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There is much debate as to the likelihood that there is intelligent life, or even life at all, on planets other than earth. Some scientists believe that some planets and moons in our solar system are capable of supporting life, or have been in the past, notably Mars and one of Jupiter's moons, Europa. Life is thought to require carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, and water. Earth, being the third planet from the sun, is just at the right temperature for liquid water to exist and is massive enough to trap a thick atmosphere, which protects it from comets, meteors, and ultraviolet and cosmic radiation, all of which are damaging to life. Are there ot

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Introduction One of the most significant lessons learned about Asian American perspectives of the American Dream comes from previous study that enables me to connect the Asian experience to those of Native Americans, African Americans and Hispanics. More like Hispanics and less like Native or African Americans, Asian American struggles for identity and achievement appear to be most hampered by struggles within Asian culture rather than external forces. While prejudice and discrimination against Asian Americans exist, it is the hopes of the older generation that seems to most haunt and confine the identity and dreams of a younger generation. However, the hopes of an older generation serve as both restraint and inspiration for many Asian Americans like Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Wayne Wang, Genny Lim, and Frances Chung. This analysis will use the works of these Asian Americans to demonstrate this lesson and others learned from study of the Asian American experie

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In Sylvia Plath's stark poem, "Childless Woman," she describes the feelings that assail her with respect to her infertility. While infertility is regarded by many affected women as a loss and a focus of grief, in Plath's case the inability to have children makes her feel useless, as though she were not fulfilling her real life's purpose, and the lack of children obliterates her future, making her life merely a push toward death. From the very first lines of the poem, Plath depicts her childlessness as a dysfunction that leaves her useless and unable to fulfill her true purpose in life. "The womb rattles its pod" suggests the image of a dead plant pod full of dried-up seeds-Plath's eggs that will never become children (Plath 259). The rattling places an emphasis on the fact that the womb's deadness and emptiness is creating psychic "noise" in her being, a jangling sound that reminds her that the seeds are dead. "The moon discharges itself from the tree with nowhe

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When Mikhail Gorbachev stepped up to party leadership in 1985 in the Soviet Union, he brought with him a three-pronged policy for getting the country back on its feet. This policy involved perestroika (economic restructuring), glasnost (openness), and "new thinking" (Wallander, 2002, p. 117). The economic restructuring consisted of a series of reforms that were intended to improve

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Logical thinking is often held up as the highest form of thought, largely because it is systematic and makes sense. However, logical thinking is not always the best approach for every decision-making problem. When a problem is new and has never been solved before, or when a better solution than the logical one is needed, creative thinking is the optimum approach. Logical thinking is useful when the best answer can be obtained by stepping through the thought process using logic, but logic tends to be stifling to innovation. If what a company needs is an innovative new product, it does not need logic; it needs creativity. The logical mind thinks in terms of known parameters and then limits itself by fears of not being able to solve the problem or wo

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Of the technologies available to improve learning in Category 1, I think those that will help me do it best include sharing content audio through social bookmarking, podcasts, and YouTube; sharing text through IMs, chat, blogs, and wikis; sharing audio/video through vlogs and Skype; and multimedia through Flickr. Social bookmarking is especially helpful for sharing where information can be found, while podcasts can be audio lectures similar to what I would hear in an ordinary classroom. YouTube is excellent for explaining and demonstrating concepts that are difficult to pick up just from reading about them. What might take several pages to explain in a textbook can be demonstrated on YouTube in a couple of minutes, and the addition of the visual aspect makes it easier to understand and put into practice myself. IMs and c

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Jesus Christ was born into a conventional Jewish family positioned firmly within then-contemporary Jewish religion, tradition and society (Borg, 1994). Living under the Roman conquerors in Palestine some 2,000 years ago, Jesus was variously regarded by Jews and Romans as a radical teacher or "rabbi," a possible Messiah, a political activist, and a threat to the Jewish hierarchy (Fisher, 1999). Judaism had a long established expectation that a messiah or savior would come to liberate them. In a brief three year public ministry, Jesus drew many devoted followers to him and the gospels that he preached. As noted by Fisher (1999), however, Jesus never declared that he had come to form a new religion although he did identify himself as the Son of God and of m

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Integral to Judaism is the great compendium of Jewish law and lore called the Talmud. As noted by Fisher (1999), the Jewish sense of history begins with the stories recounted in the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, starting with the creation of the world by God and progressing through the lives of the patriarchs and Moses as well as later prophets and kings. Jewish history does not end with the final book of Tanakh, b

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There are few issues in American society that have engendered more debate and confusion than the separation of church and state. People on both sides of the issue tend to regard this separation as a First Amendment right, yet it is found nowhere in the First Amendment. It is often hailed as being in the Federalist Papers, but it is not there either, nor does it appear in the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. The words "separation of church and state" do not appear in our laws or in any official government documents, yet the idea of separating church and state originated with one of our nation's founders, Thomas Jefferson, and was championed by the Baptist Church. This paper will discuss the original meaning of the concept as the Danbury Baptists and Thomas Jefferson envisioned it, and today's reconceptualization of it as upheld by modern progressive Baptists, showing how the concept has evolved through the nation's history and through Baptist ideology to

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Introduction The application of the concept of supply management in the Canadian egg industry is discussed in this essay. The principal objective of the essay is to describe the functioning of the industry from the perspective of market economics. Within this context, issues associated with supply, demand, and pricing are addressed in the essay. The Functioning of the Canadian Egg Industry in the Supply Management Framework The term supply management is used in many contexts. With respect to the Canadian economy, the term supply management refers to a legislated structure wherein federal product/industry-specific agencies and provincial product/industry-specific marketing board manage the production and marketing of specified agricultural products (Canad

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One of the most interesting trends in today's culture is tattooing. Tattooing is an ancient art form that was prevalent as long ago as 7300 B.C. in Europe, where it was practiced regularly (Maloney). Today, people get tattoos for a variety of reasons from gender enhancement to identification with groups, gangs, or ideologies (Maloney). Moreover, because "The body is a vessel which contains the essence of self and expresses it," tattooing becomes "one of the most intimate, personal and profoundly serious forms of esthetic expression practiced" (Maloney). Unlike clothing, which can readily be put on, taken off, and changed with passing moods, tattoos are for all intents and purposes a permanent modification to one's body that must weather future whims of fashion. In modern America, tattoos were most common, prior to the current rage, in the context of the military-particularly the Navy. Maloney cites Webb's Tattootime 1988 article #3, explaining that, "When you had gone 5,000 miles at sea, you got a bluebird on your chest, When you'd gone 10,000, you got the second bird on the other side. When you made your second crui

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America is a land of speed and convenience. We microwave our food, frequent fast food drive-thrus, and communicate via instant messaging and cell phone text messages. We are perpetually in a hurry, so fast food restaurants and "fast" food that we can pop from the freezer into the microwave at home are highly appealing. Busy parents juggling work and home are grateful for shortcuts that can save them time, and workers expected to stay at their desks all day make use of fast food snacks and meals from vending machines to comply with strict rules. Even elementary, middle school, and high school students get fast food at school. Their cafeterias give them hot dogs, hamburgers, and French fries, among other nutritionally imbalanced or nutritionally empty foods, and the vending machines are stocked with sodas and candy. We have become a nation of fast food eaters, and that food is killing all of us. The effects on our health as a nation have been deleterious. Not on

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Music has played a pivotal role in the influence and constant development of fashion throughout America's musical history. Both music and fashion are art forms, and like other art forms they are an expression of the individual's inner self. Music can be soulful, bright and happy, or slow and sensuous. Because it has lyrics, it can also tell a story, be argumentative, or persuade the listener to adopt a cause. Anything that can be expressed in ordinary speech can be expressed more vividly and effectively in music, because the words are enhanced by the rhythm and the beat. Likewise, fashion tells the story that can be told by any visual object. The old adage "A picture can take the place of a thousand words" is emphatically true; in fact, a thousand words cannot possibly ever replace a picture, because the reader must read those thousand words, thus diminishing the impact. The sight of a visual object communicates an idea clearly and immediately without the message having t

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Pretrial drug testing programs were described by Neubauer (2004, p. 240) as based on several assumptions: "First, knowledge of a defendant's drug use at the time of arrest - provides an important predictor of pretrial misconduct. Second, monitoring drug use during the pretrial periods, coupled with sanctions, will reduce the risk of pretrial misconduct." This is a widely used strategy but there is evidence, said Neubauer (2004), that requiring defendants to participate in drug testing does not necessarily reduce failure to appear rates. Drug use is very common among many arrestees and pretrial misconduct is a relatively rare event. Neubauer (2004) also stated that pretrial drug testing programs have not been found able to predict which defendants will be arrested while out on bail although when drug testing is used as one component of coordinated earlier interventions for adult offenders, it does have some success. Therefore, it should be maintained. DeJong and Wish (2000) examined the advisability of using urine tests to assess the risk of rearrest among accused individ

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Question 1. Major League Baseball (MLB) shares with the National Hockey League (NHL) the lack of a salary cap which introduces a wide disparity in the financial value of teams ("CBA: The MLB Model" 1). This lack of a salary cap has created an outdated economic structure which has reached what some analysts call "an unacceptable level of revenue disparity and completive imbalance" which creates a growing gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" clubs ("CBA: The MLB Model" 1). The MLB Players' Association has resisted a salary cap for years and it was this issue that prompted the 1994 players' strike that wiped out the World Series and lasted for 232 days. Although the owners have at various times attempted to introduce a salary cap, the best that could be done according to Bloom (1), was a five year deal running from 2006 to 2011 which included adjusted formulas for revenue sharing, a higher threshold for the competitive balance tax, a revamped draft for amateur players, and cha

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"The sunset of mankind?" Well, H.G. Wells was a science fiction writer. Women certainly saw no such ebbing. After all, was not the British Empire ruled for generations by a woman- Victoria? But, no longer would women take a backseat, so toi speak, in Britain or in the New World. Female authors wrote best0sellers, but the remarkable achievement that turned around the thought of women as The Second Sex were the radi

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According to an essay published online on the CIA World Factbook, European power struggles immersed Germany in two World Wars in the first half of the 20th century. Following the Second World War, Germany was occupied in 1945 by the victorious Allied powers of the US, UK, France controlled part of Germany which came to be known as West Germany, and the Soviet Union controlled an area that came to be known as East Germany. Two German states were formed in 1949. These were the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and

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In Congreve's The Way of the World, one of the salient themes is the competition between male and female. This competition is evidenced in a variety of ways, but most notably in terms of power, property, and social mores. In the play, Fainall aspires to a life of power, but it is not political power that he achieves; as Braverman (139) points out, "In the character of Fainall, this whole economy of power is debased and parodied...Fainall has no court, no audience." By contrast, Lady Wishfort is far more powerful by virtue of her control over a considerable property-Millamant's dowry.

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Ideology and reality concerning the lives of women in ancient Athens are not identical. It is traditionally asserted that ancient Athenian women had extremely low status, "relegated to the ranks of slaves and children," and "scholars suggest that they were even much worse off than the women of earlier and later periods of Greek history" (Cohen 3). However, primary and secondary sources fail to agree entirely on this assertion, and some of this perspective is due to unfounded assumption rather than to verifiable fact. One reason that Athenian women were thought to suffer from low status was that they were confined to their homes (Cohen 3). This circumstance was regarded as a reflection that women were thus excluded from "social, public, and economic life" (Cohen 3). This is largely an unfounded assumption, however. Although women did not function as men did in the public and political spheres, Cohen (3) points out that "it does not necessarily follow that they d

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Postmodernism is a movement in philosophy that posits a worldview which reflects the contention that truth is not something that exists and can be located but rather it is something that is constructed by society and culture. In this sense, truth is culturally-relative and cannot be applied from one culture to the other or is merely an effort to foist the "truth" of one culture onto another. Postmodernism arose in the 1970s primarily as a reaction to former views of culture and truth that were popular with sociologists of the preceding generation. Structural and functional theories of society were predominant during this period. As Peterson and Anand (2004) explain, "The former asserted that those who controlled the means of producing wealth shaped culture to fit their own class interests; the latter believed that a set of monolithic abstract values determined the shape of social structure" (p. 312). Postmodernists did not view the structure of society in this manner.

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The culture of an organization is significant to its members. Organizational culture, also known as corporate culture, is a "system of shared actions, values, and beliefs that develops within an organization and guides the behavior of its members" (Schermerhorn, Hunt and Osborn, 2008, p. 2). Organizational culture primarily serves two chief functions: external adaptation and internal integration (Schermerhorn et al. 2009). Many definitions of organizational culture refer to these two roles or purposes of corporate culture. Edgar Schein (2005) defines organization culture as "a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learns as it solves its problems of external adaptation and internal integration" (p. 1). The main goal of developing a corporate culture is to create a culture whose values and other elements are aligned with organizational goals. In today's increasing diverse global marketplace and workforce, diversity is extremely important to organizational culture. Organizational cultures that fail to embrace diversity in order to l

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Roger Smith (12-13), in a text titled Prison Conditions: Overcrowding, Disease, Violence and Abuse, makes the case that the use of determinate sentences and the so-called "three strikes" approach to life-long incarceration for repeat offenders has created a situation in which many of Americas prisons are extremely overcrowded, increasingly violent, and generally unable to rehabilitate most inmates. Indeed, while many courts have attempted to set ceilings on the number of inmates that can be held in a prison facility or parts of such facilities, the reality is that as more inmates are sentenced to prison terms, these facilitates have been forced to expand capacity without necessarily increasing space (Coles and Adams, 29). The research hypothesis to be examined in this study is stated as: Privatization of prison management is being embraced as a response to prison overcrowding in many jurisdictions. Determinate sentencing is certainly one of the reasons why prisons in America a

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Mark Richtel's "Driven to Distraction: At 60 M.P.H. Office Work is High Risk" describes the increasing tendency of motorists to use distracting devices like cell phones and laptop computers while driving. In a highly competitive and "seconds-count economy," employees routinely drive while using cell phones and laptops, a form of multitasking that has turned automobiles into

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Students across the country learn about Frederick Douglass, a former slave whose harrowing life story is told in his eponymous memoir. But beyond learning about the bravery required to escape from the shackles of a Maryland plantation, few understand his influence in the shaping of early African-American culture. This paper will explain how Douglass was instrumental in forging this ethos by his outspokenness against injustice, his concern for socioeconomic equality and his cooperation with sympathetic white leaders. Douglass' story of escaping bondage to a life of advocacy for his suffering peers makes him one of America's most visible examples of the difficulties of antebellum life for blacks. Douglas was started as a slave in Baltimore, where the wife of his owner taught him to read. He continued teaching himself by reading newspapers. But he was eventually sold into harsher conditions under an overseer named Austin Gore, who once shot a slave friend for running away from a

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The character of Steve Lopez is a complex one. He initially is drawn toe Nathaniel Ayers because of his musical genius and because he smells a good newspaper story in the Skid Row homeless man playing Beethoven. Yet Lopez seems to be unfulfilled and lacking purpose in his life. He worries about his ethics in befriending the subject of one of his stories, thinking it will undermine his objectivity. He also thinks he may be exploiting Ayers' condition by writing about his personal life. As his friendship with Ayers deepens, Lopez begins to generate greater insight and understanding into himself and his own life. He recognizes one of the only things he might be able to do for Ayers is to just simply be his friend. He comes to learn that having a friend means you accept that person for who they are, good and bad. As Lopez tells us of this personal revelation, "I've learned to accept him as he is, to expect constant backsliding, to prepare for the possibility that he could b

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