Oedipus The King Essay Example

Oedipus The King Essay Determination and Strength: An essay about Oedipus the King The play Oedipus the King by Sophocles attempts to portray Oedipus (King of Thebes) as an extremely powerful and dignified man. Throughout the play, the classic story of Oedipus comes to life and the audience comes to see that no matter how bad Oedipus life seems to get, he steadily maintains his nobility and trustworthiness. Sophocles lets the reader know in the beginning that Oedipus fate has been predetermined: that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Although Oedipus does not know this, the reader does, thus making Oedipus out to be not just a king but a person as well. Throughout the play the audience sees Oedipus power, strength, and dignity. Although Oedipus attitude changes throughout the play, we still see him as an extremely noble and trust-worthy man. The audience sees Oedipus change of character three times throughout the play. At the beginning of the play Oedipus is a great king with extreme strength, later we see him as more of a tyrant opposed to a king and lastly Oedipus demeanor changes once again to a fearful and humiliated man who maintains his dignity even at his greatest defeat. At the end however, Oedipus indeed proves himself to stay dignified. Oedipusfirst shows us to be a confident and powerful hero when he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, who has Thebes under lock and key. Despite the fact that the Sphinx threatened anyone to death who answered the riddle incorrectly, Oedipus was determined and here was when we see his bravery. After correctly solving the riddle the Sphinx frees the city of Thebes and Oedipus becomes famously known for his bravery leading him to become King of Thebes, as the people state, You cut us loose from the bloody tribute we had paid that harsh, brutal singer. We taught you nothing, no skill, no extra knowledge, still you triumphed (44-47).

Current World Population and Future Projections

Current World Population and Future Projections The world population has grown tremendously over the past 2,000 years. In 1999, the world population passed the six-billion mark. By March of 2018, the official world population had jumped over the seven-billion mark to an estimated  7.46 billion. World Population Growth Humans had been around for tens of thousands of years by the year 1 A.D. when the Earths population was an estimated 200 million. It hit the billion mark in 1804 and doubled by 1927. It doubled again in less than 50 years to four  billion in 1975. Year Population 1 200 million 1000 275 million 1500 450 million 1650 500 million 1750 700 million 1804 1 billion 1850 1.2 billion 1900 1.6 billion 1927 2 billion 1950 2.55 billion 1955 2.8 billion 1960 3 billion 1965 3.3 billion 1970 3.7 billion 1975 4 billion 1980 4.5 billion 1985 4.85 billion 1990 5.3 billion 1995 5.7 billion 1999 6 billion 2006 6.5 billion 2009 6.8 billion 2011 7 billion 2025 8 billion 2043 9 billion 2083 10 billion Concerns for an Increasing Number of People While the Earth can only support a limited number of people, the issue is not so much about space as it is a matter of resources like food and water. According to author and population expert  David Satterthwaite, the concern is about the number of consumers and the scale and nature of their consumption. Thus, the human population can generally meet its basic needs as it grows, but not at the scale of consumption that some lifestyles and cultures currently support. While data is collected on population growth, it is difficult for even sustainability professionals to understand what will happen on a global scale when the worlds population reaches 10 or 15 billion people. Overpopulation is not the biggest concern, as enough land exists. The focus would primarily be on making use of uninhabited or underpopulated land. Regardless, birth rates have been falling around the world, which may slow down population growth in the future.  As of 2017, the total fertility rate for the world was 2.5, down from 2.8 in 2002 and 5.0 in 1965, but still at a rate that allows population growth. Growth Rates Highest in Poorest Countries According to World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision, most of the worlds population growth is in poor countries. The 47 least developed countries are expected to see their collective population nearly double from 2017s one billion to 1.9 billion by 2050. Thats thanks to a fertility rate of 4.3 per woman. Some countries continue to see their populations explode, such as Niger with a 2017 fertility rate of 6.49, Angola at 6.16, and Mali at 6.01. In contrast, the fertility rate in many developed countries was below replacement value (more loss of people than those born to replace them). As of 2017, the fertility rate in the United States was 1.87. Others include Singapore at 0.83, Macau at 0.95,  Lithuania at 1.59, the Czech Republic at 1.45, Japan at 1.41, and Canada at 1.6. According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the worlds population has been rising at a rate of roughly 83 million people  every year, and the trend is expected to continue, even though fertility rates have been dropping in almost all regions of the world. Thats because the worlds overall fertility rate still exceeds the rate of zero population growth. The population-neutral fertility rate is estimated at 2.1 births per woman.

Assignment 6 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Assignment 6 - Essay Example The data obtained reveals that learners are gifted differently, and there is a need to attend to them based on their abilities. This provides a platform for teachers to attend to learners with special needs. Necessary assistance would be extended to such learners. Assessing this type of records would be relatively easy with the assistance from subject teachers and administrators of the school. Working closely with parents would help avail necessary documents of previous performance. The author is involved as a principal in a school in Southern Oregon characterized by transition of leadership, where he replaces a principle that left little to be desired. The school has 86% annual student transient rate with a high teacher turnover. Parents’ involvement is low, and all is left to the teachers. The principal aims to turn things around and pull the high-poverty community together. The new principal is keen to realize the key affected areas in his new school. The teachers are alienated in decision-making, and their opinions are overlooked. The learners are not addressed appropriately, and there is a case of multiage grouping. Such a decision affects the overall performance of the learners, in the long run. Cooperative learning is poorly executed leading to a great deal of â€Å"Davids† in the institutions. Another problem is full class inclusion without paying attention to gifted and learners with special needs. The author further realizes that language learning was a mystery topic. With the involvement of teachers, he engages in an action research with an aim to have things work perfectly. He designs a plan to higher new teachers for the school to meet the demands of the learners. The learners would need instructors competent enough to better them. The principal purposes to meet the key parents for their involvement. They would support teachers establish the most conducive environment in the school. He identified requirements in the new

China doing business in Venezuela Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

China doing business in Venezuela - Essay Example government has not made an official announcement, America feels threatened as an influence within the region. Currently, America is the largest importer of oil from Venezuela, and China will be taking away from this amount. 2) U.S. consumers may benefit from with deal through an increase in Venezuelan oil production. As of right now, Venezuela produces about 3 billion barrels of oil each day (James 2011). With help from the Chinese loans, oil production is expected to increase to increase massively. This, in turn, will benefit U.S. consumers because the oil price should hopefully come down. With more oil on the market, prices will be driven down. The cost of gas to U.S. consumers should reduce considerably. However, the United States government needs to be careful that there are not any deals going on between the Venezuelan government and their Chinese counterparts. Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez has said, â€Å"We don’t do discounts with anyone†¦We sell at international prices (James 2011). If the U.S. wants to remain competitive in the oil market, then it should hope that this is true. Associated Press. (2011, Nov. 25) Venezuela’s Chavez defends China ties as officials sign deals for $6 billion in loans. The Washington Post. Retrieved from

Higher education Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 2

Higher education - Essay Example I agree that too many people are participating in colleges. There are several opportunities apart from going to college, and they are all viable. There are so many people going to college, and the most interesting thing is that there is a high rate of drop out compared to those graduating. The graduation rate is low as described by Murray in his article. It is evidential that there are six months certificates, which are flexible as compared to four years, stay in college. In addition, most of the students spend up to six years in college; they could have invested the time in more viable ventures. Not all people that go to the college become successful. At the same time, too many people are joining the colleges leading the current education system into shamble (Murray 225). According to statistics, from the financial institutions, the competence of the financial students is wanting. Most of the people have tried to be fit and conform to the social norms of the society. No one is bound to fit into the social norm of the society, in fact, they must use creative and critical thinking does decide if to join the college or to become an electrician. The fact that too many people are going to college does not affect or influence an individual’s decision of joining the college. Joining the college must not me a communal decision but a personal decision (Murray 230). It is important to note that, not everyone who can make it through to college. Most of the skills must be learned in the alimentary and middle school. Murray describes the education system as a failing strategy. Most of the people in the society believe that everyone in the society must have a bachelor’s degree to be considered in the job market. People must do what they are good at and not what the society tells them to do. Money is not the reason for joining the college but getting a

Factor Language Model Programming

Factor Language Model Programming Language Model Language model helps a speech recognizer figure out how likely a word sequence is, independent of acoustics. There is a linguistic and statistical approach to calculate the probability. The linguistic technique tries to understand the syntactic and semantic structure of a language and derive the probabilities of word sequences using this knowledge. The challenge here is to have proper co occurrence statistics of the unit of recognition. The approach in use evaluates a huge text corpus in a statistical way and word transitions. Current language models make no use of the syntactic properties of natural language but rather use very simple statistics such as word co-occurrences. Recent results show that incorporating syntactic constraints in a statistical language model reduces the word error rate on a conventional dictation task by 10% [M.S.Salam, 2009]. Proposed Language Model The approach proposed here uses factored language model which incorporates the morphological knowledge. Factored language models have recently been proposed for incorporating morphological knowledge in the modeling lexicon. As suffix and compound words are the cause of the growth of the vocabulary, a logical idea is to split the words into shorter units. The language model proposed in this research is based on morphology. A morphological analyser obtains and verifies the internal structure of a given complete word form [Rosenfield, 2000]. Building a morphological analyser for highly inflecting, agglutinative languages is a challenging task. It is very difficult to build a high performance analyser for such languages. The main idea here is to divide a given word form into a stem and single suffix. Morphology plays a much greater role in Telugu. An inflected Telugu word starts with a stem and may have suffix(s) added to the right according to complex rules of saMdhi. This research proposes a new data structure based on Inverted Index and an efficient algorithm for accessing its elements. Few researchers have used tries for efficient retrieval from dictionary, earlier. This research work is different from earlier work in two ways: a) variation to the structure of trie b) the method of identifying and combining inflections. Modified Trie Structure A trie is a tree based data structure for storing strings in order to support fast pattern matching. A trie T represents the strings of set S of n strings with paths from root to the external node of T. Fig 5.1: Original Trie Structure The trie considered here is different from standard trie in two ways: 1) A standard trie does not allow a word to be prefix of another, but the proposed trie structure allows a word to be prefix of another word. The node structure and search algorithm also is given according to this new property. 2) Each word in a standard trie ends at an external node, where as in the modified trie a word may end at either an external node, or the internal node. Irrespective of whether the word ends at internal node or external node, the node stores the index of the associated word in the occurrence list. The node structure is changed such that, each node of the trie is represented by a triplet C,R,Ind>. C represents character stored at that node. R represents whether the concatenation of characters from root till that node forms a meaningful stem word. Its value is 1, if characters from root node to that node form a stem, 0 otherwise. Ind represents index of the occurrence list. Its value depends on the value of R. Its value is -1 (negative 1), if R=0, indicating it is not a valid stem. So no index of occurrence list matches with it. If R=1, its value is index of occurrence list of associated stem. Fig 5.2: Modified Trie Structure Advantages relative to binary search tree: The following are the main advantages of tries overbinary search trees(BSTs): Looking up keys is faster. Looking up a key of lengthmtakes worst caseO(m) time. A BST performs O(log(n)) comparisons of keys, wherenis the number of elements in the tree, because lookups depend on the depth of the tree, which is logarithmic in the number of keys if the tree is balanced. Hence in the worst case, a BST takes O(mlogn) time. Moreover, in the worst case log(n) will approachm. Also, the simple operations tries use during lookup, such as array indexing using a character, are fast on real machines. Tries can require less space when they contain a large number of short strings, because the keys are not stored explicitly and nodes are shared between keys with common initial subsequences. Tries facilitatinglongest-prefix matching, helping to find the key sharing the longest possible prefix of characters all unique. Corpus structure of proposed Language Model The corpus consists of the following modules: Stem word dictionary This accommodates all the stems of the language. Stem word dictionary is implemented as an Inverted Index for better efficiency. The Inverted index will have the following two data structures in it: 1) Occurrence list: It is an array of pairs, 2) Stem trie: consisting of stem words Occurrence list is constructed based on the grammar of the language, where each entry of the list contains the pair (ii) Inflection Dictionary This dictionary contains the list of all possible inflections of the Telugu language. Each entry of Stem word dictionary lists the indexes of this dictionary to indicate which all inflections are possible with that stem. The proposed corpus structure helps in reducing the corpus size drastically. Every stem word may have number of inflections possible. If the inflected words are stored as it is, then corpus size would be m*n, where m is number of stem words and n is number of inflections. Instead of storing all the inflected words, the proposed corpus structure stores stem words and inflections separately, and handles the inflected words through morphology. Hence the corpus size required is for m stem words and n inflections i.e., m+n. Thus there is a great reduction in the corpus size. For a corpus of 1000 stem words and 10 inflections, the required corpus size is 1000+10=1010, which otherwise would have required 1000*10=10000. Fig 5.3 : Corpus structure of proposed Language Model Textual Word Segmentation using Proposed Language Model The proposed language model is used to develop a textual word segmenter. A word segmenter is used to divide the given inflected word into a stem and single inflection. This is required as the corpus stores stems and inflections separately. Input the word segmenter is an Inflected word. Syllabifier takes this word and divides the word into syllables and identifies if the letter is a vowel or a consonant. After applying the rules syllabified form of the input will be obtained. Once the process of syllabification is done, this will be taken up by the analyzer. Analyzer separates the stem and inflection part of the given word. This stem word will be validated by comparing it with the stem words present in stem dictionary. If the stem word is present, then the inflection of the input word will be compared with the inflections present in inflection dictionary of the given stem word. If both the inflections get matched then it will directly displays the output otherwise it takes the appropriate inflection(s) through comparison and then displays. Syllabification is the separation of the words into syllables, where syllables are considered as phonological building blocks of words. It is dividing the word in the way of our pronunciation. The separation is marked by hyphen. In the morphological analyzer, the main objective is to divide the given word into root word and the inflection. For this, we divide the given input word into syllables and we compare the syllables with the root words and inflections to get the root word and appropriate inflection. Fig 5.4: Block diagram of Word Segmentr for text Steps for word segmentation Receiving the inflected word as an input from the user. Syllabify the input Analyze the input and validating the stem word. Identify the appropriate inflection for the given stem word by comparing the inflection of given word with the inflections present in inflection dictionary of the stem word. Displaying the appropriate inflected word. For example, considering the word â€Å"nAnnagariki† (à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ °-à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ °Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¿Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¿) meaning â€Å"to father†, the input is given the user in Roman transliteration format. This input is basically divided into lexemes as: Now, the array is processed which gives the type of lexeme by applying the rules of syllabification one by one. Applying Rule 1: â€Å" No two vowels come together in Telugu literature.† The given user input does not have two vowels together. Hence this rule is satisfied by the given user input. The output after applying this rule is same as above. If the rule is not satisfied, an error message is displayed that the given input is incorrect. Now the array is: c – v – c – c – v – c – v – c – v – c – v Applying Rule 2: â€Å" Initial and final consonants in a word go with the first and last vowel respectively.† Telugu literature rarely has the words which end up with a consonant. Mostly all the Telugu words end with a vowel. So this rule does not mean the consonant that ends up with the string, but it means the last consonant in string. The application of this rule2 changes the array as following: c – v – c – c– v – c – v – c – v – c – v cv – c – c – v – c – v – c – v – cv This generated output is further processed by applying the other rules. Applying Rule 3: â€Å" VCV: The C goes with the right vowel.† The string wherever has the form of VCV, then this rule is applied by dividing it as V – CV. In the above rule the consonant is combined with the vowel, but here in this rule the consonant is combined with the right vowel and separated from the left vowel. To the output generated by the application of rule2, this rule is applied and the output will be as: cv – c – c – v – c – v – c – v – cv cv – c – c – v – cv – cv – cv This output is not yet completely syllabified, one more rule is to be applied which finishes the syllabification of the given user input word. Applying Rule 4: â€Å" Two or more Cs between Vs First C goes to the left and the rest to right.† It is the string which is in the form of VCCC*V, then according to this rule it is split as VC – CC*V. In the above output VCCV in the string can be syllabified as VC – CV. Then the output becomes: cv – c – c – v – cv – cv – cv cvc– cv – cv – cv – cv Now this output is converted to the respective consonants and vowels. Thus giving the complete syllabified form of the given user input. nAn – na –cA – ri – ku cvc – cv – cv – cv – cv Hence, for the given user input, â€Å"nAnnagAriki†, the generated syllabified form is, â€Å"nAn – na – gA – ri – ki†. Fig 5.5: Word Segmenter showing an inflected word without change in stem form Fig 5.6: Word Segmenter showing an inflected word with a change in stem form SCIL Speech Corrector for Indian Languages In inflectional language every word consists of one or several morphemes into which the word can be segmented. The approach used here aims at reducing the above mentioned problem of having a very huge corpus for good recognition accuracy. It exploits the characteristic of Telugu language that every word consists of one or several morphemes into which the word can be segmented. SCIL is a procedure To deal with complex word forms applied after recognition Using which misrecognized words are corrected Architecture of SCIL The design of Speech Corrector for Indian Languages, consists of the Syllable Identifier, Phone Sequence Generator, Word Segmenter, and Morpho- Syntactic Analyzer modules. Input speech is decoded by a normal ASR system which gives the identified word as a string. The sequence of phones would be the input to the Word Segmenter module which matches the phonetized input with the root words stored in dictionary module, and generates a possible set of root words. Morpho-Syntactic Analyzer compares the inflection part of the signal with the possible inflections list from the database and gives correct inflection. This will be given to Morph Analyzer to apply morpho-syntactic rules of the language and gives the correct inflected word. Fig 5.7: Block diagram of SCIL i) Syllable Identifier Syllable identifier marks the rough boundaries of the syllables and labels them. At this stage , we get list of syllables separated with hyphen. The user input is syllabified and this would be the input to the next module. E.g. dE-vA-la-yA-ku ii) Phone Sequence Generator As the words in the dictionary are stored at phone level transcription, this module generates the phone sequences from the syllables. E.g. d-E-v-A-l-a-y-A-k-u iii) Word Segmentor This module compares the phonetized input from starting with the root words stored in dictionary module and lists the possible set of root words. The possible root word is dEvAlayamu. iv) Dictionary Dictionary contains stems and inflections separately. It does not store inflected words as it is very difficult, if not impossible, to cover all inflected words of the language. The database consists of 2 dictionaries: Stem Dictionary Inflection Dictionary Stem dictionary contains the stem words of the language, signal information for that stem which includes the duration and location of that utterance and list of indices of inflection dictionary which are possible with that stem word. Inflection Dictionary contains the inflections of the language, signal information for that inflection which includes the duration and location of that utterance. Both the dictionaries are implemented using trie structure in order to reduce the search space. v) Morpho Syntactic Analyzer This module compares the inflection part of the signal with the possible inflections list from the database and gives correct inflection. This will be given to Morph Analyzer to apply morpho-syntactic rules of the language and gives the correct inflected word. Post Recognition Procedure Capture the utterance, an isolated inflected word. Get its syllabified form. Generate phone sequence from the syllabified word. Compare the phone sequences with stem words in the dictionary and identify the stem. Segment the word into stem and inflection. Get the list of possible inflections. Compare the inflection signals possible with that stem one by one and apply morpho-syntactic rules of the language to combine stem and inflection. Display the inflected word. Using the rules the possible set of root words are combined with possible set of inflections and the obtained results are compared with the given user input and the nearest possible root word and inflection are displayed if the given input is correct. If the given input is not correct then the inflection part of the given input word is compared with the inflections of that particular root word and identifies the nearest possible inflection and combines the root word with those identified inflections, applies sandhi rules and displays the output. When there is more than one root word or more than one inflection has minimum edit distance then the model will display all the possible options. User can choose the correct one from that. For example, when the given word is pustakaMdO (à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ªÃƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¸Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¤Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã¢â‚¬ ¹), the inflections tO making it pustakaMtO (à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ªÃƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¸Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚  à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¤Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¤Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã¢â‚¬ ¹) meaning ‘with the book’ and lO making it pustakaMlO (à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ªÃƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¸Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¤Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ²Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã¢â‚¬ ¹) meaning ‘in the book’) mis are possible. Present work will list both the words and user is given the option. We are working on improving this by selecting the appropriate word based on the context. SCIL Algorithm W=Utterance.wav Syl[]=SyllableIdentifier(W) Phone[]=phonetizer(Syl[]) Stem=getStem(Syl[]) Infl[]=getInflections(Stem) While (not exactMatch) word=MorphAnalyzer(stem,inflMatch) display word Stop Working of SCIL Once possible root words identified the given word is segmented into two parts, first being the root word and second part inflection. Now the inflection part is compared in the reverse direction for a match in the inflection dictionary. It will consider only the inflections that are mentioned against the possible root words, thus reducing the search space and making the algorithm faster. For example consider â€Å"nAnnagariki† (à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ °-à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ °Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¿Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¿) meaning â€Å"to father†, is misrecognized as nAn-na-cA-ri-ku (à  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¨Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã… ¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ °Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã‚ ¿Ãƒ  Ã‚ °Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ) then SCIL is applied and will correct the recognition error as follows: The output from ASR is nAn-na-cA-ri-ku. The phone sequence generator will generate the phone sequence as n-A-n-n-a-c-A-r-i-k-u. Now, match it with the set of root words stored in dictionary module. This process will identify the possible set of root words from the Stem dictionary as follows: Once possible root words identified the given word is segmented into two parts, first being the root word and second part inflection. Now the inflection part is compared for a match in the inflection dictionary. It will consider only the inflections that are mentioned against the possible root words, thus reducing the search space and making the algorithm faster. Possible set of inflections in inflections dictionary After getting the possible set of root words and possible set of inflections they are combined with the help of SaMdhi formation rules. Here in this example cA-ri-ku is compared with the inflections of the root word nAnna After comparing it identifies gAriki as the nearest possible inflection and combines the root word with the inflection and displays the output as â€Å"nAnnagAriki†. Conclusions Language model proposed in this work results in reduction in corpus size by using factored approach. The search process is fastened by use of trie based structure. A change to standard trie is proposed. A post recognition procedure SCIL, is designed which uses the proposed language model and corrects the words misrecognized at inflections. The approach is tested using 1500 speech samples. These samples consist of 100 distinct words , each word repeated 3 times and recorded by 5 speakers in the age group 18-50. It is implemented as a speaker dependent system. An average model is built from the three utterances of each word for each speaker. Each speaker is given a unique ID, using which average model of that speaker is used for testing.

Environmental Essay -- Biodiversity, Ecological Systems

Biodiversity is the makeup and interconnectedness of ecological systems. Biodiversity makes up all the diversity among living things within a specific system. This diversity of life is invaluable to human existence for countless reasons; it is a primary source for environmental resources that shape the economics of a region, it provides the scientific community with what seems to be an ever-growing source of data that can be used for things like medicine, and provides food and aesthetic value to human life. Ontario is a privileged province of Canada as it contains over 25,00 different species of plants and animals. (†¨Lemieux, Scott. 2011) With such a vast collection of biodiversity Ontario has the obligation to ensure its protection and growth of the thousands of years of evolution that lead to the complex array of life it now contains. With the growth of the human population biodiversity is shrinking, as the globe becomes one species orientated the externalities of human exist ence threaten biodiversity. One example of these externalities are the impacts anthropogenic climate change, the changing climate due to human activities threatens wildlife as it changes their habitats at rates that most wildlife cannot adopt and evolve to live in. (Lemieux, Scott 2011). Considering the excess of 25,000 different species in Ontario, the province has a large obligation to protect and maintain this biodiversity from the dangers that human existence pose to it. The federal and provincial governments have created many laws and regulations that relate to the protection and management of the environment and biodiversity. More specifically the provincial government of Ontario has the Endangered species act, which will be the focal point of analys... ...he environment and biodiversity by protecting species at risk of extinction and their habitats. After analysis and discussion it is clearly evident that the statue was a positive movement towards a better-managed environment but has many areas of concern. The act deals with problems in a reactive nature when it should be a proactive one in maintaining biodiversity. Secondly it comes into conflict when the species concerned overlaps with private property and unjustly puts the social cost of helping the species to the hands of the private landowners, better management between landowner and government polices should be made to fix the conflicts which arise from this. Finally the act needs to deal with the scope of biodiversity being centered around a one species orientated nature, and by this should focus a better management of human interaction with the environment.

Irony in “Top of the Food Chain” by T. Coraghessan Boyle Essay

T. Coraghessan Boyle’s â€Å"On Top of the Food Chain† is more than just a narration of a selfish person’s mistakes. The narrator’s tone is a literary element used to show man’s indifference for organisms that are of no immediate benefit or are a nuisance to them. _†The thing was, we had a little problem with the insects†¦Ã¢â‚¬ _ The narrator’s tone in â€Å"Top of the Food Chain† is quickly shown as self-centered in working for his comforts and indifferent to the havoc his choices make on the environment. Humans believe that we can solve everything that is put upon us, but there is always a catch. In this story, Mother Nature proves us that she can always be ahead of how humans perceive things. From the very first sentence, the narrator is portrayed as a self-serving person. In charge of a group bringing health care to a third-world village, his choices to improve the lives of the villagers lead to wreaking chaos on the local food chain. The improvements start by poisoning the flies. When the geckos that feed off of these flies die due to starvation, the cat population also diminishes. When the cats are gone, the rat population is left unregulated and is allowed to spread disease to the humans and ruin their crops. The narrator’s condescending tone towards these disastrous events is the most significant factor that Boyle uses to develop his theme. The narrator assumes he is at the top of the food chain, and he has no problem killing off the smaller species. However, the narrator is too indifferent to realize that by hurting the lower members of the food chain, he has hurt himself. This is what shows the true irony in the story. The narrator did something that he believes is good for him, but instead it ends up being entirely the opposite of it. The story reflects that humans can do immoral things, without thinking well of the consequences and the effect it is going to have on others. â€Å"Top of the Food Chain† is ironic since Mother Nature got back at all of the selfishness that was portrayed in the story. Global Warming is a great example of how nature can get back to humans because of our own selfish actions. Human activities contribute to climate change by causing changes in Earth’s atmosphere in the amounts of greenhouse gases, aerosols (small particles), and cloudiness. The largest known contribution comes from the burning of fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide gas to the atmosphere. The release of carbon dioxide damages the atmosphere, which cause drastic changes in the climate. However, his tone following the severe circumstances that played out in the story implies that he simply does not care about anything other then what he wants. The narrator’s arrogance and belief that he can do what ever he wants without hurting himself reflects his idea that he is Top of the Food Chain. Unfortunately, he learns the hard way that his selfish actions turn around and hurt him in the end, which ends up being ironic. T. Coraghessan Boyle demonstrated us that nature can always get back to humans despite of whatever we do; selfish or unselfish.

5 More Sentences Rendered More Concise

5 More Sentences Rendered More Concise 5 More Sentences Rendered More Concise 5 More Sentences Rendered More Concise By Mark Nichol Each of the examples below illustrates a distinct strategy for shortening and simplifying sentences. A discussion and a revision follows each example. 1. You can go ahead and turn off the valve. The phrase â€Å"go ahead and† is a classic example of an extraneous phrase, preceding a verb, likely to turn up in speech when the speaker wishes to avoid seeming too assertive, but it has no place in writing, and the sentence can be further pared down by reducing it to a bare imperative statement with an implied subject: â€Å"Turn off the valve.† 2. If possible, take the rug outside and shake it to dislodge resistant dirt. Similarly, the two-step instruction in this sentence is easily truncated to a more concise direction by omitting the first verb and replacing it with the second one after the latter has been divested of the pronoun that follows it: â€Å"If possible, shake the rug outside to dislodge resistant dirt.† 3. It is not a matter of if such a risk event might occur, but more a matter of when it will occur and the organization’s preparedness to reduce the impact and proliferation of the event. The counterpoint phrases in the sentence are easily combined: â€Å"It is a matter of if, not of when, such a risk event will occur, and of the organization’s preparedness to reduce the impact and proliferation of the event.† 4. The Safe Harbor agreement was the framework used by companies in the United States and the European Union to exchange citizens’ personal data. This mechanism was declared invalid by the European Court of Justice on October 6, 2015. Simply constructed declarative statements are easily combined, usually by one of two methods- either insert one modified sentence into the other as a parenthetical, or, as here, revise both sentences so that one can be tacked onto the other: â€Å"The Safe Harbor agreement, the framework companies in the United States and the European Union used to exchange citizens’ personal data, was declared invalid by the European Court of Justice on October 6, 2015.† (Note, too, the shift from passive to active construction of the verb used. Also, the entire sentence could be rendered more active- and slightly shorter- by replacing the subject as follows: â€Å"On October 6, 2015, the European Court of Justice declared the Safe Harbor agreement, the framework companies in the United States and the European Union use to exchange citizens’ personal data, invalid.†) 5. Phorusrhacids were known as â€Å"terror birds,† and it’s clear why. They were prehistoric carnivorous birds. They were the largest flightless birds to ever walk the plant. They reached a height of up to ten feet. They were natural inhabitants of South America.   This annoyingly inelegant paragraph, written in simple, repetitive sentences as if by a child, is easily rehabilitated by employing the first method described in the previous example- incorporating a couple of the statements into the others: â€Å"Phorusrhacids, natural inhabitants of South America, are informally known as â€Å"terror birds,† and it’s clear why. These prehistoric carnivorous avians, the largest flightless birds to ever walk the plant, stood up to ten feet tall.† Find 5 more examples in this post. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Style category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Creative Writing 101Peace of Mind and A Piece of One's MindQuiet or Quite?

Mitigation banking essays

Mitigation banking essays Now more than ever the wetlands need our help and Mitigation is the way to do it. As America expands, more and more land is used up for construction. Recently environmental protection laws designed to preserve wetlands have been seem as cumbersome and can impede on land development. To help businesses get around environmental laws and continue to build, Mitigation Banking systems have been set up to ensure no net loss of wetlands. When a company wants to destroy an area of wetlands, they are now able to purchase wetland credits from a mitigation bank or other organization that protect or restore pieces of wetland (1). The credits purchased represent an amount of wetland. The credits bought must be of equal or greater acreage than intended to be destroyed in order to insure no net loss of wetlands. The purchases wetland areas can turn up in many different ways. The credits can go towards many styles of wetlands. They can be used to restore, rehabilitate, create, or moved wetl ands. Rehabilitation is often times the most expensive as well as most difficult, but when completed will reap the largest benefits. Rehabilitated wetlands often make the best filtration for reducing contaminate levels such as phosphate. Restoration is the act of taking dry or degraded wetlands and restoring them to their natural condition by raising the water level and reestablishing dominate plants. Both contribute to creating the natural wetland that once was. There still may be a problem with restoration or rehabilitation. Often time there is extremely high levels of contaminates, so high that it does not make sense environmentally of economically to help the wetlands. In these cases the wetlands are filled in and used for construction sites. Another alternative is moving a wetland area from one area to another. These areas are easily manipulated to represent the natural wetlands almost exactly. In Tampa, Florida, Steve Dibbs successfully mov...

Supply Chain Management Apple Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Supply Chain Management Apple - Essay Example This success could be due to the increasing amount of supply chain managers reporting to the CEO of a company rather than to the manufacturing department, a trend across businesses (Allen, 2010). It has been suggested that the supply chain for Apple involves ten steps in four different countries, which are Singapore, Taiwan, the US and China. Taiwan provides most of the manufacturing components for an iPhone (Apple’s biggest seller []), with six different elements being produced here – the digital camera modules, international circuitry, industrial connectors, silicon Bluetooth chipset, technology printed circuit boards and stainless metal casings (Lyons, 2010). This encourages us to believe that the supply chain manager believes that Taiwan is the cheapest and most efficient supplier of many of the components for the iPhone and other Apple products. It also means that there is a bottleneck for the supply chain, in that if there were to be any economic issues or disaste rs in Taiwan, then the supply chain for the iPhone would be severely disrupted and there would be problems in the supply of these products. Essentially, the supply chain manager at Apple feels that the benefits from producing many components in Taiwan (cost and efficiency) outweigh these dangers. China is the location in which all these components come together to be assembled, suggesting that the country has a very cheap labour rate compared with the US, and the shipping costs from this country are low enough for the cost of labour in this country for this to be the most efficient method. All of this information suggests that Apple uses a vertical integration system for their Supply Chain Management (Lyons, 2010). A vertical integration system is one where most of the hardware components of a product are bought from a variety of different manufacturers which are all owned and controlled by the central company – in this case Apple. This helps to avoid any hold-up from trying to integrate many different companies, and it also stops the different pieces of hardware being used by other companies, ensuring that the end product is something completely unique – again, something very important to Apple. The use of a manufacturer owned by the central company also ensures that the data chip, or processor, or other product, can be manufactured exactly according to company specifications, ensuring a greater specificity. This can be a response to the make-buy decision. The make-buy decision The make-buy decision is essentially a choice between outsourcing and manufacturing (Probert, 1997). It has been suggested that the decision is easy, and that a company should outsource any components that are not critical to the product’s success, do not require any specialised design or manufacturing elements, and are not core to the company’s future plans and central products (Burt & Burf, 2009). There are many other ways of making the decision, one of wh ich is known as the contribution-per-constraint module (CPCM) that relies on knowing and analysing the constraints of the component (Gardiner & Blackstone, 2007). In this case, the Supply Chain Management team at Apple have decided that it is best to make many of the components (or

Strategic Management Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Strategic Management - Assignment Example The company has strategic options like developing strategic alliances with local retailers, offering cost leadership and competitive pricing. Table of Contents Strategic management of TESCO supermarket 14 1 Strategic management of TESCO supermarket 1 Executive summary 2 Table of Contents 3 Introduction 4 Business environment 5 PEST framework 5 Political factors 5 Economical factors 6 Social factors 6 Technological factors 7 Porter’s five forces 7 Threat of new entrant 7 Bargaining power of suppliers 8 Bargaining power of consumers 8 Threat of substitutes 9 Bargaining power of competitors 9 Internal analysis 9 Swot analysis 11 Challenges facing the organization 12 Strategic options 12 References 14 Introduction Food retail sector in the United Kingdom employs over 3 million people. This makes it the largest industry in the economy. However, a growing number of supermarkets are coming under intense pressure because of unprofessional treatment meted on stakeholders in the supply chain. Tesco and other supermarkets are committed to strategic development networks that lead to increased productivity. This report gives a strategic management analysis of Tesco supermarket. ... United Kingdom is Tesco’s largest market. In this market Tesco operates under Metro, Express, Extra and Superstore banners. The retailer has diversified to non-food lines e.g. clothing. Tesco delivers close to 40,000 food products. The companies label products operate at three levels. Most of the stores contain gas stations. Therefore, it has grown to become of the leading petrol retailers in Britain. Tesco personal finance is a retailing service offered by the supermarket is a bid to expand its market share. Business environment The business environment on a retailer plays a central role in its profitability. Companies are under intense pressure to acknowledge their responsibility to the society. The introduction of taxes that target the increased advertising of fatty food is bound to affect the performance of the supermarket (Stone 2009). The relationship between consumers and supplies has also been affected because of the ‘fat tax’. The presence of powerful com petitors has led to intense price wars. In some instances, the foreign market environment is hostile and governments try to protect the local industries from foreign competition. Government policies that promote monopoly controls have been blamed for limited access to some markets and segments. Such policies have the capacity to reduce the buying power of consumers. Differentiation is increasingly becoming difficult because of unhealthy competition and government interference. Tesco has developed a policy in which it reduces the prices for fuel based on the amount of sales at its groceries. The retailer compensates by raising prices in other stores. PEST framework Political factors Besides the United Kingdom, Tesco operates in six countries in Europe. The legislative and