Crucible Story Essays - Culture, Religion, Fiction, Witchcraft

Crucible Story The Crucible takes place during the times of the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts. This was a time of much hypocrisy in the people of the town of Salem. Many people believed anything they heard or saw. Although The Crucible is fictitious, the story depicts the historical information of the Salem witch trials, and blends them with fictitious characters with minds of their own to create a very realistic plot and conflict in this story. This story has a few themes that are shown through the actions and the thoughts of the characters. One theme that I felt had an impact on the outcome of the story is Fear and suspicion can produce hysteria which results in the destruction and breakdown of the people. The thesis of the story is shown by people's actions people can become suspicious of one thing and this leads to an uprising in the town and the people. The story begins with the dancing of the girls in the forest. When the girls are seen they become scared and run off. This is what leads to the uprising in the town. The Puritans are viewed as being very religious they believe in God and everything he did for them. They believe in an unconditional election in which God has no obligation to save anyone, no matter how little the problem is. The Puritans use this during the witch trials in which they hanged many people that were innocent of witchcraft. These hangings happened because everyone believed everything the girls said and showed. People in the crowd seemed awe struck by the girls and their ability to view people as witches or not. These hangings produced hysteria in the townspeople. In the story because of the dancing of the girls the priests of the town, Hale and Parris believed that the girls called the devil upon their town. Many people are accused of witch craft because of the girls. Puritans also believe in The Supremacy of Divine Will in which god is absolute. When the girls supposedly brought Satan upon their town the people got frightened and the only way to get rid of the demons in the town is through several hangings. The girls was the link between the people they could see Satan and the people that followed his work. Through the stories the girls lied about what they saw this should not have happened. The girls took their fear out on the people of the town and they did not even realize it. The thesis of this story has a large impact on the people and the conflict of the story. The other side of my thesis would have explained that if nobody in the town got suspicious or involved in the witch trials there would not have been hysteria in the people. If this was true there may have been many lives saved including John Proctor and Rebecca Nurse. The other side of the thesis was not used because the opposite of the thesis does not explain the way the outcome of the story was. If nobody got involved in the trials the conflict/outcome would have been different. In conclusion peoples actions and suspicions of one thing can lead to and uprising in the town. Throughout the story the people turned to the girls to rely on who was a witch. The girls were led by Abigail she stunned everyone with her attitude and her ability to see the Devil. Because of what the girls said there was a disturbance in the town. The Crucible is a great example of fictional/history. It also shows that you can not always believe what you hear because it may not be true.

Marxism is Dead essays

Marxism is Dead essays After class I go home to check my e-mail. A concept such as e-mail would have seemed absurd to Karl Marx and Max Weber. It is accepted as just another part of life in our high-technology society, however. Max Weber and Karl Marx had a difference of opinion over what was the driving force behind changes in society. Marx vs. Weber, Social Conflict vs. Rational Thought. In a 12 round decision its Webers rationalization of society over socialism. The essential difference in these two theories is what drives a society towards its advancements. Marx believed that the inequality between the haves and have-nots would lead to a revolt from the proletariat. (The proletariat are easily described as the workers who are employed by the capitalists.) According to Marx, the proletariat and capitalists were class descendants of masters and slaves, and nobles and serfs. When the Industrial Revolution came to western Europe in the mid 1840s, Marx saw that the capitalists who owned the factories, and the workers who filled them, were growing further and further apart in class standing. The very rich could afford great luxuries, while the lower class worked full weeks to feed their families. He summed up that an eventual revolution was the next logical step. When the proletariat gained "class consciousness," a recognition of their strength in unity, they would overthrow the shackles of the capitalists, and eventually capitalism its elf. And what of the capitalists? The capitalists vast wealth, protected by the institutions of society, made them strong, indeed. Marx believed they would be slow to band together like the proletariat. He summarized that capitalists were afraid of competition from other capitalists, out of a desire for personal gain. Furthermore, he reasoned, because the capitalists kept employee wages low, the workers drive to turn against them would be all the greater, contributing to the capitalists dow...

Google in china Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Google in china - Case Study Example In return, the users have viewed its advertisement messages and images. As Google aims at making information useful and acceptable via its search engine, the online community has been useful to the company in promoting its performance and competitiveness within the global market. The company’s mission has also allowed it to participate in circumventing censorship of information by governments. The success of implementing the marketing strategy within Google is determined by its effectiveness in promoting access to information by societies, especially in countries, such as China, where the government is determined to suppress access (Jones, 2011). It is however notable that Google’s China operations are not aligned to its mission. In its endeavor to make information useful and acceptable within China, the company has been limited by the censorship of the government. Regardless of the dilemma surrounding the company’s values, principles and mission, the company entered the Chinese market. The company’s entry into China was motivated by the irresistible and large Chinese market, which would promote its advertising revenue. After Google’s online services in China were restored, the company officials claimed that it had not changed anything in its service offering (Jones, 2011). Users were hopeful that the company was able to maintain its mission for enhanced access to useful and acceptable information via its search engine. Nevertheless, the company’s users in China realized that they could not access some information. This revealed that the company’s searches were being censored even more by the government. For instance, sites on political information would not be accessed. These illustrations reveal that Google’s Chinese operations were not congruent with its mission. This is due to the fact that the information that was acceptable and useful to the Chinese people was still

The life and beliefs of Amanpreet Gill Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The life and beliefs of Amanpreet Gill - Essay Example This is supposed to welcome good spirits that the visitor came with into the home. They do this because according they believe that visitors are forms of good spirits that come to bless a home. Gill’s dad was not an educated man, neither was he academic in nature. However, this did not hither him from encouraging Gill to partake English and other English related courses. Gill took this encouragement seriously and due to her positive attitude, she performed well in her English papers. Interestingly, whenever Gill sat an exam, the teacher would award her 19 Â ½ points out of the total of 20 points. This was very irritating to Gill since she would be forced to write another better composition. One of the most interesting experiences for Gill while in class was when they were having reading sessions. She enjoyed reading and would always express what she was reading on her face. For instance, if the character in the book was angry or scared, she would portray this on her face, cre ating clear images of the character in the minds of her classmates. Gill also enjoyed reading since her teacher always told her class that the more one reads, the more one became knowledgeable and expounded on the vocabulary prowess. This was a tip Gill took seriously and spent every opportunity she got to read and read out loud, something that contributed to her strong command of English. Besides being good in class, Gill took part in other curricular activities. She took part in card making competitions, and painting sessions.

The Needs of the End-User Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The Needs of the End-User - Essay Example Despite the fact that most of the competencies required in IT environments are similar, they vary in a number of ways, albeit marginally. There are therefore, certain definitions and key behaviours and skills associated with each competency, for clarity purposes (Salvendy & Smith, 2009). The behaviors in this regard are the unique and observable actions by which one demonstrates his/her competency. Although there is a variety of models for IT technical competency, there is a general consensus on the stages that one need to follow while evaluating the necessary competency for a given IT management environment or position. First, it is important that an individual identifies the technical competencies applicable for the various IT management functions such as data management, emerging technology, information security, information technology service operations and network and telecommunications technology competencies. The IT management competencies one should have include dependability , ethics, motivation, professionalism, time management, technical skills, teamwork and adaptability (Salvendy & Smith, 2009). ... Just like any other developers, IT developers’ objective is often to produce the best and most applicable technologies and gadgets. They have consequently created rather sophisticated technologies that require a lot of technical knowledge to understand, operate and maintain. It is at this juncture that the end-user-developer knowledge problems begin. That is, while developers are focused on developing the most sophisticated technologies, end-users want technologies that are easy to operate and make their lives easier. However, appropriately or extremely technically knowledgeable audiences are well placed to handle complex information technologies. Developers thus require building IT technologies and systems that help end-users to solve real life/situational problems rather than being just sophisticated and fashionable. In other words, Information Technologies should not only do things that the developers are interested in but should also avoid any unnecessary appliances or opt ions that do not serve the interest of end-users (Watson, 2005). User-testing is one of the approaches used by developers to assess the usefulness of technologies, more so among persons not involved in IT technology projects. These people are then exposed to the gadget in question and their response to the serviceability and the goal-oriented nature of the gadget assessed. Importantly, there is need to promote effective communication between IT developers and end-users as this practice would help bridge the knowledge gap between them. By extension, end-users would be better placed to use IT and other technologies maximally if they are trained or educated on the said technology (Watson, 2005). There are several ways in which an IT

History of Tobacco Laws

History of Tobacco Laws Coffins of Black In 1775, Percivall Pott, a surgeon at St. Bartholomews Hospital in England, noticed a marked rise in cases of scrotal cancer in his clinic. His patients were mostly chimney sweeps, who spent a lot of time in contact with grime and ash. He noted that the minute invisible particle of soot could be found under their skin for days, and that scrotal cancer bust out of a superficial skin wound called a soot wart. Based on these observations, Pitt suspected that it was the chimney soot that caused the scrotal cancers. That would mean that the cancer was potentially preventable. But removing the carcinogen was perhaps difficult to achieve. But with the embarrassing plight of chimney sweeps exposed, social reformers sought to create laws to regulate the occupation. The Chimney Sweepers Act was passed in 1788 to prevent master sweeps from using children under eight. In 1834, the age was increased to fourteen. By 1875, the use of young climbing boys was forbidden. In 1761, an amateur scientist in London, John Hill, claimed that he had found one carcinogen tabacco could cause lip, mouth, and throat cancer. In England, tobacco was rapidly escalating into a national addiction. Cigarette smoking soon spread through Europe and across the Atlantic to the United States. As cigarette consumption became a national addiction, it would be difficult to discern an association with cancer. The Emperors Nylon Stockings In the United Kingdom, government statisticians alerted the Ministry of Health in January 1947 that an unexpected epidemic of lung cancer was emerging in the country: Lung cancer morbidity had increased fifteen-fold in the prior two decades. In February, the ministry asked the Medical Research Council to organize a conference of experts to study this inexplicable rise of lung cancer rates and to find the cause. The experts at the conference pointed to every breathable form of toxin except cigarette smoke. Without any consensus, the council appointed Austin Bradford Hill, an eminent biostatistician, to devise a systematic study to identify the risk factor for lung cancer. Hill recruited Richard Doll, a 36-year-old medical researcher who had no experience in performing a study of this scale. *** In the United States, a medical student name Ernst Wynder encountered a case of 42-year-old man who died of cancer of the airways of the lung. The man was a smoker with tar-stained bronchi and soot-blackened lungs. Wynder had never seen such a case before, so he applied to the medical school for money to study the connection between smoking and lung cancer. But he was bluntly told that the effort would be futile. He wrote to the U.S. Surgeon General, but was told that he could prove nothing. So Wynder approached his mentor Evarts Graham, the great heart surgeon in St Louis. Graham was a heavy smoker and didnt believe the connection between cancer and smoking. But he agreed to help Wynder with the study in part to disprove the link and lay the issue at rest. The Case-Control Studies In St Louis, Wynder and Graham followed a simple method. They recruited a group of lung cancer patients and a control group without cancer and asked them about their smoking habits. They used smokers to nonsmokers ratio within each group to determine the smoking-cancer connection. In the UK, Doll and Hill followed a similar method in their study. They asked social workers in the hospital to interview the two groups of patients in and around London. To counteract biases, they included other questions such as how often they eat fried fish into the survey. By May 1, 1948, the result of their study was: The one and only statistical association with lung cancer was cigarette smoking. They published their study in September 1956. Meanwhile, Wynder and Graham in St Louis had also arrived at the same conclusion. The published their studies a few months earlier. The Prospective Cohort Study It might appear that Doll, Hill, Wynder and Graham proved the link between lung cancer and smoking. But they had proved something else. In a case-control study, the risk is estimated post hoc by asking lung cancer patients whether they had smoked. The interviewer could have unconsciously probed lung cancer patients about their smoking habits more aggressively than control group. In the early 1940s, an Oxford geneticist named Edmund Ford faced a similar notion. The solution was to follow a cohort to capture the change over time. Doll and Hill followed Fords work with deep interest. There was a centralized registry of all doctors in Britain that could be used for a cohort study. Every time a doctor in the registry died, the registrar was noticed with a detail description of the cause of death. On October 31, 1951, Doll and Hill sent out survey letters to about 60,000 doctors. About 41,000 of them responded. Doll and Hill used the data to create a master list, dividing it into smokers and nonsmokers. Each time a death was reported, they found out the cause of death from the registrars office. Between October 1951 and March 1954, 789 deaths were reported, and 36 were attributed to lung cancer. All these 36 deaths had occurred in the smokers category, showing a strong correlation between lung cancer and cigarette smoking. A thief in the Night In 1956, the percentage of smokers in the US adult population had reached an all-time peak of 45 percent. Cigarette sales had climbed to stratospheric heights and the tobacco industry had transformed their advertising by targeting their advertising to selected segments of the population. By the early 1960s, an average American consumed eleven cigarettes per day, nearly one for each waking hour. In the mid-1950s, public health organizations in America were undisturbed by the link between tobacco and cancer. But the tobacco industry was worried that the link would scare consumers away. In 1953, three years before Dolls prospective study was public, the heads of several tobacco companies met in New York to prepare a counterattack. They saturated the news media in 1954 with an advertisement titled A Frank Statement, obfuscating facts and creating doubts about the connection between lung cancer and tobacco. They had already formed a committee called Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) to act as an intermediary between the hostile academy, the embattled tobacco industry, and the confused consumer. The director of the committee was Clarence Cook Little, who the Laskerites had deposed as president of ASCC. Little was a strong proponent that lung cancer was hereditary. Studies had shown a strong correlation between smoking and lung cancer. But correlation, Little argued, could not be equated with cause. To counter that argument, Bradford Hill prepared a list of nine criteria that could prove a causal relationship. No single item in that list proved causality, but scientists could pick criteria from the list to strengthen or weaken the causal relationship. In the February 1957, Evart Graham died from bilateral bronchogenic carcinoma. Two weeks before he died, Graham wrote to his friend Alton Ochsner: à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦bilateral bronchogenic carcinoma sneaked up on me like a thief in the nightà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦You know I quit smoking more than five years ago, but the trouble is that I smoked for 50 years. In 1954, in a book entitled Smoking and Cancer, Graham had wondered whether it was time for the US Public Health Service to at least issue a statement of warning. A Statement of Warning In the summer of 1963, a team of three men visited the laboratory of Oscar Auerbach in East Orange, New Jersey. Oscar Auerbach was a lung pathologist who believed that cancer grew from a precursor lesion precancer to its full-blown form slowly, and methodically, over a long period of time. Long before lung cancer became symptomatic, he found, the lung tissues contained layers of precancerous lesions in various stages of development. He had recently completed a monumental study comparing lung specimens of nonsmokers and smokers, which was considered a landmark in the understanding of the genesis of lung cancer. The three visitors were William Cochran, Peter Hamill, and Emmanuel Farber. They were three of the ten-member advisory committee appointed by the US surgeon general. The   mandate (of the committee) was to review the evidence connecting tobacco to cancer so that the surgeon general could issue an official report. US Surgeon Generals Report In 1961, the American Cancer Society, the National Tuberculosis Association and the American Heart Association had sent a joint letter to President Kennedy urging him to appoint a national commission to investigate the link between tobacco and cancer. Kennedy assigned it to his surgeon general, Luther Terry. Terry appointed ten members to his advisory committee. Each member brought insight to a unique piece of the puzzle. Piece by piece, a consistent picture emerged. The committee found the relationship between smoking and lung cancer was one of the strongest in history. Luther Terry released his 387-page report on January 11, 1964. The report was released on a Saturday in part to minimize its effect on the stock market. It was front page news and a leading story on every television and radio stations in the United States and abroad. The FTC Action The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was a federal agency whose mandate was to regulate advertisements and claims made by various products. Given the link between cigarettes and cancer, as acknowledged by the surgeon generals report, the FTC recommended that cigarette makers would need to acknowledge this directly in advertising their products. The FTC recommended to imprint the message into the product itself. Cigarette packages and all advertisements were to be labeled with Caution: Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Health. It May Cause Death from Cancer and Other Disease. The proposed action from the FTC spread panic through the tobacco industry. Rather than being regulated by the FTC, the tobacco industry voluntarily requested regulation by Congress. In Congress, the FTCs recommendation was diluted as it changed hands from hearing to hearing, leading to an amended bill called the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act (FCLAA) of 1965. It changed the FTCs warning label to Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health. The words cancer, cause, and deaths were removed from the original label. Battle on Cigarette Advertising In late 1966, a young attorney named John Banzhaf asked a local television station to provide airtime for anti-smoking announcements. The station refused. In the summer of 1967, Banzhaf filed a complaint with the FCC. The FCCs fairness doctrine required public media to provide free air time to opposing viewpoints on controversial issues. The FCC announced responded that its fairness doctrine applied to the request for anti-smoking announcements. With the FTC consent, Banzhaf sued the TV station. The suit went to trial in 1968. The court ruled that proportional airtime had to be given to pro-tobacco and anti-tobacco advertising. In February 1969, the FCC announced that they would rigorously police the proportional air time clause.   A barrage of anti-smoking advertisements appeared on television. In late 1970, faced with the daily brunt of negative publicity, tobacco manufacturers voluntarily withdrew cigarette advertising from broadcast media. Lawsuits Against Tobacco Manufacturers Rose Cipollone started smoking when she was a teenager in 1942. She tried to quit, but relapsed later with greater dependency. In her quest for the safe cigarette, she had switched brands and tried new filters periodically. In 1981, Cipollone was diagnosed with lung cancer. By August 1983, the cancer metastasized all over her body. She started chemotherapy, but had a poor response. She died on October 21, 1984 at age 58. Marc Edell, a New Jersey attorney, heard of Cipollones diagnosis in the summer of 1983. He sued for the Cipollones against three tobacco manufacturers whose products Rose had used Liggette, Lorillard, and Philip Morris. In previous lawsuits against the tobacco companies, the tobacco industry had all declared victory. Edell acknowledged that Rose Cipollone had read the warning labels and knew of the risks of smoking. But what matter was what the cigarette manufacturers knew, and how much of the cancer risk they had revealed to consumers. Edell asked the courts for unprecedented access to the internal files of the three tobacco companies. These documents showed that the tobacco companies knew smoking was linked to cancer, and the struggles within the industry to conceal the risks. In 1987, after four long years, the court decided that Rose Cipollone was 80 percent at fault. Only Liggett was liable for the remaining 20 percent, as Rose Cipollone smoked their cigarettes before the 1966 warning labels. Lorillard and Philip Morris got off without punishment. The jury awarded $400,000 in damages to Antonio Cipollone. Lawsuits by the States In 1994, Mississippi was the first state to sue the tobacco industry to recover its public healthcare outlays linked to smoking. Several other states soon followed. Faced with the prospect of defending multiple actions nationwide, the four largest cigarette makers proposed a global agreement in June 1997. In 1998, 46 states signed the Master Settlement Agreement with the four companies. Since 1998, an additional 47 cigarette makers have joined the agreement, making it one of the largest liability settlements in the United States.

Strangely Ordinary People Essay -- Movie Film Analysis

The movie â€Å"Ordinary People† was a very entertaining and educational movie. It looked into the dynamics of families and showed the different parts and dependencies. It also looked into a type of client/therapist relationship and how it evolved over time. The discussion below will attempt to explore deeper into these aspect of the film. Throughout the film a focus on family and the dynamics is prominent. A traumatic event, the loss of a son, brother, and friend, has influenced the Jarrett greatly. Due to the circumstances in which Conrad, a severely depressed teenager and the main character, was present during the death of his brother, feelings of guilt had built up in this young man. A great deal of stress and tension is built between the family members because of this tragic accident. Here is where the concept of, change in one part of the familial system reverberates through out other parts. (Duty, 2010) The relationship between the Conrad and his mother become even more absent because, in the film it is presented to show that the mother blames and has not forgiven Conrad for the death of his brother Buck. Six months after the death of his brother Conrad attempts suicide with razors in the bathroom of his home. His parents commit him to a psychiatric hospital and eight months later, he is trying to resume his â €Å"old† life. Conrad is socially withdrawn from his friends because of all he has experienced as well as the fact that he was held back in school due to missing so many days. The importance of his family and support is validated here. When looking at one of the most important challenges facing families today, the challenge of instilling â€Å"in its members a sense of belonging while also allowing members to individuate† is s... ...t it does not exist. The rapport and friendship built throughout this movie is vital to the success of the therapy exhibited here. This is a great example of Gestalt therapeutic approach and helps to identify most of the techniques incorporated. The techniques and ways of gently confronting but pushing a client all the way through are very beneficial to each viewer of this film. Works Cited Duty, G. (2010, December 10). Family Systems Therapy. Lecture presented at Principles of Counseling Class Notes, Bethany. Miller, F. C. (1999, September). Using the Movie Ordinary People to Teach Psychodynamic Psychotherapy With Adolescents -- Miller 23 (3): 174 -- Acad Psychiatry. Academic Psychiatry. Retrieved December 10, 2010, from http://ap.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/23/3/174 Redford, R. (Director). (1980). Ordinary people [Motion picture on DVD