Botanical gardens Essay Example for Free

Botanical gardens Essay Last summer, my two friends rekindled an idea we had for a long time of going for a short excursion to a nearby lake where we would camp for three days. First we informed our parents of our intentions which they supported without any objection. We intended to use this opportunity to help in bonding our relationship even more. After this approval, we did a good budget of all the things that we required for the three days of our camping. After drawing the budget, we sourced for the required money most of which came from our pocket savings with a little help from our parents. We chose to set our camping dates within a weekend as these are the days when most of us had free time. After an informative consultation, we also found out that the camp is only open during the weekends so as to give the camping ground vegetation enough time to regenerate. When the day came, we all set off during the morning so that we could get to our destination in time. This also gave us an opportunity to select the best site to set our camps before other people could take up the available sites. After setting our tents, we embarked on a trip along the shores of the lake and the adjacent flower and botanical gardens. We spent the second day canoeing and swimming as well as participating in some of conservational activities that are a mandatory practice for every camper. By the dawn of the third day, we could not believe that the day had come for us to pack our belongings and head back home. The camping experience proved to be a worthy exercise by providing a refreshing moment in our life.

Presidential Rhetoric and Campaign Essays -- essays research papers

Presidential Rhetoric and Campaign Osama bin Laden   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Osama bin Laden is a political icon to the people of Afghanistan. He has created a modern day crusade against western civilization that people support because of his rhetorical ability to create, not only through speech, but also through his actions, an insightful philosophy that has moved thousands of people into action against the United States. He was able to achieve this because he chose a religious path that people supported; he took influential persons in his life and his familial background into his radical stance on Islamic government and created an historical movement that has affected thousands of people.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Osama bin Laden was born into a wealthy Saudi family that owned a very successful construction company, the Saudi bin Laden Group. This company was started by bin Laden’s father, Muhammed. With this company, Muhammed bin Laden was able to build three of the most religious mosques located in Medina, Mecca, and Jerusalem. Osama bin Laden, in his later years would take this as one of the greatest honors bestowed upon his family. (â€Å"Through Our Enemies’ Eyes† pg. 82) His father, besides building the religious mosques, left his fifty-two children, including Osama, with a very strong devotion to Islamic religion.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Because of this strict background with Islamic religion Osama bin Laden attended schools located in Medina and in Mecca. Both places provided Osama with alliances that supported him in his beliefs, in the past and in the present with his education at both secondary and university levels. Throughout his education, he came across three of the most influential people in his life, Taqi al-Din Ibn Tammiyah, Mohammed Qutb (a.k.a. Sayyid Qutb Ibrahim Husayn Shadhill) and Shaykh Abdullah Azzam.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Mohammed Qutb is referred to as the â€Å"brains behind Osama.† (http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/~jdouglas/F02finalart9.pdf). During the late 1940’s Qutb spent a few years as an educator. During his time there, he experienced things that completely turned him off to the ways of the west. He described the U.S. as â€Å"materialistic and occupied with topics of money, cars, and movie stars.† He also described Americans as, â€Å"crass people who were generally disinterested in life’s spiritual and aesthetic d... ...ma bin Laden is able to capture and maintain the interest of thousands of Al-Qaeda members. He uses his experiences, his current involvement with the Islamic world, and his hatred for western societies in order to convey an easily readable message to his listeners. They find it easy to support him because of the basis for the Al-Qaeda code, which, in general, is to create an Islamic based society that is free of outside enforcements. Many members of the Al-Qaeda already believe and stand for this idea. Thus, Osama bin Laden has created a message that provokes emotional response from his followers and has been able to maintain that emotion throughout all of the trials and tribulations that came along with the terrorist attacks. Bibliographies Anonymous. Through our enemies' eyes : Osama bin Laden, radical Islam, and   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  the future of America. 2002. http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/~jdouglas/F02finalart9.pdf http://www.ummah.org.uk/ikhwan/ http://ddc.aub.edu.lb/projects/pspa/al-ahbash.html http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=fundamentalism http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/manualpart1_1.pdf http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2001/d20011213ubl.pdf

Assess the usefulness of official statistics Essay

Official statistics are a source of secondary data. The government produces them. There are both hard and soft statistics. Hard statistics include birth, death and marriage rates. These are registered when they occur by law, so these statistics are entirely objective. Another type of official statistic is called soft statistics, e. g. crime statistics & unemployment figures. These might not seem as objective as they first seem. They are open to manipulation for political ends, and can be considered to have a political use. For example, the methods used to measure unemployment have been changed over 20 times, because not everyone without a job counts as unemployed. Official statistics are mainly used for the study of demography, inflation, crime and deviance, unemployment, poverty and suicide. For an example Emile Durkheim, regarded as the founding father of sociology, used official suicide statistics for his suicide study. He used them to find correlations and casual relations and identified four different types of suicide, egoistic suicide, anomic suicide, altruistic suicide and fatalistic suicide. Durkheim used positivist’s methods to conduct his study. Positivists believe that quantitative data is the most reliable method to gather information as the data is compiled in a standardised way. Douglas, an Interpretivist, would disagree with Durkheim’s positivist methods. He says that official statistics are not valid. To determine a death it is up to the ‘interpretations and decisions’ of the coroner and that statistics are nothing more than a ‘social construct’. Atkinson, also and Interpretivists says that it is impossible for coroners to objectively classify suicides because their decision is based on a ‘commonsense theory of suicide’ which is based on whether there is a suicide note, the method of death, the location and the deceased’s life history etc. When adapting quantitative methodological procedures to derive specific data, official statistics is often used as a source of sociological evidence to simply enhance or complement practical research methods. However when looking at what is gained from the use of official statistics, it is important to recognize the limitations, which serve as a major downside to developing and attaining an unquestionable and flawless research. In addition, not all documents are easily available e. g. the Black Report (1980) which identified inequalities in healthcare, was released in very select circumstances. Not all secondary data give us a valid, true and detailed picture of what is being measured, not just official statistics. Diaries/e-mails, it could be possible that the author lied or exaggerated about their activities Also, a document may not be reliable. Public documents are likely to be higher in terms of reliability than private documents like letters and personal documents such as diaries and e-mails data may be fake or unrepresentative. In conclusion, official statistics can be very useful in sociological research. Nearly all secondary data can’t be trusted and official statistics might be the only appropriate form of research for your topic.

The Slavery Of The United States - 1121 Words

Before the 19th C, literature in the United States (US) was largely characterized on the basis of its diverse nature. Using different forms of documentations such as travel accounts and journals, early European explorers noted down their different experiences in the New World. Owing to the fact that these new Explorers were very religious, most of their writings were defined by their religious convictions especially the Puritan faith. In addition to these writings being shaped by religion, most of the narratives revolved around the common phenomenon of slavery. It was the time when emancipation was being advocated by many people especially in the North States which was anti-slavery. Most of the narratives in those times revolved around†¦show more content†¦Before the coming of the Europeans, the natives held the best parts of the land and when these settlers came, they took the fertile lands and most economical viable lands for themselves. Thus, the economy of the US continu ed to grow while the state of the native Indians continued to worsen as they lost their power and resources. It could not have been possible for the US to have developed in those exponential terms without acquiring land from the natives at almost no cost. When the settlers set their feet in the New World, they had one agenda which was to achieve economic growth of the new land at all costs. It was then achieved at the expense of the Native Indians who had to be stripped of their land and resources. In most of the narratives, there is a lot of Puritan religious agenda that is directly based on the Bible as their religious authority. They base their arguments on the fact that God promises to freely provide for his children through His grace. This kind of belief is not found within the Native Indians’ religious belief system and thus they were viewed as Godless. In a way, the Western Christian values largely despised on the religious system of the Indians which heightened the te nsions between the two communities. This textual exchange between factual and spiritual information within the