The Importance Of Family Essays - Letter To Khodorkovsky

The Importance Of Family The Importance of Family It has been said that It takes a village to raise a child. I guess the trick would be to find a village of people you would want to help you to raise your children. It would require a group of people with values and standards similar to your own. It is possible to find such a group in a church, if you belong to one, or among your friends, if you have a wide enough circle. However, an extended family is the village that has been responsible for the raising of children for generations in the past. My extended family includes my mother, two sisters and their families, my husband's parents, five brothers and their families. My daughters have four uncles, five aunts and twelve cousins living in California. An extended family, if you are lucky enough to have one, usually shares many values and is willing to help see that these values are passed on to the children. Some of the values my family holds in common include a strong work ethic, respect for other people, the value of education and modesty in dress and action. My father-in-law is a great example. He has had two careers and is still working. He retired after 20 years with the Air Force, earned a Master's Degree in education, taught school and worked in junior high school administration for 20 years and is now a Master Teacher. He supervises new teachers as they fulfill student teaching requirements for their credentials. He is also a successful (selling) artist with work in a cooperative gallery as well as an usher at the Sacramento Community Center Theater in his spare time. He has been married to the mother of his sons for 44 years. He passed on his values to those sons. They all have successful careers in technology, management or entertainment. Most have one or more degrees and a happy marriage. These values are being passed on to the grandchildren as well. They are expected to do th eir best in school and follow rules about the clothes they wear, where and how they spend their time and whom they spend it with. When my daughters complain about our rule that they are not allowed to date until they are 16, I tell them to call any of their cousins and check with them about what their rules are. There are several advantages for us, as parents, to maintaining close family relationships. There are the obvious advantages of built-in babysitters and people to ask for advice. Less obvious advantages include reinforcement, edification, perspective and a wide pool of life examples. Our extended family members share our standards and values and reinforce the lessons and rules we set for our children. My mother-in-law has a great sense of fashion. She has helped my daughters develop good judgment about dress and make-up. They are modest in the clothes they choose to wear. It is a relief, as a mother, to be spared a fight with them over what they call hoochie clothes. When they go to their grandparents' house after school on Thursday, my father-in-law, Papa to them, supervises their homework. They have to complete it before they are allowed to watch TV or play video games. He makes sure they do a thorough job of it as well. There is never any doubt where their priorities should lie. Much of the strength of our family relationships is based on an elusive concept called edification. Edification, in this context, is the building up of one person by another. When our daughters were growing up, we showed respect to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and made it clear that they were to do the same. We demonstrated that their relatives had value in our lives. We often asked my in-laws for advice and let the girls know that we were doing this and following some of what we were told. We were asked for advice as well, so our daughters saw that our opinions were valuable to their grandparents. When the time came that our daughters started to challenge our authority and question our standards, we knew we could count on our relatives to reinforce us

Free Essays on UFOs

Argument: UFO’s The phenomenon UFO constitutes one of the topics more disputed of our times. Since in 1947 they were sighted for the first time by the civil pilot Kenneth Arnold near the mount Rainer, there are many persons of the entire world that assure to have seen UFO’s. There are people who declare to have seen them during the day, while others speak about the presence of strange lights in the midnight. Some they assure to have witnessed the landing of extraterrestrial ships and others, declare that they have been interviewed by extraterrestrials or that have been abdicated and carried on board of a ship in which they were submitted to rigorous scientific investigations. The public interest that awoke the UFO phenomenon prompted to the Air Force of the United States to undertake an exhaustive investigation directed by a special committee of the Columbia University. The conclusion to which the investigators arrived was negative, since they attributed the majority of the sightings to mental disorders or to "erroneous interpretations" of easily understandable phenomenon, for example, meteorological globes, meteorites, bands of birds or unusual reflections. But this investigation did not satisfy the public neither the most rigorous investigators. The report of the government affirmed that its main objective was to prevent the panic before the possibility of an extraterrestrial visit. On the other hand, there are documents that show that the Air Force diffused the rumor of the UFO’s to conceal the accidents of their own secret experimental ships. Though it is possible that many sightings are simple frauds, erroneous perceptions of natural phenomenon or screens that intend to hide you determined secret investigations, the certain thing nevertheless, is that numerous intelligent, mentally stable and even expert observers continue seeing them. Sufficient reports around this theme exist as to convince us that the deb... Free Essays on UFOs Free Essays on UFOs Argument: UFO’s The phenomenon UFO constitutes one of the topics more disputed of our times. Since in 1947 they were sighted for the first time by the civil pilot Kenneth Arnold near the mount Rainer, there are many persons of the entire world that assure to have seen UFO’s. There are people who declare to have seen them during the day, while others speak about the presence of strange lights in the midnight. Some they assure to have witnessed the landing of extraterrestrial ships and others, declare that they have been interviewed by extraterrestrials or that have been abdicated and carried on board of a ship in which they were submitted to rigorous scientific investigations. The public interest that awoke the UFO phenomenon prompted to the Air Force of the United States to undertake an exhaustive investigation directed by a special committee of the Columbia University. The conclusion to which the investigators arrived was negative, since they attributed the majority of the sightings to mental disorders or to "erroneous interpretations" of easily understandable phenomenon, for example, meteorological globes, meteorites, bands of birds or unusual reflections. But this investigation did not satisfy the public neither the most rigorous investigators. The report of the government affirmed that its main objective was to prevent the panic before the possibility of an extraterrestrial visit. On the other hand, there are documents that show that the Air Force diffused the rumor of the UFO’s to conceal the accidents of their own secret experimental ships. Though it is possible that many sightings are simple frauds, erroneous perceptions of natural phenomenon or screens that intend to hide you determined secret investigations, the certain thing nevertheless, is that numerous intelligent, mentally stable and even expert observers continue seeing them. Sufficient reports around this theme exist as to convince us that the deb...

Write a letter to Obama on the national defense authorization act and Research Paper

Write a letter to Obama on the national defense authorization act and how it is not constitutional - Research Paper Example Section 1021 and 1022 of the National Defense Authorization Act allow and grant authority to the counter-terrorism unit and the Armed forces to detain any individual (more so a United States citizen) who is suspected of being involved in terrorism. This section is against the first ten amendments of the US constitution which are in accordance with the Bill of Rights. The rights of the detained person are infringed upon and especially the rights to movement and liberty (www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights.html). The above information is also supported by the American Civil liberties Union (ACLU) whose main aim and objective is protection of individual’s human rights and liberties according to the US constitution. This human rights group has been in the forefront to support in supporting the constitution and where the constitution is breached it has also to complain and demand for an amendment (www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution.html). According to the courthouse news service which reports on all court activities (http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/05/16/46550.htm), on the 16th of May 2012, a US District court Judge Katherine Forrest passed a ruling blocking the implementation of this statute. According to her ruling, the Act was contrary to the first and the fifth amendment of the United States Constitution and therefore did not protect the citizens of US against unlawful detention by the military on suspicion of being involved in terroristic acts. Judge has taken an oath to rule governed by the constitution and hence anything that is against the constitution should not be put to action. The constitution is a powerful tool and protector of the citizens of US and therefore any Act or declaration going against it is deemed as unfriendly and threatening the security offered by the constitution.

GRID (Clustered) SAN computing standards Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

GRID (Clustered) SAN computing standards - Essay Example 2. A storage system which consists of network elements such as storage devices, computer systems, servers, control software (such as server administration and site server) that will communicate over the network. Storage networks are distinguished from other forms of network storage devices simply by their low-level access method they use and is very similar to such network devices as ATA, disk drives and SCSI hardware. Inside a storage network, the server will issue a request for specific blocks of data and this device on the storage network will then send requests across the network. In the clustered GRID infrastructure would be a series of SAN devices that would then integrate as part of the larger network in order to share the storage capabilities inside the GRID. As such, each device would then be added to the larger network that can be used by other networked devices such as a computer workstation. An example of this computing infrastructure, courtesy of Force10, shows how this cluster/GRID computing network is positioned to utilized these storage devices GRID computing is the transformation of a computer infrastructure into an integrated Virtual Organisation that allows for dynamic collaboration and the ability to share resources from anywhere in the world. This sharing provides users with an unprecedented amount of computing power, especially for those in the field of scientific investigation and collaboration in which the needs of the computer power cannot necessarily be handled by one such computer. Through integration inside the GRID of such supercomputers will enable users to access power without the need to purchase larger systems. GRID computing is based on three concepts as outlined by Reddy (2004) "as: Virtualization: severing the hard-coded association of resources to systems Resource Allocation and Management: dynamically allocating resources on demand, and managing them and finally, Provisioning: configuring resources whenever and wherever needed." (Reddy, 2004) Kalzar Amin, Gregor von Laszewski and Armin R. Mikler Kalzar, et al describe the term Grid computing as commonly referred "to a distributed infrastructure that promotes large scale resource sharing in a dynamic institutional "virtual organisation" (VO). A computational Grid forms a closed network of a large number of pooled resources providing standardized, reliable, specialized and pervasive access to high-end computational resources." Typically, in order to establish a computational Grid, several institutions pool their resources such as computational cycles, specialized software, database servers, network bandwidth, and people. As a result of this "pooling" global policies will be set for the virtual organisation which will in an essence identify each of the participating entities' roles and responsibilities, much like in a LAN server networking scenario. Each of the site institution administrators, who are generally trained as network administrators will then enforce these policies at the domain level. The GRID administrators will then provide each of the GRID users their appropriate credentials and through these credentials will the users access

Understanding the Meaning, Ideologies, and Contexts of the films Argo Research Paper

Understanding the Meaning, Ideologies, and Contexts of the films Argo and Babel - Research Paper Example Film context entails the setting of a film. Other scholars refer to it as the situation, circumstances in which a film is set or scripted (Coleman, 2011). Film context involves the time frame of the film, the historic background and the geographical location of the poem. According to scholars, the ideologies of any film are those values that we get from a film that enable us to be better humans. They are the socio-economic, cultural and political values or ideas that we share with the film (Lewis, 2013). These idea or values inspire us and enable us to clean the world from the moral and political decays to make it a better ground for dwelling. If you watch a film and it inspires you to act, then you have gained ideologies in a film. This paper thus seeks to analyze the ideology, context and the meaning of the movies; Babel and Argo. Babel is a three plot American film screened in Africa, Morocco, Japan and America-Mexico. The initial plot is in Mexico. However the three are well connected such that the story line flows from one country to another (Shaw, 2011). In Morocco, in the desert, we meet Abdullah. Abdullah is a farmer who keeps his herd in the desert and has two sons; Ahmed and Yussef plus a daughter. He is constantly bothered by jackals in the desert that prey after his herd. He thus buys a gun from his neighbor Hassan. The gun is high powered. He plans to drive away the jackals with the gun. He gives the gun to his boys while out in the field herding. The boys always competing aim at rocks, trees and cars then compete in shooting. Ahmed aims at a tourist bus and shoots (Shaw, 2011). The bullet hits an American, Suzan, who together with her husband, Richard are on the country for a holiday. America is quick to brand that as an act of terror and therefore asks the Moroccan government to arrest the culprits. Police officers then come after the family of Abdulla and an open fire leads to Yussef

Interlaminar Fracture Major Failure in Polymer Composites

Interlaminar Fracture Major Failure in Polymer Composites Composites considered new class of materials produced that are strong, not easily corroded, and have low densities. Polymer matrix composites can further be developed to get better mechanical strength and other necessary properties. Polymer Composite materials are heterogeneous in content and an-isotropic in their mechanical behavior. If compared to metallic material, fracture toughness characterization of polymer composite are new and in the process of development.   Fracture may be describe as the mechanical split of a solid owing to the function of stress. Fractures of engineering material are classify as brittle or ductile fractures [18]. Brittle fractures absorb small amount of energy, while ductile fractures absorb high amount of energy, and are generally categorized by fracture which the surface is flat. Fracture toughness is associated with the sum of the energy needed to create fracture on the surfaces. For material which is brittle, such as glass the energy needed for fracture is commonly the elemental surface energy of the material [18]. For structural alloys materials at room temperature more energy is needed for fracture because plastic deformation exist in the fracture process. The function of fracture mechanics concepts has classify and quantified the main parameters that influence structural integrity [18]. These parameters comprise the range and magnitude of the stresses applied, the shape, size, and crack orientation, fracture to ughness of the material and the propagation rate of the existing cracks [18]. The fracture resistance is expressed in terms of the stress intensity factor, K and strain energy release rate is expressed in term of, G. The energy released during speedy crack propagation is an elemental material properties which not influenced by size of the part [18]. According to ASTM standard, stress intensity factor, K can be expressed as: (1) Where KI, the Mode I crucial stress intensity factor, f (g) is the dimensionless specimen geometry and loading condition factor, and the a is the preliminary crack length. The chosen size of the specimen must have small scale plasticity around the tip of the crack. One of the basic principles of fracture mechanics, the unstable fracture exist when the stress intensity factor, K at the crack tip achieve a critical value, KC [18]. The Higher the amount of fracture toughness, the greater the intensity of stress needed to develop crack propagation and the resistance of material also become greater to brittle fracture. Critical stress intensity factor can be determined by using a laboratory experiment, the limiting value being KIC / KIIC / KIIIC [18]. Fracture not only applied in metallic materials it can also applied brittle materials such as ceramics, glass and polymers. Polymer composite materials usually indicate a mixture of brittle and ductile failure processes. There a few fracture modes in polymer composites failure such as fiber breaking, intralaminar fracture or matrix cracking, matrix-fiber debonding, fiber pullout, interlaminar fracture or delamination, and etc [19]. In the polymer composite system, the matrix or resin absorbs energy in tearing, on the other hand the fibers break or damaged by brittle cleavage [20]. Factors that control the toughness in fiber reinforced composites are, the cracks deflection due to twisting or tilting movement near the fiber and debonding between fibers and matrix. Interlaminar fracture major failure in polymer composites. Its development hugely weaken the stiffness of a composite structure, which can lead to the failure during service [21] and also it hugely affected the performance of laminated composite. The interlaminar performance is determined by weakness under both shear and tensile stresses. If discontinuities exist in the material the effect of the interlaminar stress to the overall performance become more significant. This delamination and their growth can be classified by the way load is applied and the strain energy release rate, G. Delamination can be categorized in Mode I tensile, Mode II shear, Mode III tearing and shear, or it also can be loaded in combination of between these modes. Critical strain energy release rate, GC at which the delamination started to begins to extend vary significantly depending on the mode of loading [22]. Classification of delamination resistance has attract the interest researchers, hence, it result in the development of many different test methods. According to ASTM D 5528 standard which equivalent to ISO 15024 recommends using Double Cantilever Beam (DCB) method for measuring the Mode I fracture toughness GIC of polymer composites. Next, the usage of End Notch Flexure (ENF) test for Mode II fracture toughness GIIC common method used among researchers. For Mode III fracture toughness GIIIC, Ratcliffe J [23], suggested using the Edge Crack Torsion Test (ECT). However, for Mixed-Mode bending (MMB) will follow the ASTM D6671 standard which can measure fracture toughness across a wide range of combinations of Mode I and Mode II loading.

Death of a Salesman Essay -- Arthur Miller Exposes Willy Loman

â€Å"Death of a Salesman† written by Arthur Miller in 1948 attempts to give the audience an unusual glimpse into the mind of a Willy Loman, a mercurial 60-year-old salesman, who through his endeavor to be â€Å"worth something†, finds himself struggling to endure the competitive capitalist world in which he is engulfed. Arthur Miller uses various theatrical techniques to gradually strip the protagonist down one layer at a time, each layer revealing another truth about his distorted past. By doing this, Miller succeeds in finally exposing a reasonable justification for Willy’s current state of mind. These techniques are essential to the play, as it is only through this development that Willy can realistically be driven to motives of suicide. The very first section of the first scene, already defines the basis of Willy’s character for the rest of the play. The stage directions on page 8 identify him as being an exhausted aging man, whose work seems to be wearing him down. â€Å"†¦lets his burden down†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Miller, 8). Although this makes Willy appear uninteresting, he soon contrasts this characteristic when he shows an optimistic determination towards his own failures. â€Å"I’ll start out in the morning. Maybe I’ll feel better in the morning.† (Miller, 9) Another aspect of Willy that makes him more interesting to the audience is his already visible complexity of layers: â€Å"I have such thoughts, I have such strange thoughts.† (Miller, 9) This of course leads the audience on to wondering what exactly is taking place in a man’s head to make him say such a thing, evoking a mild fascination in Willy’s character. Another character that is developed almost immed iately within the first two pages of the play is Linda. Again the stage directions on page 8 introdu... ...me period without using artificial â€Å"memorable speech†. This conveyance of realism to the audience is vital for Willy’s motives to seem plausible, and for Willy to be believed in as a character. On the other hand however, â€Å"Death of a Salesman† offers the audience another aspect of the play in which the inner mind of a character is symbolically represented in an expressionistic way on stage. Arthur Miller however succeeds in combining theses seemingly contradictory techniques, by conveying a sense of realism in the way the protagonist’s mind is portrayed, creates what sets it aside from anything alike it. Work Cited Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. U.K.: Penguin, 2013. Works Consulted Bloom, Harold. Arthur Miller. New York: Chelsea, 2008. Griffin, Alice. Understanding Arthur Miller. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.