Second year BA Photography Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Second year BA Photography - Essay Example Film and photography are the main medium of art in the contemporary scenario. Besides these, there are access to the internet, email and television. In this paper, the writer attempts to give a brief description on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. This is one of the works of Walter Benjamin that deals with technology based art production. A number of people refer to his work these days. His works are gaining popularity now than ever before. He has given explanation for mechanization of art such as film and photography. He lived at the time of the growth of communism and fascism. So he had observed the politicization of art. Then the impact of technology on art is also discussed in this paper. â€Å"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction†, published in 1936, is the work of Walter Benjamin who was a German and most of his works are very significant in the contemporary world especially in the field of art and his popularity is increasing by day. This work has been considered as the standard reference in the analysis of art today, since it speaks about the mechanization in art like in movies and photography. Benjamin was so intelligent and he was influenced by the culture in which he lived. He was born in 1892 in a middle class family that had a close relation to art since his father was an art dealer in Berlin. He could not earn an academic employment due to some incidents in his life. One among them was that his doctoral study was rejected, as the subject was not comprehendible and the second incident was, criticizing and attacking one of the members in intellectual circle. His writings are supposed to be excellent works in explaining on the mechanica l reproduction of film, photography etc. Undoubtedly, we can say that technology-based production of art spoils our creativity, newness, uniqueness and authenticity. Today, one of the means of art is film production and cartoon movies which are at the fore front.

Portfolio theory and invesntment analysis Assignment

Portfolio theory and invesntment analysis - Assignment Example In fact, it is required to estimate current investment strategy of the charity and then to propose actions for its improvement. Let us suppose that the portfolio has stocks. Structure of is determined by weights of stocks, . Per se, efficient portfolio allows the charity to obtain high expected values of return under tolerable value of risk. Efficient portfolio is determined by optimal weights of stocks, . In general, portfolios with high values of allow to achieve well optimized and efficient solutions but such portfolios are expensive to operate and difficult to analyze and manage. On the other hand, portfolios with small values of are cheap to operate and easy to manage but often such portfolios are too weakly diversified to be able to track the entire market or to beat the market index. Let us consider by examples how to determine optimal values of and weights and how to analyze structure of efficient portfolio . The present portfolio of the charity is concentrated in equity shares in leading U.K. companies. So, it is reasonable to suppose that each of them is in the top of the FTSE 100 Index, a capitalization-weighted index of the 100 most highly capitalized U.K. companies traded on the LSE. For instance, let us select1 the 7 largest constituents of the FTSE 100 Index. As of 9 December 2007, these ones were RDSA.L & RDSB.L, BP.L, HSBA.L, VOD.L, GSK.L, RIO.L, and RBS.L. Then, let us consider values of their market capitalization and also betas vs. UKX: Company Symbol Market Cap (millions ) Fraction (%) Beta vs. UKX Royal Dutch Shell PLC RDSA.L, RDSB.L 127,532.881 20.48 0.934, 0.983 BP PLC BP.L 117,355.224 18.85 1.056 HSBC Holdings PLC HSBA.L 101,548.136 16.31 0.723 Vodafone Group PLC VOD.L 98,199.053 15.77 1.068 GlaxoSmithKline PLC GSK.L 72,271.602 11.61 0.643 Rio Tinto PLC RIO.L 57,299.112 9.20 1.353 Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC RBS.L 48,380.050 7.77 1.083 It is known that around 40% of the charity's portfolio is invested in one of these stocks, say, BP.L; the investment in each of the others is around 10%. In case of passive investment strategy the charity uses tracking portfolio, in which each of 7 fractions must reflect (sic!) market capitalization of appropriate leading company; e.g. see Focardi & Fabozzi (2004). Inasmuch as real market fractions of top 7 U.K. companies are distributed quite otherwise than in the charity's portfolio, we may conclude that the charity uses rather active than passive investment strategy. It seems that such choice of the investment strategy is quite reasonable. In case of passive investing the charity attempts at least "track" the market which is characterized, say, by the FTSE All-Share Index. If the market is down in a given period, the charity with an indexing strategy will also find investment performance reflecting that decline. Of course, such investing is a low-cost strategy due to reduced security analysis and insignificant start portfolio management costs. However, there are certain tracking errors when the tracking portfolio can not follow