Octopus :: essays research papers

Recently, researchers have discovered the existence of an extremely unique type of octopus. The species, known as the Indo-Malayan octopus, has the ability to alter its shape, form, and color pattern to mimic or imitate other sea creatures in order to avoid predation (2). The discovery of the mimic octopus is noteworthy because no other type of cephalopod is known to have impersonation abilities. The octopus is also not limited to one imitation. Researchers have observed up to eight different formations. The alternations occur depending upon the appetite, surrounding environment, and proximity of predators the octopus encounters (1). In analyzing the formations, behaviors, and predators of the mimic octopus, it is important to isolate the origins of this exclusive, and highly intelligent defense mechanism. Is this means of protection or evolutionary development, one that allows the cephalopod a better means of survival? Or is this the result of observed behaviors where the mimic oct opus becomes aware of the relations occurring in the environment, and successfully imitates a species based upon their ability to subsist when dealing with dangerous predators? The existence of mimic octopi is restricted to the islands of Indonesia, specifically off the coasts off Solawesi, and Bali (3). Surprisingly, the octopi have been viewed during the daylight hours, generally residing near sand tunnels, and holes (1). The octopi enjoy these mounds because they provide a significant source of food, including small worms, fish, and crustaceans. The octopus utilizes its arms to feel for prey, and then captures the food through the use of expanded webs. However, when the animal is attempting to hide itself from possible enemies, the Indo-Malayan octopus can transform itself into a variety of organisms, including fish, sea snakes, and anemones. If the octopus observes a cluster of damselfishes, it will change into a lionfish by swimming above the ocean floor, with arms extended beyond the body (2). The lionfish is known to possess poisonous spikes, which successfully deter the damselfish from preying upon the mimic octopus. Another possible transformation includes the sole fish. The octopus is able to propel itself in a similar manner by forming a leaf-shaped arm that moves it across the ocean floor effortlessly. The octopus's arms are also useful in impersonating the sea snake. Two arms are waved around to appear like a pair of snakes, while the other six are hidden from view. The octopus also changes its color and creates yellow and dark bands across the exposed arms.

Laptops, Hard Drives, The Ephemera Of Data, The Risk Of Theft And Consequence Of Law: Responsibilities And Liabilities

As technology develops at the speed of light, as digital phones computers grow more powerful than twelve acres of 1967 IBM mainframes, as information is set down in liquid pixels and stored in virtual warehouses the size of a postage stamps, as hackers and those of ill-will seek out ever-new clever ways to â€Å"break and enter† virtual â€Å"banks of data†. the law must respond, reflect, assess and codify those principles which will serve the business community, management and labor, employers and employees, as it enters the unknown territory of a virtual future.In a more gentile time of scriveners, Bartleby and Scrooge, an employee as day’s end would lift the top of his writer’s desk, store the hand written documents for that day and wait for his superior to stop by with a key to lock the desk for the night. Theft of such documents would have required the breaking and entering into a physical place to obtain physical objects.Cause and effect would be cle ar, as would an assessment of responsibility and liability. However, with today’s technology and the wide-open vistas of the world wide web, theft can occur from an transnational distance over invisible lines by processes barely comprehensible to those responsible for security. The 19th century scrivener under contract to his employer performed certain services and incurred certain duties and responsibilities.Doubtless, to a certain degree (perhaps depending upon who held the key) he was responsible for the safeguard of his newly copied documents. Likewise the modern employee owes similar duties and responsibilities; however, in the cyber age of information, the protection of data and information, securing it from being lost in the ocean of the web, is a more complicated issue, a more difficult task and raises questions that have yet to be resolved in this protean and ever-burgeoning area of business law.First, a word concerning definition and semantics: The terms â€Å"resp onsibility† and â€Å"liability† tend to get laced in the TV screenwriter’s daisy-chain of legalese in much the same way as Hamilton Burger couldn’t help himself from objecting in every episode of â€Å"Perry Mason† with the contradictory charge of â€Å"irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial. † What one gains in the impressive sound of â€Å"lawyer-words† is lost to meaning and precision.The distinction is important to present issues insofar as responsibility means the capacity, so far as this is a matter of a man’s mind or will, which normal people have to control their actions and conform to law. It describes the duties a person takes on which are general for any party to an agreement, a contract for consideration. Liability, on the other hand, is the quality or state of being legally obligated or accountable.It is a legal responsibility owed to another or society enforceable by civil remedy or punishment. Liability is a more serious matter in that it is ultimately an assessment by some given authority (judge, jury, and arbitrator) that one’s failure of responsibility is of such a nature as to incur the greater duty to make amends or remedy as determined by the specific facts of the matter.In short, liabilities denote some failure of responsibility; however, all failures of responsibility do not necessarily result in the imposition of liability. At its most basic level the law is about the management of relationships, the identification, assessment and balancing of the rights, interest, duties and responsibilities of the parties to the relationship. The law assesses the relative merits of argument when these respective interests come into conflict.In the arena of cyber space, cyber theft, cyber torts, the many relationships between and among several parties raise a plethora of issues, a multitude of arguments. The primary relationship exists between the employer and the employee. The relationship rests in the employment contract; however, depending upon the conduct of the parties other areas of law may come into play: harassment, negligence, cyber tort, trespass, theft, etc.The focus on the employment contract as setting forth certain responsibilities for either party in the age of cyber-data, the portability of laptops, and the ephemeral nature of recorded data, the questions, among others, raised are to what extent an employer can direct and restrict the conduct of an employee when those directives and restrictions bounce up against the employee’s competing interests in the ownership of personal property (his or her laptop) or the employee’s right to come and go as he/she pleases in a free society without having to exercise extraordinary care concerning the contents of his/her laptop, outside the office, beyond office hours. Just how far can the four corners of the employment contract stretch to govern employee conduct, responsibilities and the imposition of potential liabilities during the employee’s personal time? (The issues concerning the use and the restrictions on use of the employee’s personal laptop in the workplace during work hours is the easier analysis with the weight of authority siding with the employer’s right to impose restrictions deemed necessary for security and employee performance. )Analogies to the this predicament which in general asks to what degree an employer, as a condition of the employment contract, can direct the employee’s â€Å"after-hours† life, can be found in similar issues raised by those employment contracts which include a 24/hour non-smoking clause (in the interest of health costs, insurance premiums) or the ban on any office romance, inside or outside the office. What responsibilities does an employee incur with the pervasive use of laptop computers, which in a physical sense are portable items of personal property, but also carry a volume of information that on ce would have been stored in several warehouses or file rooms? Simply stated, employees are probably more of a security risk than an asset.By virtue of technology’s advance, employees have been placed in a precarious position of being guardians at the gate of treasure when the gate and the treasure are often invisible and invaded by invisible means. Perimeter security doesn’t work anymore. The airwaves are filled with rogue access points, and people are bringing infected laptops in and out of the enterprise. â€Å"A number of companies †¦ are revising their policies about how employees should handle confidential data stored on computers. Many employees are facing new restrictions on who can take confidential records out of the office and are receiving special training on how to keep data secure.Workers found violating security policies are being disciplined or even dismissed. † The next relationship is a sub-set of the first. It looks at the situation in wh ich an employee, having agreed to whatever conditions, duties, responsibilities, set forth in the employment contract and the statement of company policies, exhibits negligence, even gross negligence in the care and handling of his laptop, resulting in its physical theft. Assume the laptop’s hard drive contains something equivalent to the recipe for Coca-Cola, and the implications of loss to the company are self-evident. In this hypothetical the employee has failed in his responsibilities to the company. And yet what are the company’s remedies?As referenced above, they can discipline or dismiss the employee, and then sit back and watch as Company Z manufactures a soda as good as their own. The issue as to whether they can hold the employee liable is dwarfed by the issue of remedies. One fired employee will not return the secret formula. Assume the employee’s conduct was criminal. He gets ten years, community service, and a lien on his property (a double-wide out side of Macon) in the amount of ten million dollars. Company Z is still making a fortune manufacturing a cola as good as the original. The failure of remedy only serves to point the aggrieved party downstream to search out other remedies (i. e. , deep pockets), civil and criminal, for their loss.And yet, even then, assuming the best case scenario for Company Z (meaning the likely imposition of civil remedies and criminal fines/punishment) any litigator knows that at that advanced stage of litigation with large companies and big firms on the clock, the process is exceedingly slow and absent injunctions against the offending party – the secret’s now likely to be in the hands of Companies A, B, C and D. These hypothetical only points up the extreme seriousness of the necessity for a company’s defense against attacks from outside, and the disturbing acknowledgment that said defense is not wholly within the company’s control. Companies have instituted policies to stress, express and maximize an employee’s responsibility, even imposing certain liabilities on the failure of such duties; all to minimize and the limit the risk of hacking and theft.But the 20th century world of â€Å"hard copy† (and what that implies) is about to pass by commerce as businesses enter a new age of information-gathering and information-conveyance. The substance of current information is as rock-solid, as valuable as ever, however the â€Å"thing itself† – what used to be the paper and the ink scribbles on the paper, i. e. , the thing that carried the information are now words on screens that can all too easily disappear onto invisible hard drives that move by means of invisible wires cast about the world in an invisible matrix – rendering the whole chain of custody as ephemeral as vapor, vulnerable to the peculiar talents of a new kind of thief, who’s comfortable with the notion of theft as an intellectual rather than a physical activity. So, who’s vulnerable? â€Å"Anybody who has data. †Another issue that arises out of the various relationships involved is this: Given the current state of affairs regarding the risk and threat of data theft, cyber theft, laptop theft, floppy disk theft, companies, for some time, have been on constructive (if not express) notice that there are individuals among us, peculiar perhaps in their pursuits, talented and brilliant in ways often unknown to current Baby-Boom age management, who derive pleasure and more likely profit from infecting the web and its offshoots with viruses. The following hypothetical presents itself: Hacker X in a basement in Queens has been hired by Rogue Company Z, competitor of large and established Company A, to infect Company A’s computers with a virus that will disable Company A, thereby enhancing competitor Rogue Company Z’s position in the shared market.Hacker X is to be a paid a good deal of money and not bec ause he’s stupid. He knows from experience that a direct assault on Company A is more likely to lead a trail back to himself and Rogue Company Z. Therefore Hacker X studies the interlocking systems of Company A with client companies and determines he can attack Company A through out of state Company Client. On a given Monday Company Client’s workers go to work and discover that their system has crashed with a virus that will spread through a given network, affecting several companies down line, including Company A, the prime target. The issues are what duties did Company Client have to notify entities down line?As a practical matter, is there time for Company Client to notify other companies down line? What duty does any company, such as Company Client have, not only towards itself, but to companies down the line who will suffer impairment from the traveling virus? And most importantly do the companies down line have a cause of action against Company Client for breach of some duty in failing to protect itself (and therefore others) from virus infestation. The questions are not rhetorical. They are real and fact sensitive. One can envision a circumstance in which a company is so lax in its security that it all but screams for hackers to have their way.Such a security failure might very well be deemed a breach of duty to other companies in the zone of danger (its length and breadth however defined). And yet all we are left with are the questions: What laws or what standards govern? Are they state laws? And if so do they give rise to conflict of laws problems? Are they Federal laws? Who sets the standards codified by the legislation? Does the current state of common law (tort and contract) anticipate the advantageous application of old principles in new clothes? On analysis, it appears that when all is said and done, the essential â€Å"bottom line† issue will devolve about the areas of remedies and insurance.Analysis of responsibilities, the ir breach and consequent liabilities can fill courtrooms with boxes of pleadings; however, when the issues are finally resolved and liability is determined, who, in this day of multi-billion dollar cyber secrets will have the funds, the deep pockets, to make the aggrieved party whole. The resort to insurance opens another area of analysis which for now remains without the boundaries of discussion proscribed herein; however, one can only imagine the super-layer of responsibilities to be imposed on companies and their employees by insurance contract, drafted water-tight, so as to minimize risk of theft in a high risk environment.

Symbolism In English literatureâ€â€œGravity” Essay

Symbolism is a good tool to use when we come across difficult abstract concepts such as life and death.For example, in her article entitled â€Å"Gravity†, David Leavitt tells us a story about how a mom named Sylvia encourages her HIV infected son Theo to live longer. When Theo started to have bad eye sight in his childhood Sylvia just let him wear her flamboyant glasses despite that people around them all think that Theo looks strange. After Theo grew up, between a drug that could sustain his life and a drug that could save his sight, Theo chose the second one. Sylvia worried that Theo would give up the hope for living, so she tried to encourage Theo to live by a strange way which similar to the way she help him with his sight when he was a child. She threw a very heavy crystal bowl to Theo when they were shopping in a gift store. Theo caught the bowl without thinking. Theo realized that by throwing the bowl, on one side, Sylvia tended to prove that he is still alive. On the other side, Sylvia wanted to encourage him to live longer. The crystal bowl in the story represents exactly what Theo was going through. It symbolizes both life and death. It represents life because it was heavy and valuable â€Å"(The crystal bowl is) Four hundred and twenty- five dollars† (l. 88) This shows that the crystal bowl is very valuable just like that human’s life is very precious. In the same time, crystal bowl represent death because it could easily been shattered. Theo was surprised that he actually did not shatter the bowl â€Å"Theo looked at the floor, still surprised not to see shards of glass around his feet.† (l. 96-97) If the crystal bowl were broken, it would have not value or meaning just like it has lost its life. So, the Crystal bowl in the story represents death. If the bowl shattered, it just like a person lost his/her life. The crystal bowl also represents the character and hopes of Sylvia. The crystal in the story is very showing and pricy. â€Å"(The crystal bowl is) a large ridges crystal bowl, a very fifties sort of bowl, stalwart and square-jawed.† (l. 84-86) It represents Sylvia’s flamboyant and materialism characters. The author tells us that Sylvia has a flamboyant character by describing Sylvia’s bold and flashy glasses†Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ harlequins with tiny rhinestones in the corners†¦Ã¢â‚¬ (l. 9) The author also implies that Sylvia is quite materialism by showing us that she care a lot abo ut the price of a graduation gift her sister given to her son  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Don’t you remember that cheap little nothing Bibi gave you for your graduation? It was disgusting.†(l.50-51) On the other hand, the crystal bowl represents the strength of Sylvia’s hope for Theo to live because the crystal bowl is heavy â€Å"’That’s heavy,’ Sylvia said, observing with satisfaction how the bowl had weighted Theo’s arms down†(l.93-94) The heavier the stronger, so the heaviness of the crystal bowl represent the strong will and hope of Sylvia. The author shows us that Sylvia is a strong willed woman who has done extremely stressful things in a role â€Å"The DHPG injections she (Sylvia) took in stride—she’s seen her own mother through her dying, after all, Four times a day, with the equanimity of a nurse, she cleaned out the plastic tube implanted in his chest, inserted a sterilized hypodermic a Sylvia and slowly dripped bag of sight-giving liquid into his vein†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (l.17-20) It shows that Sylvia has tremendous strength just like the toughness the crystal bowl appeared to be. The author also shows us that Sylvia’s hope for Theo to live is very strong. Even though Sylvia was stressed out †Yet she (Sylvia) had also, at about three o’clock one morning, woken him up to tell him she was going to the twenty-four- hour supermarket, and was there anything her wanted†(1. 122-124) This shows that Sylvia was on the edge of mental broken-down. But Sylvia still keeps strong hope for The o to live â€Å"†¦ it had occurred to him (Theo) that she (Sylvia) was trusting his two feeble hands, out of the whole world, to keep it from shattering.† This shows that after all, Sylvia strongly hoped that, showing Theo that he was still strong by throwing the crystal bowl and letting him catch it, Theo would not continue on giving up his life but choose to live longer. The crystal also symbolized the general message which the author is trying to convey to the readers: life should be fully lived. The author shows that Theo was dying and tended to giving up his life. He felt â€Å"†¦wide and unswimmable the gulf was becoming between him and the evereceding shoreline of the will †¦Ã¢â‚¬  (l. 35-36) Even though he felt that way, he still caught the heavy crystal bowl without thinking. It shows the underlining deep and significant meaning of the story â€Å"There are certain things you’ve already done before you even think how to do them†¦ the bowl, which Theo was holding before he could even begin to calculate its brief trajectory†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (l.131-133) This shows us that all human have an instinct for living. By showing us this, the story conveys a message to the readers that even though life is  violable like the fragile crystal bowl; it doesn’t mean that we should give up. Instead, we should look at the positive side of life. Just like the crystal bowl also heavy and strong side, human lives also have a strong side because very one have instinct for living. Therefore, we should have faith to ourselves and stop complaining our own misery but start to look at life in a positive way, and realize that our lives should be fully lived.

Death Represenataion in Sylvia Plath’s Selected Poems Essay

Death Representation in Sylvia Plath’s Selected Poems Mohamed Fleih Hassan Instructor English Dept. / Abstract Death is one of the significant and recurrent themes in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. This paper aims at showing the poet’s attitudes towards death. Certain poems are selected to show the poet’s different attitudes to death: death as a rebirth or renewal, and death as an end. Most obvious factors shaped her attitudes towards death were the early death of her father that left her unsecured, and the unfaithfulness of her husband, Ted Hughes, who left her dejected and melancholic. Plath’s ‘Two views of a Cadaver Room’, ‘Sheep in Fog’, ‘A Birthday Present’, ‘Edge’, and ‘I Am Vertical’ are selected to outline her various perspectives towards death. Death Representation in Sylvia Plath’s Selected Poems Generally speaking, death is represented in literature in various ways shifting from being an ominous terrifying force to a means of fulfillment and new beginnings. Death came to be a recurrent theme in Sylvia Plath’s poetry due to the sudden death of her father. His death left the daughter with powerful feelings of defeat, resentment, grief and remorse. So the absence of the father had influenced her emotional life negatively to the extent that it is reflected clearly in her poems. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) passed in periods of depression and there were precursors of suicidal act through fits of breakdown. Among the reasons for her early depression are the early death of her father that left her unsecured and her failure to attend a writing class at Harvard. Though she got a chair as a college guest-editor of the Mademoiselle, but she got monotonous with nothing to fall back on in New York. She broke down with the unfulfillment of her dream of being a successful writer. Therefore, she took an over-dose of sleeping-pills to end her misery, but she was saved. 1 After successful psychiatric sessions of recovery, Plath met Ted Hughes at Cambridge and they got married in 1956. She found in him a motive and substitute for the absence of the father. Hughes believed in her exceptional gift. In that period, the couple got success and fame with their poetic development, especially when they got children. Her poems had been published in Britain and America like, The Colossus 1960, which dealt with Plath’s preoccupation with ideas of death and rebirth. Hughes’ love affair with another woman broke the heart of Plath, who suffered the devastation of the broken marriage. Shifting into a new flat in London, she started writing poems of rage, despair, love and vengeance but her poems were slowly accepted for publication. She suffered the traumatic breakdown and melancholia that she put her head in the oven in 11 April, 1963. 2 Death came to be a recurrent theme in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, and this theme has been represented in different ways in her poems. She did engage the reader either in a personal or an impersonal way to view death either as a liberating force or troubling depressing experience. Her depiction of death is reflected by the use of such techniques as imagery, language, structure, and tone. Her negative attitude towards death is caused by the early death of her father that left her dejected. In her poem ‘Two views of a Cadaver Room’ (1959), she presents a pessimistic point of view towards death. This poem recounts an experience she had while dating a young Harvard medical student. She followed her boyfriend and some other medical students into an operating room where the students were busily dissecting a preserved corpse. The speaker and her boyfriend are horrified by the experience, the narrator offers two views of the cadaver room as alternate possibilities of depicting death in art; the physical view of death and the romantic view of death. One view is epitomized by the cadaver room contrasting the romantic one of death, which is represented by a detail from a Brueghel painting depicting two lovers, who are spell bounded by one another and careless to the destruction and devastation around them. The poem is written in two parts. The first part creates a futile setting in which things are described in a ‘dissecting room’, which suggests a mood of despondency. She did so by the use of wastelandish simile through comparing cadaver with ‘burnt turkey’: The day she visited the dissecting room They had four men laid out, black as burnt t urkey, Already half unstrung. (II. 1-3) The place ‘dissecting room’ suggests mercilessness and dehumanization. The dead bodies are anatomized and bones are removed which suggest a horrible image. The poetess compares death with the dissector, in which it takes off the spirit out of the body as did the doctor in dissecting the major constituents of bodies. Death here represents a terrifying force that annihilates man’s life. The dissecting room serves as the epitome of scientific space, which is to say death’s space. And this is the space not only of female witnessing and female passivity, ‘she could scarcely make out anything/ In that rubble of skull plates and old leather’, but also of a bestowal from male to female, from male scientist to female poet. The process of dissecting the dead body indicates the savageness and carelessness of the surgeon, who cuts out the heart; the symbol of man’s life and feelings. The surgeon is associated with death in the sense that he extracts the heart of the body, ‘He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom. ‘ The simile presents a very useless pessimistic image for the heart. The heart is not only reduced to a non-functioning machine, but a man hands death to a woman. The heart is the dearest to man and is compared to the heirloom which contains the memory of the dead, but it is uprooted maliciously. Death came to be an unavoidable inheritance. 4 In many of her poems, what Plath perceives is a death-figure which threatens to swallow her up unless she can reassert her living identity by â€Å"fixing† and thus immobilizing her enemy in a structured poetic image. Plath transforms death by assuming the role of a photo-journalist who observes the details in a way as to control the scene with the transforming power of language. She follows the technique of fusing various visual images in a meaningful way. Therefore, she transcends the literal immediacy of what she sees and creates order out of chaos. The second part paradoxes the first in showing a couple who are ignorant of the horrors of death. Their ignorance of the shadow of death around them intensifies their tragic catastrophic end: Two people only are blind to the carrion army: He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin Skirts, sings in the direction Of her bare shoulder, while she bends, Fingering a leaflet of music, over h im, Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands Of the death’s-head shadowing their song. (II. 13-19) Plath thinks that the second view was untenable. Confronting the literal physicality of death (as the narrator does in the first stanza), and ignoring that reality (as the lovers do in the Brueghel painting) seem hopelessly romantic and naive. The only way to relinquish the painful awareness of impending death is by relinquishing life itself. Plath committed suicide in her flat moving herself and her work into the domain of myth and psycho-mystical speculation. The second view of death is the bestowal of death that is interrupted by art. Paradoxically, this interruption of death by art is itself a kind of death, a freezing of life. The poem surveys with an eye which is blind and an ear which is deaf. If the lovers’ blindness and deafness to death’s music permits them to ‘flourish’, then this flourishing is ‘not for long’. Paradoxically, the work of art saves from death by paralyzing or fixing the living in an absolute present, which is to say a perfected present, but without future: This stalling of death’s triumph by art, this resistance of art to death, is itself a kind of death, since it reminds us that those lovers captured in art’s absolute present can do nothing at all. Just as there are two kinds of music here – the death’s-head’s and the lovers’ – so art is not placed in any simple opposition to death. 6 There are two kinds of death: on the one hand, death as process, as rebirth or renewal, as imaginary; and, on the other hand, death as end, as factuality. Plath rides into death in ‘Sheep in Fog’ (1963) but death is no longer conceived as renewal. The objective in ‘Sheep in Fog’ becomes the ‘dark water’: They threaten To let me through to a heaven Starless and fatherless, a dark water. (II. 13-15) The sense of dissolution is overpowering in this poem through thee description of the background of the poem. Each line and each stanza of the poem concerns the disappearance of something. ‘hills step off into whiteness’, ‘Morning has been blackening’ and the starless heaven leave her dejected and wretched. 7 ‘Sheep in Fog’ suggests that there is a radical sundering of poet and poetry, a death of the poet that is the life of the poetry, if only as that which is in mourning for the poet. The impersonality of Plath’s later poetry is not arrived at through an ethical self-sacrifice of the poet’s empirical, autobiographical self in the interests of a universal validity, a kind of immortality or proof against death. Rather, it is an impersonality in which there is a highly paradoxical and unstable relation between poet and poetry. 8 ‘A Birthday Present’ (1962) is another dramatic monologue in which terror and death predominate. The persona longs to know the gift presented by his friend. The speaker, her friend, and the object â€Å"talk† to each other in the kitchen. She imagines that the present may be ‘bones’, ‘a pearl button’, and ‘an ivory tusk’. Each of these things has white colour and suggests the nature of the birthday present that she wants. The three white objects—bones, pearl, and ivory tusk—all suggest death because they were once part of living organisms. The persona speaks of the veils around the present. In order to remove the concealing veil, which causes her anxiety and fear, the speaker demands an end to the screening off of death from view. She compares her life at the end of the poem to the arrival by mail of parts of her own corpse. At the end, the speaker demands as her birthday present not the previously mentioned symbols of death or the figure representing death, but death itself: 9 If it were death I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes. I would know you were serious. There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday. And the knife not carve, but enter Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, And the universe slide from my side. (II. 52-58) The poem dramatizes her birthday to be her death. The drama of ‘A Birthday Present’ is frightening in its transformation of a domestic and happy occasion into a celebration of suicide. It captures the movement of the speaker’s mind as she throws herself into the sequence of steps that might lead her to kill herself. Plath’s second perspective towards death is that it may be chosen by the individual himself as a means of self-destruction, rather than acting as a horrible exterminating force. The poetess aims to show the suffering and agony of the persona in selecting death as a means of liberation of the antagonistic world of the person. This perspective is reflected in Plath’s ‘Edge’, which was written on 5 February 1963 and is thought to be Plath’s last poem. According to Seamus Heaney, one of the biographers of Plath, the poem was a suicide note, which is to say an entirely personal, autobiographical communication from a distressed melancholic woman. For this reason, the poem is limited by the literal death of the poet, a death that cannot help but be read back into the poem. 10 This death is a negativity that renews, and works within an economy of life. This is not just an imaginary death, but death as a figure for the imagination itself, as a negativity that may be harnessed in the interests of life. This poem carries the reader not only to the very limit of life, but also to the limit of poetry. And yet, if in this poem the woman is ‘perfected’, it is through a death that takes the form of an aesthetic object, but in which the emphasis none the less falls very much on illusion. The speaker in this poem doesn’t endure the anguish of his life and feels that his misery is over: The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. (II. 4-8) The bare feet symbolize the lack of protection and immunity. The tone looks submissive but it indicates the willingness to accept death as an outlet and escape of the aggressive world. The persona feels alienated in the world around him. No one cares for the persona’s death even the moon, ‘The moon has nothing to be sad about/ Staring from her hood of bone. Therefore, she starts looking for something beyond death, which is the longing for perfection. Usually roses symbolize purity, so she compares her folding of the dead bodies of children as petals of a rose close. Therefore she thinks that through death, she will have a new beginning. 11 Death as a means of rebirth is reflected in Plath’s ‘I Am Vertical’. She sets images taken from nature as a background of her poem. This use of nature as a setting for her poem shows death not as a horrible monstrous thing. She presented two fruitful lively images of nature and then she negates her alikeness to them: I am not a tree with my root in the spoil Sucking up minerals and motherly love So that each March I may gleam into leaf, Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted, Unknowing I must soon unpetal. (II. 2-7) The persona feels rejection of the surroundings when ‘the trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odours. I walk among them, but none of them are noticing. ‘ This represents the negligence of society and the social restraints that the individual feels. ‘each March I may gleam into leaf’ suggests the continuity of life and regeneration. She is longing to be united with nature via death; the nature that symbolizes serenity and tranquility, ‘Then the sky and I are in open conversation’. The word ‘sky’ gives death the sense of spirituality and elevation. The speaker is not satisfied in her life and she accepts death as a means for recognition: And I shall be useful when I lie down finally: Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me. (II. 19-20) Plath’s life is ended in a world of death and despondency from which there is no rebirth or transformation.

The Tradition of Judaism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The Tradition of Judaism - Essay Example The family has a meal featuring traditional food and wine. The purpose of the ritual to remind people that when God created the Universe in seven days, He devoted a whole day to resting and so should the Jews. I learned that people who adhere to the religious tradition of Judaism tend to perform this ritual on a weekly basis, namely every sun set of Friday and up to the sun set of Saturday. As I have previously noticed, the wife is responsible for lighting up the candles and saying the blessing. Then, the father of the family says all the required prayers and the people are able to have dinner and celebrate Shabbat. It is beyond any doubt that this particular ritual preaches the need of the people to adhere to the religious tradition of Judaism and devote an entire day of the week free from daily routine and contemplating about what really matters in life, namely their relationship with God. There are different methods of praying that are used during this ritual: the words of prayers are pronounced first by the woman and then all the prayers are chanted by a man. In addition to that, people are required to direct their mind to various religious matters so that it would not stray away from the ritual. Speaking of the body placement during the Shabbat, it is a tradition to remain standing while all the major prayers and blessings are performed which shows that the people feel respect for the moment. What is really interesting is that there is a certain function reserved for women during Shabbat: they not only light up the candles but also prepare the meals for the dinner, which puts a lot of responsibility on them.

Proposal (PhD) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Proposal (PhD) - Essay Example This study investigates the impact of market orientation on product innovation in Arabic countries, particularly, the impact of components of market orientation on product innovation. Market orientation and innovation have been identified as crucial success factors in companies (Day, 1994; Hunt and Morgan, 1995; 1996). Researches have shown the importance of market orientation for the success of product innovations (Cooper, 1975; 1979; Slater and Narver, 1994; Pelham and Wilson, 1996; Atuahene-Gima, 1996; Gatignon and Xuereb, 1997). An increasing number of empirical studies have demonstrated that an improvement in the level of market orientation will lead to superior organizational performance and new product innovation (Narver and Slater, 1990; Oczkowski and Farrell, 1998; Slater and Narver, 2000; Kohli and Jaworsky, 1990; Ruekert, 1992; Deshpandà ©, Farley and Webster, 1993; Atuahene–Gima, 1996; Gatignon and Xuereb, 1997). On the other hand, a number of authors are questioning the benefits of being market oriented, suggesting that there may be several limitations to a market orientation. Hamel and Prahalad (1991) suggest that market oriented firms may s uffer from ignoring or missing markets and competitors. Slater and Narver (1995) argue that market oriented firms may fail to identify and capitalize on the latent needs of customers, due to their excessive focus on expressed needs. Studies about market orientation and product innovation in European and American counties offer little guidance to understand effect of market orientation on product innovation because the resources and capabilities of Arabic firm countries are different from those of European and American firms counties. Also there is a little attention on the variables that improve the work of market orientation toward product innovation. The following research questions will be addressed in

The Urban Schools in the United States Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4500 words

The Urban Schools in the United States - Essay Example tion in schools apart from the disparity in the enrollment rates of students as well as the availability of teachers belonging to different races and ethnic origins. â€Å"Equity is central to the current reform movement in science education. Although all students are capable of understanding and doing science, persistent and widespread differences continue to exist in students’ access, retention, and achievement, depending on their culture, gender, race, and socioeconomic status† (WCER, 2007). Besides, teachers and students are exposed to a lot of challenges in the urban schools. Background of Urban Schools In the United States, the education sector has been a major priority, with numerous efforts on reform being implemented to improve students’ performance. Urban schools in the United States are located in urban areas, where there are relatively high rates of poverty. Besides, the student population here possesses limited English proficiency and is, therefore r egarded as high need areas (Ruso, 2004). Gaskell (2012) claims that in the early years, wealth was accumulated by a limited number of individuals and, as a result, poverty levels in the urban areas increased significantly. The urban population in the United States increased as well, resulting in many differences, such as racism and inequality. The funding of schools among the wealthy and the poor districts remained fraught with inequality. The urban schools in the United States have, over the years, faced a declining level of test scores and high rates of violence. According to Stark (2011), urban schools in the 1800s have been started with an aim of providing immigrant parents with affordable places for their children to stay during the day as they worked in mills, factories or shops. By 1920, the urban... This essay approves that research on teacher turnover is examined and the situation in urban schools is related to the factors for teacher turnover that have emerged from the research. Finally, the review also presents factors that contribute to teachers’ motivation to stay in urban schools despite the difficult conditions. The researcher hopes that by looking at both the challenges and the motivating factors, this study will be contribute to the understanding of teacher retention in urban schools. There appears to exist a whole range of factors that demotivate teachers in general and science teachers in particular from continuing with the profession of teaching. While teachers receive only low salaries, the job is extremely demanding both in terms of time and physical as well as emotional stress it entails. The most unfortunate aspect of the job of teaching is the fact that a teacher is held wholly responsible and accountable for the behavior and results of students. The prof ession of teaching is too taxing, which prevents a teacher from attaining a balance between his or her personal and work life. This report makes a conclusion that teacher turnover is a particular problem in most of the urban schools. Negative reports about urban settings have discouraged properly qualified teachers from taking up teaching jobs in these schools. The high level of stress and exhaustion experienced in these schools also result in high teacher turnover. Despite the negative factors, however, there are some teachers that remain in the urban schools and they are motivated to provide quality education. The literature also reviews some of the teacher qualities that motivate teachers to teach in urban schools.