Free Essays on Monsoon

Dust and yellow mustard fields. Single file coconut trees lining the muddy edges of rice paddies. Green shoots of rice in watery mud. The grainy edges of the Indian sun. Barefoot men bent under baskets full of sugar cane, walking single file. Heat beating down in wobbled yellow lines. And dust. On a long ride, scenery through the window of a car repeats and reverses itself: India came in flips and flashes, as the big, black car streamed across West Bengal, from Calcutta to the coastal town of Digha. We were still miles away from a summer holiday at the sea-beach. My legs were stuck to each other. Sweat dripped from my collarbone to my waist. Late August in a tropical country emits a feeling of endings. The heat should fade. The monsoon rains sputter. It is the last chance to lie under a fan, draw a picture, have orange biscuits and tea with milk. That summer I had just turned twelve. I played hide and seek and tag on the rooftop of our house in Calcutta in my bare feet. I hiked up my long skirt so I could run faster†¦ and let the skin of my bare legs flash for one extra second. The boys next door would pretend not to watch. And I liked how it made me want to smile. I was young enough to play. I was old enough to play. There was no difference. I spent the ride to Digha hanging out the window. Our parents were behind us somewhere. There were only children in this car, and our driver blasted the radio for us. â€Å"People people everywhere, everywhere, everywhere,† a Bengali rapper spit in English, and we sang along. When we hit the towns and got caught between a cow, a motorcycle, and street vendors with bright plastic baskets, my friend, Amrita, and I had no complaints. We tossed sultry smiles and waved. I had light skin and hair. Amrita had my American sunglasses perched on her narrow sixteen-year-old face. The young men defiantly fixed their eyes on ours. We laughed and ducked down on the hot vinyl seats. The plastic felt like it ... Free Essays on Monsoon Free Essays on Monsoon Dust and yellow mustard fields. Single file coconut trees lining the muddy edges of rice paddies. Green shoots of rice in watery mud. The grainy edges of the Indian sun. Barefoot men bent under baskets full of sugar cane, walking single file. Heat beating down in wobbled yellow lines. And dust. On a long ride, scenery through the window of a car repeats and reverses itself: India came in flips and flashes, as the big, black car streamed across West Bengal, from Calcutta to the coastal town of Digha. We were still miles away from a summer holiday at the sea-beach. My legs were stuck to each other. Sweat dripped from my collarbone to my waist. Late August in a tropical country emits a feeling of endings. The heat should fade. The monsoon rains sputter. It is the last chance to lie under a fan, draw a picture, have orange biscuits and tea with milk. That summer I had just turned twelve. I played hide and seek and tag on the rooftop of our house in Calcutta in my bare feet. I hiked up my long skirt so I could run faster†¦ and let the skin of my bare legs flash for one extra second. The boys next door would pretend not to watch. And I liked how it made me want to smile. I was young enough to play. I was old enough to play. There was no difference. I spent the ride to Digha hanging out the window. Our parents were behind us somewhere. There were only children in this car, and our driver blasted the radio for us. â€Å"People people everywhere, everywhere, everywhere,† a Bengali rapper spit in English, and we sang along. When we hit the towns and got caught between a cow, a motorcycle, and street vendors with bright plastic baskets, my friend, Amrita, and I had no complaints. We tossed sultry smiles and waved. I had light skin and hair. Amrita had my American sunglasses perched on her narrow sixteen-year-old face. The young men defiantly fixed their eyes on ours. We laughed and ducked down on the hot vinyl seats. The plastic felt like it ...

analysis of pulp fiction essays

analysis of pulp fiction essays The 1994 film Pulp Fiction may seem confusing and slow to some viewers. It is not until you fully understand the directors manipulations with time frames that you fully appreciate this film. This film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino is packed with action scenes as well as extensive dialogues between characters that illustrate the life of a small mob in Los Angeles California. Even though this movie may seem violent and cold there is certain humor created by the characters perspective of the crimes they commit. Like most of Quentin Tarantinos movies, Pulp Fiction has a circular path. The movie starts when an English couple decides to rob a coffee shop after going through an extensive discussion on why they should rob coffee shops and not liquor stores or gas stations. As the action is about to happen, the credits are shown on the screen. The movie then continues beginning with another chapter in the story. Julian, played by Samuel L. Jackson, and Vincent, played by John Travolta, are in a dialogue about Vincents trip to Amsterdam. They talk about the legalization of Marijuana. Later on they start talking about Vincent having to take care of his mob bosss wife for one night. This seemed like a delicate situation for Vincent since his boss, Marcellus Wallace played by Ving Rhames, was said to be very strict when it came to other men getting too close tohis wife. All of these facts from the movie we get just from the characters dialogue. One might think that so much dialogue could make a movie boring. The beauty of this idea by Tarantino is that we are forced to pay attention to the dialogues since they foreshadow upcoming events in the movie. All this conversation is happening while Vincent and Jules are on their way to take care of Mr. Wallaces business. They had been sent to get a suitcase that had been stolen by a group of young men. Again when the two enter the peoples ...

Retaining the Connotation of Retinue

Retaining the Connotation of Retinue Retaining the Connotation of Retinue Retaining the Connotation of Retinue By Mark Nichol What is a retinue, and do you need one? That depends on whether you need to be retained. This post defines and discusses the term retinue and its synonyms. Retinue, derived from the French verb retenir, meaning â€Å"retain,† or â€Å"keep,† refers to a group of associates or attendants. Originally, it applied to retainers (that word also stems from retenir), servants who attended to a person of high rank. Now, it is more likely to pertain to friends, employees, and hangers-on a celebrity surrounds himself or herself with. Associated words include entourage, from the French verb entourer, meaning â€Å"surround†; this word is cognate with tour (a tour â€Å"surrounds† the area circumscribed by the travel route) and tourist. Then there’s cortege, from the Latin term cohors, meaning â€Å"enclosure† (and the origin of court as well as cohort), by way of the Italian verb corteggiare, meaning â€Å"court,† as in an effort to influence someone politically or romantically; cortege also refers to a parade of attendants and may apply specifically to a funeral procession. Suite (ultimately from the Latin word sequere, meaning â€Å"follow†- and the source of sequence- by way of Old French), tail (from an Old English word meaning â€Å"lock of hair†), and train (from the Middle French verb trainer, meaning â€Å"drag† or â€Å"draw†) are also used in the sense of â€Å"those attending on an important person.† Following is another word with this connotation, though it can easily be misunderstood to apply to someone’s far-flung fan base rather than to close associates. Two slang terms synonymous with retinue are crew (ultimately from the Latin verb crescere, meaning â€Å"grow†- and the source of crescent- by way of Middle French and later Middle English, in the sense of reinforcement), from an association with the company of sailors or other workers who conduct operations (though with the connotation of a convivial assembly), and posse. That last word is a truncation of the Latin phrase posse comitatus, meaning â€Å"power of the county† and referring to a group of citizens deputized to assist in law enforcement or rescue. In popular culture, posse became associated with the Old West, conjuring the image of a band of men in a frontier town temporarily authorized to assist a county sheriff or a federal marshal with hunting down a fugitive outlaw. This meme inspired an association of the term with a rambunctious retinue accompanying a pop star. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Vocabulary category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:The Royal Order of Adjectives 5 Brainstorming Strategies for WritersUsing "May" in a Question

Gun control Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Gun control - Research Paper Example Some people supported the owning of fire arms by Americans while others advocated for new laws that would ban the sale of some semi-automatic firearms. These gun control calls were a measure to reduce the occurrence of a tragedy like the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting. After the incident at Sandy Hook, over 100,000 Americans signed a petition supporting renewed debate on gun control in America. Gun violence in the United States is the leading cause of calls to control guns. Gun violence is common in urban areas and more often involve young males (GIIDS, 2011). Such high profile shooting like the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre has heightened debate on gun policies in America. Statistics show that 70 percent of all homicides in the United States get perpetrated using some firearm. This includes suicides and accidental shooting incidences. Different policies at the state, federal and local levels, have made an attempt to address gun violence through a number of methods inc luding restrictions of firearm purchases by at risk population, establishment of gun buyback programs, law enforcement and policy strategies. Other measures to curb the increasing instances of gun violence include setting periods of waiting before purchasing of firearms, enactment of harsh laws of violators of gun laws, community outreach programs, and education programs for children and parents. The federal legislation aims at prohibiting the sale of firearms to criminals and insurgents. Gun policies get determined by the interpretation of the second amendment of the constitution of the United States. These amendments have been subject to several disagreements throughout the years. This second amendment protects a person’s right to own a firearm for the traditional lawful purpose of defense against trespassers in the home and within the federal enclaves. This protection extends to the states as well. There have been numerous endeavors in the United States by authorities to c ontrol the use of guns throughout the states. This has led to numerous recommendations in relation to gun laws and policies. Recommendations on the gun laws are as follows. There should be a ban to the military assault weapons that include high capacity magazines (Carter, 2006). Background checks should be expanded, and gun traffic laws should be toughened. A ban should be imposed on the sale and production of magazines with more than 10 rounds. The expanded background checks should include criminal checks to prevent an instance of criminals getting access to guns. The loophole should be closed that exempts gun buyers from any form of screening. Legislations should be passed to ban transfer or possession of armor bullets and cracking down on individuals. These people after passing the screening test hand over the guns to criminals and people forbidden from buying the guns. Top of these recommendations is the background checks issue. It is important for an individual background to be thoroughly scrutinized before getting allowed to own or even purchase a gun. There should be a ban on assault weapons. Another recommendation would be making legislation that defined gun trafficking as a federal crime. This legislation would limit the gun flow in, out and within states. There should be an addition of more legal language in the laws regarding the distribution of guns such that there are less legal hurdles in prosecution. This is because the current legal language as regards to gun laws has proved difficult

Algorithm Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Algorithm - Assignment Example The time taken for reversing the array would be linear to the length of the subsequence at each round. The time taken for palindromic check would also be linear to half of the length of the subsequence returned at each round. Hence, the total time for the algorithm would be O (n2). For the subsequence x [i†¦j] to be palindromic, the element x[i] should be equal to x[j], the element x [i+1] should be equal to x [j-1] and so on. Hence, to compute L (i, j), the elements x [i] and the element x [j] are first checked for equality. If equal, then we can say that L (i, j) holds at least a minimum value of 2 and the equality check is repeated for the next element x [i+1] and x [j-1]. If not equal, it is concluded that at least one of the element is not included in the palindrome. In that case, we are interested in repeating the check for elements x[i] and x [j-1] as well as x [i+1] and x [j] as we are not sure which element is not included in the palindrome. In the worst case, if none of the elements match, then L (i, j) is equal to 1 as every element is a palindrome of itself. Complexity analysis: As the computation involves two for loops, one running n-1 times which is O (n) and the other running n-s times which is also O (n), the total running time for the algorithm would be O (n2). Let be the median of x1, x2, x3.... As median occurs at i= (n+1)/2, we can say that there are (n+1)/2 -1 element smaller the median and there are n-(n+1)/2 elements larger than Sum of the weights of the elements lesser than the median can be written as: From the above analysis in (a), we found that the sum of the weights of all elements smaller than the weighted median is less than  ½. Similarly the weight of all elements larger than the median is also less than 1/2. We can compute xk by recursively calling the deterministic SELECT to compute the regular median. In each round, the array is divided into two halves around the calculated median xm and the actual median xk

History of the Stanford-Binet intelligence scales Essay

History of the Stanford-Binet intelligence scales - Essay Example The Fifth Edition of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales (SB5) is a relatively new revised method, but has a unique history (figure 1). In 1905, Binet and Simon developed the first formal intelligence test, and Louis Terman created the Stanford-Binet Scale in 1916; this final scale was revised in 1937, 1960, 1986, and 2003. The first versions used items to address functional abilities, and were arranged by levels. The Fifth Edition is a standardized intelligence battery that can be administered to people from ages 2 to 85 years. According to Strauss (2006) the main purpose of the revision was â€Å"to expand the range of the test, to allow assessment of very low and very high levels of cognitive ability†, and to increase its clinical applications (see table 1).The SB5 is based on the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of cognitive functioning, which is considered â€Å"one of the well-validated, comprehensive models of cognitive functioning† (Fiorello and Primerano, 2 005). Johnson (2007) describes the Stanford-Binet as â€Å"a comprehensive, norm-referenced individually administered test of intelligence and cognitive abilities†. The test is consists of five factors, which include Fluid Reasoning, Knowledge, Quantitative Reasoning, Visual-Spatial Processing, and Working Memory; each factor is further divided in verbal and non-verbal subtests (table 2). The Abbreviated Battery IQ scale consists of two routing subtests: one nonverbal (Object Series/Matrices) and one verbal (Vocabulary) (Coolican, J. et al, 2008).

Learning the Knowledge and Skills Required of the Profession Essay

Learning the Knowledge and Skills Required of the Profession - Essay Example I am an international student who was born and raised in Russia. I am currently 17 years old. As a young and optimistic individual, I am keen on pursuing a Management course from the Glendale Community College, pegged as one of the renowned educational institutions in the United States. I acknowledged that management is one of the traditional courses that offers vast opportunities for employment. Likewise, since I have been recognized by my parents, peers, and academic instructors, as manifesting leadership traits and skills, I deemed it appropriate to pursue an endeavour where leadership skills could be put to effective use. My professional goals include applying to a global organization right after earning a degree. I would like to be exposed to the organization’s operations that encompass a widely encompassing sphere. As such, as I reviewed the courses in Glendale’s management program, I acknowledge that in the near future, I would like to pursue higher education thr ough taking a master in business administration (MBA) degree. The management course would significantly assist in identifying areas of interest in applying management theories. At this point, I am particularly enthusiastic about delving into human resources management, which is considered a dynamic and multi-dimensional field of specialization – since it involved understanding and evaluating diverse traits, skills, competencies, and abilities of people from varied geographic and cultural orientations. Concurrently, I acknowledge that Glendale would be the perfect educational institution that would provide the theoretical framework, as well as harness the essential skills to become a practising manager in the near future.