The Pursuit of a Just and Stable Society Essay Example for Free

The Pursuit of a Just and Stable Society Essay In Plato’s writings that reached its full expression in his famous dialogue, The Republic, he argued that attainment of a just and orderly society lies on the establishment of a society wherein the reigning regime or leader is a philosopher king or queen who possesses the necessary wisdom of philosophy, ethics and politics. In Plato’s republic or just and ordered some of the main features are the abolition of private property or the holding of all goods to belong in public. These extended to the sharing of wives and husbands, establishments and almost anything in the city. Summing up Plato’s ideas in The Republic, a just and ordered society can only be attained by the reign of the philosopher king or queen and the abolition of anything that is private (Cooper, 1997). For about 2000 years after Plato wrote these ideas, almost the same framework or way of thinking had rose in to fame and managed to take the world by storm. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published what is known as The Communist Manifesto, which is considered as one of the most influential political text of all time. In the said literature, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had tried to explain how our modern society can manage to attain a society that is just and orderly. Reading the said manifesto, we can conclude that one of the most central ideas for the attainment of this ideal society that we are talking about is this – the abolition of private property. For the two thinkers, they believed that the most important foundation of any capitalist society that is the dominant idea on the world is the concept of private ownership. In the text, they had tried to build an argument that says that capitalism is evil. With arguments like alienation and exploitation, they almost declared that capitalism is the cause of all the evil that is happening in the world (Marx et al 1888/1967). However, as they argued, this evil (capitalism) has been always rooted on another evil which is also one of the central concepts in Plato’s discussion on The Republic – private property. In this respect, we are together with Plato, Marx and Engels on the belief that a perfect society can only be attained through the abolition of private property. Adopting the arguments in both The Republic and The Communist Manifesto on the evil of accumulation of private property, we are going to solely base the attainment of a just and order society by the virtue of the abolition of such characteristic in the society. Discussing whether our modern arrangement can afford a framework wherein private properties were abolished, we are going to answer if the world can attain true justice and order in the future. For more than 200 years, the framework and system of capitalism had managed to encroach in every part of our lives. Ranging from the mainstream politics of liberalism to our food in our refrigerators up to our system of education, the world had been dependent and managed to exist on capitalist grounds. The ideas of capitalism have been engraved on every human psyche that made us always think in terms of currencies, money and other capitalist traditions. The question is very simple and it is this, â€Å"Is it possible shift to a society wherein accumulation of private properties was abolished just like the socialist community of Marx or Plato’s republic. The answer is very simple. Yes. The history had taught us that a shift from a feudal or capitalist society (i. e. the case of China, Russia, Cuba, and North Korea) to a communist country (socialist in the future) is possible. Reviewing the history, these countries had managed to shift to a society that is communal in nature using the revolutions of the masses, the workers or the farmers. However, the answer is not as simple as it seems to be. Though the answer is straight yes, we must remember that the price to pay for this kind of shift is hefty and huge. We must remember that these countries managed to attain communal revolutions through the death of hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives. In the case of China, much of their cultural and historical artifacts were destroyed and sacrificed for these kinds of shift and revolution. The communal revolution had been so bloody and costly that it connotes negativity for many people (Gascoigne, 2010). Now, we must ask ourselves if we are willing to pay the price for this kind of revolution. Are we ready to let go the benefits, the beauty and the luxury of a capitalist society for the pursuit of the idea of a just and stable society? Are we ready to give up our properties and let the central government to decide on what we have to do or what will be our job? Are we ready to boycott anything that is a product of the capitalist system? Are we ready to go ‘underground’ and grab weapons and arms to fight the reigning capitalist class? All of these questions must be answered first before we can be able to decide if we are ready to pursue the just and orderly society that a communal society (that abolishes private property) promises. Lastly, it is important to note for each one of us that the basis of our discussion for the criteria of our just and order society are only the writings of thinkers such as Plato, Engels and Marx. We are never sure if their ideas can really work on the real world. Reviewing the history with the nations and countries that follow them, we can conclude that the communal government that abolished private property is not as perfect as what is seems to be (though we can also argue that they were wrong in understanding and following these thinkers). However, the question will remain simple, The question is simply, â€Å"Are we ready to sacrifice our current societal arrangement for the pursuit of an idea that are not still sure. † This is a very important question. This is an addition to the difficulty of the shift or revolution itself. These questions should be answered before we have to do anything. It is very difficult that in the end, as we pursue these ideas, we will found ourselves in the end frustrated because of the mistakes, errors and inaccuracy that made us sacrificed what we already had. The point in this discussion is simple. Assuming that the thinkers in the name of Plato, Engels and Marx were true (which is difficult to prove), the question whether we can create a just and orderly society remain complicated. It is no longer a simple Yes or No. The capitalist system and framework had been so wide and huge that it became difficult to kill it. Even if we managed to kill it, there is also a possibility that we can also be killed in the process due to our heavy dependence on it. It can be said that the last ten generations had been bred by the capitalist system making it difficult for any one of us to counter it. However, the possibility of shifting to a society that Marx and Plato had thought is still possible. Yet, the question will remain, â€Å"Are we ready to do what is necessary to achieve such system? †

Requirements for Research Essay Example for Free

Requirements for Research Essay Abstract This study entitled â€Å"Orange (Citrus Sinensis) Peelings Extract as an Alternative shoe Polish† aims to aims to determine if orange peeling oil extract be a good alternative for shoe polish specifically to answer the following questions (1) What specific properties of the shoe polish produced are present/ identified? (2) What are the physical properties of the orange peeling extract shoe polish as to texture, color, and odor? (3) Is there significant difference/s between the orange peeling extract and coconut oil shoe polish with that of the other commercially sold shoe polish in terms of: polish-ness, odor, and texture? The researcher then conducted a series of experiments to test the project. These processes are the extraction of oil from the orange peelings that would be then mixed with the coconut oil produced (cooked) from the coconut plant and the testing and comparing of the alternative shoe polish made with that of the commercially sold shoe polish. The test was conducted with the use of leather shoes as the test object. The results showed that the alternative shoe polish produced has almost the same qualities as to that of the commercially sold shoe polish in terms of its physical properties. The produced shoe polish made the shoes shine a little bit and produced a nice odor considering the natural scent of the orange oil which is added to the mixture. The researcher recommends  trying testing different ratios of each and seeing in what trial it produced the best shoe polish. Further reading about the project is also recommended to widen the scope of study and to produce an alternative shoe polish that would be of help in aiming for the alternative shoe polish with the nearest qualities with that of commercial shoe polish. Acknowledgement The researcher wish to extend her sincerest appreciation to the following people who helped make this research. They are the ones who helped and supported me in performing this research. First to our Project Adviser and Research Teacher, Ma’am Juliet Ilustre-Herreria for continuously guiding and helping me throughout the making of my investigatory project; asked some tricky questions and suggested some opinions that eventually helped a lot in making the project. Next, to my cousin, Sherwin Keith Saringan for helping me choose what project to make and giving some information that could be of great help. To my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Balcorta for me giving support and supplying the materials that would be needed for this project to be completed. To my classmates and friends for giving encouragement whenever I lose hope and most of all to the Lord, up above, for answering my prayers and continuously guiding me in doing this research. Without these people around me, my investigatory project entitled, Orange (Citrus sinensis) Peeling Extract as an Alternative Shoe Polish, won’t be finished.

Factor Language Model Programming

Factor Language Model Programming Language Model Language model helps a speech recognizer figure out how likely a word sequence is, independent of acoustics. There is a linguistic and statistical approach to calculate the probability. The linguistic technique tries to understand the syntactic and semantic structure of a language and derive the probabilities of word sequences using this knowledge. The challenge here is to have proper co occurrence statistics of the unit of recognition. The approach in use evaluates a huge text corpus in a statistical way and word transitions. Current language models make no use of the syntactic properties of natural language but rather use very simple statistics such as word co-occurrences. Recent results show that incorporating syntactic constraints in a statistical language model reduces the word error rate on a conventional dictation task by 10% [M.S.Salam, 2009]. Proposed Language Model The approach proposed here uses factored language model which incorporates the morphological knowledge. Factored language models have recently been proposed for incorporating morphological knowledge in the modeling lexicon. As suffix and compound words are the cause of the growth of the vocabulary, a logical idea is to split the words into shorter units. The language model proposed in this research is based on morphology. A morphological analyser obtains and verifies the internal structure of a given complete word form [Rosenfield, 2000]. Building a morphological analyser for highly inflecting, agglutinative languages is a challenging task. It is very difficult to build a high performance analyser for such languages. The main idea here is to divide a given word form into a stem and single suffix. Morphology plays a much greater role in Telugu. An inflected Telugu word starts with a stem and may have suffix(s) added to the right according to complex rules of saMdhi. This research proposes a new data structure based on Inverted Index and an efficient algorithm for accessing its elements. Few researchers have used tries for efficient retrieval from dictionary, earlier. This research work is different from earlier work in two ways: a) variation to the structure of trie b) the method of identifying and combining inflections. Modified Trie Structure A trie is a tree based data structure for storing strings in order to support fast pattern matching. A trie T represents the strings of set S of n strings with paths from root to the external node of T. Fig 5.1: Original Trie Structure The trie considered here is different from standard trie in two ways: 1) A standard trie does not allow a word to be prefix of another, but the proposed trie structure allows a word to be prefix of another word. The node structure and search algorithm also is given according to this new property. 2) Each word in a standard trie ends at an external node, where as in the modified trie a word may end at either an external node, or the internal node. Irrespective of whether the word ends at internal node or external node, the node stores the index of the associated word in the occurrence list. The node structure is changed such that, each node of the trie is represented by a triplet C,R,Ind>. C represents character stored at that node. R represents whether the concatenation of characters from root till that node forms a meaningful stem word. Its value is 1, if characters from root node to that node form a stem, 0 otherwise. Ind represents index of the occurrence list. Its value depends on the value of R. Its value is -1 (negative 1), if R=0, indicating it is not a valid stem. So no index of occurrence list matches with it. If R=1, its value is index of occurrence list of associated stem. Fig 5.2: Modified Trie Structure Advantages relative to binary search tree: The following are the main advantages of tries overbinary search trees(BSTs): Looking up keys is faster. Looking up a key of lengthmtakes worst caseO(m) time. A BST performs O(log(n)) comparisons of keys, wherenis the number of elements in the tree, because lookups depend on the depth of the tree, which is logarithmic in the number of keys if the tree is balanced. Hence in the worst case, a BST takes O(mlogn) time. Moreover, in the worst case log(n) will approachm. Also, the simple operations tries use during lookup, such as array indexing using a character, are fast on real machines. Tries can require less space when they contain a large number of short strings, because the keys are not stored explicitly and nodes are shared between keys with common initial subsequences. Tries facilitatinglongest-prefix matching, helping to find the key sharing the longest possible prefix of characters all unique. Corpus structure of proposed Language Model The corpus consists of the following modules: Stem word dictionary This accommodates all the stems of the language. Stem word dictionary is implemented as an Inverted Index for better efficiency. The Inverted index will have the following two data structures in it: 1) Occurrence list: It is an array of pairs, 2) Stem trie: consisting of stem words Occurrence list is constructed based on the grammar of the language, where each entry of the list contains the pair (ii) Inflection Dictionary This dictionary contains the list of all possible inflections of the Telugu language. Each entry of Stem word dictionary lists the indexes of this dictionary to indicate which all inflections are possible with that stem. The proposed corpus structure helps in reducing the corpus size drastically. Every stem word may have number of inflections possible. If the inflected words are stored as it is, then corpus size would be m*n, where m is number of stem words and n is number of inflections. Instead of storing all the inflected words, the proposed corpus structure stores stem words and inflections separately, and handles the inflected words through morphology. Hence the corpus size required is for m stem words and n inflections i.e., m+n. Thus there is a great reduction in the corpus size. For a corpus of 1000 stem words and 10 inflections, the required corpus size is 1000+10=1010, which otherwise would have required 1000*10=10000. Fig 5.3 : Corpus structure of proposed Language Model Textual Word Segmentation using Proposed Language Model The proposed language model is used to develop a textual word segmenter. A word segmenter is used to divide the given inflected word into a stem and single inflection. This is required as the corpus stores stems and inflections separately. Input the word segmenter is an Inflected word. Syllabifier takes this word and divides the word into syllables and identifies if the letter is a vowel or a consonant. After applying the rules syllabified form of the input will be obtained. Once the process of syllabification is done, this will be taken up by the analyzer. Analyzer separates the stem and inflection part of the given word. This stem word will be validated by comparing it with the stem words present in stem dictionary. If the stem word is present, then the inflection of the input word will be compared with the inflections present in inflection dictionary of the given stem word. If both the inflections get matched then it will directly displays the output otherwise it takes the appropriate inflection(s) through comparison and then displays. Syllabification is the separation of the words into syllables, where syllables are considered as phonological building blocks of words. It is dividing the word in the way of our pronunciation. The separation is marked by hyphen. In the morphological analyzer, the main objective is to divide the given word into root word and the inflection. For this, we divide the given input word into syllables and we compare the syllables with the root words and inflections to get the root word and appropriate inflection. Fig 5.4: Block diagram of Word Segmentr for text Steps for word segmentation Receiving the inflected word as an input from the user. Syllabify the input Analyze the input and validating the stem word. Identify the appropriate inflection for the given stem word by comparing the inflection of given word with the inflections present in inflection dictionary of the stem word. Displaying the appropriate inflected word. For example, considering the word â€Å"nAnnagariki† (à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ °-à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ °Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¿Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¿) meaning â€Å"to father†, the input is given the user in Roman transliteration format. This input is basically divided into lexemes as: Now, the array is processed which gives the type of lexeme by applying the rules of syllabification one by one. Applying Rule 1: â€Å" No two vowels come together in Telugu literature.† The given user input does not have two vowels together. Hence this rule is satisfied by the given user input. The output after applying this rule is same as above. If the rule is not satisfied, an error message is displayed that the given input is incorrect. Now the array is: c – v – c – c – v – c – v – c – v – c – v Applying Rule 2: â€Å" Initial and final consonants in a word go with the first and last vowel respectively.† Telugu literature rarely has the words which end up with a consonant. Mostly all the Telugu words end with a vowel. So this rule does not mean the consonant that ends up with the string, but it means the last consonant in string. The application of this rule2 changes the array as following: c – v – c – c– v – c – v – c – v – c – v cv – c – c – v – c – v – c – v – cv This generated output is further processed by applying the other rules. Applying Rule 3: â€Å" VCV: The C goes with the right vowel.† The string wherever has the form of VCV, then this rule is applied by dividing it as V – CV. In the above rule the consonant is combined with the vowel, but here in this rule the consonant is combined with the right vowel and separated from the left vowel. To the output generated by the application of rule2, this rule is applied and the output will be as: cv – c – c – v – c – v – c – v – cv cv – c – c – v – cv – cv – cv This output is not yet completely syllabified, one more rule is to be applied which finishes the syllabification of the given user input word. Applying Rule 4: â€Å" Two or more Cs between Vs First C goes to the left and the rest to right.† It is the string which is in the form of VCCC*V, then according to this rule it is split as VC – CC*V. In the above output VCCV in the string can be syllabified as VC – CV. Then the output becomes: cv – c – c – v – cv – cv – cv cvc– cv – cv – cv – cv Now this output is converted to the respective consonants and vowels. Thus giving the complete syllabified form of the given user input. nAn – na –cA – ri – ku cvc – cv – cv – cv – cv Hence, for the given user input, â€Å"nAnnagAriki†, the generated syllabified form is, â€Å"nAn – na – gA – ri – ki†. Fig 5.5: Word Segmenter showing an inflected word without change in stem form Fig 5.6: Word Segmenter showing an inflected word with a change in stem form SCIL Speech Corrector for Indian Languages In inflectional language every word consists of one or several morphemes into which the word can be segmented. The approach used here aims at reducing the above mentioned problem of having a very huge corpus for good recognition accuracy. It exploits the characteristic of Telugu language that every word consists of one or several morphemes into which the word can be segmented. SCIL is a procedure To deal with complex word forms applied after recognition Using which misrecognized words are corrected Architecture of SCIL The design of Speech Corrector for Indian Languages, consists of the Syllable Identifier, Phone Sequence Generator, Word Segmenter, and Morpho- Syntactic Analyzer modules. Input speech is decoded by a normal ASR system which gives the identified word as a string. The sequence of phones would be the input to the Word Segmenter module which matches the phonetized input with the root words stored in dictionary module, and generates a possible set of root words. Morpho-Syntactic Analyzer compares the inflection part of the signal with the possible inflections list from the database and gives correct inflection. This will be given to Morph Analyzer to apply morpho-syntactic rules of the language and gives the correct inflected word. Fig 5.7: Block diagram of SCIL i) Syllable Identifier Syllable identifier marks the rough boundaries of the syllables and labels them. At this stage , we get list of syllables separated with hyphen. The user input is syllabified and this would be the input to the next module. E.g. dE-vA-la-yA-ku ii) Phone Sequence Generator As the words in the dictionary are stored at phone level transcription, this module generates the phone sequences from the syllables. E.g. d-E-v-A-l-a-y-A-k-u iii) Word Segmentor This module compares the phonetized input from starting with the root words stored in dictionary module and lists the possible set of root words. The possible root word is dEvAlayamu. iv) Dictionary Dictionary contains stems and inflections separately. It does not store inflected words as it is very difficult, if not impossible, to cover all inflected words of the language. The database consists of 2 dictionaries: Stem Dictionary Inflection Dictionary Stem dictionary contains the stem words of the language, signal information for that stem which includes the duration and location of that utterance and list of indices of inflection dictionary which are possible with that stem word. Inflection Dictionary contains the inflections of the language, signal information for that inflection which includes the duration and location of that utterance. Both the dictionaries are implemented using trie structure in order to reduce the search space. v) Morpho Syntactic Analyzer This module compares the inflection part of the signal with the possible inflections list from the database and gives correct inflection. This will be given to Morph Analyzer to apply morpho-syntactic rules of the language and gives the correct inflected word. Post Recognition Procedure Capture the utterance, an isolated inflected word. Get its syllabified form. Generate phone sequence from the syllabified word. Compare the phone sequences with stem words in the dictionary and identify the stem. Segment the word into stem and inflection. Get the list of possible inflections. Compare the inflection signals possible with that stem one by one and apply morpho-syntactic rules of the language to combine stem and inflection. Display the inflected word. Using the rules the possible set of root words are combined with possible set of inflections and the obtained results are compared with the given user input and the nearest possible root word and inflection are displayed if the given input is correct. If the given input is not correct then the inflection part of the given input word is compared with the inflections of that particular root word and identifies the nearest possible inflection and combines the root word with those identified inflections, applies sandhi rules and displays the output. When there is more than one root word or more than one inflection has minimum edit distance then the model will display all the possible options. User can choose the correct one from that. For example, when the given word is pustakaMdO (à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ªÃƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¸Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¤Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã¢â‚¬ ¹), the inflections tO making it pustakaMtO (à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ªÃƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¸Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚  à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¤Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¤Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã¢â‚¬ ¹) meaning ‘with the book’ and lO making it pustakaMlO (à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ªÃƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¸Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¤Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ²Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã¢â‚¬ ¹) meaning ‘in the book’) mis are possible. Present work will list both the words and user is given the option. We are working on improving this by selecting the appropriate word based on the context. SCIL Algorithm W=Utterance.wav Syl[]=SyllableIdentifier(W) Phone[]=phonetizer(Syl[]) Stem=getStem(Syl[]) Infl[]=getInflections(Stem) While (not exactMatch) word=MorphAnalyzer(stem,inflMatch) display word Stop Working of SCIL Once possible root words identified the given word is segmented into two parts, first being the root word and second part inflection. Now the inflection part is compared in the reverse direction for a match in the inflection dictionary. It will consider only the inflections that are mentioned against the possible root words, thus reducing the search space and making the algorithm faster. For example consider â€Å"nAnnagariki† (à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ °-à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ °Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¿Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¿) meaning â€Å"to father†, is misrecognized as nAn-na-cA-ri-ku (à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã… ¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ °Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¿Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ) then SCIL is applied and will correct the recognition error as follows: The output from ASR is nAn-na-cA-ri-ku. The phone sequence generator will generate the phone sequence as n-A-n-n-a-c-A-r-i-k-u. Now, match it with the set of root words stored in dictionary module. This process will identify the possible set of root words from the Stem dictionary as follows: Once possible root words identified the given word is segmented into two parts, first being the root word and second part inflection. Now the inflection part is compared for a match in the inflection dictionary. It will consider only the inflections that are mentioned against the possible root words, thus reducing the search space and making the algorithm faster. Possible set of inflections in inflections dictionary After getting the possible set of root words and possible set of inflections they are combined with the help of SaMdhi formation rules. Here in this example cA-ri-ku is compared with the inflections of the root word nAnna After comparing it identifies gAriki as the nearest possible inflection and combines the root word with the inflection and displays the output as â€Å"nAnnagAriki†. Conclusions Language model proposed in this work results in reduction in corpus size by using factored approach. The search process is fastened by use of trie based structure. A change to standard trie is proposed. A post recognition procedure SCIL, is designed which uses the proposed language model and corrects the words misrecognized at inflections. The approach is tested using 1500 speech samples. These samples consist of 100 distinct words , each word repeated 3 times and recorded by 5 speakers in the age group 18-50. It is implemented as a speaker dependent system. An average model is built from the three utterances of each word for each speaker. Each speaker is given a unique ID, using which average model of that speaker is used for testing.

Free Cornell Admissions Essay :: College Admissions Essays

Cornell Admissions Essay By unlocking the door to (name) past, one sees his thoughts and actions when they first took hold of his persona. This essay serves as a key to that door and to my current personality. The first beloved books in my life were the Sesame Street Encyclopedia volumes. At three, I wasn't old enough to read them, but I always wanted to have them read to me. In fact, I memorized the ten volume set so when my parents would skip some pages I would ask them to read what they skipped. After learning to read on my own, my favorite book became the anatomy volume in the Charlie Brown Encyclopedia. Courtesy of a supermarket book offer, I was the only kindergartner who knew about fertilized egg cells. As I grew older, I continued to read largely because reading taught me so much outside of what we learned in school. Since kindergarten, my extensive reading also originated my various interests, especially in science. Living within walking distance of the library, I went there every day, enabling me to dabble in a different subject during each visit. By the fourth grade, I had read all the chemistry books containing fewer than 200 pages, by the fifth grade I was reading about Einstein's Theory of Relativity. During that time period, I became so interested in astronomy through Odyssey Magazine that I sold holiday cards door-to-door in order to buy a telescope. Reading also helped me in school. A little ingenuity didn't hurt, either. For example, as part of my third grade reading grade, I needed to do some independent reading. Every sixty pages in a book counted for one star of credit and in order to get an "A, " I needed fifteen stars. I was greedy and saw this as an opportunity to shine far above the rest of my classmates. Instead of reading many short books, I devoured 300-page sagas by Laura Ingalls Wilder. When everyone else got eighteen stars, the little banana with my name on it had 45. This inner drive and competition still motivates my work today, but unfortunately, no one gives out stars anymore. Despite this desire to do my best, I was quite normal, except for a slight perfectionist's twist to everything. I too owned a cabbage patch doll, but it was taken away because I cared for it excessively.

How to Take Professional Quality Pictures with a Digital SLR Camera Ess

A former point-and-shoot photographer can take professional quality pictures with a digital SLR (single-lens reflex) camera by learning about and experimenting with its complex operations. There are many advantages to making the transition from a point-and-shoot digital camera to a digital SLR camera. These include capturing images â€Å"more quickly, more flexibly, and with more creativity† (Busch, Digital 9). Furthermore, taking photos with a digital SLR camera reduces the amount of time that otherwise would be spent editing with photo-editing software to improve the quality of the photos. Why would one want to switch from a point-and-shoot digital camera to a digital SLR camera? Some of the reasons are: a more accurate viewfinder, a more powerful sensor, less noise in the photos, depth-of-field control, speed, similarity to a regular SLR camera, more lens flexibility, and freedom from image editors (Rowse). Some disadvantages are: expense, size and weight, and complication of use. What are some of the key features to think about when purchasing a digital SLR camera? Some of the features are: lenses, sensors and image processors, exposure systems, and focusing systems. There are also special features to consider for the individual photographer’s needs (Busch, Digital 61-63). Lenses are one of the main items to consider when purchasing and using a digital SLR camera. All digital SLR cameras come with a basic general purpose (mid-range or normal) lens, but many people would rather have some specialty lenses, depending on the type of photography in which they are interested. Some of these specialty lenses are: zoom, prime, wide-angle, fish eye, telephoto, and macro. In addition, it is important to get a lens wit... ...35-40). One should take many pictures in different ways so that the ones offering the best composition can be chosen later. If the above suggestions are followed, quality photographs should be the result. However, the photographer may want to enhance the photos by using photo-editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Picasa, Picnik, GIMP, or Adobe Photoshop Express. The last four programs are downloadable and free (â€Å"Photo Editing Software†). In conclusion, a former point-and-shoot photographer can make the transition to a digital SLR camera and take professional quality pictures by learning about and experimenting with the camera’s complex features and operations. The first step is to purchase a digital SLR camera that suits the photographer’s needs. Then, one should start taking pictures - lots of them!

Analysis of Identity in Jasmine Essay -- Literary Analysis, Bharati M

The novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee is an incredible story about the transformation and life experiences of a Panjabi girl from India. The life of Jyoti is told from her point of view when she is twenty-four years old, and pregnant with the baby of Bud Ripplemeyer, a crippled banker who is more than twice Jyoti’s age. During the span of two months in Iowa, Jyoti narrates her biographical experiences in Punjab and in America as she strives to become independent. Jasmine illustrates that when one’s relationships go through changes, it will impact one’s identity. Born in Hasnapur in India, Jyoti is said to be the most beautiful and clever person in her family. Unlike her sisters and other girls, Jyoti excels in school and continues her education until the 8th grade despite her father’s disapproval. Education represents a way for Jasmine to separate from many girls her age including her sisters and to shape her identity. In other words, this allows her to break from the semi-feudal rural society in which she lives. Her life, like most Indian women in that time period, is controlled and dominated by her father and brothers, "Village girls are like cattle, whichever way you lead them, that is the way they will go" (46). Jyoti’s opinions are often considered unnecessary. The role of women in villages was only to be a mother and to manage household affairs. The first of many glimpses of Jyoti’s varying identities occurs during her marriage to Prakash. The first time Prakash talks to Jyoti, he says, â€Å"She is a woman of fine sympathies†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (74). He sees her as a delicate, obedient woman who follows her family’s wishes and societies restriction on women. Jyoti describes Prakash as â€Å"A modern man†¦For Prakash, love was letting go. Independenc... ...el Jasmine, Jyoti has conflicts with her past and the present as she attempts to combine her life as an immigrant and life in India. Jyoti comes to America in order to fulfill her husband, Prakash’s dreams and to lead a more fruitful life. She undergoes her first transformation from an innocent, dutiful daughter to a modern wife when she meets Prakash who calls her Jasmine, then she becomes more American when she meets Lillian Gordon who calls her Jazzy. Later, with Taylor Hayse, who calls her Jase, she starts to accept her past and present together, however seeing her husband’s murderer frightens her. She then moves on to become Bud’s Jane. Jyoti tries to establish a new identity as she learns new American customs, skills, and aspirations. These transactions in her identity are apparent in her attitude towards life and her relationships with men and women.

Identification After Gender Essay

Time episode â€Å"Fionna and Cake† and reading â€Å"Berengier of the Long Ass,† the expectations of genders are exposed through the reversal of roles in both of these pieces. The characters in these stories clearly demonstrate the expectations that certain males and females must negotiate in order to expose the problems when there is labeling of certain genders. Judith Butler’s analysis of gender is that it is performative- meaning that nobody really is a gender from the start; after watching the video and reading the text for this exercise, t is clear that Fionna and The Knight expose the misconceptions of gender throughout societies today. In our society today there are certain notions that many people have about what are â€Å"right† and â€Å"wrong† for males and females to wear, think, and act. There are certain things that are expected out of males- a toughness about them, an attitude that declares them as â€Å"the man of the house†- that is unfairly labeled upon every male in our society. Females are expected to be the ones who constantly act â€Å"girly’ and let the males do everything involving manual labor- this is an unfair label that is placed upon every female in our society. The video that Judith Butler takes part in is an example of a certain female who does not believe in conforming with the problems of the rest of our society- taking a stand against the â€Å"normal ideas† of the public. Judith Baker’s ideas are expressed throughout â€Å"Fionna and Cake† and â€Å"Berengier of the Long Ass,† when Fionna , The Lady, and The Knight expose these misconceptions by swapping roles; The Lady and Fionna act as the males, while Prince Gumball and The Knight act as the females. The idea that Fionna and The Lady â€Å"act as the males† in these stories define the problem that our society has when it omes to the definition of males and females. There are certain expectations that must be fulfilled when it comes to being seen as a male or female, but in these two pieces (video and story), the main characters both reject the expectations, or try and fulfill them unsuccessfully. In the Adventure Time episode â€Å"Fionna and Cake† Fionna and Prince Gumball act as their opposite gender in many ways. Throughout â€Å"Fionna and Cake† Fionna refuses to completely fulfill these expectations that are placed among most females. Fionna goes through the majority of the video as a tomboy who would rather carry weapons in her person than make-up. However, by the end of the video she adapts to the â€Å"normal† expectations for females by dressing up in a dress and trying to flatter Prince Gumball. In order for Fionna to expose the expectations of certain genders, Fionna goes to the extreme limit when trying to act as a boy; for there is nothing more â€Å"manly’ for a human-being to do than to save someone’s life. Fionna saves Prince Gumball, which in turn creates a relationship between the two that was not there before. It becomes evident that there is a gender swap in this video when Fionna is the one who is catching Prince Gumball when he falls from the ceiling. o infatuate Fionna, portraying the inner-man of Princess Ice, and getting the inner- woman out of Fionna. Fionna Justifies the ideas of Judith Butler’s by showing the audience that it took awhile for her to find her preferred gender- switching preferences multiple times between the beginning and end of the video. Fionna proves that any female can be happy doing â€Å"male-type† things, but also can be happy with a man, which goes against the norm of being a â€Å"tom boy. † By the end of the story it is clear that Fionna chooses to give up the â€Å"girly’ personality that is expected mong women, while consistently being herself, and attracting the Prince of her dreams. In the reading â€Å"Berengier of the Long Ass,† The Knight and his Lady successfully pull off an epic gender swap that The Knight would not be very proud of. Throughout the beginning of the story the Lady constantly criticizes her husband for being lazy and not being a â€Å"chivalrous† Knight. Because she questions the Knight’s manhood, the Knight forces himself to make a change. The Knight then tries to fulfill the expectations of Knights in our society by creating fake battles in the forests to impress his wife. Because he does a bad Job of faking his fatigue and injuries after these fake battles, the wife begins to catch on to his tricks. The wife then follows him to the next â€Å"battle† realizing that what he was saying the whole entire time was a fraud. Butler’s applications to gender being performative comes into play here, because the Knight tries so hard to be a â€Å"man† -that his life turns upside down because of it. The Knight’s wife then brings back another guy to the house, knowing that because her husband is a â€Å"woman† in her eyes, he will not even think about doing anything to harm her. When the Knight realizes that his attempt at conforming to the public’s interpretation ofa knight has failed, he feels as though he is a failure- for the only important in most knights’ life is the chivalrous way in which they live. A Knight’s expectation is to be the most brave, genuine, and honest guy of all; however, in this case the knight’s wife was more of a knight than he was. The Knight in this story tried to adapt to the expectations that are naturally placed on him, and instead of adapting he completely failed at his attempt. Most people are better off being their atural-selves than trying to fulfill the expectations that others place on them. After analyzing Fionna, Prince Gumball, The Knight, and his wife, it is obvious that being yourself leads to the most happiness between one and their partner. Fionna maintains her inner-boy personality and ends up being the happiest girl in the world. The Knight tries to change his personality and ends up watching his wife hang out with another man. Judith Butler’s ideas really make sense after analyzing these characters because of the way in which characters can reject the expectations of their gender and be completely happy because of it.