Violent Video Games Raise Aggression Essay -- Gaming

Throughout history man kind has always searched for ways to entertain himself, each time developing new activities and games. Video games have become a very popular way to spend time and have fun from the 1970’s up to now. With new developments appeared different video game genres from adventure to racing, but the violent video games appear to be the most popular ones (Shin, 2003), for example: shooters, fighting and video games where you have to eliminate, destroy, or kill your enemies. Video games have become very influential on children and adults (Stafford, 1999). With violent video games humans are more prone to act aggressively, to have aggressive thoughts and become numb towards violence (Harding, 2009). Apart from these they are prone to develop antisocial behavior, depression and addiction. This means that future generations will be more violent and less sensible towards violence. Is this type of entertainment really worth a more violent world and future? B. The IT background of the issue Back in time input devices for video games were analog this means that data was very short ranged and limited like for example movements in the x-axis only, like in â€Å"Pong†. This is one of the reasons why before there were very few and not that violent video games such as â€Å"Space Invader†. But as technology developed so did the video game industry (Reynolds, 2004) and input devices became each time more complex. With more option in the input devices people can do more actions in the video games like for example combo moves or kill enemies in many other different ways (Stafford, 1999). Another development that has caused the appearance of violent video games is the increase in quality of the output. Before, the only VDU’s were C... ...1/2008. CNN. 24/05/2010 â€Å"Insert Coin: Part 5-Violence in Video Games†. Brent Stafford. Internet. Youtube, 02/11/2006 Shaky egg. Brent Stafford. 2004. Shaky Egg Communications Inc. 24/05/2010 Red3d. Craig Reynolds. 22/07/2007. None. 24/05/2010 About.com. Jennifer Rosenberg. 2003. The New York Times Company. 24/05/2010 Gamezero. Salamander. 08-09/1992. Game Zero Magazine. 24/05/2010 Tgorski. Terence Gorski. Unknown. GORSKI-CENAPS Team. 24/05/2010

How Was Sparta Governed

How was Sparta governed? The Spartan Government Ancient Spartan government was a complex system of intertwined elements, which affected the power control. In many ways, ancient Sparta was a communist state, with the lack of luxuries, other Grecian states enjoyed and the strict control for equality but was complicated with the almost religious need for a democratic vote. Sparta had three levels of government; the Kings’, the Gerousia, the Ephors and the Ekklesia, each having their own requirements, limitations and powers.The Spartan monarchy consisted of 2 kings which governed over Sparta. Unlike other Grecian kings, Spartan Kings had very little power and did not have an autocratic rule over day-to-day life. A Spartan kings’ duties were classified as religious, military, judicial roles. As the head figure of religion in Sparta, the kings were the priests of Zeus, Lacedaemonis and Zeus Uranius. The kings’ family would also worship these gods. As a monthly ritual, the kings were expected to make an animal sacrifice to the god Apollo, as to maintain the pleasure of the gods.This was similar to the sacrifice he would make prior to going to war. As a part of his religious role, the king would appoint two Pythioi who would travel back and forth to consult with the oracle (a possessed priestess whom was said to speak the words of the Gods) at Delphi. During a time of war, only one king would be sent with the battalions, and would be the supreme commander of the army. In the field of battle, the king would have ultimate power over his troops, including the life or death of his army. During the course of the war, the king would have a personal bodyguard of 100 men.Being a part of the royal bodyguard was considered to be one of the greatest honours. Amongst this body guard, 2 members of the Ephor’s would be in attendance, and keep an eye on his activities. They would record any failure or misconduct during a military campaign and could lead to the recall of the army, or punishment of the king. As stated above, the Kings’ power was strictly limited, which is seen in his judicial role. The king was responsible for all matters pertaining to public highways (e. g. the repairs, conflicts, etc).He was responsible for all legal matters in regards to the adoption of children and the power to decide upon the marriage partner of an heiress whose father died. Despite the extremities of limits the kings’ faced he had privileges which were considered as a ‘luxury’ in terms of Spartan society, such as the kings’ being supported at the expense of the state. They would also receive minor honours such as the best seats at religious festivals. During mealtimes, the kings were given the first seats at a banquet and were served first at the Syssitia.During the Syssition the kings would also receive double portions of a meal. Another privilege of the kings, following a successful war campaign, the king (who went to war) would be given a percentage of the spoils of victory. The kings could also receive the skins of any animal that had been sacrificed in a religious ceremony. At the event of a king’s death, all public business would be ceased for a 10 day period, where civilians would wear mourning clothing. During his funeral, the king’s reign would be lauded as being greater than any other previous king.Herodotus describes the role of the kings in The Histories in Book VI (6) as â€Å"The prerogatives of the Spartan kings are these: two priesthoods, of Zeus Lakedaemon†¦ and the power of declaring war on whom they please†. The kings’ role in governing Sparta was more of figure of status, that maintaining any real power outside the battlefields of war. Following the Kings’ power, were the Gerousia. The Gerousia was a group of 28 members (a total of 30, with addition of the kings’). The requirements to join the Gerousia was to be a man sixty years or older, and considered to be too old for warfare.Aristotle describes the Gerousia as â€Å"it might be debated whether they should be continued judges for life and so determine matters of the greatest importance, since the mind has its old age as well as the body†. Being a member of this particular government was considered to be prestigious and ensured the high status of the Spartiate as the position carried on until the death of the individual. The Gerousia was a body whose position it was to prepare and debate bills, which were then passed on to the lower levels of government.Their other main function was to be the head court of justice, and would decide upon treasonous crimes by the citizens. Unlike the kings’ powers having limitations, the Gerousia’s only main limitation was that although it was the court of Justice, it was the Ephors who were the Supreme court of Appeal. From this, the Gerousia is deemed a powerful level of government. The Ephors w ere next in power, below the Gerousia, but considered one of the most powerful bodies of government. The Ephors were a body of 5 men aged 30 and above who had full Spartiate citizenship.These men were supposedly representatives for every village in Sparta. The roles of the Ephors were monitoring the kings’, interactions with the Ekklesia, controlled the education and the Krypteia. As a part of the Ephors, or Ephorate, the citizen had an enormous power over the king. As such, they could monitor the king in his own home, 2 members would join a king should warfare occur and bring could bring him to an account, should he fail to have a successful war campaign. During a time of war, it was also the responsibility of the Ephors to organise the mobilisation of the army.A failure could lead him to defend himself in front of a court of Gerousia and Ephorate members, whose role it was to be the deciders of a king’s fate if prosecuted for wrong-doing. The Ephors were also the sup reme court and supreme court of appeal in Sparta, allowing them significant power over the Spartiates, Inferiors and Helots. In As an Ephor, a Spartiate held much control over the laws in which Sparta was governed. They could introduce legislation, which, without the permission of the Ephors, foreign envoys could not enter into Sparta.They could also create laws for foreign policies and control when meetings of the Ekklesia and Gerousia took place. They would oversee and preside over the meetings, introduce legislation and check on the numerous magistrates in Sparta. Ephorates had the power to control the Krypteia, a secret police for Spartiate boys aged 19 – 24 whose objective was to hunt and kill Helots. The Ephors also had the power to allocate Helots to Spartiate families, who would work domestic jobs for them as serfs. The Ephors also controlled the run the Agoge, or Spartan education system.This was a complex system where boys were sent out at the age of 7 until approxi mately 20 to learn to be warriors. Similar to the Gerousia, the Ephors had limitations to their powers. This included that their time in office was a single year and after that single term, they could not become an Ephor again. After their term in office, the Spartiate would revert to a citizen and it was said that if an Ephor behaved badly during his time in office, he could be trialled for his misdoings. Aristotle provides information on the Ephors stating; â€Å"†¦ he Ephorate†¦ has supreme authority in the most important matters†, which adds to the belief that the Ephors being a key part in government and the running of Sparta. The Ekklesia or as referred to in older books as the Apella, was the assembly of the Spartiate males, who were involved in Spartan politics. Any Spartiate male over the age of 30 who had retained his citizenship was eligible to sit in the assembly. The Ekklesia had the power for legislations, elections, warfare, kingships and Helots.When the Ephors presented legislations to the Ekklesia, the assembly had the right to vote on laws; and they could ratify treaties. The Ekklesia is also responsible for the elections of the Gerousia and Ephors, and deciding which king would go to war with the Army. Although it’s disputed, it was said from c. 700 BC onwards that the Ekklesia had the right to declare war on enemies. When the families of royal lineage disputed over the next monarch, it was the Ekklesia who would ultimately choose who would take the throne.Most disputes originated on the laws of succession, as a male son could not take the throne should he be born prior to his father succeeding the throne. Should that situation arise, it would be passed on to the next male heir. Other succession disputes originate from the lack of male heirs, in which case the throne would be passed on to the nephews of the late king. The Ekklesia was also responsible for the freeing of Helots, should they have done something extremel y courageous on the battle front, to earn their freedom.The Ekklesia had many limitations to their power, as they could not offer amendments to any of the presented legislations. Their democratic votes for laws could be ignored by the higher levels of government (Ephors or Gerousia) or be contradicted by Rider to the Rhetra which was introduced by previous kings, Polydorus and Theopompous. Although the Ekklesia was one of the largest bodies of government in Sparta, it very limited in the influences it could make on Spartan society. Spartan government was a complex set of layers, which had many limitations to the amount of power each layer had.

Criticism of Quitak’s Child observation Essay

Quitak first explains that she is â€Å"working on the assumption that the problematic aspects of our experience contain the maximum potential†. However I think it is important to clarify from the outset, how she reached this assumption, as the reader does not know whether she went into the observation with this belief or whether these assumptions were developed as a result of her observation. There is another important omission relating to who the author actually is. She hasn’t positively stated that she is a Social Work student, although this is implied when she states that her observations had â€Å"implications for social work.† Therefore it is difficult to ascertain her purpose for carrying out the observations. Furthermore Quitak fails to mention how she came to select the child included in her observations, how many observation sessions took place and the length of the sessions. Therefore the reader is unable to assess whether there were any issues of bias involved in her selection process. The fact that she is the product of English middle class parents means she may be going into the study with particular assumptions, as she is observing a child who has a Palestinian parent. A significant area which was lacking in her observations was her inability to â€Å"tune in to Selena’s inner world† (pg 250), although Quitak does acknowledge this omission. She didn’t really try to question and understand Selena’s behaviour or how she might be feeling when she demonstrated behaviour she didn’t like, which meant her observation suffered as a result. King (2010) stresses the importance of â€Å"to access the child’s emotional world†.

Vaccinations Autism Spectrum and Asd Essay

Vaccinations Autism Spectrum and Asd Essay Vaccinations: Autism Spectrum and Asd Essay Exposure to environmental toxins in developing human brains has strong implications to the cause and development of Autism Spectrum Disorders especially if when a genetic vulnerability is present. An Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is an incurable neurological disorder that impacts social connectedness, impairs communication and can exhibit repetitive patterns of behavior. The frequency of ASD has been on the rise since the 1970’s. In 1970 Autism was diagnosed for 3 in every 10,000, increasing to 66 in every 10,000 to about 1 in 88 children in 2008. The dramatic increase over the past 20 years has brought this disorder to national attention which has aided in awareness. This awareness helps parents learn the signs of an ASD so that they may achieve the help for their child that comes from a proper diagnosis at an earlier age. However, awareness and an increase in diagnosis alone can’t explain the huge increase and so doctors have tried to find other explanations. A deve loping brain being exposed to environmental toxins is greatly attributed to the development of Autism. The way the toxins weaken the developing immune system, toxins in food, gut dsybiosis, and excessive vaccinations that contain toxins like mercury all play a major role in whether or not a child develops Autism. Skeptics may say that it is genetics alone that cause Autism; however, genetics, like awareness, doesn’t explain the dramatic increase in cases seen over the past 20 years. Regardless, the risk is too high and the effects of these toxins are devastating for those individuals whose bodies can’t process it. Gastrointestinal involvement to ASD has been

The Easiest Ways to Embrace Big Trends in Digital Marketing

The Easiest Ways to Embrace Big Trends in Digital Marketing Digital marketing  is predicted to change a lot in the coming years and its moving fast. Technology is disrupting the way people discover your brand and consume your content, and now is the perfect time to prepare. At the beginning of this year, Sujan Patel did a great article looking at the  biggest and most exciting marketing trends  to adapt to. Feeling inspired, I decided to follow up giving actionable tips on how we can actually embrace those trends using emerging marketing software that is there to help content marketers to innovate. Check Out ’s Entire Marketing Toolstack Before digging into these actionable tips, check out s own marketing toolstack. Voice Search Becomes More Prominent With the ever-growing market of smartphones, as well as with the fast adoption of smart speaker assistants, voice search is quickly making it way into the online marketing world. Voice search growth presents a few challenges to content marketers, including: Organic search discoverability: Being #1 is the only way to get any exposure from voice search. New content consumption journey: On-the-go voice searchers need solutions immediately, right now. Performance tracking: Too much is going on to be able to effectively analyze what helps and what hurts your organic search visibility. Luckily, there are tools for all three challenges: Competing for #1 on Voice Search By default, there's only one search result being presented to a voice search user. While we were previously competing for top 5 positions, we are now going to compete for one. The good news, where there's a challenge, there's an opportunity. The searching behavior is changing: Search queries are getting longer, more varied and less predictable. We previously knew pretty well what we were optimizing our content for (and so did our competitors). Nowadays marketers are dealing with a much wider variety of ways our content can be discovered via search. Spoken speech is less standardized than written text. When speaking a search query to a machine, we are less confined by the rules of grammar and we are less influenced by popular search suggestions. Thanks to voice search, SEO relies more on natural language and less on SERPs design and algorithmic matching. With that in mind, what can really be done? Unlike what you may have heard, SEO is not going to die any time soon, neither is  keyword research. You still need to research keyword queries people use when searching. The difference is: (Even)  more attention to long-tail, less popular queries  (Those are more likely to be generated by voice search users). A wider variety of keyword research sources  allowing you to aggregate data and dig deeper into possible searching behaviors. These should include both standard keyword research tools (  Spyfu,  Majestic,  Ahrefs,  Wordstream, etc.) and non-SEO sources, like Twitter monitoring and customer support emails. Recommended Reading: The Most Massive SEO Copywriting Guide That Will Make Your Traffic Soar So with a wider variety of queries and more keyword data sources, how to make sense of those lists and turn them into actual content plans? Keyword clustering (i.e. grouping) is the answer. Keyword clustering  means grouping your keywords by relevance. Serpstat  offers a unique  clustering feature  allowing you to submit long keyword lists and breaking those queries into categories based on how similar Google SERPs for each of them are. The logic is as follows: The more overlapping results (i.e. pages) Google returns for two queries, the more related those queries (i.e. keywords) are,  so there's no reason to create two separate landing pages to catch each of those. Put simply, clustering helps you optimize one content asset for a wider variety of keywords making it possible to cater to a wider variety of voice-search-driven queries. Recommended Reading: What Are Topic Clusters (And How Can They Boost Your Traffic)? Optimizing for the Immediate Need Another opportunity brought forward by voice searching is optimizing for "on-the-go" needs.   Google  claims that more than 90%  of their users turn to mobile devices and voice search for inspiration while in the middle of the task. New consumers need information "right here" and "right now". Those brands that optimize their content for these searching "micro-moments" satisfying an immediate need at any given moment will win the organic search game. Micro-moment content optimization involves: Optimizing for featured snippets  (news outlets can also use  Google Speakable  to record an audio which Google will read in response to a voice query). Optimizing for questions, lots of them (this includes using "People Also Ask" boxes for inspiration). Optimizing for  search intent. All of the three tactics above are not isolated: There's no need to create a separate strategy to hit each of them. Featured rankings depend on your overall organic rankings, answering questions helps you get featured, and whether your content is satisfying the query search intent determines how high you show up in Google. In other words, it's all inter-connected and luckily today's SEO software can help you on all those fronts. Text Optimizer  is one of my recent discoveries that uses semantic analysis to help you create content that: Matches the search intent Includes related and neighboring terms Answers popular questions on each topic Using TextOptimizer is easy: Run your core query you are creating content around (TextOptimizer runs your query in Google, extracts search result snippet and comes up with related terms to help you match Google's expectations better). Select 20-25 of the suggested terms you feel will fit your future content best and include them in your copy naturally. Use suggested questions to cover in your copy and structure it better (using subheads). Run the tool again, this time using your written content, to see how well you did optimizing your copy. Google  claims that more than 90%  of their users turn to mobile devices and voice search for...Monitoring Your Efforts Closely Finally, with mobile and voice search on the rise, it has become much more challenging to monitor all your content marketing assets and, more importantly, identify the actual impact of each new (optimization) tactic you have experimented with. I am still trying to figure that part out (content analytics is never a finished task really), but what I started doing differently recently is recording all my content and website updates on a micro-level to see a bigger picture over time. Rankedy  is an interesting tool allowing you to create a micro-journal for each of your important queries allowing you to track if any of your content marketing tactics is bringing the desired ranking growth. I am using it to record everything I am doing to the site to later see the impact. Rankedy tracks both mobile and desktop rankings helping you understand the impact of your content marketing efforts. Video Marketing is Still on the Rise Video content has been on the rise for a few years now bringing in new customers' expectations. Your audience expects  to find your brand on Youtube and for many queries they expect to engage with the video rather than text content. Youtube being the second biggest search engine in the world and Google giving more and more organic search visibility to videos (through video carousels and video featured snippets), failing to embrace video marketing means failing to get found  online. There are a few reasons why many brands still shy away from video marketing: Video production is hard to scale. Video market seems already over-cluttered. Video marketing requires solid investment (either in time or money or both). Last year I did a detailed  step-by-step tutorial  on how to overcome all those challenges using content re-packaging tactics. The video creation tools that I listed there include: Blue Jeans to put together video interviews  with influencers  and customers. Filmora to create screencasts and how-to videos. Animatron to create professional entertaining or instructional videos. All in all, there are many more video creation tools (as well as both  video footage  and  free image  resources) allowing you to launch your video marketing strategy on a low budget and helping you find your style and voice in this fast-growing industry. When it comes to researching your video marketing opportunities, there's a tool for that too!   Video SEO Tool  (Disclaimer: This tool has been developed by the company I work for)  grabs your domain’s most important queries and returns the list of videos that rank for each of them stealing your clicks from organic search results. Simply enter your domain and see video opportunities for each high-performing page of your site: Now use the tools above to create better, more up-to-date, videos than those currently ranking in Google and you are in the video marketing game. Personalization Finally, another big marketing trend that is disrupting digital marketing in general and content marketing, in particular, is advanced personalization. While there's a lot being said about personalized marketing, not many businesses clearly understand the concept. Personalized marketing is often confused with these two older (but still valid) marketing tactics: Segmentation Persona building If you are doing either (or both) of the above (which you probably should), it doesn't mean you are embracing personalized marketing just yet. To help you out: Personalized marketing is not making other â€Å"customization-based† marketing obsolete. You still need to segment your optin lists to send more engaging emails. And persona building is still a valid way to better understand your target audience and create more relatable and engaging content. But what about personalized marketing? Is there any way to adopt this more complicated trend? While personalized marketing seems a bit intimidating, it's what your target customer may be expecting from you. With the biggest digital marketing players (e.g. Amazon and Netflix) already offering artificial-intelligence-driven personalized shopping experience and many digital brands offering on-demand and  over-the-top  content, more and more customers are willing to see the same level of personalization from other (smaller) publishers. The good news is, marketing technology is catching up: With tools like  Alter  you can offer personalized marketing experience to your audience on a small budget, with no in-house technology investment needed.

Importance of Smoke Alarms in Homes Research Paper

Importance of Smoke Alarms in Homes - Research Paper Example This paper will outline the significance of installing smoke alarms in homes as a means to secure them from risks of potential fires. A fire disaster is a dreaded situation, which can result from gas leaks, short-circuits or overheated appliances. Smoke alarms are very helpful in considerably reducing the chances of fire hazards in homes. However, there are many households that have neglected to install smoke alarms, despite their life-saving potential and low cost, or have been careless in maintaining the installed detectors. Like any other battery-operated device, smoke alarms also require regular maintenance to ensure that they are in good operating condition and have sufficient batteries at the time of a hazardous situation (UL 2011). Effective and reliable smoke alarms are easily available at reasonably low prices; whereas more advanced models can be linked to a security system that automatically notifies the fire department. According to a recent study by the US Fire Administra tion (USFA), the number of household fires has increased on a year-on-year basis by almost 2%, resulting in an overall loss of over 2,500 lives and 6.5 trillion dollars (USFA 2011). Another research, carried out by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) has estimated that 96% of all households have a smoke alarm present, but only 70% of these are in working condition. However, from the 400,000 household fires that have been approximately reported, 72% of the deaths were caused by either an unmaintained or missing smoke alarm (NFPA 2011). Most of these fires also cause injuries, which may result in disfigurement and other mental effects (Miller et al. 1982). A working smoke alarm  doubles  the chances of survival from a fire (NFPA 2011). The majority of fire hazards take place at night, especially when people are asleep and may not detect the spreading smoke or fire. Smoke alarms keep that risk down by alerting everyone in the household when smoke is detected. It helps t he occupants find a safe passage out of their homes, before they become trapped in the fire. Most of the deaths that take place are usually due to suffocation from smoke or other gaseous substances, which are invisible to the human eye and can spread rapidly around the house. Hence, without smoke alarms, smoke is likely to go unnoticed, especially during the night, posing a great threat to the occupants of the house (DOS 2007). However, with a functioning smoke detector, the residents can easily discover and sense if there is smoke spreading in the house and save themselves and their loved ones from possible dangers. Smoke alarms do not prevent fires, but because they provide warnings of small fires, or smokes, that can be easily extinguished, they reduce the number of fires that become serious enough to cause injuries or burns, leading to fatalities. In a recent tragic incident, a family was using a space heater to heat their house. Their house did not have a smoke alarm installed. Unfortunately, the heater malfunctioned, causing a small local fire, which went unnoticed due to the absence of a smoke alarm. The fire spread rapidly, and in a couple of minutes, the fire had engulfed the house completely, trapping the whole family inside it. Sadly, by the time the fire department arrived at the scene, the family members were critically injured. They were immediately shifted to a hospital, where three children succumbed to their injuries and passed away. The parents are still recovering

Who Won the War of 1812 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Who Won the War of 1812 - Essay Example In fact, while the majority of Americans are familiar with the War of Independence and many can recite key events and turning points within it, few can do the same as regards the War of 1812, the second war with the British. Indeed, the War of 1812 appears to have been virtually ignored by historians. While determining the reasons for the aforementioned may be quite difficult, it can be argued that this is largely due to the fact that the war was inconclusive. In other words, not only does the war emerge as somewhat senseless but ended in a stalemate. A closer analysis of this particular conflict, however, exposes the aforementioned as a superficial understanding of the War of 1812. While it may have ended in a stalemate between the British and the American armies, an argument for the United States' victory can be made, both because of the Battle of New Orleans and the destruction of the Indian confederation. The War of 1812 was incited by nationalist sentiments and America's determined quest for independence. While the country had emerged victories from the American Revolution of 1783, Britain did not withdraw from the Great Lakes territory and provided the frontier Indians with quite significant backing against the American forces (Latimer, 2007).