front of the by passing it on to someone else. The government also failed to regulate that entire system of mitigating risk by passing it along to someone else. Rather than address that flaw in the economy, regulators (corporate regulation) allowed short-term gain at the expense of long-term prosperity.

Reply 3: I am of the view that management overhead, especially remuneration of the top executives has been increasing more and more at the cost of the other non managerial staff. In fact many leading investment giants like Warren Buffet have been condemning this increasing trend of CEOs getting more packages than what they actually deserve. To compare all companies, technological and non-technological, alike is not correct because non managerial staff (most of them technocrats) of a technological company contribute much more than the management staff. Bulk of the research and innovations are carried out by technical staff (most of them may be non managerial). However compensation wise managerial staff takes a lions share which in my view is not a sound practice. Some of the U.S Corporations CEOs are reportedly taking away a major

chuck of the companys profit by a way of salary, bonus, and stock option benefits. Often companys CEO stands to gain irrespective of whether the company makes profit or loss. Its a win-win situation for the CEO in most of the cases. When companies grow at the top of the organization, they become unmanageable as they will too many reporting layers with wasteful bureaucracy. My view is that management compensation should be reasonable and proportion of the management staff should be lean. Whenever the companys performance improves, the compensation should not disproportionately go to only the top management but should evenly percolate down to others (especially technically qualified) also. It appears the ratio of the highest and the lowest pay has been increasing over the years, which is not a healthy sign.