Fast Food Restaurants Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Fast Food Restaurants - Assignment Example Therefore, in Fast Food restaurants industry, customer loyalty is built, earned and retained with the following components; Product quality, Product attributes, Brand name, Store environment (relates to customer experience with the restaurant and restaurant's ambiance), Service quality, Price, Promotion, Trust and Satisfaction. In this industry, a loyal customer means the person who avail's a restaurant's services, is highly satisfied with them, has a pleasant customer experience with the place, trusts the restaurant to provide high quality good food, considers product/service attributes to be excellent, considers the product/service quality as high, considers price to be worth the product/service offering, rates promotional activities to be highly attractive and goes for the brand name created by the restaurant, like McDonalds (Nezakati, 13). For fast food firms, customer loyalty is when a particular customer revisits their restaurant again and again and repurchases their service. M oreover, these are the customers who visit the restaurant very frequently, for instance a customer who eats at the restaurant twice every week. They are happy customers who give a positive feedback when asked about the food and they give generous tips to the waiters. Customer loyalty is measured by the revenue generated from a particular customer, a regular customer whose name every waiter would know or who could be recognized by face (Rehman et.al., 1-2). For customers, customer loyalty is the high level of satisfaction they receive from dining in a fast food restaurant. For them, customer loyalty is a product of high quality product/service that completely fulfills the customer expectations and satisfy their preferences or needs. For customers, to be a loyal consumer of a fast food restaurant's food, it is essential for the restaurant to provide them with a complete service experience. The ambiance of the place must be pleasant and enjoyable. Food must be of high quality and most importantly it must be hygienic and worth every penny they pay for it. The service must be prompt and efficient as customers do not like to wait a lot when it comes to food and restaurant staff must be hospitable and helpful since many at times customers ask for suggestions from the staff as to what they should order and what is the best dish they serve. So in a nutshell, for customers to be loyal they must be provided a high quality food service as for customers, customer loyalty is what an organization earns from the absolute satisfaction of a customer. It is all about meeting customer expectations and living up to them (Rehman et.al., 1-2). To be more specific, companies and customers define customer loyalty by dividing it into two types; attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty. Attitudinal loyalty is a state of mind a customer is in which displays a positive preferential attitude of the customer towards a company's products/services. It simply depends on the customers' liking , if they like a certain brand, like in this case if they love McDonalds, they will even pay a premium price to buy the product compared to its lower priced competitor, for instance KFC in this case. Behavioral loyalty is simply dependent on the customer's conduct without any consideration of their attitude or preference.

Information Systems Development Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Information Systems Development - Essay Example The said question is the main purpose to initiate thinking in managing essential data in all the domains listed or not listed in the article. When related data is managed or organized in an efficient way then we have to call it is a database. For organizations or for an individual the processed data is worth while. The information which is received is an ultimate form of organized and processed data. The information is used to make decisions for future tracks while the raw data will only yield mess. In the essay the focal point is the evaluation of spreadsheet and relational database as suitable instrument for handling data or user preferences of the different organizations. Spreadsheet sheet is another way to handle data in an organization. But the limitations of the spreadsheets force one to take turn on the other side i.e. adoption of the database management system. As different organizations are still using spreadsheets for the management of their data facts and its due to the lack of domain knowledge regarding databases. So the spreadsheets fit best in their environment instead of all their problems or issues which the organization members are facing. Spreadsheet is a sort of storehouse in which the users are just stuffing the data and making a heap of soft data files. Why mostly the spreadsheets are in practice the reason for the said question is that most of the people are well familiar with the environment of the spreadsheet. Using spreadsheet one can easily insert data in the rows and columns of spread sheet data. The primary usage of the spreadsheets is to handle mathematical calculations, play with numbers, and applying complex formulae. The data models which are best suited in a spreadsheet are budget, taxes, inventories, and other financial models. The application which is going to be engineered is from the domain of education industry and in our case it is an arts centre. First probing the

Jean Baudrillards Disneyworld Company Theory Analysis

Jean Baudrillards Disneyworld Company Theory Analysis In his essay Disneyworld Company (1996), Jean Baudrillard suggests that we are living within an immediate synchronism of all the places and all the periods in a single a-temporal virtuality. Please explain this statement, referencing at least two contemporary digital examples. In his statement ‘an immediate synchronism of all the places and all the periods in a single a-temporal virtuality‘, Baudrillard is addressing the gap between what we can see as the known and the experienced (Baudrillard, 1996). It is in this sense that Baudrillard is writing against the notion of human nature and revealing only experience as the real and knowledge as merely the imagined. It is due to this gap that Baudrillard is then able to show that virtuality has begun to replace our real perceptions. To understand this in full we must investigate his and other philosopher’s thoughts regarding the digital age in greater detail. Informed primarily by the role that intelligence and sensual perception plays as it is applied to experience and knowledge, Baudrillard looked at the role of subjectivity as it related to both the objective and the phenomenological world. Beginning his enquiry into humanity and reality and its relationship to the world, Baudrillard focused upon the condition of the free world and its growing technologies with an emphasis that its Medias had placed upon commercialisation, imagery and art consumption. Baudrillard spoke of the new emphasis on the philosophy of self fulfilment suggesting that, ‘Through planned motivation we find ourselves in an era where advertising takes over the moral responsibility for all of society and replaces a puritan morality with a hedonistic morality of pure satisfaction, like a new state of nature at the heart of hyper civilisation’ (Baudrillard, 1968, p.3) After prescribing this current philosophical and moral reality that he believed informed the condition for humanity in the west, Baudrillard then turned to a notion of subject / object consciousness in an attempt to define a link between our knowledge and our experience. Detailing a consumer-able condition that pertained very strongly to post modern, capitalist living, Baudrillard concluded that the relationship between the subject and object now formed the living consciousness of an abstracted life between what he/she identifies with and what is signified in the actual consummation of any chosen object, such as an image, by stating that, ‘We can see that what is consumed are not objects but the relation itself signified and absent, included and excluded at the same time it is the idea of the relation that is consumed in the series of objects which manifests it.’ (Baudrillard, 1967, p.11) What Baudrillard does here is implement the idea of a simulated code acting as our knowledge, rather like that of a robot with artificial intelligence, that works by replacing the old humanised ideological frameworks that once informed society and acted as the gel between experience and knowledge / subject and object. These driving forces once born of experience communicated through culture and language in the forms of social exchange and communal ideology were seen by Baudrillard as being the premise of the image. In this we see that Baudrillard is showing how this simulated code informs a new humanity, devoid of natural origin, that does not live out a life according to cultural meaning that is supported by a communal language, but instead acts out an imagined life that can be understood and identified by its relationship to the values apparent within the code or what Bakhtin called the ‘relationship of the other’ essentially, placing life itself as a simulated relati onship to a tructural code of knowledge. (Bakhtin, 1993). Writing on the subsequent implications of this reality that he defined as hyper-reality and documenting the cultural shift that supported the change from registering external behaviour of a subject as an indication of a subjective response to the recognition of the other as an objective image of simulated experience, Baudrillard suggested that, ‘A whole imagery based on contact, a sensory mimicry and a tactile mysticism, basically ecology in its entirety, comes to be grafted on to this universe of operational simulation, multi-stimulation and multi response. This incessant test of successful adaptation is naturalised by assimilating it to animal mimicry. , and even to the Indians with their innate sense of ecology tropisms, mimicry, and empathy: the ecological evangelism of open systems, with positive or negative feedback, will be engulfed in this breach, with an ideology of regulation with information that is only an avatar, in accordance of a more flexible patter.’ (Baudrillard, 1976, p.9) With this we can see that all cultures have become divorced from a natural reality born of experience and that the ideas of a structured culture have become replaced by a gap that is filled with the virtual. In this sense, life, according to Baudrillard, is one of virtual imagery that is then rationalised against a simulated code rather than an intrinsic relationship with nature. Essentially, this ideological code acting as virtual knowledge informs us of linear time and space and so distorts our experience of life and existence. The virtual imagery presented to us via global technology and media, such as the internet, then reinforces our application to this reality and gives us our user identity that replaces the old systems devised of actual or phenomenological reality. Scepticism towards global medias, technologies and the growing dependency that humanity and society had begun placing upon the cultural apparatus of the globe was put forward by Marxist philosopher Seigfried Kracaue rs in his concerns about the mass consumption of art. This indicated that reality of the working masses was hidden under the illusion (or virtuality) of mass produced, distributed and unrelated art (Kracauer, 1963). Expanding upon the ideas of mass consumption and art put forward by Kracauer, contemporary Walter Benjamin introduced the notion of time and space to this idea. Focusing upon the history of technological progression and its relationship to art and social reality, Benjamin suggested that, ‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element its presence in time and space, its unique existence as the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of existence. This includes the charges which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes of its ownerships. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analysis which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original’ (Benjamin, 1935, p.1) Bringing the role of time and space into the capitalist reproduction of art, Benjamin was able to expand upon Kracauer’s notion that this art was resistant to nature, the individual, the nation and the community. What Benjamin was then able to suggest was that firstly, any one piece of culture belongs to the mass production of art that determines it, and that secondly, every cultural artefact cannot stand free of the time and space in which it was presented as without its mass, it has no meaning or cultural apparatus from which it can be signified or understood (Benjamin, 1935). We can see from this that both Kracauer and Benjamin devised a rationale that applied to the placing of the ideological and virtual conceptual framework within the technological reality of global production. More contemporary thinkers and writers that have concerned themselves with this role of global media and their advancing technologies in the current global condition, hae often supported these view s providing evidence for the onus placed upon imagery in the process. For instance, in his text War and Peace in the Global Village writer Marshall McLuhan commented directly upon the growing dependency of western cultures mass media technologies. The global village mentioned in the title referred to the relationship between the people of the global cities and the mass culture that they consumed and were informed by. In particular, this text observed the actual impact that new technologies such as television and news had on cultural perception and indicated how it affected the perception of time within that perception, suggesting that it was being used to artificially construct a regional global identity based upon a virtual history and world based upon linear time and imagined geographies. For instance, information readily received from actual and real events in the world made the concept of a world and its state of being a direct part of one’s own naturalised condtion and e xperience. Essentially, as this mass of information could be freely accessed by anyone among the global village at any time, then the information could be seen as a virtual universalising reality. Furthermore, using an example of contemporary war coverage, McLuhan was able to demonstrate a clear biasness that was present in the then contemporary manipulation of mass technologies so that invading troops could be portrayed as ‘military contractors‘. He termed this as ’dichotomization’, which would offer two points of view both pertaining to the culture / counter culture of the presiding mass (McLuhan, 1963). This is the gap between knowledge and experience that Baudrillard was referring to, in which he believed synchronisation could flood the space now rendered free of actual time and actual space and portray the virtual as the real. Although we can see that both Kracauer and Benjamin’s theories of mass reproduction and McLuhan’s findings on the perceptions of technological medias are still relevant and apply to the presentation of the global world that we now find ourselves deeply immersed in, other theorists have offered another approach, implying that Kracauer and Benjamin’s theories contained a fatalistic scepticism that was born of the early twentieth century western modernist perspective. For instance, concerned with the notion of technological expansion, mass culture and the effects of globalisation, contemporary cultural theorist Homi Bhabha engaged in a global perspective that aimed to critique the notion of mass reproduction and its over riding condition. Considering Kracauer and Benjamin’s conceptual analysis of the reproduction of the mass and observing the colonial effects placed upon other cultures, Bhabha positioned this dimension in the conemporary sense by emphasising that it also formed a part of the dichotomy of the mass. Having placed their theory of mass reproduction as one of global scepticism, that was bound by the cultural historicity of their western heritage as is represented by Baudrillard’s positioning of Disney Land as a producer of virtuality within the contemporary age, Bhabha then suggested a third way approach that stood outside of the virtual mass and could observe it organically, either as individual or as a community. Having positioned Kracauer and Benjamin’s theories as part of the dichotomy of the mass, Bhabha was then able to indicate that the essence of a true global perspective was born of organic community that could be found somewhere outside of the global mass; somewhere away from the ‘imaginary’ virtual debates of global inter-national territories and free of their dependencies upon linear and grand concepts of history and time elase (Bhabha, 1994). He suggested that the location of this else where was within the unbound psychology of the individual and not in the construct of their ideological positioning within the virtual time and space created by global media, technology and information. Engaging with Benjamin’s notion of time and space in this cultural reproduction, Bhabha reasoned that, ‘The temporality of negotiation or translation has two main advantages. First, it acknowledges the historical connectedness between the subject and object of critique so that there can be no simplistic, essentialist opposition between ideological misrecognition and revolutionary truth. The progressive reading is crucially determined by the adversarial or agonistic situation itself; it is effective because it uses the subversive, messy mask of camouflage and does not come like a pure avenging angel speaking the truth of a radical historicity and pure oppositionality. If one is aware of this heterogeneous emergence (not origin) of radical critique, then and this is my second point function of theory within the political process becomes double edged. It makes us aware that our political references and priorities the people, the community, class struggle, anti-racism, gender difference the assertion of an anti-imperialist, black or thir perspective are not there in some primord ial, naturalistic sense. They make sense [only] when they come to be constructed in the discourses of feminism, Marxism.’ (Bhabha, 1994, p.23) It is from this idea of mass, global communication and its accessible depictions of regionalism and linear time that Baudrillard states that there is a synchronism. This synchronism is understood by Baudrillard as the thing that is manipulated by Disneyland to enforce and reinforce an idea of what is real and what is not that as part of the process negates the actual experience of the object itself. Essentially for Baudrillard, through image Disneyland is set within an ideological and conceptual framework reinforced by mass imagery and perceived as being real rather than being virtual. Through the mass image, the reality of Disneyland appears to us as real as it accords to the simulated code that acts and has replaced our naturalised and cultured knowledge structures, without the real experience itself being captured within an experiential temporality. Therefore, it is through the ideology of image that we view the notion of Disneyland as being fixed and constant and not in a transie nt state of natural and ultural change as pertains to objects of the organic or civilised worlds. Essentially, it is through a display of established imagery that Disneyland can synchronise all the places and all the periods of the virtually known globe, and its many cultures, in a single a-temporal virtuality and replace any reality in the process. Bibliography Bakhtin, M., (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press Baudrillard, J., (1968) The System of Objects Taken from: The Order of Simulacra (1993) London: Sage. Baudrillard, J., (1976) Symbolic Exchange and Death Taken from: The Order of Simulacra (1993) London: Sage. Benjamin, W., (1935) The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction London: Harcourt. Bhabha, H., (1994) The Location of Culture New York: Routledge Kracauer, S., (1963) The Mass Ornament London: Harvard University Press. McLuhan, M., (1968) War and Peace in the Global Village Washington: Washington Post. Web Links Baudrillard, J., (1996) Disneyworld Company Paris: Liberation. Taken from: www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=158 Jean Baudrillard

Othello: Emilia’s Metamorphosis Essay -- Othello essays

Othello: Emilia’s Metamorphosis  Ã‚        Ã‚   In his tragic play Othello, Shakespeare endows the minor character Emilia with some important functions. Her character, which changes dramatically in several ways toward the finale of the play, is the topic of this essay.    A.C. Bradley, in his book of literary criticism, Shakespearean Tragedy, defines the character of the ancient’s wife:    Few of Shakespeare’s minor characters are more distinct than Emilia, and towards few do our feelings change so much within the course of the play. Till close to the end she frequently sets one’s tooth on edge; and at the end one is ready to worship her. She nowhere shows any sign of having a bad heart; but she is common, sometimes vulgar, in minor matters far from scrupulous, blunt in perception and feeling, and quite destitute of imagination. She let Iago take the handkerchief though she knew how much its loss would distress Desdemona; and she said nothing about it though she saw that Othello was jealous. (222)    Emilia is not mentioned in the play until the initial furor of the first two scenes subsides. Brabantio’s rage, among other reasons, necessitate that Desdemona live with Iago and Emilia during the Moor’s campaign in Cyprus against the Turks. Later, while awaiting the arrival of Othello’s ship at the seaport of Cyprus, Emilia is sharing the company of her husband and Desdemona. She shows herself mentally unfit to fight off the verbal attacks of Iago, which are demeaning to her: â€Å"her tongue she oft bestows on me†; â€Å"chides with thinking†; â€Å"Bells in your parlors, wildcats in your kitchen / Saints in your injuries, devils being offended.† So Desdemona intervenes on Emilia’s behalf with: â€Å"O, fie upon thee, slanderer!† dir... ... with Cassio! (5.2)    Then she accuses him of causing murder: â€Å"And your reports have set the murder on.† Emilia is aware that she is violating social convention here: â€Å"’Tis proper I obey him, but not now.† This violation costs her dearly. Emilia’s stunning interrogation and conviction of her own husband as the evil mastermind behind the murder results in Iago’s killing her. She becomes a martyr for the cause of truth and justice. Quite suddenly she is transformed into a heroine of the play!    WORKS CITED    Bayley, John. Shakespeare and Tragedy. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1981.    Bradley, A. C.. Shakespearean Tragedy. New York: Penguin, 1991.    Shakespeare, William. Othello. In The Electric Shakespeare. Princeton University. 1996. http://www.eiu.edu/~multilit/studyabroad/othello/othello_all.html No line nos.      

Four Women in American Music History

American music history has grown an incredible amount in the last hundred years. Prior to that time, there were very few styles of music that originated in America. However, with the advent of jazz and related styles, American music culture was born. Blues is one of the early styles of music that is truly American, and there are many American artists who sang or performed in that style. In fact, blues is still popular today, although it has changed over time. Blues is an important and long-term American musical style, which has had many effects on musical culture from the early 1900s through today.Bessie Smith was an early blues singer. She was popular in the 1920s and 30s, and was known as much for her hard-drinking, rough life as much as her music. She sang about what she knew. Bessie was an African American woman who indulged in sex and alcohol, and had a strong temper. She never gave up without a fight, either in her music or her life. Getting into a fight with Bessie wasnâ€℠¢t something a person wanted to do, either, because she was over six feet tall and weighed about two hundred pounds. Bessie had a history of getting into fist fights with people, male or female.She also took off after her ex-husband with a gun when she found him cheating on her, after beating up his lover. However, Bessie herself was known for sleeping with a number of both men and women (Whitney). Musically, Bessie was not really trained. She could not read music, and relied on other musicians to write her songs down for her. She did write her own lyrics, though. She was a formidable presence on stage, able to sing loudly and strongly because of her size, and her tendency to sing in the range that was easiest for her.In writing her music, Bessie tended to modify existing melodies, and sometimes create new ones, so that they lay well in her â€Å"good† range (Whitney). Here is an example of Bessie’s lyrics, which show her feelings about life plainly: â€Å"I ain't no high yella, I'm a deep killer brown. /I ain't gonna marry, ain't gonna settle down. /I'm gonna drink good moonshine and rub these browns down. /See that long lonesome road, Lawd you know it's gonna end,/and I'm a good woman and I can get plenty men† (Whitney). Bessie was also known as something of a racist.While her fans were both black and white, she was rude to both whites and lighter-skinned blacks. Even at the height of her career, when she had enough money to live as she chose (even as a white person might, in the early 30s), she chose to stay on the streets and to live the life that was familiar to her. Her lyrics here show her thinking on this matter: â€Å"Mister rich man, rich man, open up your heart and mind,/Mister rich man, rich man, open up your heart and mind;/Give the poor man a chance, help stop these hard, hard times./While you're livin' in your mansion you don't know what hard times means, /While you're livin' in your mansion you don't know what hard times m eans; /Poor working man's wife is starving your wife is livin' like a queen† (Whitney). Ethel Waters is a blues singer who began performing later in Bessie’s career. While Bessie was primarily performing and well known during the 1920s, Ethel became better known in the 1930s (her career did officially begin in 1921, though). Ethel was specifically a different kind of blues singer than Bessie, and in fact was different from her in many ways.Ethel is also of African American decent, but she grew up in the North and was heavily influenced by white performers. When she began performing professionally, Ethel joined a group of blacks who called themselves â€Å"Cakewalk singers,† which was distinctly different from the more traditional blues singers, like Bessie (PBS). Ethel’s acceptance of whites can be traced to what was a very rough beginning for her. She was born when her mother was only 12. Her mother had been raped by a white man, John Waters. Ethel, then, is half-white, and carries her father’s surname.She was raised by her maternal grandmother in poverty, and began singing at age 5. Her beginnings are much more similar to Bessie’s, but what she did with herself later differs widely (Myers). Ethel worked with a number of famous jazz performers, including Duke Ellington. In addition to her singing career, Ethel was also an actress, an area of her life that eventually came to the forefront. Her singing style was not nearly as strong as Bessie’s, but she performed very theatrically and managed to capture the audience’s interest in all of her music.This came in handy, as she continued performing through the 1960s and 70s, working at that time with Billy Graham (PBS). Ultimately, Bessie’s influence on Ethel was very indirect. Both were jazz singers in a time when African Americans were first on the rise in popularity on the stage. Bessie’s grit may have given Ethel opportunities she might not hav e otherwise had. In many other ways, though, the two were very different; attitude, style, and more. Dinah Washington is another important singer in this chain of history.Her birth name was Ruth Jones, and she was born in 1924. She is significantly younger than both Ethel and Bessie, whose careers were near their peaks when she was born. Music was in Dinah’s family from the beginning. Her mother was a church pianist, and taught her to play at a young age. She was accompanying and touring by the time she was 16, and had already won prizes. However, although her initial roots were in the church, Dinah longed to work in secular music, namely jazz (Dahl).At age 19, Dinah got her big break, singing with Lionel Hampton’s Big Band, then one of the most popular music styles. By 1945, she was recording her own solo work for the Apollo label and Mercury records, and by 1948, she was on her way to major stardom. 1959 was her biggest year, when she sang â€Å"What a Dif’re nce a Day Makes† (Dahl). In her personal life, Dinah was similar to Bessie. She had many husbands, and she drank a lot. In fact, alcohol and drugs eventually killed her at the end of 1963 (Dahl). In addition, she also loved the finer things, including fur, clothes, and cars.Her personality was known as â€Å"feisty,† and she could be snapping one minute and generous the next (Cohodas). At first glance, Christina Aguilera doesn’t look much like the other stars. For one, she isn’t black. For another, she was born after all of the other singers had died. However, it is her roots and influences that she is similar to them. Like Dinah, she is biracial, with a mom who is Irish and a father who is Ecuadorian. Her father was in the military, which meant that Christina traveled a lot as a child (Biggest Stars).Also like the other singers, Christina was interested in singing and performing from the time she was a young girl. Her family was also musical, with her mot her performing on violin and piano professionally. Christina had a brief, two-year stint on The Mickey Mouse Club when she was a child, working with other singers who later became famous, like Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake (Biggest Stars). Christina’s initial music was definitely pop, with her first number one single titled â€Å"Genie in a Bottle. † The single topped both the U. S. and UK charts in 1999.For awhile longer, Christina continued in the pop genre, recording for the movie Mulan, and singing a new version of â€Å"Lady Marmalade† with several other female pop stars (Biggest Stars). Christina’s work eventually began to seem less significant to her, and she decided to record her 2002 album â€Å"Stripped. † The album was the first that really showed her background and influences. Her comments about this album: â€Å"Coming off of the height of being a part of such a big pop-craze phenomenon, that imagery of that cookie-cutter sweet heart, without it being me, I just had to take it all down and get it away from me.And that is why I actually named the album Stripped, because it is about being emotionally stripped down and pretty bare to open my soul and heart. † This album used many different influences, including soul, R&B, rock, hip-hop and Latin (Biggest Stars). Aguilera’s influences were similar to the earlier stars mentioned. She looked to soul and R&B, both of which are styles typically recorded by African Americans. The blues aspect of R&B, in particular, is interesting to note. Aguilera was following in the footsteps of the other female jazz singers with this style.Also, similar to Dinah Washington, Aguilera sang pop (Dinah did pop in addition to her jazz roots). In general, all four of these women have things in common, and things that are different. Each grew up under similar circumstances, often with mostly maternal influences. Most had some kind of musical background at home. Most grew u p poor, and all had an early talent for music and singing. Most also had a taste for sex, drugs, and some rougher things in life, and had a hard time at one point or another. However, each was unique.Bessie was certainly the biggest and most blunt of the group, while Christina stood of the opposite end as the â€Å"sweetheart† of pop for awhile. Christina was also different in that she was not of African American decent in any way, although Ethel was also half-white. Some of the singers, namely Dinah, had their start in gospel music, while others went straight for jazz or pop. Overall, it is interesting how strikingly similar the artists are, even though there are also very big differences in their lives and styles.Their stories and backgrounds are surprisingly similar in some respects, but very different in others. These four women are just some of the amazing performers from the rich tapestry that is American music history. Sources Burns, Ken. â€Å"Ethel Waters. † J azz. Accessed on December 4, 2007. Website: http://www. pbs. org/jazz/biography/artist_id_waters_ethel. htm. â€Å"Christina Aguilera Biography. † Biggest Stars. Accessed December 4, 2007. Website: http://www. biggeststars. com/c/christina-aguilera-biography. html. Cohodas, Nadine (2004).Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington. Accessed December 4, 2007. Website: http://www. dinahthequeen. com/. Dahl, Bill. â€Å"Dinah Washington. † Accessed December 4, 2007. Website: http://www. vervemusicgroup. com/dinahwashington. Myers, Aaron. â€Å"Ethel Waters. † Accessed December 4, 2007. Website: http://www. wntb. com/blackachievers/ethlwaters/. Whitney, Ross (1995). â€Å"Reflections Of 1920's And 30's Street Life In The Music Of Bessie Smith. † Accessed December 4, 2007. Website: http://bluesnet. hub. org/readings/bessie. html.

Earth’s hydrologic cycle Essay

The chemical quality of precipitation in the earth’s hydrologic cycle is significantly altered upon contact with the forest canopy. These chemical changes are traceable to natural biological processes and from polluted airsheds which affects precipitation chemistry. What happens to the water when it reaches solid earth shall be viewed by the chemical changes that occur on the different stages of the hydrologic cycle. Earth’s hydrologic cycle Hydrologic cycle is the process where water moves from and to the earth through the atmosphere over time and space scales powered mainly by the solar energy and gravity. Solar energy drives the evaporation process effectively transforming water from liquid to gas which results to cloud formation through saturation (Davie & Davie 2002). The degree of equilibrium then is the maximum point of saturation in any mixed atmosphere of vapor and air. When the air cools below the dew point, condensation of water vapor begins. The air at higher altitude is less dense producing lesser heat and lesser air pressure giving out cooler air. Condensation is the process through which water vapor changes to its liquid state again in the form of dew, smoke or fog. Precipitation occurs when clouds can no longer hold the heavy water vapor and it falls back to the earth in the form rain or snow and other forms. The distribution of precipitation on earth depends on the patterns of rising and falling air currents. Precipitation fills oceans, river, vegetation, land and other surfaces. Part of the water reaching the ground surface is highly dependent on turbulent transport from the atmosphere to the canopy on its composition, structure and properties. Rainwater picks up dust particles, plant seeds, bacteria, dissolved gases and ionizing radiation as it falls. It also accumulates with chemical substances like sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide and ammonia upon hitting the ground. Aerosols, pesticides and fertilizers, sewage and industrial wastes which were introduced into the ground also mix with the infiltrating ground water. If precipitation continues, complete saturation of the soil zone occurs. This allows the water to continue to descend until it merges into a zone of dense rock. Density is directly proportional on its ability to allow penetration of water. Around these rocks are unsaturated and permeable materials called gravel, shale or sand. The boundary between the unsaturated and the water bearing rocks is defined as the water table. Water table could be hundreds of meters below the water surface where sometimes water rises without pumping in the form of springs. Drilling an artesian well will cause the water to gush to the surface until the pressure is equalized. Pumping may be necessary to lift water to the surface. Ground water is largest source of fresh water but is very difficult to track. Ground water well is good if the aquifer water level that supplies it stays the same. Cone of depression occurs when ground water is pumped from an aquifer through a well lowering its water level (Strobel n. d. ). A gradient then occurs producing a flow from the surrounding aquifer into the well decreasing water levels around the well. This results in a conical shaped depression that seems to radiate away from the well continuously expanding in a radial fashion until a point of equilibrium occurs. This plays an important role when planning well placements and deciding pumping rates including distances between wells. References Davie, T. & Davie, T. (2002). Fundamentals of hydrology. New York, NY: Routledge. Strobel, M. (n. d. ). Let’s talk water – cone of depression. Retrieved April 28, 2008 Website: http://nevada. usgs. gov/barcass/articles/Ely27. pdf