Race and Affirmative Action Essay -- Argumentative Persuasive Essays

Race and Affirmative Action Race is an issue that is embedded in the nation’s history and continues to spur discussions on how the different minorities and ethnic groups must be treated fairly. Affirmative action is a recent attempt to solve the discriminations produced by racial inequality. However, affirmative action is also being scrutinized as scholars and the public debate the benefits and harms of affirmative action. A Historical View Throughout the past 30 years, affirmative action has been the answer to racial inequality. The policy began in 1965 under President Johnson. It was used to redress issues of discrimination, following the civil rights laws and constitutional guarantees on education and jobs. From the outset, affirmative action was envisioned as a temporary remedy that would create a "level playing field" for all Americans. Affirmative action policies required that active measures be taken to ensure that blacks and other minorities receive the same opportunities for career advancements, school admissions, scholarships, and financial aid that had been nearly exclusive provisions for whites. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the landmark legislation that prohibited employment discrimination by large employers (over 15 employees), whether or not they had government contracts. As a result, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established. Lyndon B. Johnson issued the E.O. 11246 regulation. It required government contractors and subcontractors to implement affirmative action policies to expand job opportunities for minorities. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) was designated to administer the regulation. In 1973 the Nixo... ...or group identity should not say that a person is naturally disadvantaged. There are many blacks in the US that are hindered by the economy, but there are also rich blacks and poor whites. Race should not determine who gets into college because black society as a whole is not entirely disadvantaged. Bibliography: Affirmative Action: The Perspectives in Detail and Overview: The Issue at a Glance. Public Agenda Online. 20 March 2003 http://www.publicagendaonline.org/ issues/overview.cf?issues_type=race. â€Å"Bush Enters Affirmative Action Fray.† CBS News. 16 Jan. 2003. 20 March 2003 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/01/11/politics/main536148.shtml. â€Å"Narrow Use of Affirmative Action Preserved in College Admissions.† Cnn.com. 25 June 2003. 13 July 2003 <http:cnn.law.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&expire=-1&ur1ID=6839596&fb..>.

Impact of Computers in Todays Society

Computer, as the term is most commonly used, refers to the digital computer, an electronic device that makes lengthy or complicated calculations at high speeds and (except for certain small models) is also able to make decisions based on logic. A less common type of computer is the analog computer. A digital computer forms the core of a data processing system. Data processing is, basically, the organization of information into a useful form by such processes as comparing, selecting, and arranging. A very simple example of data processing is alphabetizing a list of names. Electronic data processing, or EDP, is data processing performed by a computer. Computers vary greatly in the speed at which they can perform calculations and in their ability to handle complicated tasks. Computers also vary greatly in size—from arrays of equipment occupying a large room to a slice of silicon smaller than a postage stamp. In general, small computers are referred to as microcomputers; large computers, as mainframes; and computers of intermediate size, as minicomputers. General-purpose microcomputers are commonly called personal computers. The computer ranks as one of the major technological developments of the 20th century. Beginning about 1950, it took the computer less than two decades to revolutionize the methods of business, industry, and government; to greatly advance work in the sciences; and to find wide application in such diverse fields as accounting, education, medicine, and publishing. Today, the computer industry—which includes the manufacturing of computers, the designing and marketing of computer programs, and the providing of computer-related services—is among the most important in the world. History Early forerunners of the computer were the abacus, developed in the ancient times in the Far East, and an adding machine invented in 1641 by Blaise Pascal of France. The principle of the punched card was developed about 1801 by Joseph Marie Jacquard, also of France. His cards were used to control the pattern produced in textiles by a loom. All of the basic principles of the modern digital computer—input and output devices, storage and arithmetic units, and the sequencing of instructions—were conceived in the 1820’s and 1830’s by Charles Babbage, an English mathematician. He completed a small computer, called a difference engine, in 1822. It consisted primarily of gears and levers and was similar to a modern mechanical desk calculator. Impact and use of computers A computer is a high-speed mathematician, file clerk, and a typist. It can perform many thousands of times more rapidly than human without error. Its many uses grow out of these characteristics. Computers are used in business to do many routine and time-consuming jobs, such as handling billing, payrolls, and inventory. Computers can be used in making forecasts of future sales figures or economic conditions. In many organizations, computers are used as word processors, simplifying the production of reports, letters, and other documents. Some organizations routinely transmit memos and other messages by means of computer linkups, a form of communication known as electronic mail. Reporters, salespeople, and other workers can produce their written work on portable computers and then transmit the work to an office via telephone lines. In the school, computers are used in many classrooms to assist teachers in instructing students. Computers are used in a variety of ways, from supplying simple drills to providing complex simulations of such processes as conducting a scientific experiments or managing a large company. In such sciences as physics, chemistry, and psychology, computers are used to monitor experiments and organize the results so that they can be interpreted more easily. In astronomy, computers perform the complicated alculations necessary for determining the orbits and relative positions of various heavenly bodies. In engineering, computers are used to help produce and evaluate the design of new products. Another use of computers is to control industrial processes. This form of control, a type of automation, has been applied to such processes as machining, oil refining, and the manufacture of chemicals. Another industrial use is to control robots used in assembly operations. Computers are essential for a variety of functions performed by government agencies. For example, computers are used by the National Weather Services for analyzing large amounts of weather data to make weather forecasts; by the Federal Aviation Administration for operating the complex equipment needed to direct air traffic; by the Internal Revenue Service for handling tax records; by the Census Bureau for compiling statistical data on the country’s population; and by the military for communication, defense, and weapons systems. In the home, computers are used for a number of purposes. A popular used of home computers is for playing video games. They are also used to gain access by telephone hook-up to networks providing a variety of information and communication services. In some homes, computers are used for word processing and for maintaining household records. It is also known to surf the web and collect various information off of the internet. Many people work off of a computer for a living. A computer can perform a virtually unlimited number of calculations, one after another, without further action on the part of the person using it. It is this ability that sets a computer apart from an ordinary calculating machine, which requires control by a human operator for each calculation. Although the computer itself deals only with numbers, it can work with information that was not originally in numerical form if that information lends itself to mathematical and logical analysis. It does so by first converting the information into numbers; it then performs calculations with the numbers and converts the result into a usable form. Although computer does not think, it does make decisions. Each decision is based on a logical pattern previously stored—by a human being—in the computer. It makes a decision by following instructions such as â€Å"If the number you are reading is 10 or less, proceed to the next step. If it is greater than 10, skip the next step. † In making decisions, the computer uses the same processes as those described in the article LOGIC.

What Does the Archaeological Dating cal BP mean

The scientific term cal BP is an abbreviation for calibrated years before the present or calendar years before the present  and that is a notation which signifies that the raw radiocarbon date cited has been corrected using current methodologies. Radiocarbon dating was invented in the late 1940s, and in the many decades since, archaeologists have discovered wiggles in the radiocarbon curve—because atmospheric carbon has been found to fluctuate over time. Adjustments to that curve to correct for the wiggles (wiggles really is the scientific term used by the researchers) are called calibrations. The designations cal BP, cal BCE, and cal CE (as well as cal BC and cal AD) all signify that the radiocarbon date mentioned has been calibrated to account for those wiggles; dates which have not been adjusted are designated as RCYBP or radiocarbon years before the present. Radiocarbon dating is one of the best known archaeological dating tools available to scientists, and most people have at least heard of it. But there are a lot of misconceptions about how radiocarbon works and how reliable a technique it is; this article will attempt to clear them up. How Does Radiocarbon Work? All living things exchange the gas Carbon 14 (abbreviated C14, 14C, and, most often, 14C) with the environment around them—animals and plants exchange Carbon 14 with the atmosphere, while fish and corals exchange carbon with dissolved 14C in sea and lake water. Throughout the life of an animal or plant, the amount of 14C is perfectly balanced with that of its surroundings. When an organism dies, that equilibrium is broken. The 14C in a dead organism slowly decays at a known rate: its half-life. The half-life of an isotope like 14C is the time it takes for half of it to decay away: in 14C, every 5,730 years, half of it is gone. So, if you measure the amount of 14C in a dead organism, you can figure out how long ago it stopped exchanging carbon with its atmosphere. Given relatively pristine circumstances, a radiocarbon lab can measure the amount of radiocarbon accurately in a dead organism for up to about 50,000 years ago; objects older than that dont contain enough 14C left to measure. Wiggles and Tree Rings The growth rings of a tree cut horizontally to the ground can be used to date the tree and wooden objects made from it. Ollikainen / iStock / Getty Images There is a problem, however. Carbon in the atmosphere fluctuates, with the strength of the earths magnetic field and solar activity, not to mention what humans have thrown into it. You have to know what the atmospheric carbon level (the radiocarbon reservoir) was like at the time of an organisms death, in order to be able to calculate how much time has passed since the organism died. What you need is a ruler, a reliable map to the reservoir: in other words, an organic set of objects that track annual atmospheric carbon content, one that you can securely pin a date on, to measure its 14C content and thus establish the baseline reservoir in a given year. Fortunately, we do have a set of organic objects that keep a record of the carbon in the atmosphere on a yearly basis—trees. Trees maintain and record carbon 14 equilibrium in their growth rings—and some of those trees produce a visible growth ring for every year they are alive. The study of dendrochronology, also known as tree-ring dating, is based on that fact of nature. Although we dont have any 50,000-year-old trees, we do have overlapping tree ring sets dating (so far) back to 12,594 years. So, in other words, we have a pretty solid way to calibrate raw radiocarbon dates for the most recent 12,594 years of our planets past. But before that, only fragmentary data is available, making it very difficult to definitively date anything older than 13,000 years. Reliable estimates are possible, but with large /- factors. The Search for Calibrations As you might imagine, scientists have been attempting to discover organic objects that can be dated securely pretty steadily for the past fifty years. Other organic datasets looked at have included varves, which are layers of sedimentary rock which were laid down annually and contain organic materials; deep ocean corals, speleothems (cave deposits) and volcanic tephras; but there are problems with each of these methods. Cave deposits and varves have the potential to include old soil carbon, and there are as-yet unresolved issues with fluctuating amounts of 14C in ocean currents. A coalition of researchers led by Paula J. Reimer of the CHRONO Centre for Climate, the Environment and Chronology, School of Geography, Archaeology and Paleoecology, Queens University Belfast and publishing in the journal Radiocarbon, has been working on this problem for the last couple of decades, developing a software program that uses an ever-increasingly large dataset to calibrate dates. The latest is IntCal13, which combines and reinforces data from tree-rings, ice-cores, tephra, corals, speleothems, and most recently, data from the sediments in Lake Suigetsu, Japan, to come up with a significantly improved calibration set for 14C dates between 12,000 and 50,000 years ago. Lake Suigetsu, Japan In 2012, a lake in Japan was reported to have the potential to further finetune radiocarbon dating. Lake Suigetsus annually formed sediments hold detailed information about environmental changes over the past 50,000 years, which radiocarbon specialist PJ Reimer says are as good as, and perhaps better than, the Greenland Ice Cores. Researchers Bronk-Ramsay et al. reported 808 AMS dates based on sediment varves measured by three different radiocarbon laboratories. The dates and corresponding environmental changes promise to make direct correlations between other key climate records, allowing researchers such as Reimer to finely calibrate radiocarbon dates between 12,500 to the practical limit of the c14 dating of 52,800. Answers and More Questions There are many questions that archaeologists would like answered that fall into the 12,000-50,000 year period. Among them are: When were our oldest domesticate relationships established (dogs and rice)?When did the Neanderthals die out?When did humans arrive in the Americas?Most importantly, for todays researchers, will be the ability to study in more precise detail the impacts of previous climate change. Reimer and colleagues point out that this is just the latest in calibration sets, and further refinements are to be expected. For example, theyve discovered evidence that during the Younger Dryas (12,550–12,900 cal BP), there was a shutdown or at least a steep reduction of the North Atlantic Deep Water formation, which was surely a reflection of climate change; they had to throw out data for that period from the North Atlantic and use a different dataset. Selected Sources Adolphi, Florian, et al. Radiocarbon Calibration Uncertainties During the Last Deglaciation: Insights from New Floating Tree-Ring Chronologies. Quaternary Science Reviews 170 (2017): 98–108.  Albert, Paul G., et al. Geochemical Characterisation of the Late Quaternary Widespread Japanese Tephrostratigraphic Markers and Correlations to the Lake Suigetsu Sedimentary Archive (SG06 Core). Quaternary Geochronology 52 (2019): 103–31. Bronk Ramsey, Christopher, et al. A Complete Terrestrial Radiocarbon Record for 11.2 to 52.8 Kyr B.P. Science 338 (2012): 370–74.  Currie, Lloyd A. The Remarkable Metrological History of Radiocarbon Dating [II]. Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology 109.2 (2004): 185–217.  Dee, Michael W., and Benjamin J. S. Pope. Anchoring Historical Sequences Using a New Source of Astro-Chronological Tie-Points. Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 472.2192 (20 16): 20160263.  Michczynska, Danuta J., et al. Different Pretreatment Methods for 14c Dating of Younger Dryas and Allerà ¸d Pine Wood ( Quaternary Geochronology 48 (2018): 38-44. Print.Pinus sylvestris L.).Reimer, Paula J. Atmospheric Science. Refining the Radiocarbon Time Scale. Science 338.6105 (2012): 337–38.  Reimer, Paula J., et al. Intcal13 and Marine13 Radiocarbon Age Calibration Curves 0–50,000 Years Cal BP. Radiocarbon 55.4 (2013): 1869–87.