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In the Name of Identity Summary Essay - 750 Words

In Amin Maalouf’s book â€Å"In the Name of Identity† Maalouf emphasizes that we should not judge people on one singular identity. He argues that, â€Å"Identity can’t be compartmentalized. You can’t divide it up into halves or thirds or any other separate segments. I haven’t got several identities: I’ve got just one, made up of many components in mixture that is unique to me, just as other people’s identity is unique to them as individuals.† The essence of Maalouf’s argument is that one should not define another based solely on a singular component of their identity but rather their identity as a whole. In chapter one, Maalouf suggest that, â€Å"†¦ People commit crime nowadays in the name of religious, ethnic, national, or some other kind of†¦show more content†¦Rather the opposite: I scour my memory to find as many ingredients of my identity as I can.† Throughout chapter two Maalouf goes into grea t detail about what defines him. He clearly states that it is not one component, for instance coming from an Arab background and being a Christian. He does not deny himself of either identity, but instead embraces them both. Maalouf claims that the more allegiances one has the rarer one’s identity is. He clearly states, â€Å"Every one of my allegiance links me to a large number of people, But the more ties I have the rarer and more particular my own identity becomes.† Towards the end of chapter two he claimes society generalizes and puts individual components of ones identity and judges them based solely on that single component. Maalouf complicates matters further when he writes, â€Å"We blithely express sweeping judgments on a whole peoples, calling them â€Å"hardworking† and â€Å"ingenious,† or â€Å"lazy,† â€Å"touchy,† â€Å"sly,† â€Å"proud,† or â€Å"obstinate.† He claims that these judgments often lead to bloodshed. In chapter three maalouf states, â€Å"Identity isn’t given once and for all: it is build up and changes throughout a person’s lifetime.† The essence of Maalouf’s argument is our identity changes over time and different components are added everyday, changing our identity as a whole. He gives a great example of an African baby born in New York, compared to if it was born in Lagos,Show MoreRelatedHouseboy: Novel Essay969 Words   |  4 Pagessuffered unspeakable atrocities in the hands of European powers. One of the many crimes perpetrated was the loss of identity for many nations and cultures. This was a systematic manipulation to divide and conquer people by assimilation and manipulation. Ferdinand Oyonos Houseboy, told in the form of young Toundis diary in the time of French colonization of Cameroon, explores this mis-identity within the cruel system of colonization. Although being a coming-of-age novel, Oyono sharply criticizes the ironies Read MoreShould The Washington Redskins Be Allowed? Keep Their Mascot Name?874 Words   |  4 Pagestheir mascot name? Introduction: Over time the controversy on the Redskins name in the National Football League has been debated. Recently, the argument has been revamped with even congress stepping into the debate about the historic name. The topic does not just affect the Redskins though but the 2,129 other teams with a mascot with Native American association. People have been taking both sides and some believe it’s racist, while others argue the legacy and history tied with the name. Others evenRead MoreAnalysis Of The Handmaids Tale Reading Log1232 Words   |  5 PagesReading Log The Handmaid’s Tale Night Summary: The protagonist used the view of the first person to describe her situation in a dystopian society which full of restrictions. Although life is hard and they have no freedom in that unknown world, they still have expectations to the life. They yearn for it and find hope from struggling. In this place, women who have the ability to conceive will be gathered in the special place called the Republic of Gilled, and they will be distributed to differentRead MoreIdentity Theft Is An Important Factor1131 Words   |  5 Pages Identity theft is the deliberate use of someone else s identity, usually as a method to gain a financial advantage or obtain credit and other benefits in the other person s name, and perhaps to the other person s disadvantage or loss. The person whose identity has been assumed may suffer adverse consequences if they are held responsible for the perpetrator s actions. Identity theft occurs when someone uses another s personally identifying information, like their name, identifying numberRead MorePulp and Paper Industry950 Words   |  4 PagesMichael Porter’s â€Å"Five Forces† Model Summary and interpretation by Prof. Tony Lima February 25, 2006 Figure 1: Porter’s Five Forces From Michael Porter, Competitive Advantage, Simon Schuster, New York, 1985, p. 5 Prof. Michael Porter teaches at the Harvard Business School. He has identified five forces that determine the state of competitiveness in a market. The forces also influence the profitability of firms already in the industry. These five forces are summarized in the above diagramRead MoreEthics Protocol1635 Words   |  7 Pages[pic] Summary Protocol Form (SPF) University Human Research Ethics Committee [pic]Office of Research – Ethics and Compliance Unit: GM 1000 – 514.848.2424 ex. 2425 Important Approval of a Summary Protocol Form (SPF) must be issued by the applicable Human Research Ethics Committee prior to beginning any research involving human participants. The University Human Research Ethics Committee (UHREC) reviews all Faculty and Staff research, as well as some student research (in cases where theRead MoreExperiment 2a Adsorption Chromatography ( Tlc )1455 Words   |  6 PagesNAME: ____Amy Hua_______________________ Experiment 4a Adsorption Chromatography (TLC) Summary of Points for Experiment 4a: Item Possible Points Actual Points Pre-Lab 2 Notebook: N/A N/A Purpose/Table of Reagents 2 Corrections 2 Blank Spaces 2 Signatures 2 TLC data (4-in notebook) 8 Coherent 2 Conclusions (absent here) 1 Sub-Total = 21 multiply Sub-Total x 2= 42 Report: N/A N/A Introduction 2 Data and Calculations 8 Less Points-Missing Data N/A N/A Unknown Identity 10 Read MoreQuestions On Identity Theft And Theft894 Words   |  4 Pagesthis project is identity theft. What is identity theft? How do I find out if anyone is spying on me or has stolen my information? What should be the next steps after finding out that you’re the victim? How do I report a fraud activity from my credit report? How can I prevent identity theft? 2) How is the topic important to you and how does it affect you? What do you personally hope to gain or accomplish by writing about this topic? My topic is identity theft. I’ve been a identity theft victim beforeRead MoreGattaca (Summary and Analysis) Essay1623 Words   |  7 PagesGattaca A Film by Andrew Niccol Summary and Analysis Summary Exactly five seconds after he came into the world, Vincent Freeman was already considered to be a looser. His first genetic test revealed high probabilities of hyperactivity, sight troubles and serious heart diseases, a life expectancy of 30 years and 2 months and quite low intellectual faculties. At that time, the artificial insemination of test tube babies selected according to their genetic potential had become for many peopleRead MoreWilliam Wilde s The Importance Of Being Earnest Essay820 Words   |  4 Pagesknow Algernon is from the upper classes. People think self-gratification can be a powerful tool against the Victorian values of duty/virtue (Summary and Analysis Act I: Part 1). Whenever they talk about food, they refer to lust. They will never talk about it in polite society. â€Å"Society never cares about substance but instead reveres style and triviality (Summary and Analysis Act I: Part 1). Wilde is saying Victorian’s society they don’t know the difference between trivial subjects and affairs of life

Impact of Eve Teasing in the Society of Bangladesh Free Essays

Impact of Eve teasing in the society of Bangladesh: By: S. khan joy Email: skjoy2010@gmail. com Now Eve teasing is one of the main threats for Bangladesh because it is destroying the social balance. We will write a custom essay sample on Impact of Eve Teasing in the Society of Bangladesh or any similar topic only for you Order Now Eve teasing might seem harmless ‘fun’ to some, but gets the nerve of the victims. The severe impact of eve teasing is taking away the lives of young girls as Bangladesh has witnessed recently. Based on empirical study (2008) the Hunger Project has identified some impacts of eve teasing in the society of rural Bangladesh. These are: a) Curtailed education: Sexual harassment increases girls’ drop-out rate from school. Parents concerned about their daughter’s honour or safety sometimes keep their daughters home and/or marry them off at an early age. b) Early marriage: Girls who are teased or harassed are also pushed into marriage, before they are physically or mentally prepared. ) Hindered development: Eve teasing contributes to maintaining the low status of women. It also hinders women in participating in the formal employment sector. As nearly half of the population of the country are women, for the economic development of the country their participation in employment is a must. d) Eve teasing† leads to young woman’s suicide in Bangladesh: RVEYING the newspapers over the last few months we must have to be shocked realising the unprecedented rate o f suicide cases among the young girls due to eve teasing. As reported in the newspapers in the recent past Nurina, Elora, Simi, Trisha, Tonni, Swapna, Tithi, Rumi committed suicide to escape the cruelty of stalkers’ repression. Over the last four months, as reported in The Daily Star, fourteen girls, due to repression of stalkers, opted for ultimate destiny of their lives finding no other alternatives. Apart from suicide, one statistics has revealed that during January-July 2008 period only, about 13,000 women became victims of eve teasing of different forms across the country. This figure counted only the reported cases. Many occurrences remain unreported as the majority of the victims of eve teasing prefer to ignore this out of fear or not to be ‘disgraced’ or part of a social ‘gossip’. The situation has become so alarming that, in general, it can be argued that at present no girl has been spared from being a victim of eve teasing in one form or another. How to cite Impact of Eve Teasing in the Society of Bangladesh, Papers

A Tale Of Two Cities Notes Essay Example For Students

A Tale Of Two Cities Notes Essay A Tale of Two Cities Book I (Chapters 1 4)SummaryIt was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . .Dickens begins A Tale of Two Cities with this famous sentence. It describes the spirit of the era in which this novel takes place. This era is the latter part of the 1700s a time when relations between Britain and France were strained, America declared its independence, and the peasants of France began one of the bloodiest revolutions in history. In short, it was a time of liberation and a time of terrible violence. Dickens describes the two cities at the center of the novel: Paris, a city of extravagance, aristocratic abuses, and other evils that lead to revolution and London, a city rife with crime, capital punishment, and disorder. In both cities, the capabilities of an angry mob were a dangerous thing, to be feared by all. The tale begins on a road between London and Dover (in southern England) in 1775. Three strangers in a carriage are traveling along this dangerous road. The carriage encounters a messenger on a horse who asks for one of the passengers, Jarvis Lorry of Tellsons Bank. They are wary, because the messenger could be a highwayman, robber, or other undesirable. However, Mr. Lorry ventures out into the rain to receive the message. He recognizes the messenger as a man named Jerry, who works for Tellsons Bank, as well. Jerry tells him to wait at Dover for the young lady. Lorry tells Jerry to relay to the people at the Bank this message: Recalled to Life. Jerry has no idea what it means and rides off into the rain. Dickens then ponders how the heart of a person is a true mystery. Lorry can tell who or at least of what class the two other passengers are. Traveling on, Lorry dozes in and out of dreams. His dreams reveal to the reader that his mission is to metaphorically dig a man out of the grave. He dreams of imaginary conversations with this man he is to recall to life. Buried how long? Lorry always asks. Almost eighteen years, replies the man. Lorry brings the man in his dreams to see a woman (the young woman of which Jerry the messenger spoke). But the man does not know if he still wishes to live or if he can bear to see the young lady after having been buried for eighteen long years. Upon arriving at an inn in Dover, Lorry waits for the young lady. Here the reader learns that the sixty-year-old Lorry is a well-dressed businessman who works for Tellsons Bank. Tellsons has an office in London, and an office in Paris. Lorry is above all a man of business, and tries to reduce everything to business terms. When the young lady arrives, Lorry goes to see her. She is Lucie Manette, a seventeen-year-old orphan. Lucie believes that she must go to Paris with Lorry because Tellsons Bank has discovered something regarding her dead fathers small bit of property. However, Lorry nervously tells her the truth: Her father was a well known scientist in France, whom Lorry knew while working at Tellsons French office. Lucie vaguely recognizes Lorry because he brought her to London many years ago when she was orphaned and Tellsons Bank was put in charge of her. Lucie is shocked when she learns that Tellsons has found her father alive in Paris. He was imprisoned in the Bastille (a famous French prison) for eighteen years, but no one knows why. Lorry calls in the servants, and a strong, brusque woman (who we later discover is Lucies servant and who essentially raised her) comes in to take care of the young lady. CommentaryThe two cities are very important to the development of this novel. Both are violent cities rife with injustice. The characters travel between them throughout the novel. The cities provide two distinct settings, each with its own secrets and perils. The major themes of this novel are resurrection and revolution. The first of the two themes is introduced in this section.

Analyze Your SEO in Google Analytics Search Console

There is an adage in business that â€Å"if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.† Well, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no different. Being able to measure your SEO progress and success is a crucial part of improving it. Fortunately for businesses, measuring the results of your SEO efforts can be done with a little-known free tool†¦ Google Analytics. Free Actionable Bonus: Looking to elevate your SEO strategy? We partnered with Jay Baer of Convince Convert to create this free ebook on 6 Ways to Fix Your Barebones SEO Strategy. Measure What Matters Before jumping into the technical side of how to measure your SEO performance, it’s important to note that you should measure what matters. In SEO, it’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics. I’m certainly guilty of patting myself on the back when I see a jump in organic pageviews. But just looking at pageviews doesn’t tell you any about the quality of those views. Instead, we should measure beyond the click. Measuring engagement instead. Just looking at pageviews doesn’t tell you any about the quality of those views. Click To Tweet One important engagement metric is bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who viewed a single page on your site and then left without clicking any other pages. While there are some situations that a high bounce rate makes sense, typically, a high bounce rate is a big issue. Bounce rate is particularly useful for measuring the organic performance of your blog and other content. That’s because a falling bounce rate means that people are more interested in what you have to say and that you’re convincing people to engage with more content. But that’s not to say that you should ignore pageviews. Measuring organic pageviews over time is an excellent way to measure your overall SEO performance. Analyzing Your SEO Performance in Google Analytics The first step of measuring SEO performance is getting an overall picture of how you’re doing. Looking at changes in your total organic traffic over longer-term periods can give you an indication if your SEO strategy is working well or not. Organic Traffic Increasing organic traffic is one of the main indications of a successful search marketing strategy. To check your organic traffic in Google Analytics, go to Acquisition All Traffic Channels. From there you’ll be able to see how your organic traffic compares to other channels like referral and social. If your organic traffic growth rate is flat or falling, that’s a sign that you may need to adjust your content and SEO strategy. But as I mentioned above, traffic alone doesn’t tell the full story. Which pages are driving the extratraffic? Which keywords are you ranking for? Is organic traffic engaging with the content they land on? We can answer that too. Measuring Your SEO Performance by Page Websites don’t rank for keywords – pages do. Websites don’t rank for keywords – pages do. Click To Tweet For this reason, it makes sense to measure your SEO success by individual page. Looking at page-level data allows you to see which pages on your site are providing the most SEO value and which could use some work. You can find your page-level data by navigating to Behavior Site Content All Pages. To filter this view to only show organic traffic you simply need to change the segment from All Users to Organic Traffic From there you can dig into the data in some different ways. For example: Compare the time on page for different pages and content. Identifying the pages that people spend the most time on provides you with some insight into what interests your readers and what they’re looking for. Are any pages particularly good are driving goal conversions? Sort your pages by your various goals to see which pages are leading the best at converting organic traffic. Landing Pages Another good way to dig into page-level data is by looking at your landing pages. Landing pages refer to the first page a searcher lands on when visiting your site (i.e. the page they click on from a Google SERP.) To find your landing page data in Google analytics, click Behavior Site Content Landing Pages Again, you’ll need to make sure to use the Organic Traffic segment from the last example. You should hopefully be seeing a solid number of pageviews, time on page and goal conversions. If some of your landing pages aren’t performing well, then audit those pages and ask yourself: Does the page content live up to the title? Are there any formatting or design issues? Can you improve the visual appeal of the article? More Ways to Use Google Analytics to See What’s Working (And What Isn’t) Social Signals Now that search engine algorithms are taking into account social signals to determine content relevancy and calculate search rankings, it’s worth knowing which social channels are driving the most traffic to your site. Is LinkedIn bringing in more traffic than Twitter? Creating more content specifically for these social networks can help boost social signals even more. Bounce Rates If visitors are only viewing one page on your site, you have a problem with site architecture, site usability, or your actual content. Apart from ensuring your site is user-friendly, make sure the keywords that are driving traffic are relevant to your marketing goals. Do the web pages that visitors arrive on properly address the underlying questions contained in these search terms? Review your bounce rates for different pages to see which pages need special attention. Site Speed It’s common knowledge that site speed affects search rankings, and since Google’s Hummingbird update it’s even more significant. Google knows that people today expect sites to load quickly, so slow-loading sites are being penalized. Check your site speed reports and follow Google’s Webmaster guidelines to ensure you’re getting it right. SEO Ranking Something as simple as checking your search rankings can be a strong indication of the effectiveness of your SEO content strategy. Increasing your brand’s overall web presence is one important aspect of SEO, so analyze your rankings for certain keyword phrases. To get a more accurate measure of online visibility, focus on long-tail keywords. Backlinks As your content spreads, you should see the number of backlinks to your website grow, but it’s important to focus on their quality. Look at the domain authority of the websites linking to your content. Analyzing the anchor text data can also help you understand how people perceive your brand. When you know the details, you can focus on delivering content based around these terms. Indexed Pages Do you have the correct number of web pages indexed with Google? For example, if you publish 100 pages but Google finds only 50, there’s something wrong with your site structure. It could be because there are no links pointing to new pages or duplicate content issues. To check how many pages of your website Google are indexing, type: â€Å"site:† followed by your domain name into Google search. Organic Conversions Finding out what proportion of your visitors convert is key to developing an effective SEO strategy. How you define conversions will vary depending on your marketing goals, but measuring conversion rates can help you work out how effective your content is and whether you need to improve calls-to-action and site architecture. It will also show you which keywords are attracting the most valuable traffic. Branded and Non-Branded Keywords Attracting organic search traffic through branded keywords is fine, but you could be missing out on traffic from non-branded search terms. Do you have enough unique in-depth content for your website that describes your brand? Check what percentage of traffic comes from non-branded keyword phrases and if it’s low, start developing content based around these search terms. Analyze Your SEO by Keyword Alternatively, you can measure your SEO success by keyword. That said, Google Analytics doesn’t do a great job of showing you keyword data. To find the small amount of keyword data available, navigate to Acquisition Campaigns Organic Keywords. The first thing you’ll notice is that the majority of your organic keywords are â€Å"(not provided).† Not very helpful. You can improve this report by setting the secondary dimension as â€Å"landing page† This will at least break the (not provided) up by which page was clicked, which is better, but still not great. If you’re interested in learning more about secondary dimensions, check out our post How to Gain Deeper Insights Using Secondary Dimensions in Google Analytics For accessing your keyword data, you’ll want to head over to a different (but also free) Google product – Google Search Console. Setting Up Google Search Console The first step to setting up your Search Console is making sure you have a Google Analytics account. After that, setting things up is straightforward: 1. Go to Google Search Console and sign in 2. Once you’re signed in, click â€Å"Add A Property† 3. Next, enter the URL of your website 4. Then verify the website using one of the four options provided: Uploading an HTML file Verify using your hosting provider Verify using Google Tags Verify using you Google Analytics Tracking ID (Recommended) I recommend using verifying your website using the Google Analytics Tracking ID because it’s the fastest and easiest method. And just like that, you’re all set up. Now that your Search Console is ready, you just have to wait for data to start rolling in. Once you have some data, there are some different ways you can use Google Search Console to analyze SEO. 7 Ways to Analyze SEO in Google Search Console 1. The Best Keyword Data (Not Provided) Alternative Thanks to some Google updates, marketers can no longer see all of the keywords driving organic traffic in Google Analytics. While you can still access some keyword data using Search Console, it’s not as comprehensive as before. Under â€Å"Search Traffic† you can see a keyword report, showing impressions, clicks, average ranking positions, and more. Monitoring these keywords over time will help you see where to refine your content and how to improve your keyword strategy. This is an incredibly useful report because you can slice up the data in many different ways. In addition to impressions and clicks, you can filter the data by keywords, pages, and other parameters. For instance, how much traffic are you branded keywords sending? Filter the keywords to include your company name so you can see how many people are searching for you directly. Alternatively, check which blog posts the most successful at driving traffic to your site by filtering the pages to only include your blog. 2. Pinpoint Your Site’s Broken Pages When visitors to your site cannot access certain pages, you’re bound to lose some valuable traffic and potential customers – they’ll just find another site. In this scenario, all your SEO work and content means nothing, so it’s vital to fix these errors as soon as you can. Under the â€Å"Crawl Errors† tab, you’ll find data from the last 90 days about which pages returned an HTTP error and which ones Googlebot had trouble crawling. You can then fix any issues to ensure every visitor has full access to your site. 3. Analyze Your Link Profile Search Console can give you some valuable data on all your backlinks. Under â€Å"Search Traffic† you’ll find â€Å"Links to Your Site† which will show you all the websites that link to your site. If you have a huge website, it may not list all the links, but for smaller websites, all the links will be shown. You can even download the list of the URLs for reference. 4. Check Your Site Speed Since the Hummingbird update, site speed has become an important part of SEO. Using PageSpeed Insights, you can find out how long your website contenttakes to load. Improving your page load times is key to improving the user experience and getting more visitors to stay on your site. To access this tool, in the Find Crawl Web Tools Other Resources and then click the â€Å"PageSpeed Insights† link. Insert your URL and click â€Å"Analyze.† You can then use the suggestions to improve your page load times. 5. Enable Email Notifications from Google In the Webmaster Tools preferences menu, click on â€Å"Enable email notifications.† You can then select the specific issues you want to be alerted about. If you are penalized by Google, or there are any other issues with your site, Google will email you immediately. This is a simple way to give yourself peace of mind while you are focusing on other SEO tasks. 6. Use the HTML Improvements Report Under â€Å"Search Appearance† you’ll find â€Å"HTML Improvements.† This gives you a breakdown of any problems concerning your site’s title tags, meta descriptions, and other issues Google encountered while indexing your site. For example, you can find out if you have duplicate title tags and meta descriptions, helping you to make essential changes that will boost your SEO power. 7. Consider the Disavow Tool Sometimes your site may be penalized by Google even when you don’t intentionally do anything wrong. In these cases, you need to remove these penalties as soon as possible to get your site back on track and recover your page rankings. Access the disavow tool, look for poor-quality links and then request that Google remove them. Google will treat these links as â€Å"nofollow† links. Be very careful here. Google can often tell which links are spammy as soon as they link to your site, meaning in many cases you don’t have to worry about it disavowing. Plus, disavowing links incorrectly could cost you. It can take a while to get to grips with Google Search Console, but if you use these suggestions, you can ensure you are maximizing your SEO efforts and building a website that performs better in search engine results pages. Over to You Now that you’re better equipped to measure your SEO success, how is it doing? A successful SEO strategy requires high-quality content, so if you could use some help creating awesome content then get in touch.

Reflexology Essays - Manual Therapy, Pseudoscience, Reflexology

Reflexology Essays - Manual Therapy, Pseudoscience, Reflexology Reflexology The origins of Reflexology evidently reach back to ancient Egypt as evidenced by inscriptions found in the physicians tomb at Saqqara in Egypt. The translation of the hieroglyphics are as follows: Dont hurt me. The practitioners reply:- I shall act so you praise me. We cannot determine the exact relationship between the ancient art as practiced by the early Egyptians and Reflexology as we know it today. Different forms of working the feet to effect health have been used all over the ancient world. Dr. Riley maintained that this form of healing spread from Egypt via the Roman Empire. The Zone Theory was the precursor to modern Reflexology which began with Dr. William H. Fitzgerald, M.D. whom Dr. Edwin Bowers, M.D., encouraged to publish the many articles he had written on the subject of Zone Analgesia. In the forward to their combined book, Relieving Pain At Home published in, 1917, he wrote, Humanity is awakening to the fact that sickness, in a large percentage of cases, is an error - of body and mind. How true this has proved to be. Dr. Fitzgerald, was an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist working at the Boston City Hospital, as well as at St Francis Hospital in Connecticut. He called his work Zone Analgesia where pressure was applied to the corresponding bony eminence or to the zones corresponding to the location of the injury. He also used pressure points on the tongue, palate and the back of the pharynx wall in order to achieve the desired result of pain relief or analgesia. He made use of the following tools: elastic bands, clothes pegs and aluminum combs, on the hands, surgical clamps for the tongue, nasal probes and a regular palpebral retractor for the pharynx, He was responsible for formulating the first chart on the longitudinal zones of the body. Dr. Fitzgerald discovered a very interesting fact, that the application of pressure on the zones not only relieved pain but in the majority of cases also relieved the underlying cause as well. The same result is experienced through Reflexology today, which is based partially on the Zone Theory. Dr. Shelby Riley, M.D. worked closely with Dr. Fitzgerald and developed the Zone Theory further. It seems that he added horizontal zones across the hands and feet, together with the longitudinal zones and thus determining individual reflexes according to the Zone Theory. He, like Fitzgerald, espoused continual pressure on the reflex or point of contact. Eunice D. Ingham, a Physical Therapist, worked closely with Dr. Riley and was fascinated by the concept of Zone Therapy and started developing her foot reflex theory in the early 1930's. She had the opportunity to treat hundreds of patients where each reflex point of contact had been carefully and thoughtfully checked and rechecked until with all confidence she was able to determine that the reflexes on the feet were an exact mirror image of the organs of the body. Dr. Riley encouraged her to write her first book entitled Stories The Feet Can Tell where she documented her cases and carefully mapped out the reflexes on the feet as we know them today. This book was published in 1938 and was later translated into seven foreign languages which spread the benefits of Reflexology way beyond the borders of the States. The confusion between Reflexology and Zone Therapy started at this point because the foreign publisher changed the name of Eunices book, The Stories The Feet Can Tell to Zone Therapy and in some parts of the world it is still thought of as Zone Therapy. However, there is a distinct difference between the two therapies. Zone Therapy relies solely on the zones to determine the area to be worked, whereas Reflexology takes the zones as well as the anatomical model to determine the area or areas to be worked. After the publication of her book Eunice Ingham found herself on the program at many health seminars. She traveled around the country giving book reviews. Only sick and dilapidated people attended these book reviews/ seminars where she would teach people by working on them and discuss their particular health problems. As these sick people, whom everyone else had given up on, got better the word

Islam in the modern world Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Islam in the modern world - Essay Example After the death of Prophet Muhammad his four companions which are Abu Bakr, Umar ibn Al-Khattab, Ali ibn abi Talib and Uthman ibn Ghani were appointed as the Caliph to run the state (Najeebabadi 2001). The first Caliph was Abu Bakr. During his reign many battles were fought against the non-Islamic states. These battles were fought in western and eastern Iraq, Syria and some other regions. The second caliph was Umar ibn Al-Khattab. Umar ibn Al-Khattab fought many battles for the expansion and defense of Islam. The third Caliph of the Islamic history was Uthman ibn Ghani. Ali ibn Abi Talib was the forth caliph of Islam (Najeebabadi 2001). Islam is not only a religion but it also teaches us how to lead our lives in peace and harmony. Prayers in Islam are very important. The main and the most important following of the Prophet’s sunna is prayers and the ways to pray. Prophet’s sunna are those deeds which were done by the Prophet Muhammad. During the life of Prophet Muhammad , he emphasized on giving Zakat, which is giving charity to the needy and poor from one’s surplus wealth. Fasting in the month of Ramadan is also an obligatory practice in Islam. Pilgrimage is practiced as Prophet’s sunna, which is only obligatory on those who have financial resources to perform it. (Nigosian 2004) In the opinion of many Muslim scholars, Islam is a religion that is amended by the every Prophet from Adam to Prophet Muhammad and it is completed with the completion of Holy Qur’an or Koran. Holy Qur’an is a divine book (like Bible and Torah) that was revealed upon Prophet Muhammad (Najeebabadi 2001). The key belief that a Muslim must have is to believe that God (Allah in Arabic) is one and Muhammad is His Prophet. A Muslim must have faith in all the Messengers of God and in all Holy Books. He must have belief that Angles exist and they do as they are ordered by Almighty God. A Muslim must know that he will be asked about his every bad deed at the Day of Judgment and God (Allah) will punish him for his wrongs and reward him for the good deeds. Qur’an is a divine book and covers almost all aspects of life. It also guides us to give charity (Zakat) but it does not tell us the rate of Zakat on our assists. In order to clarify the matter Prophet Muhammad told us that the rate should be 2.5% or 5%. (Nigosian 2004) In first century of Islam, the key beliefs and practices are almost same as directed by Prophet Muhammad. Some scholars believe that religion and politics have no similarity. The difference between the two is vast. The politics in Islam changed the way, people think about Islam. After the first four Caliphs, the system of Caliphate was not remained the same as it was before (Nigosian 2004). During the first century of Islam, it has no sectarian system and the religion is in the principles of Prophet’s Sunna but some Muslims believed that instead of Caliph Abu Bakr, it would be more appropriate that Ali ibn abi Talib would be the first Caliph (Najeebabadi 2001). They argued that Ali ibn abi Talib was Prophet Mohammad’s cousin, so he would be the most appropriate choice. But Ali ibn abi Talib discouraged those people, who were making these discussions. Ali ibn abi Talib had two sons Hasan ibn Ali ibn abi Talib and Husayn ibn Ali ibn abi

Statutory Analysis Report Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Statutory Analysis Report - Essay Example In this scenario, Joe citizen is liable for the offence of having drunk alcohol and at the same time using a public right of way. The arrest by the policeman is warranted, and Joe ought to be charged with the offense of riding the bicycle while drunk. While riding in a drunken state, Joe put the lives of other drivers at risk, and also violated the law that prohibits persons from operating a motor vehicle while drunk. Under the New Hampshire motor vehicle laws, it is illegal to operate a motor vehicle when one’s blood alcohol content is higher than usual. Thus, Joe is guilty of the offence he committed since the reading in the meter is higher than the legal (Stevens, 2012). Besides, it is an offence to operate a bicycle while drunk since the laws that apply to drinking under the influence in New Hampshire also apply to the riding of bicycles under the influence. Every person found drunk while operating a bicycle in the roads of New Hampshire ought to be subjected to the same rules, which apply to the driver of any other motor vehicle. This is because, under the laws of New Hampshire regarding motor vehicles, the rules of the road cover even those who operate bicycles. As such, Joe is not an exception and the penalties that apply to the offenders who do not obey the motor vehicle rules in New Hampshire will also operate to him. As a judge, I would recommend that Joe be fined for riding a bicycle on a state highway while drunk. Imposing a fine on him would be a good step towards ensuring that he does not commit such an offence in the future (Stevens, 2012). In the case of Jim, he rode on a horse-drawn wagon on a public highway while he had drunk until he passed out. He violated the law since he travelled along a public highway, which can easily be accessed by the public. Although Jim was drunk, he was not directing the wagon himself as he had fallen asleep owing to the alcohol he had drunk. As a judge, I would treat the

Accounting Issues Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Accounting Issues - Assignment Example Retained earnings are the accumulated wealth of earnings not paid as dividends that the company obtained over the years. The cash balance of the company as of December 31, 2012 was $2,800,000. In terms of retained earnings the company had a balance of $31,400,000. Based on the asset distribution of the company it seems as if the company invested its retained earnings in the past in property, plant, and equipment. Common stocks, preferred stocks, and bonds payable are three distinct financial instruments that corporations can utilize to raise money. A common stock can be defined as an equity security that has last claim on residual assets and earnings of a corporation (Tewales, Bradley, Tewales). Common stocks are traded in the open market and its price fluctuates daily. A common stock gives its owner a participation stake in the ownership of a company. Common stocks have voting rights. At the end of the fiscal year shareholders are eligible to receive dividends if the board of direct ors declares them. A preferred stock is a special type of stock that has a claim on a corporation’s earnings, dividends, and assets ahead of common stock, but behind debt (Tewales, et al.). Corporations are mandated to pay dividends to preferred stock holders. If dividends are not paid they become cumulative and must be paid in the next accounting period. Preferred stocks do not have voting rights. A bond is a long term note that corporations sell to the general public. A bond has the obligation of paying its holders an interest payment to be paid on a quarterly, semiannual, or annual basis. The interest rate paid on a bond is known as the coupon rate. The principal of the bond must be repaid to the investor in full upon maturity date. The use of preferred stock is ideal for the company for a variety of reasons. First of all the use of preferred stocks does not dilute the power of the current owners of the company because preferred stocks do not have voting rights. Most impor tantly preferred stocks are accounted for as an equity option. The debt on the balance sheet of the company will not increase by selling preferred stocks. The use of preferred stocks does have a cost as the company will be obligated to pay dividends to the owners of preferred stocks. The capital structure of the company did not include any preferred stocks at the end of 2012. The company has a covenant on its previous debt that requires the firm to maintain a debt ratio below 60%. The total liabilities of the company in 2012 were $48.6 million, while its total assets amounted to $90 million. The debt ratio of the company is 0.54. This ratio is an indicator of the solvency of the company. If the company were to acquire an additional $10 million in debt its debt ratio would increase to 0.65 violating the existing covenant on its debt. The firm would also not quality for a $20 million loan since doing so would increase its debt ratio to 0.76. The use of capital leases is a viable finan cing arrangement that the company can use to acquire equipment and machinery. The debt analysis performed on the company showed that additional debt is a limiting option due to a covenant on its existing debt that requires the firm to maintain a debt ratio below 60%. The use of a capital lease is a very attractive option because the debt on the lease is not reflected on the balance sheet liabilities section, but the asset being leased is considered an asset in the accounting books of the company. The use of a capital lease affects both the income statement and balance sheet of the firm. The balance sheet is affected because the leased equipment must be included in the asset section of the balance sheet under the

Analysis of Quality Services in VoIP

Analysis of Quality Services in VoIP Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION Background to Research Due to the Innovative changes in telephony devices and related technologies world wide, the time has come to analysis the quality in telephone devices and provide improved versions of communication channels. Locally the implementation of telephony services is getting increased; many new organizations are setting up their resources to make this system and its facilities available to the users. The research in the telephone industries is in progress since last many years shown a great improvement in all over the world. Previously this telephony service used PSTN [3] which uses 54 kbps channel now after the improvement and change in the technology this telephonic service shifted to internet protocol. As Internet is a widely used medium for data receiving and transfer. Now this new technology becomes Voice over IP. The concept of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) [4] originated in about 1994, when hobbyists began to recognize the potential of sending voice data packets over the Internet rather than communicating through standard telephone service. This allows PC users to avoid long distance charges, and it was in 1994 that the first Internet Phone Software appeared. While contemporary VoIP uses a standard telephone hooked up to an Internet connection. Previous efforts in the history of VoIP required both callers to have a computer equipped with the same software, as well as a sound card and microphone. These early applications of VoIP were marked by poor sound quality and connectivity, but it was a sign that VoIP technology was useful and promising. The evolution of VoIP occurred in next few years, gradually reaching the point where some small companies were able to offer PC to phone service in about 1998. Phone to phone service soon followed, although it was often necessary to use a computer to establish the connection. Like many Internet applications in the late 1990s, early VoIP service relied on advertising sponsorship to subsidize costs, rather than by charging customers for calls. The gradual introduction of broadband Ethernet service allowed for greater call clarity and reduced latency, although calls were still often marred by static or difficulty making connections between the Internet and PSTN (public telephone networks). However, startup VoIP companies were able to offer free calling service to customers from special locations. The breakthrough in VoIP history [9] came when hardware manufacturers such as Cisco Systems and Nortel started producing VoIP equipment that was capable of switching which means that functions that previously had been handled by a telephony service now implement in computers CPU and will work as switching a voice data packet into something that could be read by the PSTN (and vice versa) could now be done by another device, thus making VoIP hard ware less computer dependent. Once hardware started becoming more affordable, larger companies were able to implement VoIP on their internal IP networks, and long distance providers even began routing some of the calls on their networks over the Internet. Usage of VoIP has expanded from the year 2000, dramatically. Different technical standards for VoIP data packet transfer and switching and each is supported by at least one major manufacturer no clear winner has yet emerged to adopt the role of a universal standard. Whereas companies often s witch to VoIP to save on both long distance and infrastructure costs, VoIP service has also been extended to residential users. In the Span of few years, VoIP has gone from being a fringe development to a mainstream alternative to standard telephone service. At present there are two standards that are in use for VoIP switching and gateways: SIP and H.323. SIP [7] mainly relates to end-user IP Telephony applications, while H.323 is a new ITU standard for routing between the circuit-switched and packet-switched worlds used for termination of an IP originated call on the PSTN, but the converse is also becoming common at a very fast rate. As the technology getting advanced and many improvements have been implemented in making sure to maintain the quality of voice and data over the internet should be maintained. The main purpose of this thesis is to discuss the techniques to maintain the quality of VoIP and the role of protocols in VoIP which are H.323 and SIP Area of Research The area of research focuses on Study and Analysis of Quality Services in VoIP and the discussion of Role of H.323 and SIP [7] Protocols. Many techniques and mathematical models have been developed and implemented. As a matter of fact this thesis is not intended to provide any new model or strategy for improving Quality services in VoIP but to get the picture based on the standard matrix of measurement of QoS of VoIP like MOS [10]. Analysis of Quality Services of VoIP Due to the emerging and advancements in the telecommunication making All-IP integrated communicating infrastructure capable to support applications and services with diverse needs and requirements. During the last few years a lot of attention is given to delivering voice traffic over both the public internet and corporate Intranets. IP Telephony, or VoIP, does not only provide more advanced services (example personalized call forwarding, instant messaging etc) than PSTN, but it also aims to achieve the same level of QoS and reliability [1],[2]. As opposed to PSTN, VoIP utilizes one common network for signaling and voice transport and thus enjoys several advantages with respect to the telephony services that are through All-IP networks infrastructures. The most important factors that influence the adoption of VoIP include improved network utilization by using advanced voice CODECS that compress the voice samples below 54 Kbps, possibilities to offer value added services(i.e. instant m essage, personalized call forwarding etc.) just to mention a few. In VoIP world many Quality impairments [34] introduced today by the Internet, it is important to provide mechanism in order to measure the level of quality that is actually provided today in the internet to interactive multimedia applications. That is, to measure how extensive are the loss, the delay and delay jitter impairments and how bad their impact on the perceived QoS, [3] is. There are a large number of methods proposed and some of them standardized which monitor the distorted signal and provide a rating that correlates well with voice quality. The most important parameters that affect the VoIP Quality are the following: CODECS Network Packet Loss Jitter Latency Demonstration Methodology; Simulation The OPNET Simulation is used during aforesaid research work [12] and is a very powerful network simulator. Main purposes are to optimize cost, performance and availability. The following tasks are considered: Build and analyze models. Configure the object palette with the needed models. Set up application and profile configurations. Model a LAN as a single node. Specify background service utilization that changes over a time on a link. Simulate multiple scenarios simultaneously. Apply filter to graphs of results and analyze the results. Role and Analysis of H.323 SIP Protocols Based on the research works that has been done so far, this part of the thesis will discuss and elaborate the H.323 and SIP [7] protocols and a comparative analysis of these two protocols based on their specification will discuss in detail in the next chapters Results and Conclusions The final conclusion of the simulation results will be shown and a comparative analysis of different CODECS with their performances from the simulated results and Role of H.323 and SIP protocols will be discussed. Chapter 2 VoIP and Quality of Service Introduction In past traditional technology, telephone calls are carried through Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN), which provides high-quality voice transmission between two or more parties. Whereas the type of data such as email, web browsing etc. are carried over packet-based data networks like IP, ATM and Frame Relay. In the last few years, there has been a rapid shift towards using data networks to carry both the telephone calls and the data together. This so called convergence of voice and data networks is very appealing due to many considerations. VoIP systems digitize and transmit analog voice signals as a stream of packets over a digital data network. VoIP technology insures proper reconstruction of voice signals, compensating for echoes due to the end-to-end delay, for jitter and for dropped packets and for signaling required for making telephone calls. The IP network used to support IP telephony can be a standard LAN, a network of leased facilities or the Internet. VoIP calls can be made or received using standard analog, digital and IP phones. VoIP gateways serve as a bridge between the PSTN and the IP network [9]. A call can be placed over the local PSTN network to the nearest gateway server, which moves it onto the Internet for transport to a gateway at the receiving end. With the use of VoIP gateways, computer-to-telephone calls, telephone-to-computer calls and telephone-to-telephone calls can be made with ease. Access to a local VoIP gateway for originating calls can also be supported in a variety of ways. For example, a corporate PBX (Private Branch Exchange) can be configured so that all international direct dialed calls are transparently routed to the nearest gateway. High-cost calls are automatically supported by VoIP to obtain the lowest cost. To ensure interoperability between different VoIP manufacturers, VoIP equipment must follow agreed upon procedures for setting up and controlling the telephone calls. H.323 is one such family of standards that define various options for voice (and video) compression and call control for VoIP. Other calls setup and control protocols being utilized, and or being standardized include SIP, MGCP [27], and Megaco. IP Telephony goes beyond VoIP transport and defines several value added business and consumer applications for converged voice and data networks. Examples include Unified Messaging, Internet Call Center, Presence Management, Location Based Se rvices etc. During the last few years, the voice over data network services have gained increased popularity. Quick growth of the Internet Protocol (IP) based networks, especially the Internet, has directed a lot of interest towards Voice over IP (VoIP). The VoIP technology has been used in some cases, to replace traditional long-distance telephone technology, for reduced costs for the end-user. Naturally to make VoIP infrastructure and services commercially viable, the Quality of Service (QoS) needs to be at least close to the one provided by the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). On the other side, VoIP associated technology will bring to the end user value added services that are currently not available in PSTN. VoIP and QoS In the networks of packet switching, the traffic engineering term is abbreviated as (QoS) or Quality of Service [3], [4], which refers to resource reservation control mechanisms instead of it, is to be understood as achieved service quality. Quality of Service (QoS). This Quality of services guarantees are important for the limited capacity network, for example in cellular data communication, especially for real-time streaming multimedia applications, for example voice over IP and IP-TV [4]. Quality of Service may or may not be agreed by Network or protocols and software and reserve capacity in the network nodes, for example during a session establishment phase. But in the entire the achieved level of performance, for example the data rate and delay, and priorities in the network nodes. The reserved capacity might be released during a tear down phase. Quality of Service does not supported by the Best Effort network Service. The ITU standard X.902 as defined the QoS quality requiremen ts on the collective behavior. The Quality of Service on all the aspects of a connection, such as guaranteed time to provide service, voice quality [3], echo, loss, reliability and so on. Grade of Service term, with many alternative definitions, rather than referring to the ability to reserve resources. The convergence of communications and computer networks has led to a rapid growth in real-time applications, such as Internet Telephony or Voice over IP (VoIP). However, IP networks are not designed to support real-time applications and factors such as network delay, jitter and packet loss lead to deterioration in the perceived voice quality. In this chapter, brief background information about VoIP networks which is relevant to the thesis is summarized. The VoIP network, protocol and system structure along with the brief over view of the QoS of VoIP [4] are described in this chapter. Voice coding technology and main Codecs also discussed in the thesis (i.e. G.729, G.723.1)[8] are discussed. Network performance characteristics (e.g. packet loss and delay/delay variation) are also presented in next sections. Problem In past years when the Internet was first deployed, it lacked the ability to provide Quality of Service guarantees due to limits in router computing power. It is therefore run at default QoS level, or best effort. The Technical Factors includes reliability, scalability, effectiveness, maintainability, Grade of Service, etc. Dropped packets Delay Jitter Out-of-order delivery Error QoS Mechanism Quality of Service (QoS) [8] can be provided by generously over-provisioning a network so that interior links are considerably faster than access links. This approach is relatively simple, and may be economically feasible for broadband networks with predictable and light traffic loads. The performance is reasonable for many applications, particularly those capable of tolerating high jitter, such as deeply-buffered video downloads. Commercially involved VoIP services are often competitive with traditional telephone service in terms of call quality even though QoS mechanisms are usually not in use on the users connection to his ISP and the VoIP providers connection to a different ISP. In high load conditions, however, VoIP quality degrades to cell-phone quality or worse. The mathematics of packet traffic indicates that a network with QoS can handle four times as many calls with tight jitter requirements as one without QoS. The amount of over-provisioning in interior links required to replace QoS depends on the number of users and their traffic demands. As the Internet now services close to a billion users, there is little possibility that over-provisioning can eliminate the need for QoS when VoIP [8] becomes more commonplace. For narrowband networks more typical of enterprises and local governments, however, the costs of bandwidth can be substantial and over provisioning is hard to justify. In these situations, two distinctly different philosophies were developed to engineer preferential treatment for packets which require it. Early work used the IntServ philosophy of reserving network resources. In this model, applications used the Resource reservation protocol (RSVP) to request and reserve resources through a network. While IntServ mechanisms do work, it was realized that in a broadband network typical of a larger service provider, Core routers would be required to accept, maintain, and tear down thousands or possibly tens of thousands of reservations. It was believed that this approach would not scale with the growth of the Internet, and in any event was antithetical to the notion of designing networks so that Core routers do little more than simply switch packets at the highest possible rates. The second and currently accepted approach is DiffServ or differentiated services. In the DiffServ model, packets are marked according to the type of service they need. In response to these markings, routers and switches use various queuing strategies to tailor performance to requirements. (At the IP layer, differentiated services code point (DSCP) markings use the 5 bits in the IP packet header. At the MAC layer, VLAN IEEE 802.1Q and IEEE 802.1D can be used to carry essentially the same information). Routers supporting DiffServ use multiple queues for packets awaiting transmission from bandwidth constrained (e.g., wide area) interfaces. Router vendors provide different capabilities for configuring this behavior, to include the number of queues supported, the relative priorities of queues, and bandwidth reserved for each queue. VoIP Networks VoIP Networks Connections Common VoIP network connections normally include the connection from phone to phone, phone to PC (IP Terminal or H.323/SIP Terminal [25]) or PC to PC, as shown in Figure 2.1. The Switched Communication Network (SCN) can be a wired or wireless network, such as PSTN, ISDN or GSM. Perceived QoS or User-perceived QoS is defined as end-to-end or mouth to ear, as the Quality perceived by the end user. It depends on the quality of the gateway (G/W) or H.323/SIP terminal and IP network performance. The latter is normally referred to as Network QoS, as illustrated in Figure 2.1. As IP network is based on the best effort principle which means that the network makes no guarantees about packet loss rates, delays and jitter, the perceived voice quality will suffer from these impairments (e.g. loss, jitter and delay). There are currently two approaches to enhance QoS for VoIP applications. The first approach relies on application-level QoS mechanisms as discussed previously to improve perceived QoS without making changes to the network infrastructure. For example, different compensation strategies for packet loss (e.g. Forward Error Correction (FEC)) and jitter have been proposed to improve speech quality even under poor network conditions. The second approach relies on the network-level QoS mechanism and the emphasis is on how to guarantee IP Network performance in order to achieve the required Network QoS. For example, IETF is working on two QoS frameworks, namely DiffServ (the Differentiated Services) and IntServ (the Integrated Services) to support QoS in the Internet. IntServ uses the per-flow approach to provide guarantees to individual streams and is classified as a flow-based resource reservation mechanism where packets are classified and scheduled according to their flow affiliation. Diff Serv provides aggregate assurances for a group of applications and is classified as a packet-oriented classification mechanism for different QoS classes. Each packet is classified individually based on its priority. VoIP Protocol Architecture Voice over IP (VoIP) is the transmission of voice over network using the Internet Protocol. Here, we introduce briefly the VoIP protocol architecture, which is illustrated in Figure 2.2. The Protocols that provide basic transport (RTP [3]), call-setup signaling (H.323 [7], SIP [8]) and QoS feedback (RTCP [4]) are shown. VoIP System Architecture Figure 2.3 shows a basic VoIP system (signaling part is not included), which consists of three parts the sender, the IP networks and the receiver [13]. At the sender, the voice stream from the voice source is first digitized and compressed by the encoder. Then, several coded speech frames are packetized to form the payload part of a packet (e.g. RTP packet). The headers (e.g. IP/UDP/RTP) are added to the payload and form a packet which is sent to IP networks. The packet may suffer different network impairments (e.g. packet loss, delay and jitter) in IP networks. At the receiver, the packet headers are stripped off and speech frames are extracted from the payload by depacketizer. Play out buffer is used to compensate for network jitter at the cost of further delay (buffer delay) and loss (late arrival loss). The de-jittered speech frames are decoded to recover speech with lost frames concealed (e.g. using interpolation) from previous received speech frames. Chapter 3 Analysis of QoS Parameters Introduction A Number of QoS [11] of parameters can be measured and monitored to determine whether a service level offered or received is being achieved. These parameters consist of the following Network availability Bandwidth Delay Jitter Loss Network Availability Network availability can have a significant effect on QoS. Simply put, if the network is unavailable, even during brief periods of time, the user or application may achieve unpredictable or undesirable performance (QoS) [11]. Network availability is the summation of the availability of many items that are used to create a network. These include network device redundancy, e.g. redundant interfaces, processor cards or power supplies in routers and switches, resilient networking protocols, multiple physical connections, e.g. fiber or copper, backup power sources etc. Network operators can increase their networks availability by implementing varying degrees of each item. Bandwidth Bandwidth is probably the second most significant parameters that affect QoS. Its allocation can be subdivided in two types Available bandwidth Guaranteed bandwidth Available bandwidth Many Networks operators oversubscribe the bandwidth on their network to maximize the return on investment of their network infrastructure or leased bandwidth. Oversubscribing bandwidth means the BW a user is subscribed to be no always available to them. This allows users to compete for available BW. They get more or less BW depending upon the amount of traffic form other users on the network at any given time. Available bandwidth is a technique commonly used over consumer ADSL networks, e.g., a customer signs up for a 384-kbps service that provides no QoS (BW) guarantee in the SLA. The SLA points out that the 384-kbps is typical but does not make any guarantees. Under lightly loaded conditions, the user may achieve 384-kbps but upon network loading, this BW will not be achieved consistently. This is most noticeable during certain times of the day when more users access the network. Guaranteed bandwidth Network operators offer a service that provides minimum BW and burst BW in the SLA. Because the BW is guaranteed the service is prices higher than the available BW service. The network operator must ensure that those who subscribe to this guaranteed BW service get preferential treatment (QoS BW guarantee) [24][25] over the available BW subscribers. In some cases, the network operator separates the subscribers by different physical or logical networks, e.g., VLANs, Virtual Circuits, etc. In some cases, the guaranteed BW service traffic may share the same network infrastructure with available BW service traffic. This is often the case at location where network connections are expensive or the bandwidth is leased from another service provider. When subscribers share the same network infrastructure, the network operators must prioritize the guaranteed the BW subscribers traffic over the available BW subscribers traffic so that in times of networks congestion the guaranteed BW subscribers SLAs are met. Burst BW can be specified in terms of amount and duration of excess BW (burst) above the guaranteed minimum. QoS mechanism may be activated to discard traffic that use consistently above the guaranteed minimum BW that the subscriber agreed to in the SLA. Delay Network delay is the transit time an application experiences from the ingress point to the egress point of the network. Delay can cause significant QoS issues with application such as SNA and fax transmission that simply time-out and final under excessive delay conditions. Some applications can compensate for small amounts of delay but once a certain amount is exceeded, the QoS becomes compromised. For example some networking equipment can spoof an SNA session on a host by providing local acknowledgements when the network delay would cause the SNA session to time out. Similarly, VoIP gateways and phones provide some local buffering to compensate for network delay. Finally delay can be both fixed and variables. Examples of fixed delay are: Application based delay, e.g., voice codec processing time and IP packet creation time by the TCP/IP software stack [32] [38]. Data transmission (queuing delay) over the physical network media at each network hop. Propagation delay across the network based on transmission distance Examples of variable delays are: Ingress queuing delay for traffic entering a network node Contention with other traffic at each network node Egress queuing delay for traffic exiting a network node Jitter Jitter is the measure of delay variation between consecutive packets for a given traffic flow. Jitter has a pronounced effect on real time delay sensitive applications such as voice and video. These real time applications expect to receive packets at a fairly constant rate with fixed delay between consecutive packets. As the arrival rates increases, the jitter impacts the applications performance [22] [27]. A minimal amount of jitter may be acceptable, but as jitter increases the application may become unusable. Some applications, such as voice gateways and IP phones, [35] can compensate for small amounts of jitter. Since a voice application requires the audio to play out at constant rate, in the next packet time, the application will replay the previous voice packets until the next voice packet arrives. However if the next packet is delayed too long it is simply discarded when it arrives resulting in a small amount of distorted audio. All networks introduce some jitter because of va riability in delay introduced by each network node as packets are queues. However as long as the jitter is bounded, QoS can be maintained. Loss Loss can occur due to errors introduced by the physical transmission medium. For example, most landline connections have very low loss as measured in the Bit Error Rate. However, wireless connections such as satellite, mobiles or fixed wireless networks have a high BER that varies due to environment or geographical conditions such as fog, rain, and RF interference, cell handoff during roaming and physical obstacles such as trees, building and mountain [2][4][25]. Wireless technologies often transmit redundant information since packets will inherently get dropped some of the time due to the nature of the transmission medium. Loss can also occur when congested network nodes drop packets. Some networking protocols such as TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) offer packets loss protection by retransmitting packets that may have been dropped or corrupted by the network. When a network becomes increasingly congested, more packets are dropped and hence more TCP transmission. If congestion continues the network performance will significantly decrease because much of the BW is being used to retransmit dropped packets. TCP will eventually reduce its transmission window size, resulting in smaller packets being transmitted; this eventually will reduce congestion, resulting in fewer packets being dropped. Because congestion has a direct impact on packet loss, congestion avoidance mechanism is often deployed. One such mechanism is called Random EARLY Discard (RED). RED algorithms randomly and intentionally drop packets once the traffic reaches one or more configured threshold. RED takes advantage of the TCP protocols window size throttle feature and provides more efficient congestion management for TCP-based flows. Note that RED only provides effective congestion control for application or protocols with TCP like throttling mechanism Emission priorities Determine the order in which traffic is forwarded as it exits a network node. Traffic with higher emission priority is forwarded a head of traffic with a lower emission priority. Emission priorities also determine the amount of latency introduced to the traffic by the network nodes queuing mechanism. For example, delay-tolerant application such as email would be configured to have a lower emission priority than delay sensitive real time applications such as voice or video. These delay tolerant applications may be buffered while the delay sensitive applications are being transmitted. In its simplest of forms, emission priorities use a simple transmit priority scheme whereby higher emission priority traffic is always forwarded ahead of lower emission priority traffic. This is typically accomplished using strict priority scheduling (queuing) the downside of this approach is that low emission priority queues may never get services (starved) it there is always higher emission priority traffic with no BW rate limiting. A more elaborate scheme provides a weighted scheduling approach to the transmission of the traffic to improve fairness, i.e., the lower emission priority traffic is transmitted. Finally, some emission priority schemes provide a mixture of both priority and weighted schedulers. Discarded priorities Are used to determine the order in which traffic gets discarded. The traffic may get dropped due to network node congestion or when the traffic is out of profile, i.e., the traffic exceeds its prescribed amount of BW for some period of time. Under congestion, traffic with a higher discard priority gets dropped before traffic with a lower discard priority. Traffic with similar QoS performance can be sub divided using discard priorities. This allows the traffic to receive the same performance when the network node is not congested. However, when the network node is congested, the discard priority is used to drop the more eligible traffic first. Discard priorities also allow traffic with the same emission priority to be discarded when the traffic is out of profile. With out discard priorities traffic would need to be separated into different queues in a network node to provide service differentiation. This can be expensive since only a limited number of hardware queues (typically eight or less) are available on networking devices. Some devices may have software based queues but as these are increasingly used, network node performance is typically reduced. With discard priorities, traffic can be placed in the same queue but in effect the queue is sub divided into virtual queues, each with a different discard priority. For example if a product supports three discard priorities, then one hardware queues in effect provides three QoS Levels. Table 3.1 illustrates the QoS performance dimensions required by some common applications. Applications can have very different QoS requirements. As these are mixed over a common IP transport network, without applying QoS the network traffic will experience unpredictable behavior [22][25]. Categorizing Applications Networked applications can be categorized based on end user expectations or application requirements. Some applications are between people while other applications are a person and a networked device application, e.g., a PC and web server. Finally, some networking devices, e.g., router-to-router. Table 3.2 categorizes applications into four different traffic categories: Interactive Responsive Timely Network Control Interactive applications Some applications are interactive whereby two or more people actively participate. The participants expect the networked applications to respond in real time. In this context real time means that there is minimal delay (latency) and delay variations (jitter) between the sender an

Hardships in Boys and Girls by Alice Munro :: Boys and Girls Alice Munro

In her story, Boys and Girls, Alice Munro depicts the hardships and successes of the rite of passage into adulthood through her portrayal of a young narrator and her brother. Through the narrator, the subject of the profound unfairness of sex-role stereotyping, and the effect this has on the rites of passage into adulthood is presented. The protagonist in Munro's story, unidentified by a name, goes through an extreme and radical initiation into adulthood, similar to that of her younger brother. Munro proposes that gender stereotyping, relationships, and a loss of innocence play an extreme, and often-controversial role in the growing and passing into adulthood for many young children. Initiation, or the rite of passage into adulthood, is, according to the theme of Munro’s story, both a mandatory and necessary experience.      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Alice Munro's creation of an unnamed and therefore undignified, female protagonist proposes that the narrator is without identity or the prospect of power. Unlike the narrator, the young brother Laird is named – a name that means "lord" – and implies that he, by virtue of his gender alone, is invested with identity and is to become a master. This stereotyping in names alone seems to suggest that gender does play an important role in the initiation of young children into adults. Growing up, the narrator loves to help her father outside with the foxes, rather than to aid her mother with "dreary and peculiarly depressing" work done in the kitchen (425). In this escape from her predestined duties, the narrator looks upon her mother's assigned tasks to be "endless," while she views the work of her father as "ritualistically important" (425). This view illustrates her happy childhood, filled with dreams and fantasy. Her contrast between the work of her father and the chores of her mother, illustrate an arising struggle between what the narrator is expected to do and what she wants to do. Work done by her father is viewed as being real, while that done by her mother was considered boring. Conflicting views of what was fun and what was expected lead the narrator to her initiation into adulthood.      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Unrealistically, the narrator believes that she would be of use to her father more and more as she got older. However, as she grows older, the difference between boys and girls becomes more clear and conflicting to her.