Freedom of Choice free essay sample

My mom would take my sister and I to the library frequently. What made books so appealing to me was that at the library there was a room full of them and I could pick whichever ones I wanted. This was my first experience with freedom, one of the only parts of my life I could control. When you’re 8 years old, even maybe 10 anywhere you go you’re choices are limited. You’re completely dependent on parents for money if you even get to buy what you want. It was a big deal for me because my mom usually made my decisions for me; my life was planned and I had an empty head. I also liked books as a kid because reading came pretty easy to me. I wasn’t someone who stumbled over words or needed to practice reading extra. Reading gave me confidence, and at the same time it was something I could challenge myself with. We will write a custom essay sample on Freedom of Choice or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page I liked to read book series, like the majic treehouse books it was a challenge and an accomplishment to finish each series, to read thicker heavier books. By middle school and high school reading wasn’t exactly a cool thing to do so I gradually stopped reading books, became more social and spent more of my free time with friends instead of sitting in a room by myself with a book. Writing was a different story though, I was always the last one to finish copying notes from the board, I hated writing as a kid because it was so structured. By the time high school came around most of the time writing assignments were bullshit. Teachers just gave long tedious assignments because the harder they made school the smarter it made you obviously. I hated writing pretty much all through high school. By senior year I stopped doing English assignments, because I hated them and I was going through a rough patch in my life. I began to look at life from a much more pessimistic viewpoint, stopped caring about a lot of thing like school and writing in general. After I was old enough to think for myself I was angry about how I was being taught English and writing. I hated listening to other people in classes reading aloud and taking notes about a book while I was reading in it. For me it ruined the story to have to look at it closely and painfully pick it apart piece by piece. You can’t dissect a frog with out killing it first. I don’t know why but for some reason English teachers get some sort of sick pleasure out slaughtering the books they love, or maybe they hated the books and threw them on the chopping block because they were taught English the same way. Junior year of High School I finally got out of accelerated English classes, it was a good move. I breezed through the class and my English teacher used much more modern teaching methods. My favorite part of the class was outside reading. Outside reading was my favorite part of English class as long as I can remember because I like books I just couldn’t enjoy them piece by piece I needed the whole thing, and once again with outsde reading we had freedom to choose what book we wanted to read. If I could use one word to describe my English teacher junior year it would be progressive. There were a lot of other words I could use to describe her, like biased, radical, batty, but if I had to choose just one it would be progressive because she used modern books, unconventional books, classic books, she used the whole spectrum from online media, blogs, email, ipods and sure some of it was still busllshit but it was bullshit I could get on board with. Sure we still slaughtered texts but that class introduced me to my all time favorite book. Walking through the library was an everyday thing, part of moving from one class to another or a safe haven for skipping class, as long as I kept my head down and my pencil moving because who skips class to do work? But that day in the library was different. First it whispered in my direction, then it called quietly, until finally after many double takes and sideways glances it shouted â€Å"Read me! † so I slowly walked over, grabbed it and read. And read. Until the bell rang and I had to leave. But I didn’t stop there like an itch I couldn’t scratch the book haunted me until I was done. From beginning to end I was riveted. This book broke all the rules, the author used words like bastard and shit talked about life, about the mysterys behind it and about walking away from it all on a whim. He wrote about everyday things in the most interesting way, he wrote about sex, about drugs, about nothing at all and about everything at the same time, I’ve never asked more questions about a book in my life and found comfort in never knowing the answers. Its main character stole cars married women, left women, conned innocent people, was well connected, and the whole time survived on nothing more than wits and keenness. The book changed my life, I found it at a very impressionable age and it made an enormous impact on me. It made me realize that there was more to life than what everyone said, it made me understand that I had been thnking backwards my whole life it made me second guess our consumerist society, it made me want to leave it all behind. Without On The Road by Jack Kerouac I would be a very different person today. I always thought that reading and writing was for lonely people. People shut away from the world wether they wanted to be or were there by choice. Ann Frank’s Diary is considered a great novel but if it weren’t for the Nazi’s it wouldn’t have been as interesting. Hemmingway was a drunk that loved cats. Once a basic foundation of English rhetoric has been laid down, most people could become writers if given the chance, it’s a side effect of cabin fever. Writing is the closest you can come to talking to yourself without being considered insane. No matter how you dress it up though, writers are artist at the core their painbrush a pen their canvas the page, and all artist are weird. Too weird to live too rare to die

Welsh v. United States (1970)

Welsh v. United States (1970) Should those seeking conscientious objector status under the draft be limited to only those who make their claims based on their personal religious beliefs and background? If so, this would mean that all those with a secular rather than religious ideology are automatically excluded, regardless of how important their beliefs are. It really makes no sense for the U.S. government to decide that only religious believers can be legitimate pacifists whose convictions should be respected, but thats exactly how the government operated until the militarys policies were challenged. Fast Facts: Welsh v. United States Case Argued: January 20, 1970Decision Issued:Â  June 15, 1970Petitioner: Elliot Ashton Welsh IIRespondent: United StatesKey Question: Could a man claim conscientious objector status even if he had no religious-based grounds?Majority Decision: Justices Black, Douglas, Harlan, Brennan, and MarshallDissenting: Justices Burger, Stewart, and WhiteRuling: The court ruled that claiming conscientious objector status was not dependent on religious beliefs. Background Information Elliott Ashton Welsh II was convicted of refusing to submit to induction into the armed forces - he had requested conscientious objector status but did not base his claim on any religious beliefs. He said that he could neither affirm nor deny the existence of a Supreme Being. Instead, he said his anti-war beliefs were based upon reading in the fields of history and sociology. Basically, Welsh claimed that his had serious moral opposition to conflicts in which people are being killed. He argued that even though he was not a member of any traditional religious group, the depth of sincerity of his belief should qualify him for exemption from military duty under the Universal Military Training and Service Act. This statute, however, allowed only those people whose opposition to the war was based on religious beliefs to be declared conscientious objectors - and that did not technically include Welsh. Court Decision In a 5-3 decision with the majority opinion written by Justice Black, the Supreme Court decided that Welsh could to be declared a conscientious objector even though he declared that his opposition to war was not based on religious convictions. In United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965), a unanimous Court construed the language of the exemption limiting the status to those who by religious training and belief (that is, those who believed in a Supreme Being), to mean that a person must have some belief which occupies in his life the place or role which the traditional concept of occupies in the orthodox believer. After the Supreme Being clause was deleted, a plurality in Welsh v. United States, construed the religion requirement as inclusive of moral, ethical, or religious grounds. Justice Harlan concurred on constitutional grounds, but disagreed with the specifics of the decision, believing that the statute was clear that Congress had intended to restrict conscientious objection status to those persons who could demonstrate a traditional religious foundation for their beliefs and that this was impermissible under the . In my opinion, the liberties taken with the statute both in Seeger and todays decision cannot be justified in the name of the familiar doctrine of construing federal statutes in a manner that will avoid possible constitutional infirmities in them. There are limits to the permissible application of that doctrine... I therefore find myself unable to escape facing the constitutional issue that this case squarely presents: whether [the statute] in limiting this draft exemption to those opposed to war in general because of theistic beliefs runs afoul of the religious clauses of the First Amendment. For reasons later appearing, I believe it does... Justice Harlan believed that it was quite clear that, as far as the original statute was concerned, an individuals assertion that his views were religious was to be regarded highly while the opposite proclamation was not to be treated as well. Significance This decision expanded the types of beliefs that can be used to get conscientious objector status. The depth and fervency of the beliefs, rather than their status as part of an established religious system, became fundamental to determining which views could exempt an individual from military service. At the same time, though, the Court also effectively expanded the concept of religion well beyond how its typically defined by most people. The average person will tend to limit the nature of religion to some sort of belief system, usually with some sort of supernatural basis. In this case, however, the Court decided that religious...belief could include strong moral or ethical beliefs, even if those beliefs have absolutely no connection to or basis in any sort of traditionally acknowledge religion. This may not have been entirely unreasonable, and it was probably easier than simply overturning the original statute, which is what Justice Harlan seemed to favor, but the long-term consequence is that it fosters misunderstandings and miscommunication.

Discourse community Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Discourse community - Essay Example There is a certain universality in the language that transcends national boundaries and specific dialects. It is a language that is used very strongly in social exclusion which also implies a strong bond for those who benefit from the reverse which is inclusion. Discourse within the military organization can be regarded as the formalized way of thinking about important matters related to war, discipline, hierarchy, loyalty, courage and love of country that has been manifested through specialized language its members know of. Military discourse is designed exclusively to maintain cohesion within the organization but quite often, the discourse also affects other sectors of society. In this paper, I will talk about the different and unique aspects of military discourse with regard to certain matters in life. Obedience – military discourse does not discount the possibility of confrontation. In fact, military men are trained in the art of war and are expected to resolve issues by force if necessary. However, much of military discourse, especially those used during their training, is geared towards obedience and respect for authority. The reason for this is quite obvious which is to maintain the rigid hierarchical structure in a military organization. The need to maintain a strict discipline is the reason for using this discourse (Bartle & Heinecken 81). Discipline is the backbone by which the hierarchy is being reinforced daily through total obedience. Exclusion – due to the very nature of their task which is to defend the country against external threats, the military by tradition, necessity and practice is discriminatory. What this means is that the military leadership uses language and policies to exclude some groups or individuals which it deems as unfit to render military service. These groups can include homosexuals, transsexuals, so-called conscientious objectors who resist the draft, convicted felons, handicapped people and persons who do

Social media and Democracy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Social media and Democracy - Essay Example Political activists use the internet hubs to spread the news of their parties and news of the election. Political activism on the internet has risen all over the world since the 9/11 attack in America. Activists against terror attacks are particularly spreading the word through the internet. The inception of Facebook into the internet has helped and made the activists get a bigger platform to express their views. Popular news networks such as CNN and BBC have Facebook accounts with more than 33million Facebook likes combined. The news networks use the media outlet to communicate the latest news to their fans. The use of social media has made it easy and faster for the news to reach people rather than waiting for prime time to get the news. During the American election season of 2008, new technologies that enabled individuals to participate in online communities’ discussions emerged (Yamamoto, 2010 p. 609). Facebook was very popular by this time, and most politicians used it to pass the message to their supporters. Arguments and trending topics of the political nature were popular among the sites. Twitter is a social network that is more of a mini-blogging site. Individuals can communicate and lay out their thoughts to their followers. Politicians and business people have Twitter accounts where they share news with their followers (Jewitt, 2009 p. 232). Popular news networks are on Twitter that they use to communicate any breaking news. Twitter is a good platform for news networks to convey their messages to people. The 2012 elections in America had a huge coverage on Twitter. There was sharing of opinions, and the use of the hashtag made it easier to reach a large group of people. Politicians shared their agendas for the nation, and it was of big help to them. Twitter increases the popularity of an individual, hence spreading more news countrywide and worldwide. The war and accident

Introduction to K Means Analysis for Stock Portfolio Essay Example for Free

Introduction to K Means Analysis for Stock Portfolio Essay 1. Background[1] Investment decisions are about making choice. Investors need to decide what asset to be invested. This is an important decision because these assets are the means by which investors transfer today’s purchasing power to the future. In effect, investor must decide on a portfolio of asset to own. A portfolio is simply a combination of assets designed to serve as store of value. Poor management of these assets may destroy the portfolio’s value, and investor will then not achieve their financial goals. There are many assets like stocks, bonds, derivatives that investors may include in the portfolio. In Hong Kong, stock portfolio is the most common investment. But what stocks have higher return? What stocks are risky? What stocks in the portfolio that it has higher return? Many investors may use fundamental analysis to analysis financial data for answering above questions. In the last decade, some researches applied data mining techniques on financial market. Data mining is the process of automatically discovery useful information in large data repositories. It can be used to support a wide range of business intelligence applications such as customer profiling, targeted marketing, store layout. 2. Motivation In America, there are some research papers[2] about applying clustering technique on America financial market. For example, using Self-organizing map(SOM) to cluster stocks and financial ratio for fundamental analysis, using SOM to find the valuable stock. These all researches want to find the characteristic of the stocks. However, most these researches use SOM clustering technique, and focus on America financial market. It seems that few researches do similar thing in Hong Kong stock market. Moreover, these researches only want to find the characteristic of stocks. In real case, investors will not only purchase one stocks. They will construct a stock portfolio to eliminate the risk. So I want to apply similar approach on Hong Kong stock market and change the clustering technique to K-means, not SOM. And I not only want to cluster the stocks, but also the portfolio. I want to cluster many combinations of the portfolio as I can to find the characteristic of different combinations of the portfolio. I am interested in investment, and I study information technology in university. I want to combine two aspects for my final year project. And I believe this project is very useful for my future career. I have read relative books, papers for getting the basic idea and concept of portfolio and data mining. In this project, I use many technical skills, methods and knowledge learnt from City University of Hong Kong in the past three years. Java programming is used to do the data preprocessing like normalization, financial calculation. It is also used to generate the combination of the portfolio and the simulation of K-means. MYSQL database is used to store the data of stocks and portfolio. The simulation result is also stored in the database. 3. Objectives In this final year project, there are several objects: 1. To investigate the characteristic of stocks in Hong Kong stock market. 2. To investigate the characteristic of different stock portfolios in Hong Kong stock market. 3. To determine that different combination of stocks how to affect the performance of the portfolio. 4. To investigate the strength and weakness of applying K-means on financial data. 4. Report outline  There are total 6 chapters in this report. Following this Chapter 1 Introduction, Chapter 2 Literature Review refers to related theories applied on the simulation, result analysis and discussion. Chapter 3 Simulation presents the methodology, project flow chat of the simulation. Chapter 4 Result Analysis will do the data processing of the result from the simulation. Chapter 5 Further Development will discuss the further development and improvement of the project. At the end, Chapter 6 Conclusion will do the conclusion of the whole project. 5. Chapter Summary This chapter mentions the background of the project. It also presents the motivation of this project and give the objective, report outline to the readers for better understanding of the project.

Aspects and Impacts of Generational Diversity Essay -- Law Enforcement

Aspects and Impacts of Generational Diversity This paper examines several aspects of generational diversity and its impact on law enforcement organizations. As the law enforcement profession prepares to move into the future it must also make ready for a changing of the guard, which will soon take place. The Traditionals and Boomers have been joined by two younger and vastly different generations of employees who bring new perspectives to law enforcement. This paper briefly discusses a few of the characteristics most commonly associated with each generation and how generational diversity will: Æ’Â ¶ CREATE CHANGE IN LAW ENFORCEMENT ORGANIZATIONS. Æ’Â ¶ AFFECT RECRUITING ACTIVITIES. Æ’Â ¶ AFFECT HOW TRAINING IS VIEWED BY MANAGEMENT AND PERSONNEL. Æ’Â ¶ REQUIRE NEW SKILLS AND MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES TO MOTIVATE A DIVERSE WORK FORCE. Æ’Â ¶ RESULT IN CHANGING THE DYNAMICS OF LAW ENFORCEMENT MANAGEMENT AND CULTURE. Managing generational diversity will be a challenge that will have a tremendous impact on the future of law enforcement. Organizations will adapt out of necessity, to meet the challenge of successfully integrating four generations. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Generational diversity is an emerging issue for law enforcement. Today ¡Ã‚ ¦s workforce is different from any other in history now that four generations are working side-by-side. Law enforcement managers will have to learn to recognize the changing dynamics of personnel and develop strategic new approaches to old problems. Traditionals were simply grateful for jobs and focused on stability, they were not inclined to question authority. Boomers inherited the need for stability and wanted a better life; many focused so much energy on work that it became their identity. Generation X was the first group to question authority, they want to be involved in the decision making process and are unwilling to wait until retirement for their rewards. Generation Y also wants to be more involved in decisions, have more flexibility, and like Generation X see work as the means to support their lives, not as a basis for self-image as the Boomers did. Creative new recruitment and motivational techniques become critical as the number of applicants drop and the need for qualified personnel increases. Younger members of Generation X and Generation Y are becoming more and more val... ...or Smaller Police Departments. Goodrich, J. (2004, Summer). Making the Most of Generational Differences [Electronic version]. The Criminal Justice Institute ¡Ã‚ ¦s Management Quarterly. Hatfield, S.L. (2002, Jul/Aug). Understanding the Four Generations to Enhance Workplace Management [Electronic version]. AFP Exchange. 22, 72-74 Homer. (800 B.C.  ¡V 700 B.C.) The Iliad. Epic Greek poem. Lancaster, L. & Stillman, D. (2002) When generations collide. New York: Harper Business Leo, J. (2003, November 3). The good-news generation [Electronic version]. U.S. News & World Report. 135 (15) p60, 1p, 1c Segal. (2002, February). Providing public sector services in a time of change: The total rewards perspective. [Electronic version]. Public Sector Letter. 2-4. Southard, G. & Lewis, J. (2004, April). Building a Workplace That Recognizes Generational Diversity. Public Management (PM) Magazine. 86 (3) Retrieved October 14, 2004 from http://www2.icma.org/pm/8603/southard.htm Tulgan, B (2002). Managing the generation mix, four generations in conflict [excerpt video overview]. RainmakerThinking, Inc. Retrieved October 22, 2004 from http://www .rainmakerthinking.com/mixtrng.htm

Defying Tradition Essay

Article Title: Funny women flourish in female-written comedies What information seems the most important? Note key points mentioned in the article. Call it The â€Å"Bridesmaids† Effect: Ever since the R-rated 2011 comedy became a runaway hit †¦ a rash of female-written comedies are enticing viewers with provocative new characters who are more like women we know. â€Å"‘Bridesmaids’ I think opened up a door to allow women to show a bunch of different women in different ways of being funny. Since then, women have been finding a voice in comedy more than ever before. Headland says the new breed of funny female writers arose out of frustration, and feminism Actresses such as Kendrick, Snow, Wilson and others say these new female-created characters look and sound more like actual women they know. â€Å"You’re not going to solve the problem, but you can start the conversation,† Headland said. â€Å"I think part of your job, especially as a woman, i s to let yourself be a little ugly and to show uglier parts of yourself. That’s your job as a female artist.† Look at the key points and organize any that are related. Call it The â€Å"Bridesmaids† Effect: Ever since the R-rated 2011 comedy became a runaway hit †¦ a rash of female-written comedies are enticing viewers with provocative new characters who are more like women we know. Headland says the new breed of funny female writers arose out of frustration, and feminism. Actresses such as Kendrick, Snow, Wilson and others say these new female-created characters look and sound more like actual women they know. â€Å"You’re not going to solve the problem, but you can start the conversation,† Headland said. â€Å"I think part of your job, especially as a woman, is to let yourself be a little ugly and to show uglier parts of yourself. That’s your job as a female artist.† â€Å"‘Bridesmaids’ I think opened up a door to allow women to show a bunch of different women in different ways of being funny. Since then, women have been finding a voice in comedy more than ever before. What do the key points i n each group have in common?