Reaction Paper Sample

Reaction Paper #4: The Prince and the Pauper Monica Sharma I read The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain and enjoyed reading about a wealthy prince name Edward Tudor and a pauper name Tom Canty trading lives with each other and experiencing how it is like to live a life that is totally opposite from what they are used to. It really made me depressed to read the part, â€Å"Drunkenness, riot and brawling were the order, there, every night and nearly all night long. Broken heads were as common as hunger in that place. Yet little Tom was not unhappy. He had a hard time of it, but did not know it.It was the sort of time that all the Offal Court boys had, therefore he supposed it was the correct and comfortable thing. When he came home empty-handed at night, he knew his father would curse him and thrash him first, and that when he was done the awful grandmother would do it all over again and improve on it; and that away in the night his starving mother would slip to him stealthily with any miserable scrap or crust she had been able to save for him by going hungry herself, notwithstanding she was often caught in that sort of treason and soundly beaten for it by her husband. No child should have to go through that sort of violence and abuse, and most children who do usually ends up becoming traumatized and disturbed. After reading that part, it made me want to jump into the book and take Tom away from that horrid place. However, it was interesting to read about how despite the environment Tom was brought up in, Tom was still happy with his life. This made me think, â€Å"How could you be happy with a life where your family abuses you and you’re forced to beg on the streets all day?! Tom even managed to obtain a proper education in his hometown since Father Andrew would always teach Tom â€Å"the right ways† and how to read and write in Latin. The part, â€Å"His head grew to be full of these wonderful things, and many a night as he lay in the dark on his scant and offensive straw, tired, hungry, smarting from a thrashing, he unleashed his imagination and soon forgot his aches and pains in delicious picturings to himself of the charmed life of a petted prince in a regal palace.One desire came in time to haunt him day and night: it was to see a real prince, with his own eyes,† showed me how Tom’s imagination served as an escape from the harsh reality he lives in. Not only that, but Tom’s imagination on becoming a prince makes Tom try to possess the qualities that a prince must always have, such as intelligence and etiquette. Because of this, it makes it easy for Tom to become mistaken as the real prince and blend in gradually.Tom’s daydreaming also causes him to wander through the streets which leads him to his encounter with the prince and their exchange of clothes. I found it funny that just because the prince and the pauper changes clothes, they are treated based on the type of clothes they are weari ng. For example, Tom is treated like a prince because he is wearing royal clothing and Edward, who is the real prince, becomes the pauper and gets treated like one when the guard of the palace sees Edward wearing Tom's rags and throws him out of the palace harshly and into the midst of a rowdy crowd. †¦ the soldier fetched him a sounding box on the ear that sent him whirling to the roadway, and said: â€Å"Take that, thou beggars’ spawn, for what thou got’st me from his Highness! † The crowd roared with laughter. The prince picked himself out of the mud, and made fiercely at the sentry, shouting: â€Å"I am the Prince of Wales, my person is sacred; and thou shalt hang for laying thy hand upon me! † The soldier brought his halberd to a present-arms and said mockingly: â€Å"I salute your gracious Highness. Then angrily, â€Å"Be off, thou crazy rubbish! † I realized that this brought exaggeration to Mark Twain’s quote who stated that â €Å"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society,† since when the two boys exchange clothes, the prince quickly became the pauper and was treated like one because of the rags he was wearing and the pauper became the prince and was treated like royalty because of the wealthy clothes he was wearing.This also symbolizes the fact that a person from a wealthy background is no different from a person that comes from a poor background since the two boys are easily mistaken to be each other despite their differences. I thought this was weird at first but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me. Tom and Edward both have the same height, weight, skin color and similar facial features, and even though they are two different people with two different backgrounds, they were able to easily switch places with each other.If they hadn’t had similar appearances, or if Tom wasn’t intelligent and able to learn how to become a real king , the plot of the story would have been completely different. This meant that the characters in the book had to have certain characteristics in order to fit the plot Twain created. I loved reading the ending of the novel since it was a happy ending (and who doesn’t like a good happy ending? ). In the end, when Edward returns to his rightful place in the throne, you can tell that his experience of living as a pauper affected him greatly.He becomes a great king who is merciful with his people and makes it a priority to get rid of injustice laws. Also, Edward finds all the people who helped when he was a pauper, such as the lawyer from prison and the judge who was nice to him even though he was wrongfully accused of stealing, and rewards them to show his appreciation of their kindness. However, to all the people who mistreated him and their power, he gives them harsh punishment. Everyone finally gets what they truly deserve in the end, yay! 🙂 Reaction Paper Sample Reaction Paper #4: The Prince and the Pauper Monica Sharma I read The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain and enjoyed reading about a wealthy prince name Edward Tudor and a pauper name Tom Canty trading lives with each other and experiencing how it is like to live a life that is totally opposite from what they are used to. It really made me depressed to read the part, â€Å"Drunkenness, riot and brawling were the order, there, every night and nearly all night long. Broken heads were as common as hunger in that place. Yet little Tom was not unhappy. He had a hard time of it, but did not know it.It was the sort of time that all the Offal Court boys had, therefore he supposed it was the correct and comfortable thing. When he came home empty-handed at night, he knew his father would curse him and thrash him first, and that when he was done the awful grandmother would do it all over again and improve on it; and that away in the night his starving mother would slip to him stealthily with any miserable scrap or crust she had been able to save for him by going hungry herself, notwithstanding she was often caught in that sort of treason and soundly beaten for it by her husband. No child should have to go through that sort of violence and abuse, and most children who do usually ends up becoming traumatized and disturbed. After reading that part, it made me want to jump into the book and take Tom away from that horrid place. However, it was interesting to read about how despite the environment Tom was brought up in, Tom was still happy with his life. This made me think, â€Å"How could you be happy with a life where your family abuses you and you’re forced to beg on the streets all day?! Tom even managed to obtain a proper education in his hometown since Father Andrew would always teach Tom â€Å"the right ways† and how to read and write in Latin. The part, â€Å"His head grew to be full of these wonderful things, and many a night as he lay in the dark on his scant and offensive straw, tired, hungry, smarting from a thrashing, he unleashed his imagination and soon forgot his aches and pains in delicious picturings to himself of the charmed life of a petted prince in a regal palace.One desire came in time to haunt him day and night: it was to see a real prince, with his own eyes,† showed me how Tom’s imagination served as an escape from the harsh reality he lives in. Not only that, but Tom’s imagination on becoming a prince makes Tom try to possess the qualities that a prince must always have, such as intelligence and etiquette. Because of this, it makes it easy for Tom to become mistaken as the real prince and blend in gradually.Tom’s daydreaming also causes him to wander through the streets which leads him to his encounter with the prince and their exchange of clothes. I found it funny that just because the prince and the pauper changes clothes, they are treated based on the type of clothes they are weari ng. For example, Tom is treated like a prince because he is wearing royal clothing and Edward, who is the real prince, becomes the pauper and gets treated like one when the guard of the palace sees Edward wearing Tom's rags and throws him out of the palace harshly and into the midst of a rowdy crowd. †¦ the soldier fetched him a sounding box on the ear that sent him whirling to the roadway, and said: â€Å"Take that, thou beggars’ spawn, for what thou got’st me from his Highness! † The crowd roared with laughter. The prince picked himself out of the mud, and made fiercely at the sentry, shouting: â€Å"I am the Prince of Wales, my person is sacred; and thou shalt hang for laying thy hand upon me! † The soldier brought his halberd to a present-arms and said mockingly: â€Å"I salute your gracious Highness. Then angrily, â€Å"Be off, thou crazy rubbish! † I realized that this brought exaggeration to Mark Twain’s quote who stated that â €Å"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society,† since when the two boys exchange clothes, the prince quickly became the pauper and was treated like one because of the rags he was wearing and the pauper became the prince and was treated like royalty because of the wealthy clothes he was wearing.This also symbolizes the fact that a person from a wealthy background is no different from a person that comes from a poor background since the two boys are easily mistaken to be each other despite their differences. I thought this was weird at first but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me. Tom and Edward both have the same height, weight, skin color and similar facial features, and even though they are two different people with two different backgrounds, they were able to easily switch places with each other.If they hadn’t had similar appearances, or if Tom wasn’t intelligent and able to learn how to become a real king , the plot of the story would have been completely different. This meant that the characters in the book had to have certain characteristics in order to fit the plot Twain created. I loved reading the ending of the novel since it was a happy ending (and who doesn’t like a good happy ending? ). In the end, when Edward returns to his rightful place in the throne, you can tell that his experience of living as a pauper affected him greatly.He becomes a great king who is merciful with his people and makes it a priority to get rid of injustice laws. Also, Edward finds all the people who helped when he was a pauper, such as the lawyer from prison and the judge who was nice to him even though he was wrongfully accused of stealing, and rewards them to show his appreciation of their kindness. However, to all the people who mistreated him and their power, he gives them harsh punishment. Everyone finally gets what they truly deserve in the end, yay! 🙂

Why was Shepherd Wheel successfully built here?

Shepherd Wheel is a water powered grinding workshop located on the River Porter. The site is the earliest industrial building with records going back to the sixteenth century. The grinding workshop was powered by a waterwheel could once house up to ten men grinding blades at the same time. This particular workshop produced edge tools. The key to Shepherd Wheel successfully being built here was that it was built at the right place and at the right time. The workshop relied on local factors and national factors to be run successfully. There are a few local factors in the site itself, such as the River Porter. This river provided a fast, reliable water source from the Peak District. This meant that it was a good source of power all year round. A piece of evidence to prove that this river was a particular constant and reliable one was that it was popular for water wheel powered services because they are workshops built up and down the river. Another local factor to do with the site itself was the L – shaped valley. This made the land easier to build on and was a cheaper way of building because it didn't require excess digging. The steep sides made the river flow faster and the millpond and dam fitted perfectly into the valley floor with no excess digging. A final factor about the site itself is that there is a residential area nearby; Ranmoor. This provided the workshop with workers who became skilled as it was a local job. The quiet, green scenery also encouraged the workers to come to work and increase production. The residential are also provided customers boosting the demand for products and creating a reputation for Shepherd Wheel. Another set of local factors are the resources nearby. For example, wood. There was plentiful supply on the wooded valley slopes for fuel and building. Clay was located by fast flowing rivers, such as the River Loxley and the River Rivelin. It was also located beside the River Porter and was used for lining the millpond to prevent water leaking and a waste of power. Clay also was used to build â€Å"crucible† pots in the Industrial Revolution. Gritstone from the quarries in the Peak District was used for the grinding wheels and maybe used for excess building, such as steps. Another resource was coal nearby. This was located in Eckington, east of Shepherd Wheel. This was used as a key element to make steel. For the other ingredient of steel there was a forge nearby; Forge Dam, which produced Iron for steel. Iron was also located at Eckington. These resources' being so close decreased transport costs and was a constant source of steel for the blades. A final resource was the good transport links. These helped the products to be sent around Sheffield and England to build up a reputation and also to meet growing demands. Shepherd did not only rely on local factors to be built and run successfully in Bingham Park, but also national factors as well. Shepherd Wheel was built in the right place as shown by the local factors and a description of the site, but also at the right time. It was built before the Industrial Revolution but benefited from this time of innovation and inventions immensely. The Industrial Revolution was a time of innovation and inventions. First, the population increased. This provided an increase in workers. It also provided a higher demand for cutlery as there were more people. This lead to production increases and also demands increased. Second, the population started to demand a higher amount of steel products for jobs and personal use. This meant an increase in production, which gained Shepherd Wheel and Sheffield a bigger reputation. Inventions also aided to success of Shepherd Wheel. There were 3 key pioneers of the steel industry were Abraham Darby, Benjamin Huntsman and Henry Bessemer. Abraham Darby found a way to make steel stronger and of a better quality. This lead to production increase and demand increase. This was because the steel was popular, stronger and purer. The steel was produced for personal use, weapons and the basis of other industries. In 1826, Henry Bessemer invented the â€Å"converter† which made up to 20 times more steel. Also he invented the â€Å"Puddling furnace†, which also increased the steels quality. Benjamin Huntsman also helped by inventing â€Å"Crucible Steel Pots† which produced a lot more steel. By this invention Sheffield could now make its own steel and this cut down on transport costs and exportation costs. It also meant that Sheffield could now reach higher demands for steel. Now that Sheffield could specialize in steel, it became well known over the country. Transport was improved to meet demand better and start to export steel globally. This gained Sheffield an enormous reputation and was officially named â€Å"The Steel City†. To conclude, I have proven and explained that Shepherd Wheel relied on local factors and national factors to be built successfully. I believe thanks to the contribution of all these factors Shepherd Wheel was successful. The most important factors were the River Porter and the Industrial Revolution. These two factors fulfilled the theory Shepherd Wheel being built in the right place and at the right time. Thanks to the inventions from the Industrial Revolution pioneers and the layout of the L-shaped valley and surroundings, Shepherd Wheel and in the future Sheffield became a well known and successful place where good quality steel was produced to meet high demands.

Disagreements on the Interpretations of the Zhuangzi Essay

Disagreements on the Interpretations of the Zhuangzi - Essay Example These differences can be summed up in presenting two modern analyses and interpretations of some parts of the Zhuangzi, with emphasis on the governing forces that shape and control the universe. For writer Erica Brindley, she interprets the Zhuangzi as the driving force and endless source of power that moves the universe and is above even Heaven itself is the Dao ?, which is â€Å"an upright way†, â€Å"a method†, â€Å"a path†, or â€Å"a truth†.1 The Dao allows the proliferation of diversity, thus any kind of method is considered acceptable as long as it is in line with the truth, making it a cyclical or a circular concept. Meanwhile writer Michael J. Puett interprets Heaven or Tian ? as the apex in the universal hierarchy and governs laws initiating changes and transformations, similar to patriarchy as a social order.2 Because the two authors read and interpreted the Zhuangzi using two different terms with differing ideologies, there are disagreements b etween the two, wherein Brindley’s interpretation of the Zhuangzi shows that the universe has a cyclic nature accessible through transcendence, while Puett’s interpretation states that the universal hierarchy is linear with Heaven at the apex, and man must live in balance with it without having to enter transcendence. Comparisons of the Two Interpretations of the Zhuangzi Brindley’s interpretation of the Zhuangzi gives a greater emphasis on the Dao as the all-encompassing, dynamic, unbounded and limitless driving force that shapes the cosmos and initiates its constant transformations.3 This is due to how she explains some ideas in the Zhuangzi using the Dao as the major influence. For example, she interprets the Dao to be impersonal, thus when a person unites with it, the perception of the self ceases to exist and becomes indistinguishable through emptiness, Wu ?. Thus this person does not act of his own accord anymore, because the self is no more. A passage fro m Zhuangzi mentions the impersonality of the Dao: â€Å"The Way has its reality and its signs but is without action or form. You can hand it down but you cannot receive it; you can get it but you cannot see it (Zhuangzi 6.9).†4 The idea is similar to Descartes’ â€Å"I think, therefore I am†, but instead it becomes I no longer am, and thus my thoughts are not mine.5 This turns thoughts from something personal to something that is not from the person, thus being impersonal. On the other hand, Puett’s interpretations of the Zhuangzi gives more emphasis on Heaven to be the one governing all changes that happen in the universe, and that humans must strive not to work against it, but rather follow its patterns.6 This is because resisting or controlling these changes makes people resentful, and will turn into an endless cycle of dissatisfaction, whereas allowing changes to happen as fate brings one pleasure and peace. This can be further explained using a passa ge from Zhuangzi: â€Å"Such things from time to time may happen to come your way. When they come, you cannot keep them from arriving, but when they depart you cannot stop them from going (Zhuangzi 16.5).†7 By allowing things to happen according to the patterns of Heaven and forgoing all, man can easily live in peace. Another disagreement between Brindley’s and Puett’s interpretations of the Zhuangzi is on how normalcy or humanity is defined. For Brindley, what the universe creates that man does not see normal are the products of how the Dao allows diversity to exist in the cosmos, while for Puett anything that exists in nature, regardless of whether humans consider it normal or not are still the products of the will of Heaven and are thus â€Å"heavenly†. The two texts both mentioned the following passage from Zhua

Analysis paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 9

Analysis paper - Essay Example For instance, in the 1920s, there were various organizations that were dedicated in the in the provision of important precedents including suburbs and the bungalow building, Victoria streetcar among others (Cohen 194). Inequality in education that rose in the 1950s is another critical element that has been emphasized by the author. In fact, some of the problems that communities may be facing today regarding the inequality in education may have been as a result of the problems suburbia created during those days (Cohen 194). The author describes Suburbia as the home of affluence as well as the home of inequality. Inequality was the order of the day. Inequality was widely spread in almost every aspect of life in Suburbia. Access to mortgages, tax benefits, credit, as well as mass income tax, worked better in favor of a particular group compared to other groups. Additionally, there was still inequality between men and women, middle class, and working class as well as between the whites and the blacks. The prices of homes in Suburban communities were extremely high. Actually, they were high to an extent that very few workers in the manufacturing firms were willing to move closer the workplaces. With an average weekly was of $ 116.62, workers could not afford to pay for homes in areas where most industries were moving (Cohen 197). Segmentation of housing was somehow reduced after the postwar metropolitan housing market. Those working class individuals who were set aside for the middle-class suburban communities were simply by virtue of their personal expenses. For instance, to get a house in New Jersey in the early 1960s, about twenty miles away North West of Newark, an individual was required to take a mortgage of $ 15,000. Also, one was required to pay maintenance, taxes, other utilities and more important one was required to including the commuting cost. Mathematically, an individual was required to have an annual income of $

BUS WK4 HOMEWORK Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

BUS WK4 HOMEWORK - Essay Example In such a devastating situation, it is imperative that the company pays great attention at how to inform the world about the catastrophe. If this situation was not handled then the audience of the company which is enormous as it includes the whole world, would see the company in a much worse light. The company has to release the information in two ways; first they would have to break the news to the families of the workers and secondly the company’s employees and then to the media. The company has to be extra cautious in choosing the representatives who will handle these releases. They have to make sure that their reputation is kept intact and at the same time the information provided is honest and precise. This adversity affected a lot of people. It was not only the 33 miners in the mine who were affected;the families of those workers were also hurt. The anguish that their families had to go through was no doubt too much. They waited to hear any news about their loved ones an d worried whether they would make it out alive. Chilean Copper Mine was responsible of keeping the families continuously up to date on the rescue mission and what was being done to help the miners in the best possible way to save them. This process of communication is extremely important. The employees of the company also need to be kept informed about the situation because they need to know what the company they work for can do in order to protect them and how serious they are about their workers. This means of communication has to be really effective; it will have to give all the information to them as well as make them feel that the company does care about its employees and that they are all united in this situation. Communication has a meaning to every person in a situation. A crucial point of an effective communication is mutual understanding of the information. It involves the shared concern of the thoughts, feelings, needs, wants and intentions of the communicators (Krizan, 2 011). If the message is sent through mail or memo or a video, the message has to be sent using a proper tone. In the case of the trapped miners, the overall tone when sending the message across has to be considerate and consoling in order to maintain calm. The families of the affected should be informed verbally through a video. Providing this information through writing will not be enough. Draft 1: I would like to address the family members of the ‘33’ as per company protocol. The main message that I want to communicate is of patience and being positive. The journey has no doubt been very long and stressful especially without enough resources. The company has now directed towards other ways to proceed with the rescue. This includes consideration of all types of safety aspects to ensure that the miners come back to the surface with full health and conditions and rejoin their families. The company completely understands the concerns of the families and will address them. It would be difficult to present all the information so we will sum up the most significant points of the rescue plans for this accident. The most essential thing for us is the well-being of the affected; we will make sure that all of them will reemerge to a normal life. Draft 2: The Chilean Copper Mine cave that has trapped 33 of our employees is indeed a tragic incident. We are very well

Earth Science movie review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Earth Science - Movie Review Example Are any of the characters playing scientists? How are these characters portrayed? Geeky or cool? This movie has many characters playing the role of scientists; extremely part of the movie had its own reason and the parts were clear well. The casts had different roles to play in the movie making the movie to have a flow that to the viewer. The best part of the movie is the coordination that was there between the casts some scenes were direct to the point meaning they did not require any scripting one had to put his words that fit the story well. The target to set by NASA to stop an asteroid on a collision course with the earth was successful (Robert 4). What parts of the movie were scientifically accurate? I.e. what happened that was actually possible and correctly portrayed? The Armageddon movie involves rush thrills narrow escapes and explosions. Extremely thing in the movie is the superb content and it is attractive to the eyes of the viewer; the lighting and the change of scenes i n the movie are correctly timed (Rick 2). The scientists are also extremely well equipped this makes the movie to be real and appealing, this movie if its accuracy is to be compared to talk shows it may be Oprah’s show. ... The directors should have also used the most equipments for astronomy to improve the content. This movie gives many flashlights to the viewer. Were there parts of the movie that may have been possible, but were likely exaggerated for entertainment purposes? The building of a comet that was to head to the earth, the comet had larger bunkers that could keep up to a million people. This was fiction and the fact that they found two hundred thousand people with significant jobs to get into the bunker. At the end, the comet does not hit the earth surface, and people still survive. This part of the movie was exaggerated because in real sense, this is something that can be done but the number of people in the comet seems to be significant, if the number was little this could be argued to be fact (Yoram 9). The number of people, who were in the movie, should be significant because the movie talks about extremely many things at once. Reflect on the movie as a whole. Would it have been as inter esting or entertaining if it had been scientifically accurate? If the movie was scientific it would have been extremely easy for people to understand, if a person many people understand what they see if there is no fiction in the characters taking part in the movie. The scientific technology that in the movie is easy to digest so if any were improvement made then the movie would have been interesting. Some people may just not get in mind what is happening by listening to the words, by watching what is in the movie makes them understand even more and seeing what you have never seen. The word Armageddon is derived from scary thoughts. This word means too many people that it’s destruction of

Personal statement for college addimissions Essay

Personal statement for college addimissions - Essay Example aking decisions on such important issues as course selection and efficient use of time has been done with assistance from college advisers, at a distance from cues and support systems from my family. While being at Temple University has developed in me a greater sense of my abilities and myself socially and academically, I feel that a change is needed to bring me closer to home. I believe that this distance from home may have contributed to failing my classes at Temple University, despite having good high school grades with a GPA of 3.6 and a SAT score of 1930. My first semester was not satisfactory and, during spring break, I took time to re-evaluate what went wrong during the semester. Family and peers play a critical role in the learning and development of the individual. The friends I grew up with in high school were creative, bright, and competitive, which made for interesting and spontaneous opinions and discussions on almost every topic. At Temple University, the seminar formats and small class size have presented me with a wonderful setting in which to learn. The professors, who are highly motivated, have encouraged participation, and this has been one of my highlights at the university. However, I have found the student interaction level to be unsatisfactory, especially with regard to limited classroom topics, which has left me feeling insufficiently challenged by my peers. Indeed, at this moment, I feel that I chose to enter Temple University for the wrong reason because I followed my best friend who also joined the university. H owever, after he left to move back home after only one month, I felt that I had made a mistake in enrolling at Temple University. In my first semester at the university, I have come to the realization that family and community play a pivotal role in growth, learning, and development. It is for this reason that I would like to move to a university that is closer to home and my family. Based on the conversations that I have had

Phonetic exercises Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Phonetic exercises - Essay Example Phonetic exercises This course has given me a good understanding of the processes involved in articulation, articulation points and the manner of articulation. This knowledge will prove handy in helping students with pronunciation difficulties especially those taking English as a second language and for whom, their first language structure is markedly different in structure fromthat of the English language e. g in the pronunciation of consonants. Sounds are the building blocks of language. A good understanding of sounds contribute to better spelling, flowing speech, and good reading skills and better comprehension. I have learned that in English there are many ways in which to spell the same sound. Therefore in oral tests, the manner in which a student perceives sound determines how he/ she spells it. Different words have different sounds and meaning attached to them and so sounds give melody to language. The right intonation of sounds can convey a host of human feelings such as empathy, anger. Sounds can show confidence or certainty of our words. This course has helped me a appreciate the two fold meaning that sound can bring into one sentence through the use of word stress and sentence intonations to alter meaning. Constructing exercises for learners of English as a second language is now easier because of the emphasis I have learned that phonetics play on the meaning and the message sentences carry. I can also comfortably test the oral capability of my students from my knowledge of how words are constructed and how the vocal apparatus achieves this.

Decision Making, Decision Levels and Types of Problems Essay

Decision Making, Decision Levels and Types of Problems - Essay Example This root of the system is primordial and through interactions with each other and combinations becomes more advanced and complex assembling progressively more complex level of systems that cooperate and exchange information and ultimately forming an information system. Information systems theory postulates a system as a symbol within a representational medium (idiom) and the representational medium in itself. The general systems theory can be applied in structured problems to solve information system problems, where the problem and desired solution is clearly defined and can be split into a series of steps that are well defined (Skyttner 2001). For example, in developing an information system for an online retailer, a structured approach would be to list the products being sold, the available staff and the processes that will lead to making a sale, in which case a product inventory can be made. Members of staff are then allocated duties such as customer service and dispatch then how data on available inventory and deliveries will be made. In this case, what is needed is clearly defined. The inventory, who will handle what and how items will be delivered to customers so a system development sequence is employed. The general systems theory can be applied in structured problems to solve information system problems, where the problem and desired solution is clearly defined and can be split into a series of steps that are well defined (Skyttner 2001). For example, in developing an information system for an online retailer.... A decision support system (DSS) then comes in handy, as there is a need for some level of intuition. The DSS will do most of the ‘thinking’ as it provides data and models to help management make decisions. Non-structured situations would be for example designing a web site that can process payments from customers online, receive orders and queries and interact with a customer. Intuition will be needed on what would be most suitable for the customer and how to reduce threats of credit card fraud to the customer. The exact situation is not fully known but forms the wider system requirement and hence the solutions are not straight forward (Mathews 2008) General systems thinking is the practice of appreciating how different parts of an information system can impact and influence each other. For example, in designing a database system for a supermarket, one has to know how the accounting system will interact with the stock and inventory system and the payroll. In terms of str uctured problems, a designer can look at how the check out system will update the daily sales records and the stocks. The problem is defined as updating the daily sales account and knowing how much of what was sold. The problem can be designed in defined steps from what system to capture what has been sold, and for how much and then the stocks must be updated. A semi-structured problem would be how to know when stocks are running low or when to take money to the bank. A threshhold for cash sales will have to be established that alerts the finance manager to call in the couriers to deliver money to the bank. The system to know how much sales came from what products and how many were paid for by credit card. A non-structured problem would be how to handle customer complaints, track their

How to Support Bilingualism in Early Childhood Essay Example for Free

How to Support Bilingualism in Early Childhood Essay Bilingualism is very important. Although most people speak English in this country, there is not really a national language in the United States of America. However, speaking more than one language will, without a doubt, get you father. Many children that enter early childhood centers have another primary language. Although it is very important that all the children learn English, it is just as important that they do not lose their first language. Besides being able to keep close to your roots and communicate with your family, being bilingual can open doors professionally. This in itself is a great reason to make sure schools support bilingualism. Accepting the child’s first language is a great step to show respect for the child and his culture and family. This acceptance is important in the early years, especially when the child first enters preschool / daycare. In showing tolerance and acknowledgement to the primary language, the child will feel comfortable in the classroom and this will make the transition to go much smoother. This article continues to explain ways in which educators and school staff can support bilingualism. Preschools and daycares play an important role in the lives of the children. The seeds we plant about bilingualism will grow forever in that child. As we accept and learn, so will the children. If we were to treat this in a negative manner, the children will perceive it that way as well. Getting to know the families in our centers is imperative. Knowing what language they speak and where they come from is a sure way to make them feel secure and comfortable. As stated in the article, the attitudes of the staff are essential to supporting bilingualism. Making sure that staff members speak both English and another language (majority at center) is the first step in having a bilingual school/program. It is never â€Å"ok† to simply disregard the native language of the child or the child’s family. Parents should continue to speak in their native language and no one should make that child feel embarrassed or ashamed to speak another language. This article is pro children and pro responsibility. As educators, it is our duty to have our children reach for the highest goal possible. It is our responsibility to take the children far in life. Guiding children and their families towards bilingualism is a great way to give value to immigrant families. Achieving the â€Å"American dream† does not mean leaving your roots behind. Having a strong self-esteem includes being proud of ourselves and where we come from. Teachers need to nurture this.

Developing IT Funding Models

Developing IT Funding Models Developing it funding models With increasing competition, costs and debates on the return of investments. Organizations need to be smarter with better practices on the way they fund their IT departments. Information Technology has grown way beyond its original role and now it is unusual for any company to not have any IT incorporated. Each organization must develop its own funding strategy for its IT. There are some fundamental principles and practices which can guide IT managers and leaders in planning and budgeting, as well as investing in its IT facilities. There are many different obstacles that an organization will face when strategically funding the business. Many different obstacles can be encountered and this usually occurs when there is failure to: Recognize that human resources play a big role in IT expenditure, and that personnel costs present increasing and ongoing annual expenditures. Determine replacement life cycles for different IT and incorporate renewal funding into IT budgets. It is also important that the financial investment is committed every time a new project is approved and that it will be available over the lifespan of that project. Standardize software, hardware and IT Technical Support services as much as possible to deliver baseline services to enable economies of scale. Educate those within the organization about the benefits of IT investments. Ensuring that those who are expected to benefit from the investment understand and have bought into the potential need to make changes in the way that they work. Information technology must be efficiently planned and must engage the attention of executive leadership. There are certain strategic questions that need to be asked. The how much is going to be enough? and how up-to-date and leading edge do we want to be? are very important questions that need to be addressed.   The answers to these questions need to come from IT manages/leaders or from executive leaders. Organizations need to make financial decisions based on realistic and accurate cost figures. Not only new implementations must be budgeted for but ongoing operational costs need to also be accounted for. The cost of supporting the IT must also not be underestimated or forgotten about. Replacement cycles for the different infrastructure must be established.   Hardware, software, wiring and personnel must be incorporated into the IT budget.   There will also need to be funding for the cost of replacement of equipment which will be within the IT budget. All IT expenditures need to be vigorously monitored to ensure that all IT resources are budgeted efficiently. Effective IT funding is very dependent on the IT management practices in place within the organization. Standardizing the use of IT around the organization will mean more effective use of resources. Whilst this is difficult to achieve it is very important so that costs are effectively managed. It is especially important for common baseline services such as networking where unique needs are not a factor. Possible downtime and the cost of reallocating IT should be factored into the IT budget. This is to ensure that funding remains available for higher priority IT projects. As new technology comes into play, old technology should be reviewed. Seeking out anything that its at the end of its useful lifecycle. Despite all of the popular beliefs, there are only a few sources of funds available to all companies. Using profits made selling goods or services. This is the most effective source of funds for any company and hopefully brings in the most revenue. Companies can borrow money from banks and take a loan. The downside to this is the high interest rates that can accumulate over time. The company can sell itself in the form of shares to its investors. This is called equity funding. The benefit to this is that shareholders will not require interest payments. The downside to this is that profits are divided amongst shareholders. These are the 3 main sourcing of funding that is available to companies. Some possible funding models for IT in a company could include the following: Technology Grants-Including public funding and private grants for hardware, software and training. Parent or individual financing Bring your own device options, tax relief and user fees. Public-Private Partnerships government-backed loans, bundled service agreements, seed funding, support from religious institutions, NGOs, and micro-financing Micro Financing There are programs that provide small loans around the world to people in poor countries/third world countries. These have become more and more popular over the years. This funding could be used to purchase certain goods such as hardware and software. Bundled Service Grants Technology businesses out there such as cable providers and computer service companies often partner up together to offer special collections of services and equipment. These offer companies around the world to obtain much of the infrastructure equipment at a competitive rate rather than purchasing individually. These service grants are also being used in countries which have been traditionally under served. The big brand companies such as Intel, Cisco Systems and Microsoft are making an impact of revitalizing Lebanon and improving the economic growth. Government backed loans A Government backed loan is a loan that will be secured by the government. This means that lenders are protected and borrowers also benefit on low interest rates. With low interest and flexible repayment schedules these loans are a very good option for funding Information Technology. Universal Service Fees In third world countries where broadband access has been cost-prohibitive, universal access funds can be used to subsidize new broadband infrastructure and network rollouts. In countries such as Chile, Turkey and Malaysia, governments have successfully created policies and funds to extend voice, data and internet services. A useful way to begin is by using a SWOT Analysis. These are Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Each of the areas will need to be analyzed. Funding strategys do not tend to work well on their own. It tends to be part of an overall business plan or strategy which shows where the organization is heading. The funding strategy is the engine to make this happen. How to go about setting up a funding strategy? What are we going to do? Be clear about the aims and objects Why are we going to do it? Why do we require IT in our business? Who will do it? Decide who is responsible for fundraising e.g. managers/leaders Where will we do it? -Location of department/IT support services How will we do it? -Resources and methods required for fundraising need to researched and decided upon. When we will do it? Have an agreed timescale or ongoing plan to see what you need to do in order to maintain current funding. When to develop a funding model Funding models require considerable time and investment to take hold. The companys leadership teams must be willing to invest in systems and the required staff to support the funding model. Size is also an important factor. Developing a funding model is generally most helpful for companies that generate at least  £3million in annual revenues. This is because smaller organizations can often get by with idiosyncratic fundraising methods. So there is no need to get over strategic until it is necessary to do so. It needs to be clear with what the company wants to achieve from the funding model.   Does it want to propel rapid growth? Become more financially secure while remaining at roughly the same scale? Expand into a new program area? Each of these objectives is likely to imply a different right funding model. Identifying and developing a funding model is a long term investment that will require patience. But it is an investment that is worth making in the long run. An organization needs to reflect on the relative strengths and weaknesses of its current funding methods and its historical methods also. The knowledge that is gained from this will pave the way for implementing a funding model that builds on those strengths and weaknesses. Organizations are likely to think that they already know a great deal about their funding structures and how they have raised money. However, there is a danger that this is wrong. It is recommended that organizations that are in search of a funding model start by researching in 3 key areas: These are: Funding Sources Funder Motivation Fundraising Capabilities Peter Kim describes these in greater detail below: Funding Sources: A few important questions we can ask are: What percentage of ongoing costs is covered by renewable funding sources that are very likely to continue for at least the next three to five years?(Kim 2011) Across how many funders are funding sources spread?(Kim 2011) What percentage of funding is restricted to non-core operations and programs? (Kim 2011) Funder Motivation: It is important to understand why funders can help non profit businesses better. The goal is to see if there is a particular funding model and the existing motivations of potential donors. Important questions to be answered include Are the funders motivated by an organizations track record, the specific population it is working with, or the personal relationships with the top leaders? Fundraising Capabilities: Organizations need to be honest about what funding sources they wish to secure and what investments would need to be made to do so. Important questions here include: Does a single individual (such as the CEO or a board member) generate most of the revenue, or is fundraising more institutionalized?(Kim 2011) What are the development teams current capabilities?(Kim 2011 Image 1: http://er.educause.edu/~/media/images/articles/2015/1/figurereinitzsidebar.jpg?la=en Image 2: http://www.centralsaanich.ca/Assets/Central+Saanich/Administration/CS+Organization+Chart+4.JPG Image 3: http://www.bakertilly.com/insights/budgeting-for-information-technology/ Kim, P. (2011) FINDING YOUR FUNDING MODEL, (37-41).

Movie: One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest :: One Flew Over Cuckoos Nest Essays Film

Movie: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest, there was a character named McMurphy, played by Jack Nickolson, who was admitted into a mental institution for medical testing after having been convicted of statutory rape. It was obvious that he was only faking and he thought that he could get off from having to serve his sentence in a work camp. He pretty much saw everything and everyone as a joke but the only person who he didn't fool was nurse Ratchet. He thought that he would be able to leave in a couple of months, the time of his sentence in the work camp, until he found out that he wouldn't be allowed to leave.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  After a few days he began to see the patients as a group that needed more enjoyment in their lives and he wanted to try to find some way that they could get out and go to a bar and watch the world series. The nursing staff seemed uncaring to their lack of enjoyment to life and basically refused to allow the patients to even watch the game on the TV during their chores even after having took a vote where a mute patient nicknamed 'Chief' for the first time communicated that he wanted to watch the game. McMurphy had befriended Chief and later discovered that he was not deaf and dumb but was only faking his muteness and they planed to escape together.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  McMurphy later found out that many of these patients were here only because they put themselves here and didn't want to leave even though they had the option to. He tried his best to bring some life to these patients such as teaching them to play poker and gambling for cigarettes. He even went so far as to escape over a fence only to open the gate and to get the patients onto a nearby bus and drive them to the docks where he took them on a fishing trip. Also he arranged for his girlfriend and a prostitute to come to the institution at night with some alcohol and had a little party for them before he decided he was going to escape. The next morning one of the patients who was suicidal was found by the nurses in bed with the prostitute. Nurse Ratchet told him that he would tell his mother what he had done and the patient was found later dead on the floor from having had slashed his own throat.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  McMurphy never did leave and he was given a form of therapy called ECT,

Octavia Butlers Kindred Essay -- Slavery Education Slaves Kindred Ess

Octavia Butler's Kindred Throughout the novel Kindred, Butler compared and contrasted modern African Americans with African Americans that were slaves in the novel. Some of the many ways she compares them are through education, work ethic, and their personal feelings about and/or how they handle their own slavery. Education is very important to the blacks that were enslaved in the novel. The slaves valued education even more than the modern African Americans like Dana who had always thought they had very high standards on education. The slaves valued education so much because to them it was not only a tool to better themselves, but also a very powerful tool that could potentially lead them to freedom. With the ability to read and write the slaves could write themselves ...

Malcolm X Essay -- Civil Rights African American Essays

Malcolm X   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Malcolm X was a man of strong words and beliefs. Some say that he was a man of hate and violence. Some also say that he was a smart man of hope and peace. Malcolm X‘s influence on people was felt more than it was alive rather than dead. Malcolm X was a major contributor to the black societies across the world. He fought for what he believed in and educated the young. Though his early life was full of up’s and downs he managed to, what some would say, â€Å"turn his life around†. In doing this he managed to gain the upper hand of the African American culture by giving them the hope that one day they would if not own be apart of, what he called, â€Å"white mans society†.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska. Malcolm’s father was murdered by a white supremacists group while in Lancing, Michigan. His mother was declared legally insane and committed to the state mental hospital. Because of that Malcolm X had no parental guidance in his young adult life. Malcolm X also dropped out of school also after the murder of his father, and from then on Malcolm turned to the streets for guidance. On the street he was he known as a hustler. He earned money by stealing and selling it back to the community or by conning others in buying bad products from him. On the streets, he was also known as Detroit Red. When Malcolm was Twenty, Malcolm X was sentenced to eight to ten years in prison. He was sentenced to prison because of breaking and entering, carrying firearms, and Larceny.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In Prison he was given the nick name Satan because of his foul mouth. While in prison Malcolm taught his self to read. So while incarcerated he studied the N.O.I which stands for the nation of Islam. He first learned about the Nation of Islam from letters, from his brother Reginald, in Jail he became an ordinary reader to the other prisoners about the Nation of Islam. During his jail time he received contact with the leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad. As their verbal contact continued, they began to write each other daily.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Malcolm was released from jail in 1952. When he left jail he went to Chicago to meet Elijah Muhammad. There in Chicago he changed his name from Malcolm Little to Malcolm â€Å"X†. Malcolm said that the â€Å"X† meant to tell the non-appreciation of his slave name. Also it was to symbolize the missing of an appropriate Muslim n... ...iving, people still hold on to the words that he spoke when he believed that minority’s deserved something better than equality. He began to see and realize that whites are not devils and in order for the world to grow and for blacks to prosper everyone must come together. Malcolm’s life and murder enraged a whole community to stand up and fight. He gave people faith, hope, and courage that one day things would get better. Yes he taught violence and he was willing to do anything for his people, to see them live a great life. But it was just for that reason so that people could see that everyone had a right to live a life that in that time the white man lived. He was seen as a racist, but all people had a problem with a person from a different color so he was just as racist as the next man. He finally realized that being together was the only way to get through and prosper, but in the days of him speaking this truth, he was murdered. He was never given the chance to become something like Dr. Martin L. King and preach about being as one, because of the fear that people had of him. He was changing once again like he did many times in his life, only this time his time ran short.

Compare and contrast Blake’s ‘London’ to Wordsworth ‘composed upon Westminster Bridge’ Essay

Both these poems were written at around the turn of the 19th century, in Georgian times, to illustrate the authors’ views on the City of London. At this time, the industrial revolution was underway and there was vast growth in the population, due to medical advances and people having more children. In my opinion, they are both mocking the City and its inhabitants. Both Poems use their structure to emphasise the words in them. William Blake’s ‘London’ is written in four, four line stanzas. Each line of each verse has the same number of syllables; this creates a regimented, almost mechanical effect. It uses alternate line rhyming to make the poem sound regular. This system also emphasises the last word of each line. Each verse of the Blake poem attacks a different aspect of London. It is clear that Blake found London a very corrupt and immoral place, providing a very bleak picture of the city. Whereas in contrast Wordsworth’s poem is written in the form of an Italian sonnet, of which describes the man made elements of the city, the last sextet refers to natural beauty. This poem also uses alternate line rhyming to create the effect of order. Bringing attention to emphasizes the meaning of the rhyming words. Both poets use different symbolism to convey their ideas to the reader. Wordsworth shows his feelings for London in a figurative way. He personifies the sun, river and the city. He allows them to perform human functions such as wearing clothes. He continues this simile giving the river ‘a will’, something which is unique to people. He says ‘The City now doth like a garment wear the beauty of the morning’. This gives the impression that the city is alive, not just an inanimate collection of buildings. I interpret this personification to mean that the city takes the beauty of the morning to disguise it dirtiness and ugliness. William Blake’s poem conveys his feelings in a more abstract style, when he uses the people and buildings of London to represent the institutions, which they are associated with. He uses the image of a church to criticise religious establishments and a palace to signify the state, and authorities that control it. He gives the image of the soldier’s sigh running in blood down palace walls. Here he is attacking the monarchy and government for condemning young men to death by sending them off to fight in foreign wars. Many of the words in Blake’s poem have more than one meaning. In the first line he talks of London’s ‘charter’d’ streets. Chartered can be interpreted to mean responsibility of the church or state or licensed; on the other side of the coin it can be use to mean licentious and freely immoral. Taken in context with the rest of the poem I consider it to mean freely immoral as further on in the poem he alludes to prostitution, and other such corrupt activities. According to traditional reading the picture of London we see in Wordsworth’s poem is an exaggerated tribute to the beauty of London. It uses imagery and praises both nature and mans achievements. It immediately sets out how the author feels in the first line saying ‘Dull would he be of soul who could pass by, a sight so touching in its majesty.’ Inferring that the sight of London would evoke strong views in everyone who sees it. It is left up to the reader to decide whether this is a compliment or a criticism. Wordsworth’s most famous works allude to the beauty of his beloved lake district. So it is not to imagine he would be shocked and repulsed by London. Wordsworth’s poem describes London as ‘glittering in the smokeless air’ and having a calming aura. These statements, I think prove that the words are sarcastic. At the time they were written the Industrial was happening and the chimneys of London would be belching out thick smoke. Also to describe London as calming is, in my opinion a blatant lie. London is the heart of the United Kingdom, a port and an important centre of commerce. It is near impossible for us to imagine it as ‘calm’ even in ‘The beauty of the morning;’ In contrast to this the Blake poem uses hyperbole to criticize London and the sadness and malice of the people who live there. Blake’s London brutally painted is a dark, dirty, disease ridden and deprived place Unlike the Wordsworth poem it leaves you in no doubt as to the authors feelings on the subject. In the last verse of the Blake poem there is a theme of sexually transmitted disease, leading to the end of society. This is most apparent in the last verse. It describes the ‘youthful harlots curse’ blasting the newborn infant. This is showing that the venereal disease affects everyone because of the promiscuity of the people in the society. The last line uses the image of a marriage hearse being blighted by sexually transmitted disease. Marriage is supposed to be a happy occasion though here it is shown to be an institution that carries people to their deathbeds. This is because marriage is usually seen as an appropriate setting for sexual intercourse, which spreads the diseases when infidelity is rife. Which are hinted to lead to the end of civilization. The Wordsworth poem is slightly less melodramatic in its outlook as it merely describes London at one moment in the morning. It has nothing in it that could be interpreted as relating to London’s people or what the future holds for them. The Wordsworth poem is made more charged in the penultimate line where he says ‘Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;’ He is so overwhelmed by the tranquillity of London that he feels the need to invoke gods name. In contrast nowhere in the Blake poem does he use direct speech to heighten any of the emotions. Both these poems, in my opinion, share feelings of concern and disgust for London. If I had to pick which one I preferred I would choose the Blake poem. This is because the meaning of the words is more clear-cut. I accept that the point of the Wordsworth poem may be to leave it up to the reader to decide whether or not the poem is sarcastic or not. But I don’t consider this device to be particularly effective; thought irritating maybe but not effective. The Blake poem is also more emotional and melodramatic.

Day After Tomorrow

FTER Hollywood cinema and climate change: The Day After Tomorrow. Ingram, David. In Words on Water: Literary and Cultural Representations, Devine, Maureen and Christa Grewe-Volpp (eds. ) (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008). Climate change, like many other environmental problems, is slow to develop, not amenable to simple or fast solutions, and caused by factors that are both invisible and complex (Adam 17).Making a narrative film about climate change therefore does not fit easily into the commercial formulae of mainstream Hollywood, which favour human-interest stories in which individual protagonists undergo a moral transformation before they resolve their problems through heroic action in the final act. Can such classical narratives mediate an issue as complex as climate change without being not only inadequate, but even dangerous, lulling their audience into a false sense of security about our ability to deal with such problems?Ecocritic Richard Kerridge observes that a British journalist responded to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 by framing it within the familiar narrative of the Second World War, with its emphasis on ‘a successful outcome and a narrative closure'. For Kerridge, such narrative strategies may be an overly reassuring way of representing environmental threats, and reveal therefore that the ‘real, material ecological crisis' is ‘also a cultural crisis, a crisis of representation' (Kerridge 4).Yet, as Jim Collins argues, ‘mass-mediated cultures', including those of popular Hollywood cinema, are characterised by ‘semiotic complexities of meaning production', which leave even popular, generic texts open to multiple interpretations (Collins 17). Film theorist Stephen Prince describes a Hollywood movie as a ‘polysemous, multivalent set of images, characters, and narrative situations', which therefore constitute what he calls an ‘ideological agglomeration', rather than a single, coherent ideological position (Prince 40).This polysemy may arise from the Hollywood industry's commercial intention to maximize profits by appealing to as wide and diverse an audience as possible by making movies which, ideologically speaking, seek to have it all ways at once. One consequence is that, when we theorize about the effects popular movies may or may not have on public awareness of environmental issues, those effects are more complex, and less deterministic, than is often assumed is some academic film theories.This essay will explore the range of meanings generated by The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which frames the issue of anthropogenic climate change within the familiar genres of the disaster and science fiction movie. Ideological analysis of the film, combined with a study of its audience reception, suggests that even a classical Hollywood narrative can generate a degree of ideological ambiguity which makes it open to various interpretations, both liberal and conservative. Th e ideological ambiguity of The Day After Tomorrow derives in part from the way its narrative mixes the modes of realism, fantasy and melodrama.A realist film will attempt to correspond to what we understand as reality, mainly through the optical realism of its mise-en-scene and the sense of psychological plausibility produced by both its script and the performance of its actors. Melodrama, on the other hand, will simplify character and heighten action and emotion beyond the everyday. Hollywood movies tend to work by moving between these two modes of representation. Some genres, such as science fiction and horror, also move between realism and fantasy, a mode which exceeds realist plausibility by creating a totally fictive and impossible diegetic world.As a science fiction movie, then, The Day After Tomorrow deliberately blurs the distinction between realism and fantasy. The narrative begins from a scientifically plausible premise: the melting of the Artic ice-cap, caused by anthropo genic global warming, cools the North Atlantic Current, colloquially known as the ‘Gulf Stream', and thereby affects the weather in the Northern hemisphere. The movie then extrapolates from this premise beyond even the worst-case scenarios proposed by climate scientists.The switching off of the thermohaline current generates a global superstorm, as a result of which an ice sheet covers Scotland and a tsunami floods Manhattan. The movie's literary source, it is worth noting, was The Coming Global Superstorm (1999), by Art Bell and Whitely Streiber, whose television talk show on the paranormal suggests an interest in the ‘parascientific'; that is, in speculation beyond what is provable or falsifiable by scientific method. When interpreted literally, that is, as realism, The Day After Tomorrow clearly violates notions of scientific plausibility.The basic climatology in the movie is inaccurate: hurricanes can only form over large bodies of warm water, not the cold seas found in high latitudes, where polar lows are the main storm systems. The movie also distorts the science of climate change, mainly by accelerating the time frame within which its effects take place, and by making them much worse than predicted. Any slowdown in the thermohaline current would take a period of years, at least, and probably centuries, rather than the days featured in the film.Moreover, even if the North Atlantic Current did switch off, average temperatures would still be likely to rise, rather than fall, because of the greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere (Henson 112-5). The film's central narrative, in which government paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) walks in sub-zero temperatures all the way from north of Philadelphia to the New York Public Library, to rescue his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhall) who is sheltering there, is thus impossible: neither would survive such low temperatures.For helicopters to freeze in mid-air, temperatures would not only be too cold for snow, but also too cold for human survival. Burning books in a library would be insufficient to keep people alive. Such implausibilities are worth pointing out, not because cinema audiences necessarily take what they see as scientific truth, but because science fiction often provides an opportunity to learn some real science. Indeed, as we will see later in this essay, environmental groups used the release of the movie as a ‘teachable moment' on the science of climate change (Leiserowitz 6).The two-disc DVD edition of the movie includes a documentary on the science of climate change; screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff commented on its release that, although ‘our primary concern' in making the film ‘was entertainment rather than education. On the DVD, there's room for both'. Acknowledging that the time frame he created for the movie was accelerated for fictional purposes, and that the ‘superfreeze' was ‘purely a cinematic device', he added that ‘t he political, agricultural and societal consequences of a sudden change in the ocean currents would still be catastrophic' (Nachmanoff 1).To dismiss The Day After Tomorrow purely for its scientific inaccuracies, then, clearly misses the point of the movie, which is to use realist elements of climate science as a starting point for melodrama and fantasy, so that it can dwell on the spectacle of extreme weather, appropriate for a blockbuster disaster movie, and also invite the audience's emotional engagement with the human-interest story that becomes the main focus of narrative. It is to these elements in the film that we will now turn.As a ‘natural disaster' melodrama, the film works on an opposition between nature and civilization, and invites an ambiguous identification on the part of the viewer: in Hollywood terms, we are invited to ‘root for' both nature and civilization at various points in the narrative, although the values of civilization eventually become the domi nant ones. Before that happens, however, the scenes of extreme weather make the experience of environmental apocalypse strangely attractive. As Maurice Yacowar observes, the natural disaster movie ‘dramatizes people's helplessness against the forces of nature' (Yacowar 218).The set pieces of extreme weather in The Day After Tomorrow reveal the sublime power of wild nature: violent, chaotic, powerful beyond human control, and therefore exciting and seductive. Environmentalist Paul Hawken writes that the concept of doomsday ‘has always had a perverse appeal, waking us from our humdrum existence to the allure of a future harrowing drama' (Hawken 204). As Stephen Keane points out, although disaster movies regularly feature television news reports commenting on the events that are taking place, they do not go on ‘to make the critical point that we are all electronic voyeurs' (Keane 84).The Day After Tomorrow follows this pattern. The audience's complicity in seeking cin ematic thrills in the scenarios of mass death and destruction caused by the weather is encouraged, rather than questioned, by the movie itself. Indeed, such thrills are the raison d'etre of its genre. Yet the aesthetics of the sublime have always been based on vicariousness; if we take pleasure in the destructive forces of nature, it is from the safe distance of our movie seats, where we are in the position of voyeurs, rather than of victims.This construction of victimhood in the disaster movie depends on narrative alignment: when people die, we do not dwell on them, nor on the bereaved people they leave behind. Typical of the disaster genre, the focus of nature's destructiveness in The Day After Tomorrow is the city. Hollywood disaster movies, writes Geoff King, share with millennial groups ‘a certain delirious investment in the destruction of the metropolis' (King 158). When a series of tornadoes attack Los Angeles, the mise-en-scene focuses on familiar landmarks: the Hollyw ood sign, the Capitol Records building, and a billboard advertising the model Angelyne.Screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff observes on the DVD commentary that preview audiences greeted the moment where the Angelyne sign flattens the television reporter with cheers and applause (Emmerich). The sense of retribution is difficult to avoid: perhaps there is poetic justice in the media figure, parasitical on other people's suffering, finding his nemesis in Angelyne, the model and aspiring actress who paid to advertise herself on her own billboards, and thus became for some emblematic of the meretricious values of the city.As Mike Davis observes, Los Angeles is often given special treatment in apocalyptic narratives. ‘No other city,' he writes, ‘seems to excite such dark rapture'. Unlike other cities, the destruction of Los Angeles ‘is often depicted as, or at least secretly experienced as, a victory for civilization' (Davis 277). Geoff King draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin's notio n of the ‘carnivalesque' to account for such moments of ‘licensed enjoyment of destruction', based on an ‘overturning of cultural norms' (King 162). But the destruction is too cruel, as well as unfocussed and generalised, to be simply an anti-authoritarian gesture.As Susan Sontag noted, science fiction films provide a ‘morally acceptable fantasy where one can give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings' (Sontag 215). Freud's notion of the ‘death wish' thus better captures the dark side of such fantasies. For Freud, such aggressions were natural drives that need to be controlled; art provides catharsis for such anti-social instincts. Patricia Mellencamp draws on Freud to argue that American television is both ‘shock and therapy; it both produces and discharges anxiety' (Mellencamp 246).The disaster movie works in a similar way, mobilising and exploiting our negative drives and emotions. But are there unconscious meanings specific to the natura l disaster movie? One reading of such movies is as ‘revenge of nature' narratives, which enact a fantasy of nature getting its own back for its mistreatment at the hands of human beings. Psychoanalyst Karl Figlio draws on the theories of Melanie Klein to argue that scientific thinking itself is an act of repressive violence towards Nature. ‘Nature killed,' he writes, ‘is nature in a vengeful mood, a primitive retaliatory phantasy that fuels apocalyptic forebodings.The more scientific the culture, the more it is at the mercy of irrational fears, and the more it is dependent on scientific protection from them' (Figlio 72). He cites Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as an ‘extreme example of scientific mapping that calls forth revenge from nature' (75). According to this reading, then, when we watch nature getting its revenge, we as viewers are able to purge our guilt about its degradation. However, as Yacowar notes, the moral attitude of the typical disaster movie is ambiguous. Poetic justice in disaster films,' he writes, ‘derives from the assumption that there is some relationship between a person's due and his or her doom'. However, this notion breaks down when the ‘good die with the evil' (Yacowar 232). The Day After Tomorrow works according to these generic expectations, with Nature at times appearing amoral in its destructiveness, and at other times, a force of moral retribution and punishment. The arrogant businessmen who bribe the bus driver, and the corruptible bus driver himself, get their comeuppance when they drown in the tidal wave that engulfs Manhattan.Jeffrey Nachmanoff reveals in the DVD commentary that, in an early draft of the script, the businessman had been negotiating an insider deal with the Japanese businessman killed by the hailstorm in Tokyo (Emmerich). In the final version, the latter lies to his wife on his cell phone moments before his death. The ethical critique in these scenes fits into the ideological agenda of many disaster films. As King writes, such films ‘include an element of criticism of capitalism, but this is a gesture that for the most part leaves its core values largely intact.A few ‘excesses' are singled out, such as the greedy cost-cutting that undermines the integrity of the eponymous star of The Towering Inferno, leaving the remainder mostly untouched' (King 153). In The Day After Tomorrow, then, greedy, self-interested individuals are punished. Yet innocent people also die in the movie, including the climate scientists who freeze to death in Scotland, led by the avuncular Terry Rapson (Ian Holm), and Jack's friend Frank (Jay O. Sanders), who falls to his death through the roof of a building, after cutting his own rope to prevent his friends from endangering their lives in trying to rescue him.These are figures of heroic sacrifice, also central to the disaster genre, because they bring out the redemptive aspects of the apocalypse. The film does not stat e clearly where the British royal family stand in this hierarchy of innocence and guilt: what is clear, is that death by climate change is no respecter of class privilege and wealth. The disaster movie, then, is about which values are the key to survival. The rescue of the innocent, French-speaking African family is thus crucial in einforcing the movie's ethical hierarchy based on racial, national and gender differences: they are saved by the white American woman (Laura), who in turn is saved by the white American male (Sam), thereby enacting in miniature two important themes in the movie. The most important of these is the narrative of male heroism and redemption. Melodrama, writes Linda Williams, is about a ‘retrieval and staging of innocence' (Williams 7). In this film, the melodramatic plot of father rescuing son makes the moral point that hard-working fathers need to take a more active role in bringing up their sons.The movie implies that, although millions of people may be dead, if one American family can be saved, then at least some good has come out of the eco-apocalypse. This message is more liberal, or at least not as unambiguously patriarchal, as in earlier disaster movies. In keeping with Stephen Prince's notion of ideological agglomeration, mentioned earlier, although Jack's wife is a doctor, she ends up playing the role of surrogate mother to a seven-year old boy with cancer, separated from his parents by the storm.The movie can thus be interpreted as either liberal (she is a doctor) or conservative (she is placed in the stereotypical female role of nurturer). The second important theme in the movie is the United States' self-appointed role as global protector-policeman. The rescue narrative trumpets the frontier values of male physical heroism, strong leadership and individualism, encapsulated by the iconic image of the torch of the Statue of Liberty emerging from the waves of the tsunami that engulfs Manhattan.However, America's role in w orld politics is also questioned by a more liberal discourse in the movie, when American refugees are forced to flee illegally into Mexico, in an ironic reversal of the real politics on the national border. This ironic reversal is itself made ambiguous, though, when later the United States government writes off all Third World debt, but in return, wins the right for its citizens to live as ‘guests' in those countries. It should be noted that not all Hollywood movies with environmental themes are as individualistic in their proposed solutions as The Day After Tomorrow.Some have endorsed more collective forms of action, even in narratives led by strong individuals: an image of placard-waving protestors recurs in Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home (1995) and Fly Away Home (1996) as a sign of collective resistance. Ultimately, The Day After Tomorrow prefers American notions of liberal individualism, which it turns into universal values by identifying them with human civilization as a whole. Indeed, civilization, rather than wild nature, becomes the real object of audience identification by the end.The choice of the New York Public Library as the place of sanctuary and rescue is significant in this respect. One of the survivors makes sure he preserves the Gutenberg Bible from burning, not because he believes in God, he says, but because, as the first book ever printed, it represents ‘the dawn of the age of reason'. ‘If Western civilization is finished', he adds, ‘I'm going to save at least one little piece of it'. Ultimately, then, the movie celebrates reason and science as the values most central to Western civilization. Unusually for a Hollywood disaster movie, scientists are neither evil nor incompetent.As Yacowar notes, specialists in disaster movies, including scientists, ‘are almost never able to control the forces loose against them'. The genre thus serves ‘the mystery that dwarfs science' (Yacowar 228). This is also true of The Day After Tomorrow, in that the scientists are unable to contain the devastating effects of climate change once they have begun. ‘Ultimately,' writes ecocritic Sylvia Mayer, ‘the movie makes the point that the most advanced and dedicated scientific work is still powerless against the forces of nature once they are unleashed' (Mayer 111).Nevertheless, the scientists are the heroes of the movie. Their advice on the risks of climate change was ignored by the politicians until it was too late. As the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration angrily tells the Vice-President: ‘You didn't want to heat about the science when it would have made a difference'. The scientists' computer models prove correct: in the movie, unlike in real life, climate science provides the clear, certain and unambiguous knowledge necessary for survival.Moreover, advanced technology is ultimately a force for good. Jack is able to locate his son in the Public Library un der the frozen wastes of Manhattan because of his friend's portable satellite navigation system (which, of course, would not work in such a massive storm). He is also seen driving a hybrid Toyota Prius earlier in the film. Reason, science and technology thus win the day. However, as Sylvia Mayer also notes, the movie stops short of simplistically advocating a technological fix for environmental problems as complex as climate change (Mayer 117).The values of civilization finally triumph over the destructive forces of wild nature when the pack of wolves, which escaped from Central Park Zoo earlier in the movie, return to attack Sam and his friends when they are searching for medicine and food. That the wolves are computer-generated special effects only adds an extra layer of irony to the triumph of civilization and benign technology in the movie. Indeed, the movie itself can be seen as a paean to the imaginative power of Computer Generated Imaging.In Eco Media (2005), Sean Cubitt argu es that The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2002-3) can be read as a celebration of the computer technologies from which it was made, which are an artisanal mode of production that demonstrates a creative place for technology within ‘green' thinking. There is an ‘increasing belief', he suggests, ‘that through the development of highly technologised creative industries, it is possible to devise a mode of economic development that does not compromise the land' (Cubitt 10). The thematic resolution of The Day After Tomorrow is ambiguous, however.The ending of the movie follows the recurrent pattern of the genre identified by Geoff King, in which ‘the possibility of apocalyptic destruction is confronted and depicted with a potentially horrifying special effects/spectacular ‘reality', only to be withdrawn or limited in its extent' (King 145). Typically, then, destruction is extensive, but total apocalypse is prevented at the last moment. The superstorm passes, the reby confirming Jack's earlier opinion that the storms will last ‘until the imbalance that created them is corrected' by ‘a global realignment'.Gazing at a beautiful, calm Earth, an astronaut in the International Space Station comments that he has ‘never seen the air so clear'. In Winston Wheeler Dixon's phrase, this could be the ‘exit point for the viewer' that disaster movies invariably provide (Dixon 133); the moment where the audience is let off the hook with a simplistic, evasive solution to the seemingly intractable problem explored in the rest of the movie. To return to the question posed at the start of this essay, does such an ending merely encourage evasion, denial and complacency in regard to issues such as anthropogenic climate change?Dixon argues that contemporary American cinema serves those who ‘wish to toy with the themes of destruction', from movies about atomic apocalypse to those that flirt with Nazism. This cinematic ‘cult of d eath', he concludes, is ‘the ultimate recreation' for an exhausted, media-saturated culture, a cult which ‘remains remote, carefully contained within a box of homicidal and genocidal dreams' (Dixon 139). But the ideological ambiguity of The Day After Tomorrow, as well as its audience reception, suggests that the process of interpretation is more open and varied than this.From an environmentalist perspective, the melodramatic ending of the film is ambiguous. No matter what human beings do, it appears, the Earth will heal itself. According to this reading, the message of the movie is that, because the storm eventually passes, we don't need to worry. This message resembles the right-wing appropriation of the Gaia hypothesis; that is, the idea, proposed by the British chemist James Lovelock, that the Earth as a whole is a self-regulating system in a natural state of homeostatic balance.In his 1999 book Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, Peter Hube r used the concept of Gaia to justify a conservative manifesto that called for the dismantling of existing environmental regulations. The ‘most efficient way to control' pollutants such as greenhouses gases, he argued, ‘is not to worry about them at all. Let them be. Leave them to Gaia' (Huber 128). The notion of Gaia, we should note, is not the sole property of New Age environmentalists or deep ecologists.According to this interpretation, the movie appears to endorse the idea that humanity, through a combination of ingenuity, courage and chance, can survive whatever Nature may throw at us, an argument used by conservatives like Huber to justify a non-interventionist approach to environmental issues. It is a mistake, however, to assume that the final moments of a movie, when narrative closure is achieved, dictate its overall meaning. An analogy may be drawn here with the critical analysis of the role of women in film noir.As Janey Place argues of the female characters in films such as Double Indemnity (1946), ‘it is not their inevitable demise we remember but rather their strong, dangerous, and above all, exciting sexuality' (Place 48). In a similar way, the most memorable images in The Day After Tomorrow are probably the scenes of extreme weather. The main advertising image for the movie showed the shot of the hand of the Statue of Liberty held above the storm surge: an image of survival which at least includes a sense of struggle, rather than the calm, reposeful Earth revealed at the close of the film.Indeed, the above interpretation of the film as conservative is contradicted by its more explicit message, which advocated liberal political reform in the election year of 2004. Early in the film, Vice-President Becker, played by an actor who bears an obvious resemblance to Dick Cheney, refuses to listen to the advice of scientists on global warming, arguing that to take action would harm the American economy. In another reference to George W. Bush's presidency, we are told that the administration in the movie has also refused to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.At the end of the movie, Becker, now President, appears on television to apologise to the nation out of a newfound sense of humility: ‘For years we operated under the belief that we could continue consuming our planet's natural resources without consequence. We were wrong. I was wrong'. Perhaps the most unbelievable part of the whole movie, the President's public apology confirms the words of the African-American homeless man earlier in the film, who refers to people with their ‘cars and their exhausts, and they're just polluting the atmosphere'.The disaster has been a wake-up call for America, and the new start will allow for the changes in lifestyle necessary for a more sustainable future. The government will also change its attitude to the Third World from one of arrogance to gratitude. In these moments, th e movie works as a secular form of jeremiad; ‘secular' because the environmental catastrophe is not seen as punishment from God, but as human-created. Opie and Elliott argue that both ‘implementational and evocative strategies' are necessary in successful jeremiads, and cite Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) as a powerful exemplar (Opie and Elliott 35).The Day After Tomorrow also uses both pathos and rational argument to convince its audience of the need to take steps to avoid environmental catastrophe. Critical speculation on the effectiveness or otherwise of making a disaster movie about global warming can draw on the conclusions of an empirical study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research of the reception of the movie in Germany. This found that the movie did not appear to reinforce feelings of fatalism in its audience. Less than 10% of the sample agreed with the statement, ‘There's nothing we can do anyway', whereas 82% preferred, ‘We hav e to stop climate change'. Reusswig). Indeed, the Potsdam study makes hopeful reading for environmentalists. It found that the publicity surrounding the film triggered a new interest in climate change, and raised some issues previously unfamiliar to audiences, such as the role of oceans in global warming. A similar study of reception in the United States concluded that the film ‘led moviegoers to have higher levels of concern and worry about global warming, to estimate various impacts on the United States as more likely, and to shift their conceptual understanding of the climate system toward a threshold model.Further, the movie encouraged watchers to engage in personal, political, and social action to address climate change and to elevate global warming as a national priority'. However, whether such changes constituted merely a ‘momentary blip' in public perceptions remained to be seen (Leiserowitz 7). These empirical studies are important because they show that audienc e reception is a more complex and variable process than it is sometimes taken for in film theory. According to some versions of psychoanalytic ‘subject positioning' theory, Hollywood movies like The Day After Tomorrow tend to render spectators passive.Under the influence of Bertolt Brecht's theories of narrative, film academics such Colin McCabe and Steven Heath argued that only modernist or avant-garde narrative techniques can produce a more active (even revolutionary) film spectator. As the 1992 textbook New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics puts it, psychoanalytic film theory ‘sees the viewer not as a person, a flesh-and-blood individual, but as an artificial construct, produced and activated by the cinematic apparatus' (Stam 147). In his book The Crisis of Political Modernism (1999), D.N. Rodowick exposes the flaws in such thinking. The politics of political modernism, he writes, assume ‘an intrinsic and intractable relation between texts and their spectators, reg ardless of the historical or social context of that relation' (Rodowick 34). But film viewers are flesh-and-blood individuals, and when they are treated as such by film theorists and researchers, the phenomenon of film reception becomes more complex and nuanced, and less deterministic and stereotyped, than that imagined by subject positioning theory.Empirical audience research shows that we do not all watch the same movie in the same way, and that audience responses are complexly determined by a long list of variables, such as nation, region, locality, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and, last but certainly not least, individual temperament. When we look at the public reception of The Day After Tomorrow, then, it is clear that different interest groups appropriated the movie in different ways.Both sides of the public debate about climate change interpreted the movie within a realist framework, either positively or negatively, and produced selective readings in order to fur ther their own agendas. Patrick Michaels, one of the minority of scientists who stills rejects the idea of human-created climate change, pointed out the scientific flaws in the movie, and damned Hollywood for irresponsibly playing into the hands of liberal environmentalists by exaggerating the threat of global warming (Michaels 1).Liberal-left environmental campaigners also understood that the movie's foundation in science was flawed. However, they found its scientific exaggerations and inaccuracies less important than what they saw as its realistic portrayal of the American government's denial of the scientific evidence for global warming. As former Vice-President Al Gore put it, ‘there are two sets of fiction to deal with. One is the movie, the other is the Bush administration's presentation of global warming' (Mooney 1). Gore joined with the liberal Internet advocacy organization MoveOn. rg, which used the movie's release as an opportunity to organize a national advocacy ca mpaign on climate change. Senators McCain and Lieberman also used the movie to promote the reintroduction of their Climate Stewardship Act in Congress (Nisbet 1). Greenpeace endorsed the ‘underlying premise' of the film, that ‘extreme weather events are already on the rise, and global warming can be expected to make them more frequent and more severe'. It summed up its response to the movie with the line: ‘Fear is justified' (Greenpeace 1-2).The use of this movie to encourage environmental debate suggests that it is perhaps only if Hollywood movies like The Day After Tomorrow are people's sole, or even main, source of information on the environment that we should worry. As Sylvia Mayer argues, Hollywood environmentalist movies ‘have the potential to contribute to the development of an ‘environmentally informed sense of self' that is characterised by an awareness of environmental threats, by the wish to gain more effective knowledge about them and by a d isposition to participate actively in efforts to remedy the problem' (Mayer 107).In this respect, a classical, Hollywood-style narrative does not necessarily inculcate or reinforce a feeling a complacency or denial it its audience. In any case, no narrative can be as complex as the reality to which it refers; all art is a process of simplifying, selecting and giving shape to reality. 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