Effects of Social Networking Sites Essay Example for Free

Effects of Social Networking Sites Essay The implementation of social networking sites has changed how the average person communicates with others. Studies show that the average person spends at least nine hours a week surfing and posting on social network sites (http://socialnetworking.procon.org/). In fact, using social networking sites has not only improved our communication skills, but has had a negative impact as well. One of the many pros and cons to communicating on a networking site is the ability to â€Å"stay connected.† When a student graduates, a loved one moves, or a career changes, everyone wants to keep up with people they have grown to care for. Being on a social networking site, you can â€Å"friend request† people you know to keep up with their day to day actions. This ensures we don’t miss out on parts of someone’s life where we want to be included. Increasing the communication you have with someone, even online, strengthens your relationship. Unfortunately, being able to â€Å"stay connected† has kept thousands connected in a less than personal way. Networking sites entice people to stay online and spend less face-to-face time with others. So, you may be connecting to friends and family, but you are being distracted by the time wasting activities and applications the site supplies. Your mother doesn’t really care if you reached level ten in the Adventures of Indiana Jones on Facebook. She wants to know how you are doing in your classes at school. Read more:  Essays on Social Networking Another way networking sites are affecting society is evident in the ability to find new people. Making new friends can be a wonderful thing. Consider the following scenario, you are interested in a certain musician and find their â€Å"page† on your networking site. On that same page are many others that have that common interest. Befriending these new people provides a new outlet for expression. A family member or friend may not like the same artist, but finding this new friend gives the ability to have someone to talk to about the subject. On the other hand, not all people surfing these sites that are looking for new friends are doing it for the right reasons. Artists and topics that attract a younger population give ample opportunity for predators to have access to the viewers. There is no way to know that the 15 year old girl you’ve become â€Å"besties† with is really a young girl, or if it’s really a pedophile looking for new prey. â€Å"In Feb. 2009, MySpace identified 90,000 registered sex offenders with profiles on the site, while Facebook declined to reveal how many were present on its site† (http://socialnetworking.procon.org/). Another example of how social networks affect society both positively and negatively is the ability to obtain information. Many networking sites created today are made for specific genres of people. Sites like LinkedIn.com and CafeMom.com have been created to help people with life issues such as finding new jobs or getting tips on breastfed babies. If a person is shy and has trouble meeting that â€Å"special someone,† they can go to a networking site such as MeetUp.com. Sadly, not everything that is posted on these sites can be verified. Most sites, like the match-making sites, have no way to verify that the person posting on their site is them. An older, obese person can post a picture of a younger, thinner person to try and get a match. The site itself does not know that the picture posted is actually the person posting it. So, when the â€Å"date† shows up expecting person A, they are angry or upset that they meet person B, the real person, and bullying, fighting, or worse occurs. Too much false information is passed along the internet, and a large percent of it is done via networking sites. Overall, social networking sites can’t wholly be praised or put down for being â€Å"bad.† Being able to stay connected, make new friends, and get information via these sites has its pros and cons. No matter what changes are made, there will always be those that say the sites are good for our society, and those that say the dangers outweigh the benefits. References: Are social networking sites good for our society? (2012). Retrieved from http://socialnetworking.procon.org/

Physics of Music Essay example -- physics music sound

"He who understands nothing but chemistry does not truly understand chemistry either" Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) Music is not purely a form of art. There is a great deal of science that goes behind the production of beautiful musical sounds. In order to understand how music is possible, one must have an understanding of physics. Physics allows us to create musical instruments with different tone qualities and the ability to be played in a certain way to produce a specific pitch or note. Music is sound, and sound is vibrations or waves that are at the right frequency to be perceived by the human ear. Audible vibrations are waves with a frequency between 16 and 20,000 vibrations per second. So what causes sound waves? Sound waves are caused by a disturbance in an elastic medium. These can include the strings on a violin, the reed on a clarinet, and even the human vocal cords. Click on the links below to discover how science makes it possible to create a variety of musical sounds. Stringed instruments produce sound when an action such as plucking or bowing causes them to vibrate. When a string is fixed at both ends, two transverse waves will move from the left and right side of the disturbance. When the waves hit the fixed ends of the string, they bounce back and continue to vibrate until they are eventually stopped by friction and "leaks" through the fixed points. It can be proved with mathematics that standing waves are the only stable vibrations that are possible for a string with two fixed ends. Because these waves are standing waves, the only possible wavelengths are found by 2L/n, where L is the length of the string and n is the harmonic number, which is can be any integer describing the mode of the stret... ...of valves that attach to additional tubing. When the valves are pressed additional lengths of tubing are inserted into the airway of the horn to lower the pitch. Bibliography Askill, John. Physics of Musical Sounds. Litton Educational Publishing, Inc. 1979. Fletcher, Neville H. and Rossing, Thomas D. The Physics of Musical Instruments. Springer-Verlag New York Inc. 1991. Harder, Paul O. and Steinke, Greg A. Basic Materials in Music Theory. Prentice Hall. 2000. Levarie, Siegmund and Levy, Ernst. Tone: A Study in Musical Acoustics. Kent State University Press. 1968. Roederer, Juan G. The Physics and Psychophysics of Music: An Introduction. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. 1995. Serway, Raymond A. and Beichner, Robert J. Physics for Scientists and Engineers. Thomson Learning, Inc. 2000.

A Critical Analysis of Sir Patrick Spens, The Ballad Essay

‘Sir Patrick Spens’ is, for the most part, an archetypal early ballad being composed in quatrains, with the typical alternating four-stress and three-stress lines and the second and fourth line of each stanza rhyming. The poem is set in medias res, telling certainly of a tragedy, possibly based on two voyages in the thirteenth-century on which Scottish noblemen transported princesses to royal marriages, with many members of Alexander III’s daughter Margaret’s escort drowning on the journey home. The theme of tragedy and having a plot based on local history are both elements often seen in the ballad form. However, the poem does also defy characteristics of the traditional ballad; it includes a third person narrative voice that is not necessarily impartial, which contradicts the typically impersonal, distanced narration commonly found in this genre of poetry. There is an example of a satirical view of the higher classes, mocking the king’s decision to not withhold the voyage and also mocking the fact that the nobles boarded the ship, for if they had not, then the tragedy would have been avoided. The dark humour found in the personification of their hats that ‘swam aboon’(line 32) exemplifies a view not particularly sympathetic with the drowning victims, which coupled with the idea that ‘the play were played’(line 31) suggests the inevitability that this would be the situation, clearly signifying a mockery of the decisions made by the higher classes. Early ballads often contain strong regional dialect as they were originally orally transmitted. This particular dialect gives the reader a strong idea of the origins of the ballad and lends a sense of authenticity to the text, reaffirming the typicality of this particular ballad, being a further reference to it’s foundations in local history. The dialect can also be used as a tool to highlight sections of the ballad, for example, when it is used to describe the King drinking blood-red wine or ‘blude-reid wine’ (line 2). This strong image is prefigurative of the tragic ending of the poem and echoes the previously displayed idea that the narrator feels the king is responsible for this misfortune. The narrator’s view reflects the idea of ‘power without responsibility’ which makes this ballad somewhat  ahead of its time. It was rare that royalty were questioned when the ballad form flourished in Scotland from the fifteenth century onward. This notion that the poem is quite a ahead of it’s time implies that at least this ballad negates the view of Ben Johnson’s dictum ‘a poet should detest a ballad maker’[1] as clearly here the early ballad demonstrates a brilliant use in it’s ability to convey a person’s personal political view in a rather active way, passing on their message by word of mouth and challenging the accepted.

The Study of Linguistics Essay - 1450 Words

The Study of Linguistics Language changes with history and time. Our perception of words changes. Everything changes, from cooking with a fire to cooking with a microwave. Some examples of the ways language changes are through accents, books, slang, influential people, and historical events. Accents show development of culture over time, maybe through a historical event, such as a new country being found. The people living there might adopt the culture of the founders. Language also changes, from using different sounds in words, which are called phonemes or segments that differentiate words (Fromkin and Brace 303). The English language has about 43 different phonemes, such as OH, EE, etc, which make up our language.†¦show more content†¦Maybe their culture says it is mandatory to have everything in one long continuos sentence, while others more advanced may follow the rules to the very letter. How can language have meaning? Through time it may lose and gain new meaning, for example through things such as historical occurrences. Imagine during the war, a whole new kind of lingo spreading like wild fire through fighting countries. The study of how language contains meaning is called semantics (Friend 145), and through this we can see what has occurred and what will occur, kind of like a time machine right before our eyes which we have to constantly study to use correctly. There are many different influential people who have a major effect on our lives. Family, friends, and even those in our political system or government may affect our lives in both positive and negative ways. Influential people also play a part in our evolution of language. Influential people can coin words and do many other things that will affect our language. They may use one word that has become a habit to them, but do they know they might make it a habit for a million people? Ten million? The whole world? This example is shown in speeches of important people, books of all kinds, and especially through television and movies. In my life I know that my friends and I make up sayings all the time that are used by many people. It isShow MoreRelatedDifference Between Linguistic And Linguistic Studies1097 Words   |  5 Pagesgoing to present a comparison between two linguistic studies. Constructing another Language-Usage Based Linguistics in Second Language Acquisition by Eskilds en and Sources of Linguistic Knowledge in the second language acquisition of English articles by Ionin, Zubizarreta, and Maldonado are going to be contrasted regarding their theoretical frameworks, research questions and research designs together with the conclusions reached. 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