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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