Gold Rush Paper :: essays research papers

One moment the California creek beds glimmered with gold; the next, the same creeks ran red with the blood of men and women defending their claims or ceding their bags of gold dust to bandits. The "West" was a ruthless territory during the nineteenth century. With more than enough gold dust to go around early in the Gold Rush, crime was rare, but as the stakes rose and the easily panned gold dwindled, robbery and murder became a part of life on the frontier. The "West" consisted of outlaws, gunfighters, lawmen, whores, and vigilantes. There are many stories on how the "West" begun and what persuaded people to come and explore the new frontier, but here, today, we are going to investigate those stories and seek to find what is fact or what is fiction. These stories will send you galloping through the tumultuous California territory of the mid-nineteenth century, where disputes were settled with six shooters and the lines of justice were in a continuous chaos. Where's the West How and where did the West begin? This is the question that is asked most often and there is never a straight -forward answer. Everyone has their own opinion on the subject: "Oh, it started sometime in the nineteenth century," or "The west is really just considered to be Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas." Whatever happened to California actually being considered the "West?" With all honesty, even into the twentieth century, California is not thought of as being the "West," or the "West" in the manner in which Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas are thought of. Cowboys, horses, and cattle are only considered to be in the central states, but what about California? To give a straight- forward answer on where and how the "Real West" or even the "Wild West" began; it began by a millhouse worker named James Marshall. On the morning of January 24, 1848, Marshall was working on his mill and looked down in the water and saw a sparkling dust floating along the creek bed (Erdoes 116). Assuming it was gold, he told his fellow workers what he had found and they began searching for the mysterious metallic dust as well. Four days later Marshall rode down to Sutter's Fort, in what is now Sacramento, and showed John Sutter what he had found. They weighed and tested the metal and became convinced that it was indeed gold. John Sutter wanted to keep the discovery secret, but that was going to be impossible. The rumor flew and Sutter's mill workers, which were Mormon, caught wind of it and began searching for their own fortune. Shortly after they fled, they

Playdough, Paperweight, Snowball: An Analysis of the Bell Jar Essay

â€Å"I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three †¦ nineteen poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.†(Plath 123) This quote fully embodies the whole mood of the book, The Bell Jar by Silvia Plath. The main character Esther is constantly at war with herself, she can’t figure out what to work towards or where her life is going. She is unable to see past the nineteenth post in her life, it’s as if her life was never supposed to move on. This mind set pushes Esther into a deep depression and drives her to attempt suicide many times. In the novel Ester Greenwood, a young aspiring writer, battles a war within herself everyday. She starts out high on life; she was one of the winners of a writing contest so she is living in New York experiencing a very affluent lifestyle. Her life is as colorful and wonderful as brand new Play Dough. Then one day she realizes she is no longer herself, she is trapped in an image that others have molded. She stops and thinks, who am I? Where am I going? What am I doing with my life? Much like that wad of Play Dough she too wore out, she was now dull, hardened, and futureless. Though it is still called Play Dough, it no longer serves the same purpose or is anything like its old self. Simply a shell of the girl she once was she no longer has her old friends, she didn’t make it into her college honors writing class, and she cant even bring herself to write anymore. Battling a civil war daily wore Esther down farther and farther until there was nothing left of her soul. For Esther the troubling question was no longer just who am I? It was a much more serious question of why am I here? Why am I alive? She has a very hard time getting through each day, â€Å"I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.† (Plath 117). She doesn’t know what to do with herself, she tries to learn new things, but she can’t stay focused for more than a few mere minutes. She is convinced that she will amount to nothing, that her life is going nowhere, and she will be a paperweight for the rest of her life. She is so disgusted with who she is and her life she can no longer stand to live in her own skin, she always feels as if there is something inside her that she wants to kill. â€Å"But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.† (Plath 147) She attempts many times to end her life, but she always makes it out alive and well. Nobody knows what to do with her so they try some treatments, but those don’t work so she is placed in a special facility. Stuck in this asylum she goes up and down, she gains freedom but then has a relapse and it right back to square one all over again. After many hard years of wanting to die and hating herself, she finally finds people she trusts and it starts to get better. â€Å"All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air. † (Plath 215). In this quote Esther speaks about the bell jar lifting above her, throughout the entire book it was on her, suffocating her, but finally it had lifted and she could start living again. She starts over like a rolling snowball, starting small yet gaining more trust and confidence by the second; before she realizes it she is a huge snow boulder rolling gaining speed, size, and confidence. A major theme in the novel is places of entrapment. Whether it is Esther feeling trapped within her own body, or if she is trapped in a hospital she is always under something. â€Å"The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.† (Plath 160). At the beginning Esther is forced into going to many events at various places whether it’s a luncheon or a fashion show. From there she goes back home which ends up being almost like solitary confinement. She is bounded in a lifestyle that is very different from her own. Her mother was constantly trying to teach her shorthand, a skill which Esther has no wish to learn. Also when at home she finds herself unable to sleep. This traps her in the world of thinking, which works against her because of where her life is. This is where her depression first starts, and it takes he life on a downward spiral. After many suicidal attempts Esther is put into a psychological hospital. She moves from hospital to hospital, but for years she is always under rule of doctors in nurses. Plath used many things to convey the feeling of suffocating under pressure throughout the book. Though Plath wrote an entire book through the eyes of a depressed young woman, she still kept the book easy to read. The book flowed well from scene to scene. It kept the reader wondering if Esther was going to break out of her depression or if she was finally going to succeed and end up ending her life. She uses complex yet easy to understand wording that a wide range of readers can comprehend. â€Å"I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.'† (Plath 90). This quote not only shows how Plath created a novel easily read but it shows how there was hope; Esther did have the capacity to feel happiness, she was capable of living a happy life. The struggle through the book was if she was going to overcome her illness, or be consumed by it. Plath wrote an in depth story about a young woman suffering through depression. Though the topic was no happy in any way, Plath kept it light and hopeful. Keeping the reader always wondering if she was going to get better. Also, she it was so descriptive with her writing that the reader felt like he could relate with Esther. Overall, The Bell Jar is a very well written book that can be read easily. It leaves one with the feeling of hope, and believing any situation can heal. â€Å"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.† (Plath 243).

Tom Coronado

Case Study: Tom Coronado True to form, Tom Coronado – manager of employee relations for Huse Manufacturing Company – pulled into his reserved company parking space early. It was 7:30 Monday morning – usually the most hectic day of week, with more than its share of problems. But the first good news: Friday had been payday. Now the bad news: Monday of every week turned up Friday's payroll errors. With new hires, overtime work, and different wage-rate categories, there always seemed to be mistakes in figuring wages and paychecks. To make matters worse, in recent weeks, these errors had been on the increase.Reason: a new computerized payroll system. Long live progress, Tom thought. He was also thinking, with concern, about a 10 o'clock meeting scheduled with the executive vice-president on this very subject. Tom would have to report on how the new system was working out. Right now, though, he needed to find at least an hour of quiet to get his report together. Fortun ately, his office was quiet, and Tom was able to review a couple of computer printouts. But shortly after 8 o'clock the phone began to ring. His secretary wasn't in yet, so Tom had to take six calls personally in 20 minutes.The first five were about errors in the payroll checks; two calls were from shop supervisors, one was from a worker on the night shift, one from the production superintendent, and one from the local union president. This last one was the most sweat; the union leader's parting shot was, â€Å"When in blazes are you going to straighten out this payroll mess? † The sixth call was from Tom's secretary. She wouldn't be in today. Over the next hour, Tom was able to correct most of the payroll errors – with a little help from his friends.These included payroll clerks, the production superintendent, a junior systems analyst, and one hourly paid worker. By 9:30, Tom thought he was ready to stick his phone in a filing cabinet and sit down with his materials f or a last review before the 10 o'clock meeting. Five minutes later the phone started ringing. It was Ted Brokenshire, president of the Metropolitan Personnel Association. Would Tom be willing to give a talk at the association's next meeting? By the time he hung up the phone, Tom realized he had talked away the rest of his prep time before the meeting.It was 9:57. Quickly, he pulled together his notes and materials and walked into the two corridors to the vice-president's office. The secretary waved him right in to a meeting that lasted two hours. But they were two hours well spent, Tom thought. The problems and the progress of putting in the new payroll system were taken apart, gone over, and put together again. And despite the recent increase in mix-ups, implementation was actually two weeks ahead of schedule. Tom came out of the meeting feeling good and ready to go ahead on the assignment.As he entered his office, it also occurred to him that he had a new more ingredients for that talk he had agreed to give Metro Personnel. Then his eye caught the clock: 12:20. Now for some lunch, he thought. He remembered that he hadn't had breakfast, and how he felt like having a big plate of shrimp lo mein. Then the phone rang. Tom finally left for lunch at 2:30. As he pulled into the parking lot of the Shanghai Dynasty, he recalled that they were closed on Mondays. Source:Lawrence J Gitman and Carl McDaniel, Jr. , Business World, New York: Wiley, 1983, p. 98. Filename:tomcoro. doc

Svante August Arrhenius Essays - Panspermia, Svante Arrhenius

Svante August Arrhenius Essays - Panspermia, Svante Arrhenius Svante August Arrhenius Svante August Arrhenius was born at Uppalsa, Sweden, on February 19, 1859 His intelligence and creativity were apperent nt from an early agehe taught himself to read when he was three Although credi ted with many scientific innovations, he remains best known for his ionic theory of solutions, For which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1903 Arrhenius henius died in Stockholm on October 2, 1927 Science is a human endeavor subject to human frailties and governed by personalities, politics, and prejudice ces. One of the best illustrations of the often bumpy path of the advancement of scientific knowledge is the story of Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius. When Arrhenius henius began his doctorate at the University of Uppsala around 1880, he chose to study the passage of electricity through solutions. This was a problem that had baffled scientists for a century, The first experiments had been done in the 17 70s by Cavendish, who corn pared the conductivity of salt solutions with that of rain water, using his own physiological reaction to the electric shocks he rece ived! Arrhenius had an array of instruments to measure electric current, but the process of carefully weighing, meas uring, and recording data from a multitude of experiments was a tedious one. After his long series of experimerits were performed, Arrhenius quit his laboratory bench and returned to his country home to try to formulate a model that could account for his data, He wrote, "I got the idea in the night of the 17th of May in the year 1883, and I could not s leep that night until I had worked through the whole problem." His idea was that ions were responsible for conducting electricity through a solution. B ack at Uppsa]a, Arrhenius took his doctoral dissertation containing the new theo ry to his advisor, Professor Cleve, an eminent chemist and the discoverer of the elements holmlum and thulium. Cleve's unlnterested response was what Arrhenius had expected. It was in keeping with CIeve's resistance to new ideas he had not even accepted Mendeleev's periodic table, introduced ten years earlier. It is a long standing custom that before a doctoral degree is granted the disse rtation must be defended before a panel of professors. Although this procedure i s still followed at most universities today, the problems are usually worked out in private with the evaluating professors before the actual defense. However, w hen Arrhenius did it, the disserta tion defense was an open debate, which could be rancorous and humiliating. Knowing that it would be unwise to antagonize his professors, Arrhenius downplayed his convictions about his new theory as he de t ended his dissertation. His diplomacy paid off: he was awarded his degree, albei t reluctantly, as the prolessors still did not believe his model and considered him to be a marginal scientist, at best. Such a setback could have ende d his scientific career, but Arrhenius was a crusader; he was determined to see his theory triumph. Recognizing his low credibility in his home coun try, he sen t his dissertation first to Rudolf Clausius, a German seientist who had fimnulat ed the second law of thermodynamics, but Clausius wasn't interested. He next app roached Lothar Meyer, another German scientist who had gained prominence for his work on the periodicity of the clements, but Meyer was also unresponsive. Final ly, Arrhcnius found the right champion in Wilhelm Ostwald, a German profes sor o f chemistry at Riga. Ostwald, already known as a defender of revo lutionary chem ical causes, fully accepted the idea that reactions in solu tion often involve i ons. In 1885 Arrhenius began work ing in Ostwald's laboratory, continui ng his research on ions. Reading everything he could find on the sub jeer, he ca me across a research paper written by a Dutch scientist, Jacobus van't Heir, whi ch was particularly helpful in placing the ionic theory on firmer gnound. In 1887 Arrhenius went to Amsterdalm to nicer van'l Heft At 22 years of age, van't Help had postulated the existence of stereochemistry; that is, that atoms in molecules have definite relative positions in space. This theory was initially criticized harshly, and van't Heft, aided by Ostwald, had to fight to have it accepted. The ionic theory was yet another unaccepted theory for which both Ostwald and van't Heft' would extend their support. By the time Arrhenius returned from Amsterdam, Ostwald had moved to Leipzig, where he had be come professor of chemistry. It was there that Ostwald and Anhenius put together

Basic Information About Adult Education

Basic Information About Adult Education With so  many adults  returning to the classroom, the term adult education has taken on new meanings. Adult education, in the broadest sense, is any form of learning adults engage in beyond traditional schooling that ends in their 20s. In the narrowest sense, adult education is about literacy- adults learning to read the most basic materials. Thus, adult education encompasses everything from basic literacy to personal fulfillment as a lifelong learner and the attainment of advanced degrees. Andragogy and Pedagogy Andragogy is defined as the art and science of helping adults learn. Its distinguished from pedagogy,  the school-based education  traditionally used for children. Education for adults has a different focus, based on the fact that adults are: More self-directed and require less guidanceMature and bring more experience to the task of learningReady to learn and primed to learn what they need to knowMore oriented to learning that is problem-centered rather than subject-centeredMore internally motivated to learn Functional Literacy One of the primary goals of adult education is functional literacy. Organizations like the U.S. Department of Education and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) work tirelessly to measure, understand, and address adult illiteracy in the U.S. and around the world. Only through adult education can we address the real problems of society- like power sharing, wealth creation, gender and health issues. said Adama Ouane, director of the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning. The programs of the Division of Adult Education and Literacy (part of the U.S. Department of Education) focus on addressing basic skills such as reading, writing, math, English language competency, and problem-solving. The goal is for American adults get the basic skills they need to be productive workers, family members, and citizens. Adult Basic Education In the U.S., each state is responsible for addressing the basic education of their citizens. Official state websites direct people to classes, programs, and organizations designed to teach adults how to read prose, documents like maps and catalogs, and how to make simple computations. Getting a GED Adults who complete basic adult education have the opportunity to earn the equivalent of a high school diploma by taking the General Educational Development, or GED, test. The test, available to citizens who have not graduated from high school, gives them the chance to demonstrate the level of achievement normally achieved by completing a course of study in high school. GED prep resources abound online and in classrooms around the country, designed to help students prepare for the five-part exam. The GED comprehensive exams cover writing, science, social studies, math, arts and interpreting literature. Adult Education and Continuing Education Adult education is synonymous with continuing education. The world of lifelong learning is wide open and covers a variety of circumstances including: Going to college for the first time after age 25Returning to college to finish a degreeWorking toward a graduate degreeLearning a technical skillEarning CEUs for professional certificationTaking classes at your local community center for the sheer fun of it

Racial Discrimination in Policing Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 6250 words

Racial Discrimination in Policing - Case Study Example This project was conducted as a result of research done in the reading and reviewing of a great variety of racially motivated occurrences creating racial tensions and reactions to those tensions. This project focused its concentration upon the eruption of violence and the implications of racially motivated criminal actions. A specific incident which caused tensions to nearly roar occurred in Eltham, Kent when a young, eighteen year old Stephen Lawrence was murdered mere yards from his home by still unidentified white assailants. Perceptions within the public eye were such that racial discrimination was often spoken about by the witnesses, the family of the victim and others involved in the investigation. Though arrests were eventually made, no convictions were ever managed, the case remains open. After some deliberation and thought I chose to study racial discrimination in policing because I felt the consideration of public perception of racial discrimination in policing Eltham, Kent would be the most appropriate use of this information and an in-depth analysis of the processes and procedures in policing would facilitate understanding. Research was conducted to include true to life accounts of the entirety. This was the reason for seeking out governmental inquiries and files that would give accurate and even eye witness testimony of the events that occurred on 22 April 1993 in the brutal death of Stephen Lawrence. The methodology of this project was to develop the viewpoint of the various inquiries and police accounts along with the eyewitness accounts during and after the incident that erupted in the death of Stephen Lawrence more than a decade in the past. The impact of the work performed proves that one's perception of events rarely coincides with another's. There have been two inquiries into the events that transpired and resulted in the death of Stephen Lawrence in Waltham, Kent on 22 April 1993. Neither inquiry resulted in arrest and conviction of those responsible nor would those arrested at the time of the incident have been convicted, instead they were acquitted of the charges against them due to lack of evidence linking them to the crime. The inquiries were held to reveal the inadequacies of policing and the automatic perceptions of race implied or otherwise in the methods utilized while working to discover truth in the midst of mysterious occurrences. The evidence of these incidents would be documented several times in several testaments to the incident, including The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny as advised by Tom Cook, the Right Reverend Dr. John Sentamu, and Dr. Richard Stone in February 1999. A treatise titled Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics written by Norman Denni s, George Erdos, and Ahmed Al-Shahi from the Institute for the Study of Civil Society in London first published in September 2000. The Black Information Link of London also provided information in regards to Stephen Lawrence and the results of the official inquiries conducted. The annual reports of the metropolitan police in the United Kingdom would have been consulted, utilizing their annual

The Cost Allocation Process of Information Technology Essay

The Cost Allocation Process of Information Technology - Essay Example As more firms have adopted computer software over manual functioning. Similarly, computer networks also help the departments within a firm to coordinate and communicate among themselves. With all of these advancements come costs of setting up computer networks and other related costs. Allocation of I.T costs(charging the cost to each department according to its usage of a resource) is among current hot-topic in the corporate world. According to a study done by Forrester, Computer Hardware and Network costs make up to one-third of the I.T department budget. However, the main problem is of allocating costs among various departments within a firm. The most widely used method by accountants is to allocate these costs is by dividing these costs according to the consumption by the respective department. By relative consumption, we mean that each department will be charged a share of cost according to their use. For example, if there are two departments who both use I.T network, now when at the end of fiscal year, the time for cost allocation comes, the department with more usage will be charged more and with less usage will be charged less. The fundamental reason for charging this method is to avoid multiple free-riders problems. Free-riding occurs when those who do not pay for a resource could also use the resource, so no-one is foolish enough to put up his hand and say I will pay for the resource because he knows that even if he doesn't pay for the resource he would be able to use it. For example, let's take an example from out of context here. Suppose that there is a community of fishermen is living near the sea.