James Spencer Essay Example for Free

James Spencer Essay Introduction The conditions for the poor were terrible at the time when Charles dickens wrote the novel a Christmas carol to express his concern about the conditions for these people. At first Charles was going to show his concern by writing a serious pamphlet explaining the conditions people were living in but after much thought he decided a book would be better because he was a famous author. Charles believed this would help by alerting people of the lives the people were living so they would donate to charity at Christmas a time of giving. Paragraph 1 In stave one of the book we are introduced to Scrooge and Jacob Marley. In the first stave scrooge is described as and evil man and also you can tell this from the things he says Every idiot who goes around with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holy through his heart. He replied to his nephew after he invited him to Christmas dinner this shows he dose not like Christmas and also he is very rude and is not afraid of sharing his point of view with others. Scrooge is rude to all the people who try to be nice to him in this first chapter from the men who asked for a donation for charity to his employee who asked for Christmas day off to whom he only just excepted say he needs to be in the earlier the next day. When scrooge goes home he sees the ghost of his ex-partner Jacob Marley who tells him he will have to mend his ways or he may end up with a similar fate. Paragraph 2 In stave two Scrooge is visited by the first of the three ghosts of Christmas the ghost of Christmas past. This chapter gives us a lot of important information on scrooge such as his time at school his work for Mr. Feziwig and his relationship that ended when he became obsessed with money I have seen you nobler aspirations fall off one by one until the master-passion, gain, engrosses you. Scrooges fianci e told him when she didnt want to see him anymore because he had changed at the begging of this chapter he is show as a hard working boy in school that didnt really have any friends but had a grate love for his sister. The chapter also tells us about the time he worked for Mr. Feziwig and how he used to have a good time and how he was bad employer because he didnt treat his staff to a good time. Paragraph 3 In stave three Scrooge meets the second of the ghosts the ghost of Christmas present who shows him what over peoples Christmas are like this shows the appalling conditions the Cratchits lived in and how his nephew disrespects him and what he says about him his offences carry their own punishment, and I have nothing to say against his. Fred said after he called a toast to his uncle later on at the meal they all insult scrooge. In this chapter we learn of the great poverty of the Cratchits were they have to share glasses and of tiny Tims illness and how he will die if scrooge doesnt help him. Paragraph 4 In stave for scrooge meets the last of the ghosts the ghost of Christmas future. In this chapter of the book scrooge finds out he has died and he realizes that no one liked him and that his money was not any use to him when he was dead he frightened everyone away from him when he was alive to profit us when he was dead! Ha, ha ha! The pawn broker says as we realizes all of scrooges possessions have been sold when they can no longer be any use to him as he is dead. In this chapter he realizes that being a bad person isnt any good to him and thats its better to be remembered as a good person than a bad one because thats all you have when you die. Scrooge has now changed and wants to be a better person and we see what he dose in the last chapter Paragraph 5. In the last chapter in the book scrooge seems to be happier person he dose this by trying to be nice to other people and by doing good deeds he also apologizes to bob and says a merrier Christmas, bob, my good fellow, than I have given for many a year! Ill raise your salary; endeavor to assist your struggling family. Scrooge said to bob on Christmas day he also gives the Cratchits a turkey anonymously and goes to dinner with his nephew and family this shows that scrooge has changed a lot and also want to be a better person. Conclusion I believe that by the end of the story scrooge is a better person and the only reason he became a bad person was because of his own ignorance to what was going on around him. Charles Dickens is try to tell his rich audience of readers that money isnt every thing and you can have a good time without it but if you do have it you should be generous and try to help over people have a good time and by doing that you will have a good time your self.

US Foreign Policy Essay -- American History, The Cold War

The contemporary foreign policy of the United States represents an evolving continuum of principles, conceptions and strategies that in part, derived from the particularistic American Cold War experience. As such, United States foreign policy is neither a static entity, nor is its intentions or direction uncontested. This essay will examine the underlying issues of identity and how, beginning with the Truman Doctrine, a distinct articulation of the national interest was evinced that has defined America’s role in the world. In doing so, focus will be given to the development of alliance policy, containment and its effect on transforming the US posture in the post-Cold War international order. Firstly, it is pertinent to reconsider the traditional narratives that underpin American identity. Inherent in this is Manifest Destiny, which asserts that Anglo-Saxon American’s are God’s chosen people, with a superior culture and who are pre-ordained to spread civilisation to inferior peoples (Hollander 2009, 169). This tradition offers instructive themes for the formulation of American exceptionalism and its manifestation into a missionary foreign policy (Hoffmann 1968, 369). It also raises to the forefront the Manichean character of American policy, its solipsism and tendency to justify geopolitical objectives in moralistic terms (Lepgold 1995, 372). Thus, US foreign policy is a discourse for reproducing American identity, containing threats to its core principles and legitimating global actions (Campbell 1998, 70). The Cold War era ended America’s historic vacillation between isolationism and internationalism. The Truman Doctrine committed, in part to â€Å"support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minoriti... ... rapidly evolving international system, the US is at the forefront and yet is most threatened by the emerging multipolar order (Zakaria 2009, 43). The contemporary foreign policy of the US reflects an evolution of the policies pursued during the Cold War. Using a combination of ideology, alliances and containment, the US cultivated a global order that defeated the Soviet Union. Having achieved pre-eminence, the signatures of these same philosophies remains embedded in US policy and strategic thinking. Perhaps the best indication of this is the designation of a new ideological enemy in terrorism and its resulting revalidation of Cold War dogma into a modern raison d'État. Most critically, the US is utilising this new calling to consolidate its alliances and contain adversaries in light of the emergence of an increasingly decentralised, multipolar global order.

Evidence Based Health Promotion Essay

Health promotion has emerged in the last decade as an important force to improve both quality and quantity of people’s lives. Sometimes termed ‘the new public health’ it seeks to support and encourage a participative social movement that enables individuals and communities to take control over their own health. (Bunton,R & Macdonald,G 1992) Health promotion plays an important part in everybody’s life and the lives our children and our children’s children. The purpose of this assignment is to discuss and give justification for evidence based health promotion, some people may ask why we need evidence based health promotion and practice, this paper goes some way to identifying the answer to this question. Health promotion can be defined in may ways, as defined by the World Health Organisation health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health. (www. who. int accessed November 2007) Tannahill (1985) defined health as ‘the process of enhancing health and reducing risk of ill health through the overlapping spheres of health education, health protection and disease control,’ ultimately they all accept that lifestyle and ecological elements play a critical part in any health promotion strategy. The topic of evidence based health promotion is a timely one given the resolution of the World Health Assembly that all members state: ‘adopt an evidence-based approach to health promotion using the full range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. WHO, 51st World Health Assembly, Geneva, 1998) (www. who. int accessed November 2007) In the past few years significant advances have been made in health promotion to generate readily accessible systematic reviews of evidence on the effectiveness of interventions and programs. The influence of this evidence on policy and practice has, however, been unpredictable and proponents of evidence based health practice are identifying ways to increase the use of research in decisions about health promotion interventions. www. oxfordjournals. org) Health promotion is a process directed towards enabling people to take action and control over their own health, it is not something that is done on or to people, it is done by, for and with people either as individuals or as groups. In Choosing Health (DOH, 2004) the Government insist a positive way forward is to promote and to motivate the nation to make healthier lifestyle choices. Ewles and Simnett (2003) state that health promotion is about raising the health status of individuals and communities – this means improving health, advancing, supporting, encouraging and placing it higher on personal and public agendas. The purpose of health promotion is to strengthen the skills and capabilities of individuals to take action and the capacity of groups or communities to act collectively to exert control over the detriments of health and achieve positive health. Evidence based health promotion assists people in this aim. The response to the current need for evidence has been two fold, on the one hand we have witnessed an increase in the number of published systematic reviews, together with more robust evaluations from the field. On the other hand there has been considerable debate about the nature of evidence and how we can assess effectiveness. Concerns about the possible dominance of a positive methodological agenda and its limited applicability to health promotion have been more fully discussed elsewhere. Signs are emerging that these concerns are being beginning to be addressed. There is increasing recognition of the broad epistemological basis of health promotion research, the value of methodological pluralism and the particular capacity of qualititative methods to provide illuminating perspectives. (www. oxfordjournals. org) Evidence based health promotion asks us, how do we know? who says so? , it is based on inspiration, values, experiences, statistics, data, samples and research. Research is about proving and disproving and is completed to ensure data is valid and reliable; we depend on evidence based health promotion to contribute to the development of our knowledge. It is a crucial means of producing evidence which informs practice, offers guidance and prescription, It makes the practitioner an informed individual who practice is less likely to be questioned as unsafe or unreliable. Government documents are increasingly emphasising the importance and their support for evidence based health promotion such as the document better health Wales in 1998 which covers many areas of health, although some years ago the content is still as relevant today. The dominant model for reviewing health care interventions is that established by the Cochrane Collaboration (1994). This is a bio-medical model, in which the ultimate effectivness of interventions is expressed as ‘hard’ outcomes such as changes in mortality and morbidity and behavioural outcomes. Accumulating scientific proof of the effectiveness of a clinical intervention can be complex and can involve randomized controlled trial’s meta-analysis and undertaking systematic reviews. ( Webb,D 1999) So what are these trials and why are they used? A randomized controlled trial is an experiment with a group of patients which seeks to determine which outcomes are obtained with a particular intervention. Of course it is always possible that a clinical outcome may be a consequence of some factor other than the intervention This possibility is ‘controlled for’ by incorporating into the design of the trial a second group, the ‘control group’ who do not receive the intervention. Patients are randomly assigned to either the intervention or the control group through randomising the allocation of patients to intervention or control groups it becomes likely that factors which might influence an outcome, for example socio economic differences are equally distributed and therefore cancel each other out. The random controlled trial provides the best assurance that outcome differences can be attributed to the intervention and not to extraneous factors. ( Webb,D 1999) Randomized controlled trials are the most rigorous way of determining whether a cause effect relation exists between treatment and outcome and for assessing the cost effectiveness of a treatment. They are used to establish efficiency of a treatment as well as frequency of side affects. This is meant to address issues such as, effects of treatment may only be small and therefore undetectable except when studied methodically on a large scale, also biological organisms are complex and do not react to the same stimulus in the same way, which makes influence from single clinical reports very unreliable and generally unacceptable as scientific evidence. Finally, it is also known and has been proven that when administering the treatment it can have psychological effects on a person this is known as the placebo effect. There are some limits of a randomized controlled trial such as ethical concerns, some might say it is unethical to expose a patient to treatment that is inferior to one already currently available, however some might say how can we progress until these trials are performed and results are found. It is widely acknowledged that random controlled trials are not well suited to explaining how something happens, rather than what happens (Pawson & Tilley, 1997), However, understanding how something was implemented and what effect this has on outcomes, is absolutely crucial to health promotion. Since the late 1970’s Meta analysis has emerged as a powerful tool for synthesising the results of independent trials. In essence, it is an overview of clinical trials in a particular area of treatment, in which the results are presented in the form of numeric summary. ( Webb,D 1999) There are some weaknesses of using this method, one is that sources of bias are not controlled by this. Even if you have a good design of meta analysis if you have a bad study you will get bad results, it can be argued that only methodologically sound studies should be used in meta analysis, a practice called by Robert Slavin as ‘ best evidence meta analysis’. Systematic reviews of the literature on clinical effectiveness are being undertaken to provide clinicians, managers and policy makers with a more efficient means of accessing information about effective interventions. Systematic reviews are intended to provide a synthesis of research findings in given areas and present the results in ways which are manageable, Systematic reviews can seek to establish whether research findings are consistent, can be generalised across target groups and settings or determine whether they vary by particular sub sets (Mulrow, 1995). In addition to the need for systematic reviews to incorporate less stringent inclusion criteria for research designs is the criticism that they have been predominantly concerned with the quality of the research design and have not considered in detail the range and quality of the interventions in each study. (Speller & Webb 1997) Both quantitative and qualitative research test on rich and varied traditions that come from multiple disciplines and both have been employed to address almost any research topic you can think of. To put it simply qualitative data typically consists of words while quantitative data consists of numbers. Although there are clear differences between to two anything that is qualitative can be assigned meaningful numeric values, these values can then be manipulated to help us achieve greater insight into the meaning of the data and to examine specific hypotheses. (www. socialresearchmethods. et) Qualitative data is extremely varied in nature it can include almost any information that can be captured that is not numerical in nature such as interviews, observations and written documents. Another difference between the two is that in quantitative research, the researcher is ideally and objective who neither participates in nor influences what is being studied. In qualitative research, however, it is thought that the researcher can learn the most by participating or being immersed in a research situation. These basic underlying assumptions of both methodologies guide and sequence the types of data collection methods employed. (www. writing. colostate. edu) Research in several countries provides consistent evidence of a ‘theory practice gap’ in health, clear disparities have been demonstrated between the best practice ideals and values that are taught and those actually encountered in everyday practice. (www. eprints. soton. ac. uk) Larsen et al (2002) said it is obvious that almost everyone spontaneously experiences a gap between theory and practice. Theory and practice exist in their own right as two kinds of knowledge, theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. This statement of relations between theory and practice challenges not only theorists and practitioners but also basic thinking in modern, western cultural circles that has been in place since the enlightenment. The experience of a gap is a social construct, it is a product of history and society. While most of the literature on the subject of theory practice gap sees it as a problem it has been suggested that a positive benefit of the gap is that it can provide you with an opportunity to develop problem solving skills. Eraut et al (1995) offers a more precise typology of theory practice gaps, focusing on different types of knowledge and its implication for use in practice. The ideal and the real world for care delivery, the difference between generic and specific application of theory, the problems of translation and implementation (transfer of learning) and the need to identify the relevant from the irrelevant ( often dependent on the setting and the resources available) Research has shown that there can be many factors involved in causing the gap, such as rapid changes in the clinical setting that affect the nature and setting of care delivery, sequencing of theory and practice, lack of recent clinical experience by nurse educators, lack of collaboration between clinical areas and educational institutions and the need to be an educational generalist who can cover a wide subject range whilst clinical areas are becoming increasingly specialist and even super specialist. (www. who. org) Solutions that have been suggested to bridge the theory practice gap such as an innovative curriculum allowing closer sequencing of theory and practice, improving collab oration between clinical areas and educational institutions. The creation of joint appointments (between education and services) where the role is to facilitate the application of theory to practice, promote effective collaboration between the two services and education: promote research based practice: and facilitate the development of nursing practice. And by using the use of tools such as the skills grid that sets out the knowledge, skills, behaviour and outcomes are linked and supported by research evidence. ( Knight C M et al) Then role of evidence based practice in health promotion has amplified over the years, this is due to the increased amount of evidence available and the willingness of the specialist’s and practitioners, also the need for precision when it comes to health promotion. Evidence based health promotion is an aide to health promotion and an essential part of advancement in the health field. Health promotion, in order to be effective needs both quantitative and qualitative research to best inform practice, even with all the methods of research it still depends on the rigour and the extent to which the investigator is methodical in the collection and analysis of the data and its limitations. Qualitative approaches are able to explore the different meanings that individuals attach to health and to the different variations, given that health promotion is committed to the idea that there are many different definitions of health and that the role of health promotion is to help meet some of the diverse needs and aspirations of different communities as can be seen in the Ottawa chart. (Webb 1999) Evidence based health promotion starts from skills and qualities which many health promoters have already. It complements reflective practice by adding the experience of others, presented in various forms.

The Ideas Of Discrimination During The 20th Century

The Ideas of Discrimination A controversial topic since the 20th century, discrimination was and continues to be a concept of heated discussion all over the world. In the past one hundred years, we have continued to make an effort to defeat discrimination, but a closer look shows that, even with all the effort put against it, discrimination still runs rampant all around the world. Since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the entire world has made large advancements in the fight against racism, discrimination, xenophobia, and apartheid. However, there are still civil rights movements in the 21st century of the same magnitude or larger than those in the 20th century. How far has the United States come since the 20th century in the field of civil rights? With the United Nation’s goal being the complete eradication of all forms of discrimination around the world, this still remains a pipe dream in the eyes of a few. Perhaps one may ask, is it possible to eradicate a ll discrimination? In the mid-1950’s, the people of America, led by Martin Luther King Jr., fought for civil rights for African-Americans. One of the cornerstone events of this movement was the kidnapping and brutal murder of Emmett Louis Till in 1955. During the trial, there was a clear racial bias, with Mamie Till noted saying that â€Å"I could tell that everything was against us† (The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till), and the two men put on trial, with clear evidence ofShow MoreRelatedSummary Of The Case For Reparations 1057 Words   |  5 PagesSlavery and racism was the plague of the United States. It followed on the heals of government policy and trickled down the social ladder for many years. Racial discrimination is still existent today, though people are afraid to talk about it, for fear of admitting ancestral sin and current stereotypes. 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