Tuesday, January 28, 2020

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Essay Example for Free

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Essay The Setting of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is set in the time before the civil war. This setting of is when racism and civil rights were still around. It was around the late 1800s. The state of which story takes place in is Missouri. The town that Huck Finn starts off at is called St. Petersburg which goes along the Mississippi river. Later on Huckleberry Finn goes off to an island that he is familiar to called Jason Island after he faked is death. This is when and where the story of Huckleberry Finn took place. The story Finn a Novel Matthew Olshan took place in a more modern time in Missouri. Even know it was set in a more modern time there was still racism around. Later on they end up going to California. This was the setting of both of these stories. The Plot of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Finn a Novel by Matthew Olshan are very similar to each other. In The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn the main character Huck Finn is trying to find a way to freedom from his irresponsible drunken father Pap. In the novel Finn a Novel Chloe is trying to find a way to freedom from her crazy mother. Huck Finn and Chloe were both kidnapped by their parents. The slave of Widow Douglas, Jim, ran away from her and Huck Finn ran into Jim on Jason Island (which is where Huck Finn ran away to after he faked his death). They both run away together to find freedom. In Finn a Novel Finn faked her own death and ran away with her grandparent’s maid Silvia to California to be free of discrimination and racism. Both stories run through some situations and get split apart, but they make it through them. That is how both of the stories plots were similar to each other. The themes of both of these stories are pretty much the same. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the theme is natural life. It was not right in society that slave should be around. Huck Finn helped Jim to get to freedom after they ran away from civilization and society. When they were out of civilization the rules did not apply and made life easier for them. The theme of Finn a Novel was the same. When Silvia was working just to stay in the US without a pay was not alright. There was racism all around Silvia that was trying to deport her back to Mexico. To go to California was going to make her life better for her and her child. Both of these stories show that life can be better away from society. This is how the themes compare to each other.

Monday, January 20, 2020

I Must Help Others :: Medicine College Admissions Essays

I Must Help Others    I grew up amidst the poverty and deprivation of the Third World, and for the majority of the twenty years that I lived in Jamaica, I lived with a sense of hopelessness. I lived with my mother, one brother, and two sisters in a one-bedroom house without any roof. The day before my final exams, during my first year in high school, we were evicted from the house. I never got another chance to take my exams, and I had to spend the next school year repeating the same classes.    At the age of thirteen, I dropped out of school for about nine months because we were without any resources. During that time out of school I came to realize the value of education. I realized that I could improve the quality of my life and that of the people around me with an education.    While in high school my decision to become a doctor became real. As a member of the Hospital Club I visited the Kingston Public Hospital and saw that there were people there that had been waiting for days to see a doctor because they could not afford to go elsewhere. I had to do something to help.    As I pause to think of the forces that have motivated and influenced me, I remember the harsh experiences that I have endured, and the obstacles I have overcome. But, I would rather focus on the positive experiences that I have had. In doing so, I recall the many times that I was called upon by the headmistress of my high school to teach a mathematics class when the teacher was out ill, including the class in which I was enrolled. I remember the many times that I was voted in as class monitor and I also recall during my senior year being one of the fifteen prefects for the student body, which consisted of approximately 1500 girls. These experiences gave me a sense of pride, dignity, and the will to carry on.    I graduated from high school in 1985, and during that summer I worked as a clerk at the Police Forensic Laboratory. My interest in Physics and Biology blossomed as I watched the ballistics and other experiments being performed in this Laboratory. These were classes that I had never taken before.

Sunday, January 12, 2020

Analyzing Barnes & Noble.com

The Barnes & Noble online store – www. bn. com – was launched in March 1997. Among its primary strengths is its offline component – the Barnes & Noble, Inc. which is a leading publisher and retailer involved in selling trade books, mass market paperbacks, children’s books, bargain books, magazines, music and movies. The big inventory of this online channel is largely attributed to its offline counterpart. Another strength that Barnes & Noble. com has is its purchase of SparkNotes. com.This website is considered as the world’s largest educational site which provides access to thousands of study guides on various poems, short stories, novels, and other literary pieces. When Barnes & Noble bought SparksNotes in 2001, the educational site already had six million registered users. This number is continuously increasing and this increase widens the market reach of Barnes & Noble. com. Apart from SparkNotes, Barnes & Noble. com is also affiliated with the Barnes & Noble University.The university offers free courses and its students are potential targets which can be reached through the direct introduction and promotion of the online store and its products. Another advantage of Barnes & Noble. com is its acquisition of an online electronic book retailer – Fictionwise. Fictionwise allows the online store to penetrate the e-book market and effectively compete with Amazon. com (its prime competitor) in distributing digital copies of books and other content. Before, the prime problem of the site was that it was not as user-friendly as Amazon. com.Fortunately, that has been resolved by changing the site’s management team. Now, the major weakness that Barnes & Noble. com has is the fact that it is still not as popular as Amazon. com. When it started its operation in 1997, Amazon was already two years ahead in operation and it has already built a very big market of registered users in its database. In 1999, it was noted that Ba rnes & Noble. com only had 1. 8 million names while Amazon had 8. 4 million. Another weakness is the fact that its product prices are not as competitive with Amazon especially when it comes to e-books.Amazon also has bigger storage capacities for its products and this enables them to provide services and ship their products very quickly. Fortunately, its recent affiliations with SparkNotes and Fictionwise pose many opportunities. Barnes & Noble. com management speculates that Fictionwise can help the company significantly reduce its marketing price in e-books. Moreover, the acquisition of SparkNotes increases the market database of Barnes & Noble. com by millions. The company can also utilize its nationwide stores as marketing venues which already have access to millions of Barnes & Noble customers.It can also foster affiliations with other online companies in order to expand its market reach and increase probabilities for future innovations. As for the threats, Barnes & Noble still faces challenges from Amazon. com, as well as other book sellers which adapted the Amazon concept of online retail. This includes Blackwell Synergy, Books-A-Million, and Powell’s Books. If these companies would merge to launch a new online library and book retailer, Barnes & Noble. com might have suffer from fierce competition. A leader in the industryBarnes & Noble. com is considered as a leader in the online bookselling as it offers a wide selection of in-stock inventory – three million from the company’s online catalogue and another thirty million listings from other book dealers of in-print books which may be new, rare, used, or out-of print. In addition to that, the website is also leading in the electronic books and publishing industry. The site has almost 5,000 e-book titles which can be purchased and readily downloaded from the site to any personal computer, laptop, or pocket PC.With its rapid expansion and tie-up with various online companies, Barnes & Noble predicts that it won’t be long before their site would offer digital companies of all of the company’s book titles. Barnes & Noble. com is also leading in the music commerce. Recently, Forbes. com voted the website as the No. 1 music site. The music store of Barnes & Noble. com has been credited for offering not just great music of jazz, world music or Broadway. Instead, it also achieved recognition for its extensive and interesting editorial features for people who want to know more about the music that they are buying.Barnes & Noble. com’s success is best demonstrated in its revenues. Based on the company records, the sales of this online channel have steadily increased in the past few years. In 2006, its sales reached $433 million for the full year. In 2007, the sales were up to $477 million for the full year – exhibiting about 13. 4% increase as compared to 2006. The revenue model of the E-commerce site Barnes & Noble. com is patterned after Am azon. com’s web catalog revenue model. Like other booksellers, Barnes & Noble.com get their revenues when customers choose from the on-site product catalogs and buy through the site. The orders can be placed and paid through the automated ordering forms and â€Å"shopping cart† of the website. What’s good about this model is the fact that it acts as an online extension of the company’s nationwide stores for its in-print products. Since the model is implemented at an online level, the revenue generation becomes more effective as potential customers can access the site, view their choices, and buy products anytime that they want to.Although there are other methods of earning which Barnes & Noble. com can use (i. e. advertising through editorial content and ad spaces), such must be utilized only at a minimal level in order to avoid comprising the site’s book selling and promotion process. Marketing on the web Barnes & Noble. com tries aims to appeal t o the general audience. To attract the target market and maintain a great share of loyal customers, the company employs various promotional methods – both offline and online. Offline, www. bn.com is introduced through the stores of Barnes & Noble. It is also popularized through the Barnes & Noble Membership Program which offers incentives to shoppers of the company’s products online and offline. The most beneficial incentive is the discounts which range from ten to ninety percent. The marketing campaign of Barnes & Noble. com is a lot more aggressive. Foremost of these is the promotional mailing. The online book retailer attempts to pitch various book clubs including the 5. 5 million members of the Bertlesmann.In addition to that, they have linked their physical stores to their site. Included in their previous strategy was to provide incentives for customers who give away their e-mail addresses to them. Through their university, Barnes & Noble gains access to the e-mai l addresses of students as well. The e-mails are then supplied with promotional offers, flyers, brochures, newsletters and product catalogs. In addition to this, the online book seller is promoted through advertorials and advertisements in Yahoo. In 2000, Barnes & Noble.com initiated a partnership with Yahoo. As a result, the site became the premier book seller that is featured in the Yahoo directory. The site was also the featured merchant on Yahoo Shopping. Moreover, graphic links of Barnes & Noble. com were presented in every search result page and in all the book category pages of Yahoo. Conclusion Barnes & Noble. com has achieved its position as a leading online bookseller through its successful acquisition, affiliations and merging with other online companies such as Yahoo, SparkNotes, Spinway, and FictionWise.Moreover, a great part of its success must also be attributed to the fact that it has a big inventory of books (in-print and e-books), magazines, and CDs and DVDs of var ious music and movies. The online book seller also has an efficient marketing campaign – online and offline – through Yahoo. com, Barnes & Noble physical stores, and through its aggressive promotional mailings distributed primarily via book clubs and the Barnes & Noble University. Barnes & Noble. com’s success is best demonstrated in its continuously increasing revenues for the past few years.Furthermore, this success is seen in its rapid expansion and continuously increasing inventory. To keep up with this success and the fierce competition with Amazon. com, the online company should make sure that it can keep up with the new innovations in marketing, new methods in presenting online product catalogs, and more efficient processes in shipping their products. It should also increase its inventory storage capacity through the acquisition of more warehouses. References: Barnes & Noble (2008). Barnes & Noble Press Release: Barnes & Noble Reports 2007 Year-End Sales, Released 03-03-2008.Retrieved 03-15-2009 from http://www. barnesandnobleinc. com/newsroom/press_releases_list. html Danielle Belopotosky (2009). E-Book Seller Fictionwise Bought by Barnes & Noble. Published 03-05-2009 in New York Times Online. Retrieved 03-15-2009 from http://gadgetwise. blogs. nytimes. com/2009/03/05/e-book-seller-fictionwise-bought-buy-barnes-noble/ Gale Group (2007). Barnes & Noble Reports Preliminary 2006 Results: Issues First Quarter 2007 Guidance. Published 03-22-2007 in Business Wire, The Free Library. Retrieved 03-15-2009 from http://www. thefreelibrary.com/Business+Wire/2007/March/22-p53 Larry Light (1999). Barnes & Noble's New Battle Plan for the Cyberbook War. Published 07-07-1999 in Business Week Online. Retrieved 03-15-2009 from http://www. businessweek. com/bwdaily/dnflash/july1999/nf90707a. htm Yahoo. (2000). Yahoo Press Release: Barnes & Noble Announces Availability Of Free Unlimited Internet Service CDs At Stores Nationwide, Released October 16, 20 00. Retrieved 03-15-2009 from http://yhoo. client. shareholder. com/releasedetail. cfm? sh_print=yes&releaseid=173692 Barnes & Noble Website: http://www. barnesandnobleinc. com

Saturday, January 4, 2020

Outer Circle - Definition and Examples - World English

The outer circle is made up of post-colonial countries in which English, though not the mother tongue, has for a significant period of time played an important role in education, governance, and popular culture. Countries in the outer circle include India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, and more than 50 other nations. Low Ee  Ling  and Adam Brown describe the outer circle as those countries in the earlier phases of the spread of English in non-native settings[,] . . . where English has become institutionalized or has become part of the countrys chief institutions (English in Singapore, 2005).   The outer circle is one of the three concentric circles of World English described by linguist Braj Kachru in Standards, Codification and Sociolinguistic Realism: The English Language in the Outer Circle (1985).   The labels inner, outer, and expanding  circles represent the type of spread, the patterns of acquisition, and the functional allocation of the English language in diverse cultural contexts.  As discussed below, these labels remain controversial. Explanations of Outer Circle English In the Inner Circle, English spread largely because of a migration of English speakers. In time each settlement developed its own national variety. On the other hand, the spread of English in the Outer Circle has occurred largely as a result of colonization by English-speaking nations. Here, two major types of linguistic development occurred. In some countries like Nigeria and India, where under colonial powers it developed as an elite second language, only a minority of the society acquired English. However, in other countries like Barbados and Jamaica, the slave trade had a significant impact on the variety of English spoken, resulting in the development of English-based pidgins and creoles.(Sandra Lee McKay, Teaching English as an International Language: Rethinking Goals and Approaches. Oxford University Press, 2002)The Outer Circle may be thought of as country contexts where English was first introduced as a colonial language for administrative purposes. . . . English is used in these countries for intra-country purposes. In addition to Outer Circle, terms frequently used to describe the manner in which English has evolved in these settings include institutionalized and nativized. In these countries, a variety of English has evolved which possesses the common core characteristics of Inner Circle varieties of English, but in addition can be distinguished from them by particular lexical, phonological, pragmatic, and morphosyntactic innovations.(Kimberly Brown, World Englishes:  To Teach or Not to Teach. World Englishes, ed. by   Kingsley Bolton and Braj B. Kachru. Routledge, 2006) Problems With the World Englishes Model Considering the history of the emancipation of various Englishes around the globe, it is obvious that the groundbreaking work emanated from and has been essentially focused on the Outer Circle. But it has been an uphill struggle. Even today, what is often termed international by Inner Circle scholars, publishers, etc. is often simply interpreted as the international spread of native-speaker Standard English (a minority variety in itself) rather than the way English has changed to meet international needs.(Barbara Seidlhofer, World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca: Two Frameworks or One? World Englishes--Problems, Properties and Prospects, ed. by Thomas Hoffmann and Lucia Siebers. John Benjamins, 2009)As a large number speakers from the Outer-Circle and Expanding-Circle countries now live in the Inner-Circle countries, even native speakers of English are increasingly exposed to World Englishes. This means revising the notion of proficiency even for the English of native speake rs. Canagarajah (2006: 233) maintains that, in a context where we have to constantly shuffle between different varieties [of English] and communities, proficiency becomes complex . . . one needs the capacity to negotiate diverse varieties to facilitate communication.(Farzad Sharifian, English as an International Language: An Overview. English as an International Language: Perspectives and Pedagogical Issues, ed. by F. Sharifian. Multilingual Matters, 2009) Also Known As: extended circle