Queen Victoria Essays (1004 words) - Queen Victoria,

Queen Victoria Queen Victoria, written by Carolly Erickson, was a candid tale of the life of Victoria, a British queen whose obstinate and pertinacious behavior helped to maintain England's impenetrable reign over the rest of the world. Erickson aimed to prove that women, such as Victoria, were entirely competent of governing themselves and others, even though women were regarded as inferior and in need of male supervision. The author successfully accomplished her purpose of depicting Victoria in a positive light by imforming the reader of how she managed to triumph over adversity despiite her callous upbringing. Princess Alexandria Victoria was born on May 24, 1819, to the Duke and Duchess of Kent in Kensington Palace. Unfortunately, the Duke passed away shortly after her birth. Therefore, Victoria's upbringing was left in the hands of her avaricious and irascible mother in the hands of her father's tyrannical equerry, Captain Conroy. With only their own self-interests in mind, Victoria's care takers attempted to deprive the young princess of her childhood by enforcing stringent rules and by confining her to the palace. Her own relatives tired to deny her noteworthy status of being third in line for the throne, and they publicly regarded her as an intruder. However, there were, in fact, many favorable aspects of Victoria;s childhood and adolescence. Victoria was taught the grace of dance and the beauty of art in her childhood, and she learned to appreciate her future role as queen through her extensive study of British history. She was quite a determined and uncompromising young princess, and this attitude remained with her throughout her reign as Queen of England. Soon after the death of King William IV, Princess Victoria was crowned as queen at the legal age of eighteen. Queen Victoria aspired to be a fit and upright ruler of England, and iwth the assistance of the English government, Victoria was able to constitute order in all areas of her empire. Her marriage to her cousin, Prince Albert of Sax-Coburg-Gotha, was very advantageous and favorable for both Victoria and her empire. Albert privided the emotional stability that Victoria required in that period of time, and he also supplied England with his wonderful expertise in political and social issues. Their marriage produced nine children who continued this English dynasty after the death of their parents. Albert's tragic death had a detrimental impact on Victoria's life because her husbands served as an emotional crutch for her, and she suddenly felt overwhelmed by her responsibilities as queen. However, with the guidance of her extraordinary prime ministers, Victoria was able to be victorious in wars in Crimea an Prussia. Uner Victoria's rule, England was able to assert its power over India, a country in which Victoria attempted to gain popularity among its citizens. Queen Victoria also organized housing arrangements for England's less fortunate citizens and medical care for the workmen in England's factories. There were incessant disputes among the Whigs and Tories in Parliament, which Victoria successfully ceased, and there were difficulties concerning the British occupation of Sudan, Africa. However, Victoria was able to overcome these hardships and to gain the admiration of her kingdom. On January 22, 1901, Queen Victoria died at the age of eighty one, leaving behind an empire that lamented over the death of such a remarkable ruler. Carolly Erickson's biography of Queen Victoria provided an equitable insight into Victoira's life as queen. Erickson supplied elaborate descriptions of England's palaces and royal celebrations, allowing the reader to easily envision these places and festivities. For example, the author described the House of Windsor with a great deal of detail when writing, "Beyond the magnificent furnishings, glowing tapestries, and fine paintings that adorned the ancient castle's living quarters, there were riches brought from India, booty taken from Tippoo Sahib, including a golden tiger's head and sparkling sculpted peacock studded with rubies and emeralds." Furthermore, the author also included excerpts from Victoria's private journal, which she maintained in the years before and during her rule. These excerpts allowed the reader to view Victoria with feelings of admiration and enderment. The reader was able to share in Victoria's triumphs and tragedies and to understand the emotions that she felt during certain episodes in her life. For instance, Victoria was terribly grieved after the death of her beloved husband, and she felt as if she was lacking part of her soal because of his untimely death. The readers gained an insight into her pain when reading an excerpt from her journal in which she said, "I stood up, kissing his dear heavenly forehead and called out in a bitter

Music Lyrics Linked To Crime essays

Music Lyrics Linked To Crime essays Music lyrics have undergone dramatic changes since the introduction of rock music more than 40 years ago. This is of vital interest and concern for parents .During the past four decades; music lyrics have become increasingly explicit, particularly with reference to sex, drugs, crime and violence. Recently, heavy metal and gangsta rap music lyrics have elicited the greatest concern. Such lyrics are of special concern in todays environment, which poses unprecedented threats to the health and well-being of adolescents. Pregnancy, drug use, STDs, injuries, homicide and suicide have all become part of everyday life for many teens. We dont even blink when prominent corporate citizens sell music to our children that celebrate violence, including the murder of police, gang rape and sexual perversity, including pedophilia. (Senator J.Lieberman) These cultural indicators have very real implications. We are left with an unmoral hole in our society, in which our children learn that anything goes, and is the heart of our societys worst problems. These trendsetters exert an extremely powerful hold on our culture and our children particular, and they often exhibit little sense of responsibility for the harmful values they are portraying. (Committee on Communications) Consider a song like Slap-a-ho by the group Dove Shack, distributed by PolyGram, which touted the virtues of a machine that automatically smacks a wife or girlfriend into line; or the vile work of the death metal band Cannibal Corpse, distributed through a Sony subsidiary, which recorded one song describing the rape of a woman with a knife and another describing the act of masturbating with a dead womans head. These songs and others like contain some of the most disgusting thoughts Ive ever heard, but they are more than just offensive. When combined with all the murder and mayhem depicted by the media they are helping ...

Amazon Database Essay Example for Free

Amazon Database Essay Amazon.com is developing a system to gather and keep massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and income. The database, which would combine information disclosed voluntarily by customers with facts gleaned from public databases, conceivably would give Amazon a larger or more detailed profile of its customers than any other retailer. The Seattle-based company, with 59 million active customers, said it has no immediate plan to implement such a program. Its ability to do so emerged in a detailed patent application with the U. Patent & Trademark Office, disclosed Thursday. A privacy expert said customers should be wary about Amazon having the capability to gather such a large amount of detailed information. She said the data could end up in the hands of the myriad retailers that do business with the company, or with government officials or hackers. â€Å"Amazon never ceases to amaze me,† said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. â€Å"If they create this database, it will be used for other purposes. †¦ They are really creating something worth a great deal of value that will help their company.† The patent disclosure comes at a time of heightened awareness over online security and a rash of recent security breaches. AOL recently published a list of more than 650,000 user queries that revealed names, addresses and Social Security numbers, and the company this week apologized and removed the data, but it’s unknown how many copies of the sensitive information were made. Amazon’s pending patent, which would bar competitors from replicating the company’s process for gathering information, details how it could compile data from customers to create a profile of products that a person might want to buy. Such a database would include the gender, date of birth, interests, occupation, education, income level, residence, race and ethnicity of customers for Amazon’s â€Å"gift clustering† program. Customers already willingly disclose some personal information on the site — to create a â€Å"wish list† of desired products, for example. The larger potential database would go beyond that. â€Å"Even if a customer does not know demographic information or interest s of a possible recipient, the system may be able to access such information from a user profile for the recipient, from past ordering patterns of the recipient, or from publicly accessible databases,† the patent application said. Company spokeswoman Patty Smith said Amazon.com has â€Å"no current plans† to implement such a system. â€Å"Not every company uses a patent it has in its name, but it may have a patent in portfolio,† Smith said. â€Å"Who knows 10 years down the road or five years down the road? It might be good to implement. We want to protect our intellectual property.† Smith said the document released Thursday is an addendum to a patent Amazon sought in October 2000 and received in February of this year. She said much of what was in the original patent was also disclosed Thursday, but she didn’t have details on what was new. Smith said that six years ago Amazon was â€Å"trying to figure out ways to make it easier for customers to find information† on the company’s wish list feature for gifts. â€Å"Amazon is always careful how it uses customer data so the customer experience will be as good as it can be,† she said. The system described in the patent would give shoppers, with the click of a mouse, additional detailed information at the discretion of the gift recipient. Amazon already groups or clusters gifts, such as camping items or back-to-school goods, and then suggests them to buyers based on generic factors such as price, the relationship between the giver and receiver or the recipient’s age or gender. The patent disclosure also comes at a time when Amazon, originally an online bookseller in 1995, is moving into new ventures to boost profits. The company’s stock took a huge hit last month after Amazon reported disappointing second-quarter earnings and company executives said there would be continual heavy spending on technology. Amazon recently started its own toy and food stores. The patent application, filed Dec. 9, 2005, by Amazon inventor Amit Agarwal but made public Thursday, could take years to be approved, according to Brigid Quinn, a Patent & Trademark Office spokeswoman. Quinn said there’s a backlog of more than 700,000 patent applications, and the agency reviews about 300,000 a year. â€Å"It’s in the early stages. It’s not even on an examiner’s desk yet,† Quinn said. â€Å"But they could use it without it being patented. The patent only prevents others from using it.† Greg Linden, a former technology team leader at Amazon, said it sounds to him like Amazon is just protecting its wish list feature. Linden, founder of Findory.com, an online news site, also warned not to read too much into a patent application because lawyers â€Å"throw in everything they can think of† to keep competitors from copying an idea. Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Amazon-database-would-put-shoppers-intimate-1211419.php#ixzz24rlGoBic http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon-oracle/ AWS Case Study: Amazon.com Oracle DB Backup to Amazon S3 Amazon.com is the world’s largest online retailer. In 2011, Amazon.com switched from tape backup to using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for backing up the majority of its Oracle databases. This strategy reduces complexity and capital expenditures, provides faster backup and restore performance, eliminates tape capacity planning for backup and archive, and frees up administrative staff for higher value operations. They were able to replace their backup tape infrastructure with Cloud-based Amazon S3 storage, eliminate backup software, and experienced a 12X performance improvement, reducing restore time from around 15 hours to 2.5 hours in select scenarios. As Amazon.com grows larger, the sizes of their Oracle databases continue to grow, and so does the sheer number of databases they maintain. This has caused growing pains related to backing up legacy Oracle databases to tape and led to the consideration of alternate strategies including the use of Cloud services of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com. Some of the business challenges Amazon.com faced included: Utilization and capacity planning is complex, and time and capital expense budget are at a premium. Significant capital expenditures were required over the years for tape hardware, data center space for this hardware, and enterprise licensing fees for tape software. During that time, managing tape infrastructure required highly skilled staff to spend time with setup, certification and engineering archive planning instead of on higher value projects. And at the end of every fiscal year, projecting future capacity requirements required time consuming audits, forecasting, and budgeting. The cost of backup software required to support multiple tape devices sneaks up on you. Tape robots provide basic read/write capability, but in order to fully utilize them, you must invest in proprietary tape backup software. For Amazon.com, the cost of the software had been high, and added significantly to overall backup costs. The cost of this software was an ongoing budgeting pain point, but one that was difficult to address as long as backups needed to be written to tape devices. Maintaining reliable backups and being fast and efficient when retrieving data requires a lot of time and effort with tape. When data needs to be durably stored on tape, multiple copies are required. When everything is working correctly, and there is minimal contention for tape resources, the tape robots and backup software can easily find the required data. However, if there is a hardware failure, human intervention is necessary to restore from tape. Contention for tape drives resulting from multiple users’ tape requests slows down restore processes even more. This adds to the recovery time objective (RTO) and makes achieving it more challenging compared to backing up to Cloud storage. Advantages with Amazon Web Services Amazon.com initiated the evaluation of Amazon S3 for economic and performance improvements related to data backup. As part of that evaluation, they considered security, availability, and performance aspects of Amazon S3 backups. Amazon.com also executed a cost-benefit analysis to ensure that a migration to Amazon S3 would be financially worthwhile. That cost benefit analysis included the following elements: Performance advantage and cost competitiveness. It was important that the overall costs of the backups did not increase. At the same time, Amazon.com required faster backup and recovery performance. The time and effort required for backup and for recovery operations proved to be a significant improvement over tape, with restoring from Amazon S3 running from two to twelve times faster than a similar restore from tape. Amazon.com required any new backup medium to provide improved performance while maintaining or reducing overall costs. Backing up to on-premises disk based storage would have improved performance, but missed on cost competitiveness. Amazon S3 Cloud based storage met both criteria. Greater durability and availability. Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year. Amazon.com compared these figures with those observed from their tape infrastructure, and determined that Amazon S3 offered significant improvement. Less operational friction. Amazon.com DBAs had to evaluate whether Amazon S3 backups would be viable for their database backups. They determined that using Amazon S3 for backups was easy to implement because it worked seamlessly with Oracle RMAN. Strong data security. Amazon.com found that AWS met all of their requirements for physical security, security accreditations, and security processes, protecting data in flight, data at rest, and utilizing suitable encryption standards. With the migration to Amazon S3 well along the way to completion, Amazon.com has realized several benefits, including: Elimination of complex and time-consuming tape capacity planning. Amazon.com is growing larger and more dynamic each year, both organically and as a result of acquisitions. AWS has enabled Amazon.com to keep pace with this rapid expansion, and to do so seamlessly. Historically, Amazon.com business groups have had to write annual backup plans, quantifying the amount of tape storage that they plan to use for the year and the frequency with which they will use the tape resources. These plans are then used to charge each organization for their tape usage, spreading the cost among many teams. With Amazon S3, teams simply pay for what they use, and are billed for their usage as they go. There are virtually no upper limits as to how much data can be stored in Amazon S3, and so there are no worries about running out of resources. For teams adopting Amazon S3 backups, the need for formal planning has been all but eliminated. Reduced capital expenditures. Amazon.com no longer needs to acquire tape robots, tape drives, tape inventory, data center space, networking gear, enterprise backup software, or predict future tape consumption. This eliminates the burden of budgeting for capital equipment well in advance as well as the capital expense. Immediate availability of data for restoring – no need to locate or retrieve physical tapes. Whenever a DBA needs to restore data from tape, they face delays. The tape backup software needs to read the tape catalog to find the correct files to restore, locate the correct tape, mount the tape, and read the data from it. In almost all cases the data is spread across multiple tapes, resulting in further delays. This, combined with contention for tape drives resulting from multiple users’ tape requests, slows the process down even more. This is especially severe during critical events such as a data center outage, when many databases must be restored simultaneously and as soon as possible. None of these problems occur with Amazon S3. Data restores can begin immediately, with no waiting or tape queuing – and that means the database can be recovered much faster. Backing up a database to Amazon S3 can be two to twelve times faster than with tape drives. As one example, in a benchmark test a DBA was able to restore 3.8 terabytes in 2.5 hours over gigabit Ethernet. This amounts to 25 gigabytes per minute, or 422MB per second. In addition, since Amazon.com uses RMAN data compression, the effective restore rate was 3.37 gigabytes per second. This 2.5 hours compares to, conservatively, 10-15 hours that would be required to restore from tape. Easy implementation of Oracle RMAN backups to Amazon S3. The DBAs found it easy to start backing up their databases to Amazon S3. Directing Oracle RMAN backups to Amazon S3 requires only a configuration of the Oracle Secure Backup Cloud (SBC) module. The effort required to configure the Oracle SBC module amounted to an hour or less per database. After this one-time setup, the database backups were transparently redirected to Amazon S3. Durable data storage provided by Amazon S3, which is designed for 11 nines durability. On occasion, Amazon.com has experienced hardware failures with tape infrastructure – tapes that break, tape drives that fail, and robotic components that fail. Sometimes this happens when a DBA is trying to restore a database, and dramatically increases the mean time to recover (MTTR). With the durability and availability of Amazon S3, these issues are no longe r a concern. Freeing up valuable human resources. With tape infrastructure, Amazon.com had to seek out engineers who were experienced with very large tape backup installations – a specialized, vendor-specific skill set that is difficult to find. They also needed to hire data center technicians and dedicate them to problem-solving and troubleshooting hardware issues – replacing drives, shuffling tapes around, shipping and tracking tapes, and so on. Amazon S3 allowed them to free up these specialists from day-to-day operations so that they can work on more valuable, business-critical engineering tasks. Elimination of physical tape transport to off-site location. Any company that has been storing Oracle backup data offsite should take a hard look at the costs involved in transporting, securing and storing their tapes offsite – these costs can be reduced or possibly eliminated by storing the data in Amazon S3. As the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon.com continuously innovates in order to provide improved customer experience and offer products at the lowest possible prices. One such innovation has been to replace tape with Amazon S3 storage for database backups. This innovation is one that can be easily replicated by other organizations that back up their Oracle databases to tape. Amazon Database. (2016, Dec 09).

Criminal Conviction Rate in England Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Criminal Conviction Rate in England - Essay Example ter than 90% conviction rate and 85% negotiated pleas, it would appear that the English judicial system delivers justice at an acceptably speedy rate and therefore has fewer number of detainees on remand awaiting trial for an inordinate number of years. However, the judicial process still takes considerable time and questions arising over the denial of the right to trial within a reasonable time remain relevant. Strong criticisms on how the British government handles terrorism-related cases have been expressed in more recent times. For instance, in 2004, the British House of Lords took exception to the way the government took inordinately long periods of time to deal with terrorism cases2. According to data released by the Ministry of Justice, there has been a general decline in the rate of convictions over the past decade. This is deducible from figure1, which is a graphical representation of the conviction rate in England and Wales for the decade between 2002 and 2012. Figure 1 demonstrates that convictions were low in 2002 but dramatically increased to peak in 2004. Nonetheless, from 2004 to 2012 the convictions continued to decrease with a slight increase between 2008 and 2009 during the global financial crisis, but nevertheless continued on a downward trajectory thereafter, reaching the bottom at roughly 1.2 million convictions in 2012. Based on the figures delineated in Table 1, it appears that there was a statistically significant decline in the number of persons coming into contact with the judicial system for the years 2011 and 2012. These figures include prosecuted cases and control for cases that were settled out-of-court. For 2011, 2.03 persons came into contact with the judicial system which is 8.4% higher than the numbers for the year 2012. These statistics were drawn-off the 13 % fall in out of court settlements from 444,441 persons to 386, 95756, as well as the 7.1 % downfall from 1,583,373 to 1,471, 304 in the defendants proceeding to court

Investment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 1

Investment - Essay Example Thus why they have steady feature for portfolio. Bonds also have a better planning. This is due to the higher stability in their returns as opposed to real estate. It is easier for a person to plan for his or her future. Having the knowledge that the amount you invested in bonds will pay you the interest it has earned in a year enables a person to set a target on the savings. Also he or she will be in a better position to estimate his or her return on investment. A house may is not an investment, this is because houses are not efficient ways of investing. They usually cost more to buy and to manage. Though it may seem as if it will have more returns in future this does not hold because of the cost that was incurred in purchasing it, renovating, insuring, repairing and paying taxes on it. All this costs will not make the house to appreciate in price in reality. Even if I was to sell the house in the future the profit I will earn is not a true one but it will just be a large refund of the cost incurred. I do not view jewelry as an investment because not all the times it appreciates in values. Many jewels although they seem to be pretty they may not be having any significant value in them. Most of the jewels are only covered with precious materials and the underneath material might be of less value. Others are not made of pure materials thus making them depreciate it value. Also other factors that determine the value of the jewelry are: when you purchase jewelry from a trader, its mark up is rather heavy. Also the size of the jewelry will determine how it is going to appreciate. A large size will appreciate more than a small one. A high quality jewel will have more value as compared to a low quality one. Lastly the jewel will appreciate depending on its history and uniqueness. The one which was made by a famous designer is likely to have more value. The more rare the jewel

Biome Essay Example for Free

Biome Essay The African Savanna biome is a tropical grassland in Africa between latitude 15Â ° North and 30 degrees S and longitude 15 degrees W and 40Â ° West. It covers Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote Divore, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Botswana, and South Africa. Around 2 million large plant-eating mammals live in the savanna. There are 45 species of mammals, almost 500 species of birds, and 55 species of acacia in the Serengeti Plains. There are animals such as lions, African wildcats, klipspringer, steenbok, Burchells zebra, African Savanna monitor, and puff adders. They have the largest diversity of hoofed animals in the world including antelopes, wildebeest, buffalos, zebras, and rhinoceros. Fire, ground water, water table, soils moisture retention, landforms (plateau, mountain, valley) and their slope ( 3% to 10%), soil temperate, days of cloud cover versus days of sun for amount of sunlight and it influence, first last frost dates for growing season. Focus on the limiting factors of the air supply, precipitation, soil types, light.

Kants Attack on the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection :: Philosophy Philosophical Essays

Kant's Attack on the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection ABSTRACT: In the neglected 'Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection,' Kant introduces a new transcendental activity, Transcendental Deliberation (Kemp Smith calls it 'Transcendental Reflection'). It aims to determine to which faculty a representation belongs and does so by examining the representation's relationships to other representations. This enterprise yields some powerful ideas. (1) Some of the relationships studied have great interest, numerical identity in particular. Indeed, seeing Kant discuss it here, one wonders why he did not include it in the Table of Categories. (2) Kant gives a solid argument for the necessity of a sensible element in representations, something not found elsewhere in the Transcendental Analytic. In the neglected Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection, Kant introduces a new transcendental activity, Transcendental Deliberation (Kemp Smith calls it Transcendental Reflection). It aims to determine to which faculty a representation belongs and does so by examining the representation's relationships to other representations. This enterprise yields some powerful ideas. (1) Some of the relationships studied have great interest, numerical identity in particular. Indeed, seeing Kant discuss it here, one wonders why he did not include it in the Table of Categories. (2) Kant gives a solid argument for the necessity of a sensible element in representations, something not found elsewhere in the Transcendental Analytic.The Transcendental Analytic of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ends with a little appendix on what Kant calls the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection. As an appendix, the passage is more than a little curious. The point that Kant eventually gets around to defending, that we are aware only of appearances, not things as they are in themselves, is familiar, but the argument that Kant now gives for it is entirely new and so interesting that one wonders why Kant relegated it to an appendix. Second, the passage introduces an important new concept, namely, numerical identity. For the first time in the Critique so far, Kant treats the notion separately and gives it important work to do. The Table of Categories does not so much as mention numerical identity, even though the concept would seem to be at least as good a candidate for categorial status as, say, modality. Third, the passage argues for the claim that knowledge requires sensible intuitions as well as concepts. Prior to the Amphiboly Kant has of course asserted this many times — but try to find an argument! Here he offers one.