A Tale of a War Between Two Cities essays

A Tale of a War Between Two Cities essays Government has been an essential part to our world for as long as we have existed. People who disagree with the government have been around for just as long. A Tale of Two Cities, written by Charles Dickens, takes place in England and France during the French Revolution. The novel shows the impact that the revolution had on citizens of England and France. The revolution and government's effect was shown in characters in the book, such as, the Defarges, the Marquis St. Evrmonde, and Sydney Carton. The outcome of A Tale of Two Cities is formed with the help of government and the revolution. The message that A Tale of Two Cities showed throughout the book, was how war and change in government can affect the people. The wine shop in Paris was the hot spot for French revolutionists, mostly because the wine shop owners, Ernest Defarge, and his wife, Madame Therese Defarge, were leaders and officials of the revolution. Every night, the men of the revolution living in Saint Antoine, met in the wine shop to discuss their plans of the revolution. Throughout the story, Mme. Defarge knits accounts of the meeting, which is similar to a hit list'. She is a very major character in the story and is very stubborn and unforgiving in her revenge against the Evrmonde family. The story shows the vengeance that the revolutionist, Mme. Defarge, had toward the government, " Well, well, but one must stop somewhere. After all, the question is where? At extermination,' said madame." (Dickens,351) Mme. Defarge had such hatred toward the Marquis, and his decedent, Charles Darney, that she would stop at nothing to destroy them, even if it came to the guillotine. Dickens putting Mme. Defarge in the book, may sh ow his displeasure with human nature and the way the revolutionist handled their problems. Although honorable to her family, Mme. Defarge's scheme against the Evrmonde family may have been too cold and h...

Nummerberg Trials-Unjust essays

Nummerberg Trials-Unjust essays After World War II, the victorious Allies decided to hold a trial for the defeated Nazis. These trials lasted from November 20, 1945 till October 1, 1946. Although the victors claimed that they would give the accused a fair trial, upon closer inspection we can see that in reality, these trials were biased and were a victors justice. After the war, each of the Allies leaders had their own idea for how they should deal with the Nazis. Stalin suggested that they should have trials, but here everyone is guilty and afterwards is shot. What then would be the point of having a trial then? It would just appear as a play before they would perform their actual intentions. He may have suggested this also so that he could say that they were fair because they gave them a trial-but what sort of trial? Churchill even said that they should just be lined up and shot. If the leaders of the Allies were saying such things, how could we even expect the trials to be unbiased then? Each allied country had its own persecutors. All the judges at the trials came from the victorious countries as well. Most of the judges were American or Russian. During the trials, the Americans put American justice over International Justice. It was wrong and unfair however to do such a thing because those who were guilty didnt even come from the United States? Since the trials were supposed to be international in scope, they shouldnt be following the justice of one country, but rather international justice. Although the Americans were applying American justice to the trials, they didnt even follow their constitution while doing so. The US constitution states that laws cannot be made post-facto, but in Nuremberg, they created these laws (for example, crimes against humanity, and waging aggressive war) after the Germans had committed them. It is wrong however to charge defendants with crimes ...

Attentional Spotlights Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Attentional Spotlights - Essay Example In the study conducted by Vargha-Khadem and his associates in 2005, they have concluded that the ability to focus, organize and correlate information is important in the development of the communication and social skills that eventually set our species apart from other primates. These evolutionary developments include molecular neurological activities related to visual attention that has streamlined the brain into the identified activity centers (Mangun, 1995). According to Tong (2004), the "longstanding notion that spatial attention cannot be divided stems from the assumptions of early philosophers, such as Descartes, that consciousness itself is unitary and indivisible" is being challenged by neuroimages chronicling the neural activities that occur in the brain's retinotopic visual areas (p. 524). An important element in these changing perspectives is the technology that is becoming available for researches. There has been progression inclination towards the existence of multiple attention points in recent years. There has been evidence that attention spotlights are active concurrently at various areas of the brain given a common stimuli (Mller et al, 2003). At the same time, there are some researches that also point out that these concurrent activities many not necessarily be attention spotlights but rather are independent and unrelated cognitive neural activity (LaBerge et al, 1997). There is significant divergence in the consensus regarding the function of selective visual attention in attentional spotlight. Opinions mainly diverge on the prevalence, degree and significance of attentional spotlight. However, there is a universal realization that existing technologies and knowledge needs is still not enough to be deterministic. Current studies indicate that selective visual attention affords for flexibility and efficiency to facilitate between high level process and low sensory information. The role of spotlight serves as an accelerator of the highlighted information or stimulus (Spratling and Johnson, 2004). In the process of spotlighting, information is illuminated by the attention spotlight which has then the effect of streamlining perscotion of the said elements. However, when spatial shifting takes place, the spotlight turns off to be able to focus anew. This means that in the process of going thorugh spotlight A to spotlight B, the current consensus is that attentional spotlight does not exist. Concept Appraisal Understanding selective attention in the process of visual perception requires the recognition of the different attention mechanisms that are involved in the identification of a stimulus versus those that are involved after the process of perception (Vecera & Rizzo, 2003). Modern cognitive neuroscience experts in particular are emphasizing the need to further understand the components of selective visual attention to an attentional spotlight considering neuroanatomy and timing (Hopf et al, 2000). This is in view of its significance not only in the process of p[perception but also in the development of language and speech skills that in humans has been identified to depend significantly on the said factors (Vargha-Khadem et al, 2005). According to Chris Chatam (2006), "The spotlight metaphor of attention accords with our subjective experience: as

Response Paper 3 - Feminist (Human Resource Development) Essay

Response Paper 3 - Feminist (Human Resource Development) - Essay Example Initially the feminist wave was that women can also work the way men do and become economically as productive as men are. However, the thought has now taken a new direction. Hughes mentions that most late-twentieth-century feminist are (rightly) resistant to the simplistic arguments, say of men with objectivist, distanced, positivistic, scientific methods and women with subjectivist, connected, interpretive, non-scientific methods. Few feminists would endorse a wholesale science-bashing that smacks more of ideological excess than of a genuine quest for knowledge. Nor would feminists unanimously opt for the essentialism that identifies quantitative methodologies as male, qualitative ones as female; and positivism as male, ‘interpretationism’ as female (Code, 1995 cited in Hughes, 2000, p. 51). Hughes supports the view of the new breed of feminists who have come way ahead of crude assumptions related to two genders and believe in understanding the minute similarities and d ifferences among men and women. Though it has not got much attention of the HR departments as yet, this study can benefit HR the most as there the two genders are supposed to be treated as equal. Also since it is the responsibility of the HR department to train the human resources for the organisational need, a better understanding of the process of learning of the two can facilitate their training process to a great extent. Hughes rightly defines her purpose as to begin to delineate the ways in which the field of human resource development would be enriched through the incorporation of feminist perspectives (Hughes, 2000, p. 63) Even as the number of women in the managerial spheres of organisations has increased, the learning styles and working styles of men is still taken as a norm. Female managers are forced to confirm to men’s style of learning and working. Else they are assumed to be inefficient. Though the women’s way of working in cooperation with other colleagu es can be extremely beneficial for the organisation, till date the independent working approach of men is considered to be a norm. The reason behind such an approach is that the top level management in most of the organisations is still dominated by men. Giving data from three developed countries, Fiona M. Wilson quotes that U.K. has only 18% of women in managerial positions, Germany has 25% while U.S. has only 5% of the senior managerial positions filled by women (Wilson, 2003, p. 17) Since several years, the society has groomed men and women in a way that they use two different modes of reasoning. Hughes rightly differentiates the two. She says that more men used the mastering, impersonal and individual modes and more women used the receiving, interpersonal and interindividual patterns of reasoning (Hughes, 2000, p. 55). Based on an interview study, Hughes quotes that the gendering pattern of mastering, impersonal and individual patterns was stronger than the receiving, interperso nal and interindividual patterns (Severeins et al., 1998 cited in Hughes, 2000, p. 56) Another strong belief was that men are more target-oriented than women and women are better in doing repetitive work. However, these generalizations do not always hold true. Women also look for more satisfying and challenging jobs as shown in a study on job satisfaction and employee attrition. Many women, like men, express the need for personally satisfying

Evaluating Civil Engineering in Modern Day Technology as a Career Path Research Paper

Evaluating Civil Engineering in Modern Day Technology as a Career Path - Research Paper Example Civil engineers are analytical thinkers and are more comfortable dealing with concrete facts. When presented with a problem, they like to solve it. I have selected Civil engineering because of its importance in the everyday life and the solutions it gives to the various problems being faced by human beings on Earth which have originated due to the scarcity of resources. Selecting Civil engineering as a profession directly influences the every day life of individuals as the impacts of the environmental issues, the problems due to rapid urbanization and limited resources are equally evident to each and every individual of the society and every individual of the society is equally responsible for solving these issues however, a Civil engineer is in a much better position to propose solutions to these problems and thus he can become an effective member of the society. After selecting this profession an individual does not remain a mere spectator of the problems faced by mankind but can t hink about various different solution available to solve the issues resulting in a remarkable change in the everyday life of the individual who selects civil engineering as a profession. ... For example, only a Civil engineer can think about recycling waste water in Qatar as a solution to water scarcity, a Civil engineer can propose the mechanism to make earthquake resistant buildings in Tokyo, a Civil engineer can propose the mechanism to limit the discharge from industries to conserve air quality in Bombay, a Civil engineer can propose the use of micro-hydro potential of waters in China as a solution to energy crisis, a Civil engineer can propose damping mechanism to limit the vibrations of Millennium bridge in London; in short a Civil engineer sees things differently from other individuals of the society and can provide solutions to the problems which are affecting the everyday life of human beings. Civil engineers design facilities to improve the quality of life of people in the whole world. The various tasks which civil engineers do for improving the quality of life include designing and construction of railways, roadways and bridges to ease traffic congestion, meet ing the increasing energy needs of the world through providing various new non-conventional solutions for power generation and the planning and development of urban areas; all these works are related to the everyday life of individuals living on this planet. Goals and Objectives for a Civil Engineer Civil engineering is a very vast field and has many sub-disciplines as well as interdisciplinary fields. Studying Civil engineering at undergraduate level will allow me to get an understanding of the various sub-disciplines of this field and thus after studying the civil engineering for a few years I will be in a better position to specify my goals and objectives.

History Of Home Video Game Consoles

History Of Home Video Game Consoles Entertainment and technology have worked hand-in-hand on the path of progress since the beginning. Computer gaming has had an ever changing face ever since it was first introduced. We take a look at the predecessor of the heavily upgraded video consoles in the market today. A Video Game console is a device generally used for playing video games for non-commercial purposes. The video game console can be either an interactive computer or an electronic device. It produces a video display signal that is displayed using a display device (a television, monitor, etc.) to display a video game. The term video game console and is used to differentiate a machine designed for consumers to buy and use solely for playing video games from a personal computer, which has many other functions, or arcade machines, which are designed for video game businesses. The video game console requires a monitor, be it a television screen or a computer monitor, to display the images. The video game console is termed such to differentiate between arcade game machines, which are used for commercial purposes and personal computers, which offer many more features to the end-user. The first video game console was the brainchild of Ralph Baer of Sanders Associates. It was termed the Magnavox Odyssey and was released in 1972. Later, Atari came up with the extremely popular PONG games, which brought a flurry of Pong and Pong related games into the market. Apart from PONG, the other players in the market were Coleco Telstar and APF TV Fun. These consoles are known to be the first generation of video game consoles. The term videogame console was first used by Fairchild Systems for their Video Entertainment Systems (VES) in 1976. This was the first console to contain a programmable microprocessor. Soon, other manufacturers like RCA and Atari came up with microprocessor based video game consoles. These consoles are known as the second generation of videogame consoles. The Video Game console market faced its second and biggest crash in 1983. While the first crash in 1977 was mainly due to obsolete gaming consoles being sold at a loss-making price, the crash of 1983 had entirely different reasons behind it. In 1977, manufacturers of older, obsolete consoles sold their systems at a loss to clear stock, creating a glut in the market and causing Fairchild and RCA to abandon their game consoles. It was not until Atari released a conversion of the arcade hit Space Invaders in 1980 that the home console industry was completely revived. Many consumers bought an Atari just for Space Invaders. Its unprecedented success started the trend of console manufacturers trying to get exclusive rights to arcade titles, and the trend of advertisements for game consoles claiming to bring arcade experience home. Other companies released video game consoles of their own, throughout the early 1980s. Many of them were technically superior to Atari 2600. However Atari dominated the console market in the early 1980s. By 1983, the video game console market was in full bloom, and a number of companies had invested money and released either their own console games or consoles. Many of these were low on quality, high on advertising products which tried to bank on the popularity wave of video game consoles. One such game which gained massive unpopularity, and is often blamed (wrongly) for the video game crash of 1983 is E.T. The game was made with only six weeks of development time and tried to bank on two of the biggest booms at that time, E.T the movie and the video game console boom. It was full of programming bugs, improper and illogical programming and features and concepts which made the game unplayable. It has been dubbed as the worst video game of all time by many. This was critical in putting to an end the second generation of video game consoles. In 1983, Nintendo came up with the Famicom (Family Computer) or NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) series of games, which brought about a change in the video game console market. The NES series featured full colour, high resolution and longer games with detailed graphics. The game was bundled with a plastic Robot and a light gun. Like Space Invaders for the 2600, Nintendo found its breakout hit game in Super Mario Bros. Nintendos success revived the video game industry and new consoles were soon introduced in the following years to compete with the NES. The NESs massive success with Super Mario Bros, which heralded the return of video game consoles. This wrapped up the success of the third generation of video game consoles. Nintendo ran a tight ship as regards its NES system. It introduced a lockout system, which forced game manufacturers to go through Nintendo only for their games. Also, it allowed third party game manufacturers to make only five games per year for the NES. The fourth generation of video game consoles saw the release of Segas Master System and Segas Sega Mega Drive. The Sega Mega Drive was released on October 29, 1989, two years before the release of Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Sega extended the Mega Drive with the Mega CD/Sega CD, to provide increased storage space for multi-media based games that were then in vogue among the development community. Later Sega released the 32X, which added some of the polygon processing functionality common in the fifth-generation machines. However the peripheral was a commercial failure due to the lack of software support, with developers more keen to concentrate on more powerful machines, with a wider user base, such as Saturn that followed shortly after. The fifth generation video game consoles were feature-rich and had many other capabilities as compared to their previous counterparts. Chief among these was the Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. The other players in the market were 3DO and Atari. Atari Jaguar and the 3DO, both of these systems were much more powerful than SNES or Mega Drive. They were better at rendering polygons, could display more onscreen colours and the 3DO contained discs that contained far more information than cartridges and were cheaper to produce. Neither of these consoles were serious threat to Sega or Nintendo, though. It was not until Segas Saturn, Sonys Play station and the Nintendo 64 were released that fifth generation consoles started to become popular. The Saturn and PlayStation used CDs to store games, while the Nintendo 64 used cartridges. All three cost far less than the 3DO, and were easier to program than the Jaguar. The Saturn also had 2D sprite handling power on par with the Neo-Geo. The sixth generation of video game consoles saw updates and new releases. This generation saw a move towards Pc-like architectures in gaming consoles, as well as a shift towards using DVDs for game media. This brought games that were visually more appealing. Furthermore, this generation also saw experimentation with online console gaming and implementing both flash and hard drive storage for game storage. Sonys released the next version of the PlayStation, the PlayStation 2, while Nintendo and Microsoft fought competition with the GameCube and the Xbox respectively. Sega came up with the Dreamcast, but has since then stopped production. The Xbox heralded a new age in video game consoles, by being the first console to have a hard disk drive. It had many similarities to a low end computer. The features introduced in the seventh generation include the support of the new disc formats: Blu-Ray Disc, utilized by the PlayStation-3, and HD DVD supported by the Xbox 360. Another new technology is the use of motion as input, and IR tracking (as implemented in Wii). Microsoft kicked off the seventh generation with the release of the Xbox 306 in 2005. It featured processing power never before seen until Sony stroked back with its PlayStation 3 one year later. The software used on these dedicated computer systems has evolved amazingly from the simple rectangular blips used in Pong. Games today feature richly textured, full-colour graphics, awesome sound and complex interaction between player and system. The increased storage capacity of the cartridges and discs allows game developers to include incredibly detailed graphics and CD-quality soundtracks. Several of the video game systems have built-in special effects that add features like unique lighting or texture mapping in real-time. Each new generation of console hardware made use of the rapid development of processing technology. Newer machines could output a greater range of colours, more sprites, and introduced graphical technologies such as scaling and vector graphics.}

Lady Macbeth is a Feminist Role Model and a Despicable Human Being Essa

This fall, the second instalment of the Hunger Games trilogy was released in theatres. The main character, Katniss Everdeen, is a brave, intelligent, female character with an exceptional level of physical and inner strength. Even 50 years ago it would have been considered unacceptable to present this type of female in entertainment and media has made significant strides when representing women in such a positive way. Yet in the 16th century, Shakespeare crafted a character that shared many of the same traits as Katniss while simultaneous pleasing an audience with traditional views on femininity. As a result, Lady Macbeth is a feminist role model before the rise of feminist ideology in the mainstream and a truly evil person as well. Lady Macbeth is shown to be a leader as it is her ambition that is the driving force behind the murder plot and her husbands actions. She had the strength to go through with the plan to kill King Duncan and holds it together for both she and Macbeth afte r the muder is complete. Finally, in elizabethan England the idea that a women could be capable of such evil wrongdoing would have been inconceivable. The fact that Lady Macbeth had murderous thoughts makes her equal to the men she was surrounded by. It is through these points that Lady Macbeth’s character can be both vilified and explored as a feminist role model. An audience who would have attended Macbeth in the 16th century would have believed that women we're incapable of ambition and leadership. Lady Macbeth shatters this when she latches onto the idea that Macbeth will be king and creates a plot to murder Duncan. While Macbeth is hesitant about assassinating the current monarch, Lady Macbeth doesn't have a second though; she tells her husband... ...he makes a plea to â€Å"Make thick my blood. Stop up the access and passage to remorse† (1. 5. 33-37). Her character broke down the notion that women are somehow more pure than men. She does an awful thing and as a result she sheds a light on the difference between the evil in men and women, there is none. If Shakespeare was alive today the story of Macbeth might have gone a little differently. People are multidimensional, they can be motivated by terrible thing and feel hesitation and guilt for these forces at the same time. As a result, Lady Macbeth could be the only Macbeth if the play has been written after the 20th century. She is both the face of women in power and a prime example of what happens when power gets the best of you. Lady Macbeth uses her ambition, leadership skills, emotional strength, and sheer absence of remorse to gain the throne for her husband.