Introduction page for an essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Introduction page for an - Essay Example fluenced significant transformations in ways of life and in validating that this unifying force confirms universality of responsibility with one another. One story focused on Pope John Paul’s ability to spark â€Å"a revolution of the spirit that liberated Poland, brought down the Berlin Wall, reunited Europe, and transformed the face of the world† (Albright 4). Bob Seiple, the first American ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, shared the story about Mary’s remarkable survival to overcome hate and forgive a militiaman who shot her, paralyzed her and left her to die. The third story centered on the struggles of young children in a camp in Gulu who remained steadfast in faith amidst adversities from members of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The crucial lessons imparted were summed, to wit: â€Å"(1) that there are people who are willing to die—and kill—for their faith; and (2) that religion at its best teaches forgiveness and reconciliation, not only when those acts are relatively easy but also when they are almost unbelievably difficult† (Albright 5). In this regard, the essay hereby aims to explore the extent in which religion plays a crucial factor in influencing diplomatic policies and in determining how the current stance in separating religion and politics have affected resolving political conflicts Albright, Madeleine. "Faith and Diplomacy." The Review of Faith & International Affairs (2006): 3-9. Web. 15 January 2012.

Sophisticated narrative review of Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret life of Essay

Sophisticated narrative review of Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret life of Bees - Essay Example is a major character or merely an asterisk to the action, the white woman is, by virtue of her symbolic importance in Southern history and culture, a significant presence in novels about the Civil Rights Movement. This might be counterintuitive since the white man would seem the likely arch-adversary in the civil rights dilemma—or worse, focus on the white woman might appear as an attempt to usurp the centrality of African Americans in favor of the group furthest removed from civil rights issues. And yet, the white woman was at the center of those issues. The white woman is central to civil rights issues and to fiction that specifically and substantially depends upon the Civil Rights Movement for material because she was the supporting beams and pillars of the culture the Movement sought to dismantle. That the relationship between the white woman and the Civil Rights Movement has been neglected suggests only that the significance of this relationship has been somehow overshadowed, not that it is insignificant. In 2002, a novel hit the New York Times best-seller list. The setting was the rural South in the late sixties, just after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The main characters, take refuge with a family of women who live in a house on the outskirts of town. The book is Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. Its heroine, Lily Owens, thus achieves spiritual transcendence through communal living with a family of women, self-styled religious rituals, and racial integration. Kidd’s novel exemplifies the two trends that have emerged most clearly in American women’s fiction over the last quarter of the twentieth-century: the move on the part of women writers to a creative and individualized religious practice rather than a traditional institutionalized one, and the examination of the intersections of religion, gender and race as they shape identity. Everything from the novel line to the references of the Civil Rights Movement occurring in 1960’s

The Evolution of the Telephone and Operator :: Communication Technology Papers

The Evolution of the Telephone and Operator A few nights ago I was sitting at the dining room table reviewing my research, when my roommate, Lucy, walked in and inquired as to my progress. We started talking a bit about telephones and telephone operators and she related a story about the telephone in her hometown. Lucy is from a small town in Ireland. She clearly remembers when, at the age of four (about twenty eight years ago), her family installed their first telephone. To make a call her family would turn the crank on their telephone which would then alert Mrs. Murphy at the post office who would connect the call. Everyone in the village, Lucy explained, resisted making phone calls on Christmas Day in order to give Mr. Murphy break for the holiday. It was not until Lucy was in her teens that her town phone switched to automatic. She remembers calling home from school one day and receiving a pre-recorded message informing her that her number had been changed. Needless to say, she was greatly surprised. Lucy is not much older than I am; we grew up in virtually the same period of time, but in obviously different worlds. Her story of the telephone recalls memories of the endless episodes of Little House on the Prairie I used to watch where Mrs. Nelson would nosily listen into a phone call after making a connection. Lucy's story is an abbreviated version of that of America's. What occurred in her town over a period of ten or twelve years, transpired over the late 19th and a good part of the 20th centuries in the United States. While the technology of the telephone has transformed considerably since it's creation in the late 1870's, the basic job and job-related stresses of the telephone operator have changed significantly, but to a lesser degree. Most of my data falls within two time periods: then (before the 1920's) and now (the 1990's). While we will be missing a large chunk of detailed information, what I have found allows us enough to piece together the missing periods. In the first two years after the invention of the telephone, all subscribers in a particular area were linked to each other via a telephone line. When one wished to call another party, s/he would call directly across the line indicating the desired recipient by the number of rings sounded.

Chrysalis module four behaviourism Essay

‘Behaviourists explain maladaptive behaviour in terms of the learning principles that sustain and maintain it. Discuss this statement and show how a behaviourist’s approach to therapy is in stark contrast to a psychoanalytic one’ In this essay I will first of all explain the main principles and theories that underpin the behaviourist approach to psychology. I will subsequently outline how behaviourist theory can provide therapists with some insight into both the causes of maladaptive behaviour and how that behaviour might be sustained and maintained. Having discussed the main behaviourist principles and how they relate to maladaptive behaviour, I will then compare and contrast the behavioural approach with the psychoanalytic (Freudian) approach. I will also comment on ethical issues especially as they relate to behaviourism and some of the experiments on which the theory is founded. Behaviourism is a school of psychology that emphasises the scientific study of obs ervable behaviours especially as they relate to the process of learning. It was highly influential and dominated psychological theory for some thirty years between the early 1920’s and 1950’s. The early formulation of behaviourist theory was in the work of an American psychologist John B Watson. In some respects, his research was a response to the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches to therapy at the time. In his work ‘Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviourist’ published in 1929, Watson believed that behaviourism, ‘Attempted to make a fresh, clean start in psychology, breaking with current theories and with traditional concepts and terminology’ (www.britannica.com). His vision was one of psychology becoming a purely objective branch of natural science, where the only admissible conclusions were those that could be obtained by independent observers of the same object or event, as would be the case in scientific experiments. Behaviourism is concerned with explaining how behaviour arises and is maintained. Also to identify and characterise influences on behaviour and to explain how, under certain conditions, behaviour can change. The roots of behaviourist theory can be found in the work of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian scientist. He researched what is known as reflex, an automatic reaction to a particular stimulus. Specifically, his research looked at the reflex that stimulates the production of saliva in dogs when given meat. The meat is the stimulus for the reflex, but what Pavlov noticed was that the dogs in his experiments would start to salivate even at  the sight of the person who regularly fed them. In his famous and now well- known experiment, Pavlov then introduced the sound of a bell every time the food was presented. He found that just the sound of the bell would produce the same reaction in the dogs even if there was no food. He concluded that the dogs had learned that the bell signalled food. Watson brought Pavlov’s findings to the attention of fellow psychologists and then conducted his own experiment involving a young boy, Albert. This came to be known as the ‘Little Albert’ experiment. Watson initially presented Albert with a tame rat and observed his response; at that st age the boy had no fear of the rat. Watson subsequently observed Albert’s reaction to a loud noise when it was made behind his head. Not surprisingly, the child cried at the sound and tried to move away from it. Watson then presented the rat to Albert just before making the loud sound. This time the child reacted by moving away from the rat thereby demonstrating to Watson a change in behaviour as a result and linking the rat to the loud noise. Watson’s experiment showed that Albert had learned to show a defensive reflex reaction. This came to be known as classical conditioning and this approach to understanding behaviour was described as stimulus response psychology. These days the ethics of this experiment would be highly questionable however, subjecting a child to fear in this way and conditioning his response as a result would not acceptable. Several contemporaries of Watson were also working in this area of behavioural research. The work of Edward Thorndike and B.F. Skinner made a huge contribution to behaviourist psychology. Thorndike pioneered the study of animal behaviour with his ‘puzzle boxâ €™ into which he placed a hungry cat. Food was placed outside the box and he found that the cat learned to manipulate the door catch to get out of the box to obtain the food. Unlike Pavlov’s dogs, the cat in his study had some element of control given that being able to get the food was conditional on the cat opening the door. The consequences of the cat’s behaviour (getting the food), Thorndike argued, altered the cat because it learned to open the door. As the cat was ‘instrumental in opening the door he called this instrumental conditioning. Skinner, who was influenced by Thorndike’s work, argued that learning through reinforcement is common to all species not just animals. Much of his work involved studying the behaviour of rats and pigeons. He conducted several experiments using a special device he designed called the ‘Skinner  box’. This provided a controlled environment in which animal behaviour could be observed in a systematic way. His experiments were designed to shed light on how behaviour is initiated, maintained and how under certain conditions it can be changed as a result of consequences of the beha viour. He argued that behaviour takes a particular form because it has consequences that both give rise to it and maintain it. When the consequences change, so does the behaviour he said. Skinner placed a hungry rat in the box where it had to negotiate a maze to find the food. At first the rat would run up blind alleys in the maze but with experience it gradually learned how to negotiate the maze to find the food more quickly. Behaviourists like Skinner believed that the principles involved in these learning processes were applicable to people and underpin complex human behaviour. Skinner proposed that behaviour changes as a result of its consequences and that behaviour is also reinforced by reward. Behaviour that is reinforced will also increase in frequency Skinner suggested. Similarly, he argued, negative reinforcement works in the same way as positive re inforcement. For example, if a loud noise is made every time a rat pokes its nose through its cage, the rat would stop doing it. He promoted the idea that as humans are just another species, giving praise for desirable behaviour in a child would reinforce that behaviour in the same way that getting food by pressing a lever in a box would reinforce behaviour in a rat. Skinner went further by suggesting that there is no such thing as free will; he called it the principle of determinism, the assertion that all human behaviour is determined by what went before. Skinner’s hypotheses created widespread debate amongst psychologists and not surprisingly, his critics pointed out that humans are very different to animals and that results from experiments conducted on rats in a laboratory couldn’t just be applied to human behaviour. Behaviourist critics reasoned that human behaviour is immeasurably more sophisticated than animal behaviour, rooted in language and operating within complex cultures. Humans have insight into their behaviour and have conscious awareness, they contended and therefore are able to make conscious choices. Skinner fell out of favour in the 1970’s following the publication of his book ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ where he urged society to reject the assumption that free will is the main determinant of behaviour. In contrast to the psychoanalytic school of psychology, behaviourists regard  all behaviour as a response to stimuli, with the underlying assumption that what we do is determined by the environment we are in that provides stimuli to which we respond. Also that the environments we have been in in the past, caused us to learn to respond to stimuli in particular ways. ‘Behaviourists are unique amongst psychologists in believing that it is unnecessary to speculate about internal mental processes when explaining behaviour’ (psychlotron.org.uk). Behaviourists believe that people are born with some innate reflexes such as fear and rage which do not need to be learned, but that all of a person’s complex behaviours are as a result of learning thr ough interaction with the environment. It is therefore assumed that the individual plays no part in choosing their own actions and behaviour. Today only a few psychologists would label themselves as behaviourists and the arguments about free will and conscious choices still continue. However, studies since the 1950’s have in fact brought an increasing recognition that conditioning probably occurs more widely than was previously understood. It is recognised for example that drug or alcohol use can be triggered by environmental cues – places and situations where drug taking or alcohol consumption is present. Contemporary therapy for some types of psychological distress owes much to insight derived from behaviourism. Children who self -harm can be treated with techniques of re inforcement for non- harming behaviours for example. Apparently one of the techniques used for treating people with obsessional and phobic disorders involves identifying and removing reinforcement for behaviour that is excessive and reinforcing the more positive behaviour with praise. The behaviourist approach is also relevant in understanding addiction and habitual behaviour – whether it be smoking, drugs, alcohol, drugs, gambling or sex etc. With this type of maladaptive behaviour there is a strong and fairly immediate positive reinforcing consequence of the behaviour. Whereas the unpleasant consequences of the behaviour are delayed i.e. potential serious illness in terms of smoking for instance. It is also recognised that someone who regularly exhibits violent or aggressive tendencies may well have grown up in a violent household where violent behaviour was modelled and reinforced. The psychoanalytic approach to counselling and psychotherapy has its roots in Freudian theory which essentially espouses that it is repressed memo ries and sexual wishes that are the root of psychological problems. In the  psychoanalytic approach there is an assumption that client’s difficulties have their ultimate origin in childhood experiences and that the client is not usually aware of the motives or impulses behind their actions. Prior to Watson and Skinner’s experiments, psychology had almost entirely been based on a psychoanalytic approach – the study of what happens in people’s minds. In therapy, people would report what was on their mind and this was documented and analysed by psychologists such as Freud. This approach to understanding people’s behaviour was considered highly subjective and unscientific by behaviourists. Freud espoused a range of theories to account for maladaptive behaviour; he argued that in early childhood three phases of psycho sexual development set the stage for a series of conflicts between the child and its environment, its family and most importantly its parent. He proposed that that the way in which parents responded to th e child would have a powerful influence on the later personality of the child and a significant impact on adult relationships. Psychological problems according to Freud arise because a person’s impulses and drives are driven underground and continue to influence the person subconsciously. There is significant emphasis in psychoanalytic theory on the quality of the relationship between child and parents. The fundamental viewpoint shared by all psychoanalytic counsellors and therapists is that in order to understand the personality of an adult client it is necessary to understand the development of their personality through childhood. Freud did not suggest however that that childhood experiences directly influence adult personality; he stated that the influence occurred in a particular way through the operation of the unconscious mind. This is perhaps where there is the most stark contrast between the behaviourist and psychoanalytic approaches. Behaviourists concern themselves with actual, observable behaviour rather than internal thoughts processes. Freud however not only advanced the idea of the unconscious mind, he also developed a complex theoretical model explaining the human mind as comprising three regions which he labelled the id the ego and the superego. The id being a reservoir of primitive instincts and impulses that are the ultimate motives for the behaviour; the ego which is the conscious rational part of the mind that makes decisions and deals with external reality and the superego a sort of store house of rules and taboos, mainly an internalisation of parental attitudes. Conflicts between  these elements can lead to stress in Freudian theory. An individual’s behaviour can be understood according to Freud, as being under the control of forces such as repressed memories, childhood fantasies which a person cannot acknowledge. The role of the psychoanalytic therapist is to look for ways of getting beneath the surface of what the client is saying and what is immediately observable. One could of course explain t he ‘forces’ mentioned above in behaviourist terms; that a person has simply been conditioned to do, act, say things in a certain way. A child repeatedly subject to violence or witnessing violence may well be more prone to aggressive behaviour in adulthood for example. But in Freud, I feel there is a richness not found in behaviourism. People and relationships are complex and therefore some emotional problems equally complex. In my view a psychoanalytic approach attempts at least to reflect this complexity – where therapy aims to enable clients to become more aware of their inner emotional life and therefore be more able to control feelings in an appropriate manner and gain the freedom to behave differently. A key aim of psychoanalysis is to achieve client insight into the true nature of their issues/ problems. Genuine insight usually being attained as result of the quality of the relationship between client and therapist. There is little reference to the quality relationship between client and therapist in the behaviourist approach. In the psychoanalytic approach there is as much emphasis on what the client doesn’t say as on what he or she does say about his or her problem – Freud wrote about what he termed defence mechanisms, which seek to protect an individual from emotionally disturbing or threatening unconscious impulses. These defence mechanisms might include such things as repression , denial, projecting one’s unacceptable thoughts and feelings to another person; or displacement, where an individual might channel impulses to a different target or regression where an individual responding to internal feelings triggered by an external threat, might revert to childlike behaviour from an earlier stage of development. This aspect of Freud’s theory provides powerful insight I feel into certain maladaptive behaviours. Of course the work of the proponents of behaviourism such as Watson and Skinner and Freud’s psychoanalytic theories have been developed and redefined over the years. In my opinion both approaches can have a valuable role to play in understanding maladaptive behaviour in spite of  their very different emphases, depending on the type of behaviour being treated. Behaviourism was the precursor to social learning theory developed by Albert Banduras and this emphasises both the social and physical context people find themselves in and how children in particular learn by observing and then imitating others who effectively act as models. This is more complex than simple stimulus response theory and it can be very important and enlightening for a therapist to understand the current and past social contexts of a client and its potential impact on their behaviour. Equally important, in my view, is the recognition that people have a complex inner mental life and an emotional inner world and responses that sometimes can’t be explained by environmental factors alone. In the same way that behaviour theory has developed, psychoanalytic theory has also a dvanced. The work of psychologist Melanie Klein for example, who researched the early relationship between mother and child, concluded that human beings are motivated by the need to establish and maintain relationships. This suggests to me that the quality of relationship between client and therapist is of significant importance. This thinking has little or no place in behaviourist approaches to therapy. Even contemporary cognitive behaviour therapy, which has its roots in behaviourism, places less emphasis on the relationship between client and therapist. Whereas the psychoanalytic counsellor would emphasise exploration and understanding, the CBT approach would be more orientated towards demonstrable action to produce change. It would seem sensible, in treating stress and anxiety to try to combine both approaches. A client suffering from anxiety is more likely to respond positively to a therapist with whom they have a trusting relationship; without that it would be very difficult for a client to face fears that may be buried in their subconscious. And for the therapist, it would be necessary to be able to establish/ understand the potential environmental and social triggers or stimuli (both current and historic) for the client’s anxiety. This could involve exploring the clients past in terms of their relationship with their parents perhaps and also searching for other relevant information about the situations that provide the cues for the client’s anxiety. In conclusion, although the assumptions made by early behaviourist psychologists seem overly simplistic nowadays , this work laid the foundations for more extensive research that has advanced our knowledge  about social learning and how this can affect behaviour. Although behaviour modification therapy doesn’t necessarily sit easily within a collaborative counselling relationship, some of the principles of behaviourism can be applied and adapted to understanding maladaptive behaviour. Behaviour modification therapy has been shown to be very effective with certain types of disorder such as obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, addiction, anxiety disorders, fears and phobias. Sources: Mcleod J. (2008) Introduction to Counselling, third ed, Open University Furnham A. 50 Psychology Ideas You Really Need to Know, Quercus Publishing Hayes N. (2010) Understand Psychology, Hodder Education Ltd Chrysalis Year Two, Module Four course notes. www.britannica.com 17/11/2014 www.wikipedia.org/behaviourism 17/11/2014 www.psychlotron.or.uk 17/11/2014

Fracking Of The United States - 911 Words

Jeremy D. Moore Science 101 8 September, 2015 Fracking in The United States Fracking is a term that is used as a shorthand term referring to hydraulic fracturing. This is a type of drilling used for oil and natural gas within the Earth. Fracking has been used commercially for the last 65 years in the U.S... With the new technology advances in the field along with advanced hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling is responsible for the U.S. surging in the oil and gas production. Fracking is allowing the U.S. to tap in the vast oil and gas reserves that were previously locked in the shale and other tight-rock formations that were hard to get to. Using this process will also allow the U.S. to go back to older wells and stimulate†¦show more content†¦Until we find a replacement for both oil and gas fracking will improve on our own resources. Another reason is by using natural gas in making electricity instead of coal because coal emits a huge supply of carbon dioxide into the air. So by using natural gas instead of coal it would reduce air pollution as a whole. Being able to increase our own supply would help the U.S. by allowing us not to be so dependent on foreign oil as we are now. Also with the population of the U.S. still growing and the increase of drivers in the states it would pay to be able to have more domestic sources for the oil we consume. Even though fracking impedes on the ability of the U.S. of its dependency of the natural resources. With companies being ability of fracking it lowers the taxes on the oil and natural gases consumers use daily. It also helps ease the minds of everyone knowing there is a domestic supply of both resources. Techniques of the way normal drilling is done it does not produce the same results as fracking does when getting oil and gas out of the Earth. Fracking is important in the states because we are looking for more unconventional oil and natural gas resources and by drilling at those type of sites is less helpful than fracking due to fracking maximizes the return on the investment. While fracking has very good production in gathering the resources need not all things are good about fracking. The main conflict between

Clay Tokens Neolithic Seeds of Mesopotamian Writing

Writing in Mesopotamia—if you define writing as recording information in a symbolic manner—took an important step forward with the domestication of plants and animals and the development of trade networks during the Neolithic period of at least as long ago as 7500 BCE. Beginning then, people recorded information about their agricultural goods—including domestic animals and plants—in the form of small clay tokens. Scholars believe that  the written form of language that is used to pass this information along today evolved out of this simple accounting technique. Mesopotamian clay tokens were not the first accounting method developed by humans. By 20,000 years ago, Upper Paleolithic people were leaving tally marks on cave walls and cutting hash marks onto portable sticks. Clay tokens, however, contained additional information including what commodity was being counted, an important step forward in communication storage and retrieval. Neolithic Clay Tokens Neolithic clay tokens were made very simply. A small piece of clay was worked into one of about a dozen different shapes, and then perhaps incised with lines or dots or embellished with pellets of clay. These were then sun-dried or baked in a hearth. The tokens ranged in size from 1–3 centimeters (about 1/3 to one inch), and about 8,000 of them dated between 7500–3000 BCE have been found so far. The earliest shapes were simple cones, spheres, cylinders, ovoids, disks, and tetrahedrons (pyramids). The premier researcher of clay tokens Denise Schmandt-Besserat argues that these shapes are representations of cups, baskets, and granaries. The cones, spheres and flat disks, she said, represented small, medium and large measures of grain; ovoids were jars of oil; cylinders a sheep or goat; pyramids a person-day of work. She based her interpretations on similarities of the forms to shapes used in the later Mesopotamian written  proto-cuneiform language and, while that theory has yet to be confirmed, she may very well be right. What Were Tokens For? Scholars believe that clay tokens were used to express numerical quantities of goods. They occur in two sizes (larger and smaller), a difference that may have been used as a means of counting and manipulating quantities. The Mesopotamians, who had a base 60 numbering system, also bundled their numerical notations, so that a group of three, six, or ten signs equated to one sign of a different size or shape. Possible uses for the tokens are associated with accounting and include trade negotiations between parties, tax collection or assessments by state agencies, inventories, and allotments or disbursements as payment for services rendered. Tokens were not tied to a particular language. No matter what language you spoke, if both parties understood that a cone meant a measure of grain, the transaction could take place. Whatever they were used for, the same dozen or so token shapes were used for some 4,000 years throughout the Near East. The Sumerian Take Off: Uruk Period Mesopotamia During the Uruk period in Mesopotamia [4000–3000 BC], urban cities blossomed and administrative needs for accounting expanded. Production of what Andrew Sherratt and VG Childe called secondary products—wool, clothing, metals, honey, bread, oil, beer, textiles, garments, rope, mats, carpets, furniture, jewelry, tools, perfume—all of these things and many more needed to be accounted for, and the number of types of tokens in use ballooned to 250 by 3300 BCE. In addition, during the Late Uruk period [3500–3100 BCE], tokens began to be kept in sealed globular clay envelopes called bullae. Bullae  are hollow clay balls about 5–9 cm (2–4 in) in diameter: the tokens were placed inside the envelope and the opening pinched shut. The exterior of the ball was stamped, sometimes all over the surface, and then the bullae  were fired. About 150 of these clay envelopes have been recovered from Mesopotamian sites. Scholars believe that the envelopes were meant for security purposes, that the information was kept inside, protected from being changed at some point along the way. Eventually, people would impress the token forms into the clay on the outside, to mark what was inside. Apparently, by about 3100 BCE, bulla e  were replaced by puffy tablets covered with the impressions of the tokens and there, says Schmandt-Besserat, you have the beginning of real writing, a three-dimensional object represented in two dimensions: proto-cuneiform. Persistence of Clay Token Use Although Schmandt-Besserat argued that with the dawn of written forms of communication, tokens stopped being used, MacGinnis et al. have noted that, although they did decrease, tokens continued in use well into the first millennium BC. Ziyaret Tepe is a tell in southeastern Turkey, first occupied during the Uruk period; the Late Assyrian period levels are dated between 882–611 BCE. A total of 462 baked clay tokens have been recovered from those levels to date, in eight basic shapes: spheres, triangles, disks, pyramids, cylinders, cones, oxhides (squares with indented sides in the shape of a tanned animal hide), and squares. Ziyaret Tepe is only one of several later Mesopotamian sites where tokens were used, although tokens do seem to drop completely out of use before the Neo-Babylonian period about 625 BCE. Why did the use of tokens persist some 2,200 years after the invention of writing? MacGinnis and colleagues suggest that it was a simplified, para-literate system of recording that allowed more flexibility than the use of tablets alone. History of the Research Near Eastern Neolithic clay tokens were recognized and studied first in the 1960s by Pierre Amiet and Maurice Lambert; but the major investigator of clay tokens is Denise Schmandt-Besserat, who in the 1970s began studying the curated corpus of tokens dated between the 8th and 4th millennium BCE. Sources Algaze, Guillermo. The End of Prehistory and the Uruk Period. The Sumerian World. Ed. Crawford, Harriet. London: Routledge, 2013. 68–94. Print.Emberling, Geoff, and Leah Minc. Ceramics and Long-Distance Trade in Early Mesopotamian States. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 7 (2016): 819–34. Print.MacGinnis, John, et al. Artefacts of Cognition: The Use of Clay Tokens in a Neo-Assyrian Provincial Administration. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 24.02 (2014): 289–306. Print.Overmann, Karenleigh A. The Role of Materiality in Numerical Cognition. Quaternary International 405 (2016): 42–51. Print.Roberts, Patrick. ‘We Have Never Been Behaviourally Modern’: The Implications of Material Engagement Theory and Metaplasticity for Understanding the Late Pleistocene Record of Human Behaviour. Quaternary International 405 (2016): 8–20. Print.Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. Decipherment of the Earliest Tablets. Science 211 (1983): 283–85. Pr int.---. The Earliest Precursors of Writing. Scientific American 238.6 (1978): 50–59. Print.---. Tokens as Precursors of Writing. Writing: A Mosaic of New Perspectives. Eds. Grigorenko, Elena L., Elisa Mambrino and David D. Preiss. New York: Psychology Press, Taylor Francis, 2012. 3–10. Print.Woods, Christopher. The Earliest Mesopotamian Writing. Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond. Eds. Woods, Christopher, Geoff Emberling and Emily Teeter. Oriental Institute Museum Publications. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2010. 28–98. Print.Woods, Christopher.  Geoff Emberling, and Emily Teeter. Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond. Oriental Institute Museum Publications. Eds. Schramer, Leslie and Thomas G. Urban. Vol. 32. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2010. Print.

The Spoken Language Between Two Culturally Dissimilar...

Hola. Bonjour. Ciao. Namaste. Hallo. Hello. The spoken language between two culturally dissimilar individuals has the capability to serve as a barricade for communication. If the primitive practice of connection between two people is incomprehensible and ineffective, how can a man from the United States and a woman from Germany understand one another? How can freshman Charlie relate to seniors Sam and Patrick? How can a cheeky, uppity lady from Amish-country sit in a car with an Italian from Dirty Jersey, like me, for three and a half hours? How can a character in a frequently challenged, young adult novel be so comparable to me? Individuals seek cultural identity through music in the era of independence and self-defining nature in a button-down, conformist society. Cultural identity is the â€Å"part of a person’s self-conception and self-perception and is related to social class, generations, or any kind of social group† (reference.com). Our musical tastes and preferences can form important statements regarding our own values and attitudes. How we are perceived in society are reflected in the clothes we wear, the slang we speak, and the music blasting in our ears. It is our badge of honor and commitment to the subcultures created under the artists we identify with. By close association with a certain band or song, Charlie and I embroider our distinctiveness on our badges. Although they differ by the artists or songs’ influences, the language of music isShow MoreRelatedChinese Food As A Multicultural Country852 Words   |  4 Pagestraditional since they mainly chose their ethnic food from which they can be easily distinguish. The difference of food culture between Chinese and western country is so complicate, and it can be reflected in many perspectives, especially it reflects the difference of living and thinking habit between ethnic groups. According to author, â€Å"therefore, there are great disparities between China and the western countries in ideas, attitudes, contents and functions of food cultures.† (Wang 2009) For instance,Read MoreIntercultural Studies : Intercultural Relationships, Racial, Class Level, Religious, And National Identity Essay1834 Words   |  8 Pagesâ€Å"values are windows into persons’ belief systems and behaviors† (p. 221). The study also states that values are â€Å"culturally derived† so cultural differences means value differences and ultimately creating an impact to any intercultural relationship, and in this case, the intercultural marriage. As Guirdham (2005) suggested, it is common for the non-acceptance of the others’ values between a people, in this case a couple, coming from different cultural backgrounds. 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