I Am a Survivor :: Law College Admissions Essays

I Am a Survivor    I grew up the youngest in a family of five. My mother and father divorced when I was a few months old. My mother struggled to take care of five young children on her own. Because her parents died when she was a little girl, she never considered giving us up for adoption or to relatives. My natural father never kept in touch with us. He never helped my mother care for us and so I never knew him and have no recollection of him.    My mother tried her best to ensure we had a good family life by marrying twice after her divorce from my natural father, but neither man in her life served as a role model for my three older brothers. My brothers suffered the most from the breakup of my parents' marriage and my father's abandonment of his parental duties. All three have ruined their lives through drug abuse and crime. My oldest brother lives from day to day without any hope and with the constant internal battle against a drug addiction, which he often loses. My second oldest brother has been in and out of state mental institutions for over fifteen years. He is forty-two years old and is schizophrenic. My third oldest brother is somewhere in New York City, and he doesn't want to be found. He calls my mother from time to time to let her know that he's alive.    I talk about my brothers first because even though they had problems growing up, they managed to protect and shelter me from their troubles. They made me believe in fairy tales and tried to shield me from the ugly reality of the world. It was because I lived a child's fairy tale life that I would later learn that fairy tales don't come true. I would learn to struggle, suffer, and survive.    When I was eighteen years old my mother moved away and left me in New York City with my friends to attend college. I guess my mother thought I would easily succeed and become the first college graduate in our family and I would easily learn to be responsible and independent. She must also have assumed that because I had never struggled for anything, I would be okay and I would doubtless succeed in becoming a lawyer. I Am a Survivor :: Law College Admissions Essays I Am a Survivor    I grew up the youngest in a family of five. My mother and father divorced when I was a few months old. My mother struggled to take care of five young children on her own. Because her parents died when she was a little girl, she never considered giving us up for adoption or to relatives. My natural father never kept in touch with us. He never helped my mother care for us and so I never knew him and have no recollection of him.    My mother tried her best to ensure we had a good family life by marrying twice after her divorce from my natural father, but neither man in her life served as a role model for my three older brothers. My brothers suffered the most from the breakup of my parents' marriage and my father's abandonment of his parental duties. All three have ruined their lives through drug abuse and crime. My oldest brother lives from day to day without any hope and with the constant internal battle against a drug addiction, which he often loses. My second oldest brother has been in and out of state mental institutions for over fifteen years. He is forty-two years old and is schizophrenic. My third oldest brother is somewhere in New York City, and he doesn't want to be found. He calls my mother from time to time to let her know that he's alive.    I talk about my brothers first because even though they had problems growing up, they managed to protect and shelter me from their troubles. They made me believe in fairy tales and tried to shield me from the ugly reality of the world. It was because I lived a child's fairy tale life that I would later learn that fairy tales don't come true. I would learn to struggle, suffer, and survive.    When I was eighteen years old my mother moved away and left me in New York City with my friends to attend college. I guess my mother thought I would easily succeed and become the first college graduate in our family and I would easily learn to be responsible and independent. She must also have assumed that because I had never struggled for anything, I would be okay and I would doubtless succeed in becoming a lawyer.

The Seven Phases of the Systems Development Life Cycle

COMPUTERIZED PAYROLL SYSTEM FOR TURNSHOP (A SUPERMARKET) PURPOSE AND PROBLEM(Initiation): Firstly the purpose of this system is to help Turnshop to solve it problem in the running of it accounting department which the whole company relies on it, so that they can have accurate, reliable and fast processing of their payroll system in the company.For now the payroll system of the company is process manually and since there are 2000 employees and more actives of the company it make it very hard and tedious to accomplish this task in the company, it also cause a high room for errors, overtime, resources and money and it will help the company a lot if they have a computerized payroll system (CPS). PlANNING The cost of the computerized payroll system (CPS) is about 50,000 Ghana cedis. since we will install a two new severs for them to handle most of most of their data, one of the sever will act as a recovery and the other works as the main.And also the cost will include a free demonstration and practical tutorial for the accounting staff in TURNSHOP as well with three (3) months training using the computerized payroll system (CPS). we will help during the period of transition. It will be a user friendly and easy to install and use. 1. Since the company already has some hardware requirements already this can be use for the computerized payroll system(CPS) ,so we only need to install the software on the computers and laptops in the company and link them to the sever.SAP solutions will be installed to provide the company-wide accessibility so that they can accelerate an accurate financial closing cycle at any level. This will provide the business management solutions through the financial record of the employees and the management of finance in the company such The Detailed Employee List contains all the pay, deduction, benefit, state, And local tax codes, and monthly, quarterly, and yearly totals for each Employee. The report also provides wage and withholding informati on.Print the Detailed Employee List to review all the employee records That is set up in Payroll. It will eliminate the manual payroll and transaction system in the company which is time consuming and also there is a bigger chance of having errors. FLOWCHART FOR THE EMPLOYEE PAYROLL SYSTEM REQUIREMENTANLAYSIS Beginning the payroll process for the company starts with obtaining the proper documentation from employees. The human-resources department and the accountant department will need to forward an internal form or a copy of the accepted-offer letter complete with the appropriate paperwork to us.Once this process is verified as finished, recording of employee information can begin and designing and deploying for the payroll period can start. Question will be also ask and it will be both open and close questions, to help us get the full understanding of how the payroll works in the company. For example What is salary package in the organization? How the salaried will be paid? How do they calculate the local tax codes, and monthly, quarterly, and yearly totals? And many more DESIGN STAGE OF THE SYSTEMIn the design the organization system will be targeting a hierarchy as follows: Company -> Cluster -> Business Unit (BU) -> Department -> Employee, The salary for an employee is made up of various salary components. Each salary component has 3 rules associated with it, a Calculation Rule (Calculate component as percentage of another component, or percentage of a fixed number or a fixed number), an Eligibility Rule (whether an Employee/Dept is eligible for a component) and a Constraint Rule which limits the maximum and minimum of a component. These rules are editable and can be edited by a user end user.Also these rules are inherited top-down, but if defined at a lower level, the lower level rule takes precedence. The database will contain Attendance, Leaves, Bonuses tables and these rules are also supposed to interact with each of the tables. The client will be gen erating payroll for multiple clients each hosting a Separate Database instance. They may each have a different interpretation of each component and may have different components. We are only looking to support SQL Server, and payroll generation will be an offline activity and also an online activity in some instant.It will work upon where to put the logic which uses these rules to generate the individual tax components (which will include Tax Deductions, Tax Write-offs, Allowances, etc). The system will take an employee Id and generate a payroll for that month. The order of our priorities is: 1. The ability to adapt changes to new clients quickly 2. Long term maintainability 3. Performance 1 and 2 outweigh 3 here by a large factor as this will be an offline activity. Maintainability and Quick Customizability are very important; we will be deploying the application for different clients.Client A may have a Salary Component Rule as ((0. 3 * Basic) + 800) and Client B as (0. 2 * Basic) + (0. 1 * Attendance Bonus) Also report on the payroll will be created in this stage. DEVELOPMENT STAGE After the System Design it leads to Development where the information system is built and programmed. Here we develop all the necessary ideas we got through the requirement stage and the design stage and send them a prototype so that they can try and gives us the feedback, also this phase where the bugs are worked out of the system. A contingency plan is also developed at this point.A contingency plan is an emergency management document. If the power goes out – what happens to the system? What is the back up? How fast can it be brought back up to speed? INTEGRATION AND TESTING STAGE This is the formal integration and testing of the system. Testing has been done on the development phase, but in the Integration and Testing Phase it is a formal, documented testing procedure, not only to assure that the system performs as designed, but testing the roll-out of the system. If th ere is already another system in place with data, how fast can that data be migrated into the new system and useable to the company?Usually, the system is rolled-out over a weekend so that if anything goes wrong, the old system is still active and available. Integration and Testing is vital for the decision to go with the new system, trusted to the system. Also In this stage the functionality of the individual sub systems in the payroll are tested to ensure proper operation. After successful testing of each subsystem the entire system of the payroll is tested to ensure all subsystems work together properly and so that an employees can check every information on his or her payroll.

Television: the Undiscovered Drug

Television has brain-washed the majority of our youth. The first thing I hear as I get home are TV mumbles. I open the door and to no surprise there is my younger brother in full motion on the coach, hand in remote, flipping through channels. My brother could not be any more of a coach potato. He watches TV all day and night. I refer to him as the human TV guide. So much endless television can dull our minds, take away time from completing important activities, and has exposed us to a world of violence. First off, Television has dulled the mind of our youth easily.Youths today are used to having their information passed to them on a silver platter. Not as many teens like to read anymore because it involves too much work. My brother hates to read, not only because there are words involved in that activity, but also because it is now impossible for him to visualize the world presented within the book. It is also impossible for him to focus on a book because of the short attention span he has developed, and reading books just takes too much time for him. Television presents the world to him, a different world every thirty minutes, which holds his attention. Similar article: Teenagers’ Leisure TimeThis now leaves him no mental work to do, except to decide which channel he would like to watch. Because watching television requires no mental work, the brains of the adolescents that watch television are not stimulated enough. This may lead to a slower learning process, which would then explain my brother’s inability to memorize the multiplication table. Second, Television consumes time youths should be dedicating to more important and more essential things in their lives. Television takes away time that should be devoted to homework.When my brother gets home from school, he will immediately flip the television on, leaving his homework for later. When he finally decides to do his homework, the television will remain on, and he will sit on the couch with his books propped up in front of him, giving it only half of his attention. Homework takes longer to complete, and it probably will not be his best work since only half of his co ncentration was focused on it. Television also takes time away from quality family time. Most adolescents do not have a strong family connection.Families whose only time together is at the dinner table will waste precious quality time with their heads turned towards the television. The youth of today lose the strong morals and values they can get when spending time with their family. Television can even take away time from friends. When I spend time with my friends, I like to talk with them or go out. When my brother spends time with his friends, they spend the whole day watching the television. Their conversation revolves around what they are watching on the television. Most teens have the majority of their day devoted to the television. Lastly,Television has exposed a world of violence towards our youth causing them to be apathetic towards situations. Many television shows make at least one of the three aspects, violence, drugs, and sexual immorality, a normalcy. Adolescents of to day model their behavior after characters who live in world of violence, and they do not realize that what they are doing is wrong because to our youth, whatever they see and hear on television is right. For example, my brother has become a lot less sensitive towards all his friends at school. He thinks its okay to laugh if somebody gets hurt accidentally even if it could be serious.Or abruptly scream nonsense! He also believes its okay to manipulate people as long as he gets his way. Violence on television is glamorised and styled, and watching it does not hurt. So maybe this contributes to my brothers way of thinking their is no consequences. It is pretty short sided to blame everything on television because my brother should know what is â€Å"right† and what is â€Å"not† but how can he be really sure when television glorifies all sorts of violence? In Conclusion, When television was first invented, its purpose was to bring the family together and perhaps present a way in which we could receive information faster.In modern times, the television has managed to affect our youth in various ways we would not have imagined. The family gathering concept has disappeared. We have accomplished a faster way to transmit information, but it was a little too much information a little too fast for the wrong audience. I suppose my brother chooses to react this way because he is already too accustomed to being a coach potato. Television has taken over our way of life and we must stop the effects it has had on our youths and our society before it is too late.

Overview of Systemic Functional Linguistics

Overview of Systemic Functional Linguistics Systemic functional linguistics is the  study of the relationship between language and its functions in social settings. Also known as  SFL, systemic functional grammar, Hallidayan linguistics, and systemic linguistics. Three strata make up the linguistic system in SFL: meaning (semantics), sound (phonology), and wording or lexicogrammar (syntax, morphology, and lexis). Systemic functional linguistics treats grammar as a meaning-making resource and insists on the interrelation of form and meaning. This study was developed in the 1960s by British  linguist  M.A.K. Halliday (b. 1925), who had been influenced by the work of the Prague School and British linguist J.R. Firth (1890-1960). Examples and Observations SL [systemic linguistics] is an avowedly functionalist approach to language, and it is arguably the functionalist approach which has been most highly developed. In contrast to most other approaches, SL explicitly attempts to combine purely structural information with overtly social factors in a single integrated description. Like other functionalist frameworks, SL is deeply concerned with the purposes of language use. Systemicists constantly ask the following questions: What is this writer (or speaker) trying to do? What linguistic devices are available to help them do it, and on what basis do they make their choices?(Robert Lawrence Trask and Peter Stockwell, Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts. Routledge, 2007)that language use is functionalthat its function is to make meaningsthat these meanings are influenced by the social and cultural context in which they are exchangedthat the process of using language is a semiotic process, a process of making meaning by choosing.Four M ain ClaimsWhile individual scholars naturally have different research emphases or application contexts, common to all systemic linguists is an interest in language as social semiotic (Halliday 1978)how people use language with each other in accomplishing everyday social life. This interest leads systemic linguists to advance four main theoretical claims about language:These four points, that language use is functional, semantic, contextual and semiotic, can be summarized by describing the systemic approach as a functional-semantic approach to language.(Suzanne Eggins, An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics, 2nd ed. Continuum, 2005) Three Kinds of Social-Functional NeedsAccording to Halliday (1975), language has developed in response to three kinds of social-functional needs. The first is to be able to construe experience in terms of what is going on around us and inside us. The second is to interact with the social world by negotiating social roles and attitudes. The third and final need is to be able to create messages with which we can package our meanings in terms of what is New or Given, and in terms of what the starting point for our message is, commonly referred to as the Theme. Halliday (1978) calls these language functions metafunctions and refers to them as ideational, interpersonal and textual respectively.Hallidays point is that any piece of language calls into play all three metafunctions simultaneously.(Peter Muntigl and Eija Ventola, Grammar: A Neglected Resource in Interaction Analysis? New Adventures in Language and Interaction, ed. by Jà ¼rgen Streeck. John Benjamins, 2010)Choice as a Basic Sy stemic Functional ConceptIn Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) the notion of choice is fundamental. Paradigmatic relations are regarded as primary, and this is captured descriptively by organizing the basic components of the grammar in interrelated systems of features representing the meaning potential of a language. A language is viewed as a system of systems, and the linguists task is to specify the choices involved in the process of instantiating this meaning potential in actual texts through the resources available for expression in the language. Syntagmatic relations are viewed as derived from systems by means of realization statements, which for each feature specify the formal and structural consequences of selecting that particular feature. The term choice is typically used for features and their selection, and systems are said to display choice relations. Choice relations are posited not only at the level of individual categories such as definiteness, tense and number but also at higher levels of text planning (as in, e.g., the grammar of speech functions). Halliday often stresses the importance of the notion of choice: By text . . . we understand a continuous process of semantic choice. Text is meaning and meaning is choice (Halliday, 1978b:137).(Carl Bache, Grammatical Choice and Communicative Motivation: A Radical Systemic Approach. Systemic Functional Linguistics: Exploring Choice, ed. by Lise Fontaine, Tom Bartlett, and Gerard OGrady. Cambridge University Press, 2013)

The Pharaohs Double Crown of Egypt

The Pharaoh's Double Crown of Egypt Ancient Egyptian pharaohs are usually depicted wearing a crown or a head-cloth. The most important of these was the double crown, which symbolizes the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt and was worn by pharaohs starting with the First Dynasty around the year 3000 BCE. Its ancient Egyptian name is the pschent. The double crown was an amalgamation of the white crown (Ancient Egyptian name hedjet) of Upper Egypt and the red crown (Ancient Egyptian name deshret) of Lower Egypt. Another name for it is shmty, meaning the two powerful ones, or sekhemti. The crowns are seen only in artwork and no specimen of one has been preserved and discovered.  In addition to the  pharaohs, the gods Horus and Atum are depicted wearing the double crown. These are gods that are closely allied with the pharaohs. Symbols of the Double Crown The combination of the two crowns into one represented the rule of the pharaoh over his united kingdom. The red deshret  of Lower Egypt is the outer portion of the crown with cutouts around the ears. It has a curled projection in front that represents the proboscis of a honeybee, and a spire in the back  and an extension down the back of the neck. The name deshret  is also applied to the honeybee. The red color represents the fertile land of the Nile delta. It was believed to have been giving by Get to Horus, and the pharaohs were the successors of Horus. The white crown is the interior crown, which was more conical or bowling pin shaped, with cutouts for the ears. It may have been assimilated from the Nubian rulers before being worn by rulers of Upper Egypt. Animal representations were fastened to the front of the crowns, with a cobra in attack position for Lower Egyptian goddess Wadjet and a vulture head for the goddess Nekhbet of Upper Egypt. It isnt known what the crowns were made of, they could have been made of cloth, leather, reeds, or even metal.  Because no crowns have been found in burial tombs, even in those that were undisturbed, some historians speculate they were passed from pharaoh to Pharaoh. History of the Double Crown of Egypt Upper and Lower Egypt were united around the year 3150 BCE with some historians naming Menes as the first pharaoh and crediting him for inventing the pschent. But the double crown was first seen on a Horus of the pharaoh  Djet  of the First Dynasty, around 2980 BCE. The double crown is found in the Pyramid Texts. Nearly every pharaoh from 2700 through 750 BCE was depicted wearing the pschent in hieroglyphs preserved in tombs. The Rosetta Stone and the king list on the Palermo stone are other sources showing the double crown associated with pharaohs. Statues of Senusret II and Amenhotep  III are among many showing the double crown. The Ptolemy rulers wore the double crown when they were in Egypt but when they left the country they wore a diadem instead.

Religious Service Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Religious Service - Term Paper Example A case of observation is the name. For Christians, the place of worship is called a church, for Islam a mosque, while for the Buddhist, a temple. It is also evident that the religions have unique symbolic cultures that differentiate them from one another as I observed with Islam when I once attended a religious service. This paper will describe the material and non- material culture of the mosque, a place of a warship by Muslims. Mosque A mosque is a place of worship for the Muslim faithful. It is evident from my observation of Muslim congregation and the mosque building that the design and building materials used in the construction of the place of worship mostly depends on heritage, culture and the resources in the community that hosts the mosque. However, it is noticeable that there are certain architectural features common to all mosques. For instance, the mosque’s parts are practical and show a sense of tradition and continuity among all the Muslims across the globe (Penn ey 10). Common architectural features include a minaret which is a slender tower rising at the top of a mosque (Penney 12). The minaret usually varies in height, number, and style. It may be square, octagonal, or round in shape and are in most cases covered with a pointed roof as noted by Penney (12). In the case of the mosque I attended, I was able to observe that it had a tall, slender and round-shaped minaret (Penney 14). On the minaret, there is a loudspeaker used to sermon people to prayers commonly called adhan (Hephaestus Books 14). The mosque is divided into two sections in which, men and women attend the service in different rooms. However, the services are conducted with the leadership of an Imam who is stationed on men’s side. The dress code is usually a veil gown mostly white in color for men and black for women. Every member of the congregation is required to remove the shoes before entering the mosque and put on the shoe shelf. This is mainly to preserve the cle anliness of the mosque and a sign of humility to God. The shelf is placed near the door to prevent pilling of shoes at the door.

Risk Management Issues Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Risk Management Issues - Essay Example 54, 2009). One decision that appears from this scrutiny is the quantity of resources that the organization should have to provide cushion for potential failures that can take place during the way of its trading actions. In view of the fact that trading revenue is doubtful, despite the fact that, a significant risk management activity concentrates on the risk extent crisis - calculating how huge potential failures could be. Corresponding activities entail the examining as well as enforcement of risk-related trading restrictions, by this means helping the risk amended performance assessment of individual trading bureaus (Chapman & Ward, p. 42, 2003). These two phases of the risk management function turn the resources distribution decision into an optimisation issue: very small sum puts the firm in front of extreme levels of risk, although excessively huge sum increases financing expenditures as well as lessens productivity. The point of complexity with which the risk management role is carried out has progressed considerably during current years. Evidently, there are still significant issues whose answers would improve the task’s usefulness all the more. These issues come under three groups: (1) risk management functions, (2) risk forms, and (3) risk measurement execution concerns (Abkowitz, p. 76, 2008). The risk management issues put huge stress on attempting to get the â€Å"probability distribution† for the income of the entire company. Risk managers are particularly â€Å"interested in the extreme left-hand tail of this distribution as a predictor of the largest ex post loss that the firm could experience† (Olson & Wu, p. 65, 2007). After that, to offer assurance of firm-wide solvency, the organization would have resources more than that quantity. Then again, this whole quantity of resources should as well be distributed between the individual trading bureaus so that their job can be assessed on a risk-amended base. As a result of unsati sfactory correlations with bureaus’ revenue flows, the level of possible failures for the entire organization is not more than its total for the individual trading companies, forming the following procedural problem: if risk managers assess the company’s resources satisfactoriness condition initially and after that disaggregate the outcome for distribution to individual companies, they are susceptible to reserve misallocations between bureaus (Khan & Zsidisin, p. 89, 2011). The substitute of calculating capital prerequisites on the individual company level primarily and after that combining the outcomes with the help of a set of approximate correlations, alternatively, is prone to the possibility of overcapitalising the company altogether. Despite the fact that a lot of companies acknowledge the contradiction of depending on both approaches, the most excellent existing practice in the derived business supports the â€Å"bottom-up approach† (Smith & Merritt, p. 7 9, 2002), to a certain extent due to a custom of calculating the different sorts of risk (such as credit, marketplace, functioning) autonomously as well as being acquainted with the different comparative significance of these risk forms amid companies. The expansion of a incorporated tactic which conserved this point of specialisation devoid of giving up exactness on the universal level would be a considerable step ahead. Authoritarian organizations force funds prerequisites on