Brechtian Techniques

Bertold Brecht (1898 – 1956) founded the so-called new, or â€Å"epic theatre† that creatively reworked the principles of traditional â€Å"Aristotelian† drama, in order for the plays to correspond to modern demands. Brecht characterised his position in dramatic art as social-critical. He was an active antifascist and thus centered his works on major historical events and gave them a social-political meaning. From the formal point of view, Brechtian techniques were based on defamilirisation of the event. First and foremost, he transposed the event into third person.He uses new concept of author’s time, i. e. time as it is perceived by the narrator of the play. The latter usually tells about the events that happened in the past and comments them. In doing so, he freely operates various layers of time, so that the whimsical structure of the story reminds that of a recollection or a dream. Finally, an important element of Brechtian drama is its increased conv ention, for instance the action can be interrupted by speaking stage directions aloud and or via usage of placards and signs.The drama â€Å"Zoot Suit† (1978) by Luis Valdez’ efficiently uses the Brechtian principles and techniques. Like many of Brecht’s dramas, this work is a passionate social protest that shows the injustice of the society with purely Brechtian didacticism. Valdez wrote this play at the end of â€Å"turbulent seventies†, which in the US were characterised by increased social activity of minorities fighting for their rights, and Mexican Americans were among these.Thus, the playwright addresses the times, when the Mexican American identity was only forming, and yet it was oppressed and discriminated by the police. Valdez implies that the same thing may happen or even happens in his times and protests against it. In this respect his play may be linked with activities of Guerilla theatre, which considered itself to be a cultural revolt agai nst war and a mouthpiece of social protest movements. Valdez’ play also has explicit antiwar and protest connotations, and in accordance with Brecht’s conception, his art serves political purposes.Furthermore, action is presented and commented by the narrator, the fictional El Pachuco, which is the condensed embodiment of Mexican spirit (pachucos were Mexican American youth who emphasized their Mexican identity and wore zoot suits). He converses with the protagonist of the story, Henry Reyna, and in some episodes interferes into action (for instance, he takes the place of Rudy Reyna in an uneven fight with sailors). Moreover, from the very first words Valdez emphasizes Brechtian convention. For instance, the drop curtain is â€Å"giant facsimile of a newspaper front page† (1, 1992).Besides in his first monologue EL Pachuco says that he is an actor who plays El Pachuco and recollects this myth. This indicates another Brechtian technique. The narrated action takes place in the past. The setting, as described by the author, emphasizes that the age of zoot suits is in the past: â€Å"The somber shapes and outlines of pachuco images hang subtly, black on black, against a back-ground of heavy fabric evoking memories and feelings like an old suit hanging forgotten in the depths of a closet somewhere, sometime† (1, 1992).At the same time, in the end El Pachuco says that this legend still lives and is topical, for at least he is interested in telling it. However, this is not the objective past time of Aristotelian drama, but rather narrator’s individual perception. El Pachuco can retard action by making the judge repeat for the second time that â€Å"zoot haircuts will be retained throughout the trial for purposes of identification† (ibid). He also uses sudden retrospections, for example when Henry mentions Saturday night dance, El Pachuco snaps fingers and makes this event repeat.In another instant, he skips witness’ st atement, saying â€Å"You know what. We've already heard from that bato. Let's get on with the defense† (1, 1992). Besides the conventionality is emphasized by various other interruptions of action. An interesting example of this is when the arrested pachucos stand in a line, the Press starts and they continue the headline. In another episode the Pressâ€Å"moves the bundles of newspapers on the floor to outline the four corners of a jail cell†, i. e.makes the decorations for the next scene in jail (1, 1992). To sum up, the play â€Å"Zoot Suit† by Luis Valdez exemplified Brechtian understanding of social-political role of art and demonstrates a number of Brechtian techniques of the â€Å"new theatre†, among them accentuated conventionality of action, transposition into third person (use of narrator) and into the past, connected with the present, and forcible handling of time. References 1. Valdes, L. (1992). Zoot Suit. Zoot Suit and Other Plays. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press. Pg 22-94.

Sample Size for a Margin of Error in Statistics

Sample Size for a Margin of Error in Statistics Confidence intervals are found in the topic of inferential statistics.   The general form of such a confidence interval is an estimate, plus or minus a margin of error.   One example of this is in an opinion poll in which support for an issue is gauged at a certain percent, plus or minus a given percent. Another example is when we state that at a certain level of confidence, the mean is xÌ„ /- E, where E is the margin of error. This range of values is due to the nature of the statistical procedures that are done, but the calculation of the margin of error relies upon a fairly simple formula. Although we can calculate the margin of error just by knowing the sample size, population standard deviation and our desired level of confidence, we can flip the question around. What should our sample size be in order to guarantee a specified margin of error? Design of Experiment This sort of basic question falls under the idea of experimental design. For a particular confidence level, we can have a sample size as large or as small as we want. Assuming that our standard deviation remains fixed, the margin of error is directly proportional to our critical value (which relies upon our level of confidence) and inversely proportional to the square root of the sample size. The margin of error formula has numerous implications for how we design our statistical experiment: The smaller the sample size is, the larger the margin of error.To keep the same margin of error at a higher level of confidence, we would need to increase our sample size.Leaving everything else equal, in order to cut the margin of error in half, we would have to quadruple our sample size. Doubling the sample size will only decrease the original margin of error by about 30%. Desired Sample Size To calculate what our sample size needs to be, we can simply start with the formula for margin of error, and solve it for n the sample size. This gives us the formula n (zÃŽ ±/2ÏÆ'/E)2. Example The following is an example of how we can use the formula to calculate the desired sample size. The standard deviation for a population of 11th graders for a standardized test is 10 points. How large of a sample of students do we need to ensure at a 95% confidence level that our sample mean is within 1 point of the population mean? The critical value for this level of confidence is zÃŽ ±/2 1.64. Multiply this number by the standard deviation 10 to obtain 16.4. Now square this number to result in a sample size of 269. Other Considerations There are some practical matters to consider. Lowering the level of confidence will give us a smaller margin of error. However, doing this will mean that our results are less certain. Increasing the sample size will always decrease the margin of error. There may be other constraints, such as costs or feasibility, that do not allow us to increase the sample size.

Seymour Cray and the Supercomputer

Seymour Cray and the Supercomputer Many of us are familiar with computers. You’re likely using one now to read this blog post as devices such as laptops, smartphones and tablets are essentially the same underlying computing technology. Supercomputers, on the other hand, are somewhat esoteric as they’re often thought of as hulking, costly, energy-sucking machines developed, by and large, for government institutions, research centers, and large firms. Take for instance China’s Sunway TaihuLight, currently the world’s fastest supercomputer, according to Top500’s supercomputer rankings. It’s comprised of 41,000 chips (the processors alone weigh over 150 tons), cost about $270 million and has a power rating of 15,371 kW. On the plus side, however, it’s capable of performing quadrillions of calculations per second and can store up to 100 million books. And like other supercomputers, it’ll be used to tackle some of the most complex tasks in the fields of science such as weather forecasting and drug research. When Supercomputers Were Invented The notion of a supercomputer first arose in the 1960s when an electrical engineer named Seymour Cray, embarked on creating the world’s fastest computer. Cray, considered the â€Å"father of supercomputing,† had left his post at business computing giant Sperry-Rand to join the newly formed Control Data Corporation so that he can focus on developing scientific computers. The title of world’s fastest computer was held at the time by the IBM 7030 â€Å"Stretch,† one of the first to use transistors instead of vacuum tubes.   In 1964, Cray introduced the CDC 6600, which featured innovations such as switching out germanium transistors in favor of silicon and a Freon-based cooling system. More importantly, it ran at a speed of 40 MHz, executing roughly three million floating-point operations per second, which made it the fastest computer in the world. Often considered to be the world’s first supercomputer, the CDC 6600 was 10 times faster than most computers and three times faster than the IBM 7030 Stretch. The title was eventually relinquished in 1969 to its successor the CDC 7600.  Ã‚   Seymour Cray Goes Solo In 1972, Cray left Control Data Corporation to form his own company, Cray Research. After some time raising seed capital and financing from investors, Cray debuted the Cray 1, which again raised the bar for computer performance by a wide margin. The new system ran at a clock speed of 80 MHz and performed 136 million floating-point operations per second (136 megaflops). Other unique features include a newer type of processor (vector processing) and a speed-optimized horseshoe-shaped design that minimized the length of the circuits. The Cray 1 was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. By the 1980s Cray had established himself as the preeminent name in supercomputing and any new release was widely expected to topple his previous efforts. So while Cray was busy working on a successor to the Cray 1, a separate team at the company put out the Cray X-MP, a model that was billed as a more â€Å"cleaned up† version of the Cray 1. It shared the same horseshoe-shape design, but boasted multiple processors, shared memory and is sometimes described as two Cray 1s linked together as one. The Cray X-MP (800 megaflops) was one of the first â€Å"multiprocessor† designs and helped open the door to parallel processing, wherein computing tasks are split into parts and executed simultaneously by different processors.   The Cray X-MP, which was continually updated, served as the standard bearer until the long-anticipated launch of the Cray 2 in 1985. Like its predecessors, Cray’s latest and greatest took on the same horseshoe-shaped design and basic layout with integrated circuits stacked together on logic boards. This time, however, the components were crammed so tightly that the computer had to be immersed in a liquid cooling system to dissipate the heat. The Cray 2 came equipped with eight processors, with a â€Å"foreground processor† in charge of handling storage, memory and giving instructions to the â€Å"background processors,† which were tasked with the actual computation. Altogether, it packed a processing speed of 1.9 billion floating point operations per second (1.9 Gigaflops), two times faster than the Cray X-MP. More Computer Designers Emerge Needless to say, Cray and his designs ruled the early era of the supercomputer. But he wasn’t the only one advancing the field. The early ’80s also saw the emergence of massively parallel computers, powered by thousands of processors all working in tandem to smash though performance barriers. Some of the first multiprocessor systems were created by W. Daniel Hillis, who came up with the idea as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The goal at the time was to overcome to the speed limitations of having a CPU direct computations among the other processors by developing a decentralized network of processors that functioned similarly to the brain’s neural network. His implemented solution, introduced in 1985 as the Connection Machine or CM-1, featured 65,536 interconnected single-bit processors. The early ’90s marked the beginning of the end for Cray’s stranglehold on supercomputing. By then, the supercomputing pioneer had split off from Cray Research to form Cray Computer Corporation. Things started to go south for the company when the Cray 3 project, the intended successor to the Cray 2, ran into a whole host of problems. One of Cray’s major mistakes was opting for gallium arsenide semiconductors – a newer technology as a way to achieve his stated goal of a twelvefold improvement in processing speed. Ultimately, the difficulty in producing them, along with other technical complications, ended up delaying the project for years and resulted in many of the company’s potential customers eventually losing interest. Before long, the company ran out of money and filed for bankruptcy in 1995. Cray’s struggles would give way to a changing of the guard of sorts as competing Japanese computing systems would come to dominate the field for much of the decade. Tokyo-based NEC Corporation first came onto the scene in 1989 with the SX-3 and a year later unveiled a four-processor version that took over as the world’s fastest computer, only to be eclipsed in 1993. That year, Fujitsu’s Numerical Wind Tunnel, with the brute force of 166 vector processors became the first supercomputer to surpass 100 gigaflops (Side note: To give you an idea of how rapidly the technology advances, the fastest consumer processors in 2016 can easily do more than 100 gigaflops, but at the time, it was particularly impressive). In 1996, the Hitachi SR2201 upped the ante with 2048 processors to reach a peak performance of 600 gigaflops. Intel Joins the Race Now, where was Intel? The company that had established itself as the consumer market’s leading chipmaker didn’t really make a splash in the realm of supercomputing until towards the end of the century. This was because the technologies were altogether very different animals. Supercomputers, for instance, were designed to jam in as much processing power as possible while personal computers were all about squeezing efficiency from minimal cooling capabilities and limited energy supply. So in 1993 Intel engineers finally took the plunge by taking the bold approach of going massively parallel with the 3,680 processor Intel XP/S 140 Paragon, which by June of 1994 had climbed to the summit of the supercomputer rankings. It was the first massively parallel processor supercomputer to be indisputably the fastest system in the world.   Up to this point, supercomputing has been mainly the domain of those with the kind of deep pockets to fund such ambitious projects. That all changed in 1994 when contractors at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, who didn’t have that kind of luxury, came up with a clever way to harness the power of parallel computing by linking and configuring a series of personal computers using an ethernet network. The â€Å"Beowulf cluster† system they developed was comprised of 16 486DX processors, capable of operating in the gigaflops range and cost less than $50,000 to build. It also had the distinction of running Linux rather than Unix before the Linux became the operating systems of choice for supercomputers. Pretty soon, do-it-yourselfers everywhere were followed similar blueprints to set up their own Beowulf clusters.  Ã‚   After relinquishing the title in 1996 to the Hitachi SR2201, Intel came back that year with a design based on the Paragon called ASCI Red, which was comprised of more than 6,000 200MHz Pentium Pro processors. Despite moving away from vector processors in favor of off-the-shelf components, the ASCI Red gained the distinction of being the first computer to break the one trillion flops barrier (1 teraflops). By 1999, upgrades enabled it to surpass three trillion flops (3 teraflops). The ASCI Red was installed at Sandia National Laboratories and was used primarily to simulate nuclear explosions and assist in the maintenance of the country’s nuclear arsenal. After Japan retook the supercomputing lead for a period with the 35.9 teraflops NEC Earth Simulator, IBM brought supercomputing to unprecedented heights starting in 2004 with the Blue Gene/L. That year, IBM debuted a prototype that just barely edged the Earth Simulator (36 teraflops). And by 2007, engineers would ramp up the hardware to push its processing capability to a peak of nearly 600 teraflops. Interestingly, the team was able to reach such speeds by going with the approach of using more chips that were relatively low power, but more energy efficient. In 2008, IBM broke ground again when it switched on the Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to exceed one quadrillion floating point operations per second (1 petaflops).

Definition and Examples of Asterismos in Rhetoric

Definition and Examples of Asterismos in Rhetoric Definition Asterismos is a  rhetorical term for an introductory word or phrase (such as behold) that has the primary function of calling attention to what follows. Asterismos is generally regarded as a type of pleonasm.   See Examples and Observations below. Also see: AsteriskEmphasisExclamation Interjection EtymologyFrom the Greek, marking with stars   Examples and Observations Gotham, take control of your city. Behold, the instrument of your liberation!(Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, 2012)Behold, Nagini, our work is done.(Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, 2011)Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,When I give I give myself.(Walt Whitman, Song of Myself)Hey, Ive read all about your accident. That much gamma exposure should have killed you.(Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark in The Avengers, 2012)Hey, this is not First Class.(King Julien XIII in Madagascar 3: Europes Most Wanted, 2012)We should talk more tomorrow. Listen, I dont take chances anymore.(Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes, First Time Again. The Walking Dead, 2015)Now listen people, we are experiencing some kind of disaster.(Andre Braugher as Brent Norton in The Mist, 2007)And Jesus said to his disciples, Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel t o go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.(Matthew 19:23-24, The Bible: Revised Standard Version) Well, looky here, boss, deys sumfn wrong, dey is. Is I me, or who is I? Is I heah, or whah is I? Now dats what I wants to know.(Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain) The Emphatic FigureAsterismos [is the] addition of a logically unnecessary word at the beginning of a phrase, or a phrase at the beginning of a sentence, to emphasize what follows. Pascal states, All human evil comes from this, mans being unable to sit still in a room. The pronoun this interrupts the flow of thought and draws attention to what follows. Beaumarchais is using that as an asterismos in Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love at all seasons, Madam: That is all there is to distinguish us from other Animals. In the Bible the most frequent asterismos is behold: Behold, the Lord God said . . .. In contemporary sports interviews, hey is frequently used as an asterismos.(Arthur Quinn and Lyon Rathbun, Asterismos. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Information Age, ed. by Theresa Enos. Taylor Francis, 1996) Pronunciation: as-ter-IS-mos

Discussion Question 2 Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Discussion Question 2 - Assignment Example The success of a given coaching relationship is mainly determined by achievement of a given coaching goals through development and implementation of a given action plan. More importantly it is critical that coaching goals be clearly defined as well tangible to enhance adequate measurements of the coaching relationship success. It is important to note that coaching goals are in most cases driven by the coach manager’s needs and thereof established early in a coaching relationship to give focus for successive coaching intervention. The success of coaching relationship is assessed based on the level at which the positive behavioral changes are directed by the coaches. Some of the positive behavioral changes, are improved effectiveness in monitoring others in working place and enhanced ability to set goals as well prioritize tasks in a more effective dialog through effective communication. Some of the Signs that a manager is not coaching his or her employees effectively include; n egative attitude, thoughts, and lack of motivation from the employees. Attitude, thoughts, and motivation are some of the signs that an organization uses to evaluate a manager’s effort on coaching his / her employees (Oberstein and American Society for Training and Development, 2009). The success coaching relationship is determined by attainment of a given coaching goals. The success of coaching relationship is assessed based on the level at which the positive behavioral changes are directed by the coaches for instance, attitudes, thoughts and

Social Media on the Internet Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Social Media on the Internet - Essay Example One of the most notable features of social media is that it has grown exponentially across the world within a very short duration compared to other business and communication tools in human history. To illustrate this phenomenon, Lee (2010) points out that while it took 13 years for television to attract over 50 million viewers and 38 years for radio to attract about 50 million listeners, it took 4 years only for internet to attract 50 million participants. He further points out that it took social media platform, Facebook, one and a half years to attract the same number of participants. There has been raging debate on whether the availability and use of social media on the internet is useful to businesses in regard to providing them with new and different useful information. This paper will discuss how the availability and use of social media on the internet really provide businesses with new and different useful information. Historically, technology has been injected and adopted in to the society as well as the business world and it has often required that there be a radical shift in business and cultural processes and practices (Lincoln, 2009). Social media is one such kind of technology in the business world. Unlike other types of technologies, social media technology greatly reflects the social behavior of people. Social media is also unique in the sense that it allows anybody to produce media content and deliver it by interactive communication. Qualman (2010) notes that the available statistics show that social media has established itself as the media of choice around the world over the last 4 years, with over a quarter of the world population using one type of social media or another. The growth of social media has been so tremendous such that social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have grown rapidly and have gradually relegated other forms of advertising such as print advertisements, and threatened them with extinction (Nair, 2011 ). The popularity of the use of social media on the internet can be attributed to four reasons. To start with, users can get the latest information on virtually anything they want. Secondly, it satisfies the desires of the users of expressing themselves. Users are also able to see how individuals and groups that they are interested in are doing therefore getting more satisfaction. Finally, it helps people to escape from their day-to-day routine by providing alternative ways of using time (Lee, 2010). The fact that social media has experienced exponential growth over the years cannot be disputed. However, there has been debate on whether the availability and use of social media on the internet really provides businesses with new and different useful information. The response to this question has been two-fold: on one side, there are those who believe that it does provide businesses with new and different useful information, while on the other side there are those who believe that it does not (Nair, 2011). While the later side has its reasons for taking that position, there is a greater consensus among those engaged in this debate that, indeed, the availability and use of social media on the internet provides businesses with new and different useful information (Hinchcliffe et al., 2012). So, how does the use of social

FIN501 MoD 4 Case Assin Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

FIN501 MoD 4 Case Assin - Essay Example A financial structure of a company on the other hand includes the short term debts, business creditors and other short term liabilities (Ho and Lee, 2003). Most businesses finance their business through debt or equity or a combination of both. Through debts the companies secure long term bank loans or take bonds which are redeemable after a long period of time. Through equity the companies issue common shares, preferred shares and sometimes the retained earnings injected at the end of the trading period where a profit has been realized. This literature will examine the financial books and ratios of 3 companies and determine their financial structure and the risks they run in choosing that particular mix (Ehrhardt, 2013). The choice of whether to use exclusive debt or equity financing or what mixture depends on the financial position of the business, the credit standing, the tax situation of the country and the nature of the business. This mix will determine what the cost of capital i s (Finnerty, 2013). Equity financing has its own advantages in that there is no burden of debt hanging over the owner’s heads, they therefore do not run the risk of going bankrupt unlike when financed by a debt. The owners too consent to the risk of losing all their investment in case the business fails. The disadvantages of equity financing is that the many the investors the more the control of the business is diluted and so are the profit shares. Debt financing on the other hand is advantageous to the management of the business in that the lenders do not take any control of the business or direct how the money lent will be spent. The lenders also do not share the profit of the company, all they are entitled to is the loan repayment and the interest on loan. But one of the major advantages of debt financing is that it reduces the tax liability of the business because the interest paid on loan is tax deductible. This protects a part of income from taxation and at the same tim e lowering your business’ tax liability. The disadvantages of debt financing involve ruined credit rating and risking bankruptcy (Besley and Brigham, 2008). An optimal capital structure is one that attains a good balance between the returns of the capital structure and the risks that the structure exposes the company to. The optimal capital structure will minimize the risks involved yet maximize the returns and it also increases the valuation of the stock in the stock market at the same time minimizing the cost of capital (Ho and Lee, 2003). eBay This is a multinational company based in America with outlets in more than 30 countries worldwide. It was started in 1995 and deals with providing consumer-to-consumer internet services. Its nature of business involves providing an over the internet market where customers can auction their goods, this was the initial venture. However, with time the company has diversified its services providing online advertisement services through e Bay classifieds, online payment through PayPal and online event ticket trading through StubHub (Gitlin, 2007). Between 2005 and 2009 it had acquired Skype but then sold a majority stake so as to concentrate on the other internet services it was renowned for. Examining the financial statements of the company for the period ended 31st December 2012 the following information was obtained. The company has a total assets value of $37.074 billion