Business Continuity Management & Its Critical Services and Functions Essay

Business Continuity Management and Its Critical Services and Functions - Essay Example As the paper features this century, organizations are at noteworthy dangers, which if not very much oversaw may end a business. Consequently, there should be least authoritative prerequisites for any business coherence plan. The reason for existing is to upgrade business security through successful catastrophe the board plans. Expanding prerequisites guarantees business endurance after a disaster. In any case, where the law requires a business to just exchange with different organizations in consistence with the guidelines, it would back off if not decimate a business in totality. The base necessities could likewise prompt conclusion of firms not in congruity with the law. What's more, supervisors could confront desperate outcomes after a calamity that would bring about disturbance of the elements. The guidelines would be going about as an order to such administrations. While thinking of business coherence plans, calamity the board and recuperation of an organization after emergencies drive the procedure. In such manner, different administration instruments face authorization. The absolute most significant exercises of the endeavor to focus on incorporate business security, the board of archives, review, data framework, administration level understandings, among others. Every one of these parts are vital in guaranteeing the endurance of a business after a disaster.â

How GMOs Created Free Essays

How GMOs made? A hereditarily changed life form might be partner creature, plant, or miniaturized scale life form (for example microscopic organisms) whose sequencetic cosmetics is adjusted through quality graft, hereditary alteration, or transgenic innovation. We will compose a custom paper test on How GMOs Created? or on the other hand any comparable theme just for you Request Now This control of qualities and DNA can possibly make combos of creature, bacterial, plant, and infective operator qualities that either don’t or wouldn’t normally show in nature through old crossbreeding methodologies. It’s the insecure characteristics made by these logical controls, and a shortage of long investigation and examination on the effect such controls will deliver, that has a few researchers and individuals from the general open involved.How hereditarily changed nourishments created?When hereditarily altering plants that square measure utilized for food, researchers remove explicit qualities from the DNA of another creature, similar to relate creature, bacterium, plant, or infection thus include those qualities into the DNA of the plant they require to change. This strategy is normally referenced as grouping join. By including totally various qualities, researchers trust the plant can acquire the attributes contained inside the joined segment of DNA.ZUCCHINIWhat Is Zucchini? Otherwise called courgette, zucchini has its starting point in America and is reachable in yellow, lightweight unpracticed, and unpracticed shading. the type of this small summer squash looks like that of a furrowed cucumber and choices different seeds. A few cultivators conjointly produce zucchini in adjusted or bottle shapes. Today, the most significant makers of this squash encapsulate Japan, China, Romania, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and Argentina. it’s grown-up year-around and might be eaten crude, cut or in lyonnaise kind. It might be cut in an exceedingly chilly dish and is furthermore lyonnaise in hot plates of mixed greens. Despite the fact that zucchini could be an organic product, it’s once in a while lyonnaise as a vegetablebecause it’s best once eaten in lyonnaise dishes. it’s picked once it’s beneath 8in/20cm long and furthermore the seeds square measure delicate and youthful. a completely evolved zucchini is at times 3 feet in length and contains an over the top measure of fiber and isn’t brilliant to eat. Youthful zucchini joins a sensitive style, delicate covering, and rich white substance. it’s possible in its best kind all through might and July. the greater part the components of this squash square measure eatable, along with the tissue, seeds, and even the skin.Varieties of zucchini: Some far reaching assortments are: Brilliant zucchini alternatives brght brilliant yellow skin that holds its shading even once planning. Round sorts square measure thick, overwhelming, and about seeded with a wash surface. Tatume, that is regular in Mexico, has comparable choices of circular determination anyway has the huge oval structure. Costata Romanesco conjointly called Cocozelle could be a long, thin sort with a little lump at modest completion. It alternatives pale, raised ribs with dappled unpracticed skin. when solid and youthful, this squash is delicious and sweet. Center Eastern sorts square measure fat, lightweight unpracticed, tightening closes with a thick greenish stem. they need wash, gleaming skin and firm, fresh and flavourous substance. Yellow Crooknecks have thick unsmooth skin with an especially falcate neck. they’re new in surface with sweet, sensitive flavor. Wellbeing Edges Of Zucchini: Health edges of zucchini exemplify the following;Weight Loss: You may be stunned to get a handle on that mind-boggling zucchini can help you dissolve off essentially. it’s low in calories, anyway it gives you the impression of being full. In this manner, it’s a decent gratitude to fulfill your appetency while not getting calories or starting an accident diet set up. except for the low-carbohydrate level, it’s high water content and is made in fiber. Henceforth, when you eat it, your midsection isn’t void, in this way making zucchini plans phenomenal if you’re on a diet.Maintains Best Health: Already being an amazing gracefully of metal and ascorbic corrosive, zucchini is also the best flexibly of dietary fiber that may save your body inside the best structure for the day's end. It conjointly contains axerophthol, magnesium, folate, potassium, copper, and phosphorus. This mid year squash conjointly fuses a high substance of omega-3 unsaturated fat unsaturated fats, zinc, niacin, and macromolecule. Besides, nutrient B1, nutrient B6, nutrient B2, and nuclear number 20 in zucchini guarantee best wellbeing. it’s in all likelihood the best squash having partner exhibit of supplements, along with sugar, starches, solvent and insoluble fiber, sodium, minerals, amino acids, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. The B-complex nutrient element of this squash is very recommended for pregnant young ladies additionally.Promotes Men’s Health: Many analysts have taken concentrates from this squash to direct sure examinations related over that this natural product has sure properties that adequately treat an evil in men known as amiable prostatic hyperplasia or Benign endocrine Hypertrophy. Considerate prostatic hyperplasia could be a condition any place the ductless organ gets amplified in partner odd structure and size, that at that point will cause bother with each sexual and urinary work. a legitimate treatment of this is regularly observed along with various nourishments that contain phytonutrients; zucchini is professed to be exceptionally useful in diminishing benevolent prostatic hyperplasia symptoms.Prevents Diseases: Your general wellbeing can for certain improve in the event that you devour zucchini as often as possible. It prevents a wide range of infections in an exceedingly broad sense. Studies have just pronounced that fiber-rich nourishments encourage lighten malignant growth conditions by clothing endlessly disease causing poisons from cells inside the colon. The ascorbic corrosive, folate, and carotenoid in zucchini encourage to defend these cells from the hurtful synthetic concoctions that may bring about carcinoma. carotenoid and ascorbic corrosive even have medication properties, consequently normally cementing diseases like joint inflammation, asthma, and joint pain, any place expanding is tremendously excruciating. The copper extent in it conjointly helps in diminishing the indications of arthritis.Protects vascular framework: It is made in natural procedure worth, especially all through the late spring, when it conveys unnumbered advantages to the body. The food positioning frameworks in zucchini-rich nations have proclaimed that this squash has broad degrees of metal and ascorbic corrosive that encourage to remain the middle strong. During the examination, the greater part of those supplements were discovered successful inside the bar of diabetic cardiovascular ailment and induration of the courses. The metallic component content strikingly diminishes the risk of coronary failures and strokes. along with K, metallic component conjointly helps in decreasing high power per unit territory. The ascorbic corrosive and carotenoid found in summer squash encourage in forestalling the oxidization of cholesterin. change cholesterin constructs up to date vas dividers, anyway these supplements cut back the occasion of induration of the corridors. The sustenance B-complex nutrient is required by the body to dispose of partner hazardous metabolic result known as homocysteine, which may prompt assault and stroke if the degree rise excessively high. Its fiber content brings down high cholesterin levels furthermore, along these lines serving to downsize the peril of induration of the veins and heart maladies on account of polygenic disease.Immunity: Our body USually|is often} effectively connected inside the barrier against a few microorganisms that may hurt us. On occasion, this procedure gets feeble, and would perhaps need fortifications. taking care of nourishments made in cell reinforcements like ascorbic corrosive will fortify our framework, and acquire it up and managing like ne’er previously. Zucchini is one food that may give you with essential portions of this nourishment.Vitamin C acts to flavor up invulnerability by animating the gathering of white platelets. These cells square measure worried in defensive our framework against obtrusive unsafe microorganisms like infections and microorganism. ascorbic corrosive conjointly helps battle the exercises of free radicals, whose collaboration with various body cells may prompt neoplasm growth.Zucchini’s Benefits: Zucchini has a place with the Cucurbita pepo species that was the subject of partner India-based examination. since it appears, this types of summer squash ensures against the occasion of injury of the midsection and furthermore the small digestive tract, that will be that the area of the little viscus that associates it to the mid-region. inside the examination, same ulcers were evoked in guinea pigs by giving them Empirin. when fourteen days of managing the concentrate of ready Cucurbita pepo, film thickening of the mid-region and duodemun was resolved, affirming the gastroduodenum-defensive and generally speaking enemy of ulcerogenic instrument of Cucurbita pepo. Squash has conjointly been found to contain quantifiable measures of cellulose, a kind of sugar that shows potential for dietary clinical guide for polygenic malady. The dicot family types of squash, of that zucchini has a place with, has been concentrated in Slovak Republic, and it’s been discovered that the cellulose during this types of squash has therapeutic medication impacts. inside the investigation, hacking was inspired in guinea pigs by managing corrosive. A short time later, cellulose polysaccharides got orally to the subjects and their hacking reflex remittent. The outcomes were then contrasted with the restorative medication impacts of torment pill, a kind of opiate, and cellulose polysaccharides had similar, and sometimes significantly higher hack stifling action than torment pill. Phytonutrients square measure broad in zucchini also and proceeding with investigation has delivered revelation of grouped phytochemicals blessing in Cucurbita pepo. These mixes have demonstrated multi-focused on bar of disease

Google

Google With several of the core General Institute Requirements out of the way, sophomore year was really the dawn of my computer science life at MIT. Impostor syndrome started to take a backseat, and taking CS classes I enjoyed and did reasonably well in was a confidence booster. Soon enough though, I had to start thinking about internships, and I couldn’t help but feel the creeping approach of “not-enoughness. As career fair drew closer, resume workshops and interview tips began to dominate my inbox. Companies were hosting multitudes of events on campus, drawing us in with tech talks and lotteries for electronic swag, which we could usually enter by submitting a resume. I didn’t have a resume, and when I solicited some sample resumes from my friends, a clear difference emerged. On theirs: Github repositories populated with a multitude of extracurricular code, polished websites, sophisticated projects. On mine: a spatter of somewhat relevant classes and side projects I felt were too simple to be worth including. After speaking with some friends at Alpha Delta Phi, I consulted with staff at MIT’s Career Development office. Around the period of the fall Career Fair Week, the office let students book quick appointments for resume reviews, interview tips, offer negotiation tactics, and so on. I met with a nice lady who encouraged me to include my Olympiad and writing experiences from before MIT, as well as compensate for my relatively low CS experience by emphasizing one of the bigger projects I’d implemented in an MIT class. All of a sudden, I had something of a resume, but it still felt inadequate. Career Fair came and went in a blink. I stopped by for less than an hour and quickly left, after an enormous buildup of anxiety took over. I spent the days and weeks that followed caught in the usual MIT routine, and put an internship search on the backburner. It wasn’t necessarily feeling like I couldn’t land an internship. A combination of (to my ears) an adequate but relatively average resume, insufficient experience, fear of interviewing and the constant workload MIT unraveled each day put me in a state of complacency career-wise. Then one evening, I received an e-mail about a talk Google was having on campus. It was right after one of my classes, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to check it out, and at the very least, grab some free swag. ** Most of the swag had vanished when I arrived (although I did manage to grab a nice pair of socks) but I came just in time to hear one of the Google engineers speak about his route to the company, starting from his freshman year in college with virtually no experience. He spoke passionately, and after the talk was over, a small ball had knotted my chest, a familiar ball that meant I was on the verge of doing something potentially nerve-wracking. I got back to my dorm, and immediately filled out an application for Google’s Engineering Practicum Internship Program. It was designed for college freshmen and sophomores with little experience in Computer Science, and seemed like just the perfect thing I needed. Boosted by this, I sent out my resume to several other companies (which would result in several rejection e-mails) over the days that followed. A few weeks after I’d sent out my resume, I got contacted by a recruiter to set up two back-to-back phone interviews, each of them roughly an hour long. They constituted my first coding interviews, and as such, I was incredibly nervous. I remember the twenty minutes or so prior to the first call. I was in my room, spread across the bed, and playing some Taylor Swift music, trying to get into a state of calmness. Breathe in. Breathe out. The interviews had a straightforward structure: the interviewers, current Google engineers, would spend a minute or two talking about themselves or about you, but pretty quickly, they’d get into the meat of the hour. You were given one or more challenges, which you solved by thinking aloud and writing code on a shared Google Doc, each keystroke and backspace visible. The first interview went pretty great; the second felt like a trainwreck in which my brain just decided to turn to mush and forget everything I knew about coding. I ended up having to do a third interview, which went well. Shortly afterward, I was accepted into the program. ** I interned twice at Google, first in 2015 at their Los Angeles Office as an Engineering Practicum Intern, and again in 2016 at their Boston Office (right across the MIT campus) as a Software Engineering Intern. Although the former program had a greater deal of mentorship, both summers essentially consisted of working Monday through Friday reading and writing code. Spending the summer of 2015 in Los Angeles was magical. I left the perpetual variability of Boston’s weather and stepped into a wonderland of mid-seventies stability. The apartment hunt was quite frustratingalthough Google helped out a great deal by providing interns with a housing stipend and giving us access to a document detailing how previous interns had gone about looking for housing. I ended up sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three other Google interns. It was unfurnished, and our only furnishings that summer were a small carpet that looked rather comical on the floor of a large, empty living room and a set of chairs. I purchased an air mattress that had a funny way of deflating when I was deep in sleep, so that I’d always wake up to my face on the ground. However, splitting that apartment four-ways, combined with the stipend, made it very affordable. Plus, with us on the twelfth floor, we had a sweeping view of the Los Angeles skyline. Before starting off work in LA, I spent a week at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, an incredibly large campus I could see myself still getting lost in even if I were there for years. Orientation Week was fast-paced and intense, as we were introduced to the company’s culture, code base, practices, guidelines and sweet, sweet food. Interns were represented across multitudes of schools and from all over the country. We wore brightly-colored Noogler hats and probably had this look of constant wonder on our face. That week invoked familiar images of being new to the United States and to MIT, that overwhelming sense of utter fascination, of getting lost in a sea of brilliant minds. Innovation was happening quietly, in buildings all around us, and even if we couldn’t see it right then, we could feel it. And for those summers, in our own ways, we could be part of it. ** The binoculars-shaped LA office was designed by Frank Gehry, the same architect behind MIT’s distinctively shaped Stata Center. Its uniqueness was a fitting metaphor for everything that followed; my traditional notions of what an office typically looked like were met with Google’s own imagination of a workspace, the sort of bright-eyed, in-the-clouds imagination that MIT got me familiar with. The designs were thematic, incorporating features of the office locations into its structure. The perks were incredibly enticing too. Across both offices: free massages, an onsite barber, cafes serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, a gym, a music room, a game room, a library, fire poles down which we could slide, rock-climbing walls, and on the list goes. I remember thinking how the heck anyone got work done. ** And the work itself was the heart of my internships at Google. After spending endless hours speeding through MIT’s roulette of classes and labs and problem sets, getting to translate that to an industrial setting was quite the experience. Google has defined the entirety of my CS industry experience, and is thus my only reference point, but going behind-the-scenes into the company’s codebase, for me, bordered more on Harry-Potter-style magic than on technicity. As an intern, I had access to the vast majority of the company’s internal codebase, to which I could now add. For both summers, the early weeks of the internship were defined by reading through heaps of code and extensive documentations (Googlers will often complain about the variable quality of their code documentation, but it’s largely thorough, perhaps intimidatingly so). I felt a bit lost both times, just by the sheer newness of everything, but as the internship progressed, familiarity took over. I got to learn new languages, and then learn Google’s version of those languages. I got to learn their process of code review (every line of code gets reviewed before being checked in), code rollback, style guides. I got to learn about strange, powerful technologies implemented by their engineers, tech that made researching and processing large amounts of data seamless. I got to see the magic of Computer Science at a wider scale than I had in the past. My Los Angeles internship was a great mix of research and coding. The description that follows is about as high-level as I can get, but hopefully it paints something of a picture. For Google’s advertising customers, the team I worked with (Brand Insights) was interested in measuring and classifying some metrics. For the first half of my internship, I researched on and documented possible different algorithms for which these metrics could be computed, and ended up choosing and implementing what I considered the best one. Then, using Google’s MapReduce system, I was able to compute and classify metrics for billions of existing data points. The team also had an internal UI prototype, to which I made a slight expansion by adding a time-range selection feature for which metrics could be computed. The 2016 Software Engineering Internship in Boston was decidedly more involved, and was a Machine Learning project. I had to preprocess data from multiple internal sources to extract features for thousands of entities, train the data on a classifier using classic machine learning algorithms (Adaptive Boosting, Winnow, Random Forest), and sort of play around with the parameters until the accuracy was satisfactory. Then I had to integrate the trained classifier into the pipeline that fetched these entities, so that it could generate and classify new unlabeled data. I also got to take a 20-hour ML course to complement my coding work, making for a very engaging summer. Beyond reading and writing code, I also had to give presentations, create documentations, attend team meetings, and quite memorably attend the company’s weekly TGIF meeting, which actually takes place on Thursdays. It occurs live in the Mountain View headquarters, and streams to other Google offices worldwide. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google co-founders, often lead the meetings, and talk about the state of the company. Different teams also talk about their products and give demos. At my first TGIF meeting, with my bright Noogler hat on, I grabbed some wings, sat somewhere in the back, facing huge screens streaming from Google HQ and a ripple of chatter. I remember thinking, This is really happening. ** And being a Googler didn’t end when I wrote my last bit of code for the day. Whether it was with my team, or with other Googlers drawn from different teams in the office, we were often united in non-technical endeavors. About a month into my LA internship, I joined several Googlers at Venice Beach for a few hours. Dozens of footprints in the sand tracked our path as we picked up as much trash as we could and disposed of them. The people in my immediate vicinity on that afternoon constantly shifted, whether it was Emilia, my Engineering Practicum Host, or other interns or engineers I hadn’t met before that day. Conversation shifted with them, but it felt light and easy, comfortable. I also ended up spending a few hours one week just patrolling the Los Angeles Office. My eager self had signed up to be part of a group of Googlers giving high school kids a tour of the building, and at that point, I was still getting lost. So I learned where the cafes were, and the numerous microkitchens, and the Game Room, and the huge Google Earth device that let you see any location in the world on multiple large screens surrounding you. The tour went great, although at one point I was certain I would emerge with some of the kids into some strange new room and suddenly have no idea where we were, forcing us to spend an eternity in that subsection of the office. On the bright side, no matter where we were, we wouldnt have to walk for long to find a microkitchen stuffed with snacks. One of my favorite memories from that internship was probably the nugget eating contest my Brand Insights team had. The goal was to eat fifty McNuggets in sixty minutes. The reward, aside from all that free food, was immortalizationyour picture would go up on the team’s Hall of Fame wall. We sat outside, surrounded by boxes of Nuggets and napkins and drinks. The timer was set, and we went in immediately. Fifty nuggets in an hour seemed like nothing to me, a confidence that didn’t waver until about 15 nuggets in. Then, my pace slowed, but I kept on, relentless. About forty-seven nuggets in, I gave up. Yes, I only needed three more nuggets, but I was pretty sure I’d explode at that point if another molecule of food found its way into my mouth. Emilia, my project host, absolutely destroyed all fifty of her nuggets, in a display of effortlessness that still amazes me to this day. That summer, I would also attend the Special Olympics with Googlers at the University of Southern California. I would spend some Saturdays walking dogs with fellow engineers (I got attached to a very energetic Beagle). I would take part in a karaoke contest with interns in which my inner Taylor Swift came roaring out, unleashed. And I would share some of my writing with Googlers. Those unexpected e-mails of “Hey I read this and thought it was wonderful” always made my week. My internship at Google was about good code and putting what I’d learned at MIT to great use. It was about newfound confidence, bolstered by a chance they took on me and the support my project hosts gave me. It was about rediscovering Computer Science, and realizing that when you put together a band of the brightest minds in the world, what you create more closely resembles sorcery than machinery. It was about people who loved their work, and were more than their work. It was about excellent food, and new friends, and going to bed each night feeling incredibly content. One of the things that especially stood out to me was the mostly clean separation between “work” and “life”. At MIT, even when you weren’t doing problem sets, the specter of undone work, unmet deadlines hung around you at every moment. 3 P.M. was just as potential a time to be doing some work at 3 A.M. But for both summers, while I did occasionally have to work overtime, as soon as I logged out and left, there was no lingering specter. It made for a great balance that sometimes gets missing at MIT. There were off-kilter moments at times, whether it was from noticing how few engineers of color were around (although Google’s efforts at diversity are immense and well-documented), or just from my own anxiety kicking in right before a presentation. However, the memories of that summer are imprinted in a hallway of all my best life memories. And just before my last internship ended, when I received the e-mail about interest in moving forward, I already knew what I wanted to do. ** In September 2016, I accepted a full-time Software Engineering job offer from Google. I’ll be starting sometime in September of this year, in their New York Office. Needless to say, I am beyond excited. In just a few days, I graduate from MIT, a crazy fact I still haven’t quite processed yet. But as the chapter on the Institute reaches a conclusion that part of me isn’t entirely ready for, a whole new book awaits. And I can’t wait to turn the page. Post Tagged #Career Fair

Google

Google With several of the core General Institute Requirements out of the way, sophomore year was really the dawn of my computer science life at MIT. Impostor syndrome started to take a backseat, and taking CS classes I enjoyed and did reasonably well in was a confidence booster. Soon enough though, I had to start thinking about internships, and I couldn’t help but feel the creeping approach of “not-enoughness. As career fair drew closer, resume workshops and interview tips began to dominate my inbox. Companies were hosting multitudes of events on campus, drawing us in with tech talks and lotteries for electronic swag, which we could usually enter by submitting a resume. I didn’t have a resume, and when I solicited some sample resumes from my friends, a clear difference emerged. On theirs: Github repositories populated with a multitude of extracurricular code, polished websites, sophisticated projects. On mine: a spatter of somewhat relevant classes and side projects I felt were too simple to be worth including. After speaking with some friends at Alpha Delta Phi, I consulted with staff at MIT’s Career Development office. Around the period of the fall Career Fair Week, the office let students book quick appointments for resume reviews, interview tips, offer negotiation tactics, and so on. I met with a nice lady who encouraged me to include my Olympiad and writing experiences from before MIT, as well as compensate for my relatively low CS experience by emphasizing one of the bigger projects I’d implemented in an MIT class. All of a sudden, I had something of a resume, but it still felt inadequate. Career Fair came and went in a blink. I stopped by for less than an hour and quickly left, after an enormous buildup of anxiety took over. I spent the days and weeks that followed caught in the usual MIT routine, and put an internship search on the backburner. It wasn’t necessarily feeling like I couldn’t land an internship. A combination of (to my ears) an adequate but relatively average resume, insufficient experience, fear of interviewing and the constant workload MIT unraveled each day put me in a state of complacency career-wise. Then one evening, I received an e-mail about a talk Google was having on campus. It was right after one of my classes, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to check it out, and at the very least, grab some free swag. ** Most of the swag had vanished when I arrived (although I did manage to grab a nice pair of socks) but I came just in time to hear one of the Google engineers speak about his route to the company, starting from his freshman year in college with virtually no experience. He spoke passionately, and after the talk was over, a small ball had knotted my chest, a familiar ball that meant I was on the verge of doing something potentially nerve-wracking. I got back to my dorm, and immediately filled out an application for Google’s Engineering Practicum Internship Program. It was designed for college freshmen and sophomores with little experience in Computer Science, and seemed like just the perfect thing I needed. Boosted by this, I sent out my resume to several other companies (which would result in several rejection e-mails) over the days that followed. A few weeks after I’d sent out my resume, I got contacted by a recruiter to set up two back-to-back phone interviews, each of them roughly an hour long. They constituted my first coding interviews, and as such, I was incredibly nervous. I remember the twenty minutes or so prior to the first call. I was in my room, spread across the bed, and playing some Taylor Swift music, trying to get into a state of calmness. Breathe in. Breathe out. The interviews had a straightforward structure: the interviewers, current Google engineers, would spend a minute or two talking about themselves or about you, but pretty quickly, they’d get into the meat of the hour. You were given one or more challenges, which you solved by thinking aloud and writing code on a shared Google Doc, each keystroke and backspace visible. The first interview went pretty great; the second felt like a trainwreck in which my brain just decided to turn to mush and forget everything I knew about coding. I ended up having to do a third interview, which went well. Shortly afterward, I was accepted into the program. ** I interned twice at Google, first in 2015 at their Los Angeles Office as an Engineering Practicum Intern, and again in 2016 at their Boston Office (right across the MIT campus) as a Software Engineering Intern. Although the former program had a greater deal of mentorship, both summers essentially consisted of working Monday through Friday reading and writing code. Spending the summer of 2015 in Los Angeles was magical. I left the perpetual variability of Boston’s weather and stepped into a wonderland of mid-seventies stability. The apartment hunt was quite frustratingalthough Google helped out a great deal by providing interns with a housing stipend and giving us access to a document detailing how previous interns had gone about looking for housing. I ended up sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three other Google interns. It was unfurnished, and our only furnishings that summer were a small carpet that looked rather comical on the floor of a large, empty living room and a set of chairs. I purchased an air mattress that had a funny way of deflating when I was deep in sleep, so that I’d always wake up to my face on the ground. However, splitting that apartment four-ways, combined with the stipend, made it very affordable. Plus, with us on the twelfth floor, we had a sweeping view of the Los Angeles skyline. Before starting off work in LA, I spent a week at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, an incredibly large campus I could see myself still getting lost in even if I were there for years. Orientation Week was fast-paced and intense, as we were introduced to the company’s culture, code base, practices, guidelines and sweet, sweet food. Interns were represented across multitudes of schools and from all over the country. We wore brightly-colored Noogler hats and probably had this look of constant wonder on our face. That week invoked familiar images of being new to the United States and to MIT, that overwhelming sense of utter fascination, of getting lost in a sea of brilliant minds. Innovation was happening quietly, in buildings all around us, and even if we couldn’t see it right then, we could feel it. And for those summers, in our own ways, we could be part of it. ** The binoculars-shaped LA office was designed by Frank Gehry, the same architect behind MIT’s distinctively shaped Stata Center. Its uniqueness was a fitting metaphor for everything that followed; my traditional notions of what an office typically looked like were met with Google’s own imagination of a workspace, the sort of bright-eyed, in-the-clouds imagination that MIT got me familiar with. The designs were thematic, incorporating features of the office locations into its structure. The perks were incredibly enticing too. Across both offices: free massages, an onsite barber, cafes serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, a gym, a music room, a game room, a library, fire poles down which we could slide, rock-climbing walls, and on the list goes. I remember thinking how the heck anyone got work done. ** And the work itself was the heart of my internships at Google. After spending endless hours speeding through MIT’s roulette of classes and labs and problem sets, getting to translate that to an industrial setting was quite the experience. Google has defined the entirety of my CS industry experience, and is thus my only reference point, but going behind-the-scenes into the company’s codebase, for me, bordered more on Harry-Potter-style magic than on technicity. As an intern, I had access to the vast majority of the company’s internal codebase, to which I could now add. For both summers, the early weeks of the internship were defined by reading through heaps of code and extensive documentations (Googlers will often complain about the variable quality of their code documentation, but it’s largely thorough, perhaps intimidatingly so). I felt a bit lost both times, just by the sheer newness of everything, but as the internship progressed, familiarity took over. I got to learn new languages, and then learn Google’s version of those languages. I got to learn their process of code review (every line of code gets reviewed before being checked in), code rollback, style guides. I got to learn about strange, powerful technologies implemented by their engineers, tech that made researching and processing large amounts of data seamless. I got to see the magic of Computer Science at a wider scale than I had in the past. My Los Angeles internship was a great mix of research and coding. The description that follows is about as high-level as I can get, but hopefully it paints something of a picture. For Google’s advertising customers, the team I worked with (Brand Insights) was interested in measuring and classifying some metrics. For the first half of my internship, I researched on and documented possible different algorithms for which these metrics could be computed, and ended up choosing and implementing what I considered the best one. Then, using Google’s MapReduce system, I was able to compute and classify metrics for billions of existing data points. The team also had an internal UI prototype, to which I made a slight expansion by adding a time-range selection feature for which metrics could be computed. The 2016 Software Engineering Internship in Boston was decidedly more involved, and was a Machine Learning project. I had to preprocess data from multiple internal sources to extract features for thousands of entities, train the data on a classifier using classic machine learning algorithms (Adaptive Boosting, Winnow, Random Forest), and sort of play around with the parameters until the accuracy was satisfactory. Then I had to integrate the trained classifier into the pipeline that fetched these entities, so that it could generate and classify new unlabeled data. I also got to take a 20-hour ML course to complement my coding work, making for a very engaging summer. Beyond reading and writing code, I also had to give presentations, create documentations, attend team meetings, and quite memorably attend the company’s weekly TGIF meeting, which actually takes place on Thursdays. It occurs live in the Mountain View headquarters, and streams to other Google offices worldwide. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google co-founders, often lead the meetings, and talk about the state of the company. Different teams also talk about their products and give demos. At my first TGIF meeting, with my bright Noogler hat on, I grabbed some wings, sat somewhere in the back, facing huge screens streaming from Google HQ and a ripple of chatter. I remember thinking, This is really happening. ** And being a Googler didn’t end when I wrote my last bit of code for the day. Whether it was with my team, or with other Googlers drawn from different teams in the office, we were often united in non-technical endeavors. About a month into my LA internship, I joined several Googlers at Venice Beach for a few hours. Dozens of footprints in the sand tracked our path as we picked up as much trash as we could and disposed of them. The people in my immediate vicinity on that afternoon constantly shifted, whether it was Emilia, my Engineering Practicum Host, or other interns or engineers I hadn’t met before that day. Conversation shifted with them, but it felt light and easy, comfortable. I also ended up spending a few hours one week just patrolling the Los Angeles Office. My eager self had signed up to be part of a group of Googlers giving high school kids a tour of the building, and at that point, I was still getting lost. So I learned where the cafes were, and the numerous microkitchens, and the Game Room, and the huge Google Earth device that let you see any location in the world on multiple large screens surrounding you. The tour went great, although at one point I was certain I would emerge with some of the kids into some strange new room and suddenly have no idea where we were, forcing us to spend an eternity in that subsection of the office. On the bright side, no matter where we were, we wouldnt have to walk for long to find a microkitchen stuffed with snacks. One of my favorite memories from that internship was probably the nugget eating contest my Brand Insights team had. The goal was to eat fifty McNuggets in sixty minutes. The reward, aside from all that free food, was immortalizationyour picture would go up on the team’s Hall of Fame wall. We sat outside, surrounded by boxes of Nuggets and napkins and drinks. The timer was set, and we went in immediately. Fifty nuggets in an hour seemed like nothing to me, a confidence that didn’t waver until about 15 nuggets in. Then, my pace slowed, but I kept on, relentless. About forty-seven nuggets in, I gave up. Yes, I only needed three more nuggets, but I was pretty sure I’d explode at that point if another molecule of food found its way into my mouth. Emilia, my project host, absolutely destroyed all fifty of her nuggets, in a display of effortlessness that still amazes me to this day. That summer, I would also attend the Special Olympics with Googlers at the University of Southern California. I would spend some Saturdays walking dogs with fellow engineers (I got attached to a very energetic Beagle). I would take part in a karaoke contest with interns in which my inner Taylor Swift came roaring out, unleashed. And I would share some of my writing with Googlers. Those unexpected e-mails of “Hey I read this and thought it was wonderful” always made my week. My internship at Google was about good code and putting what I’d learned at MIT to great use. It was about newfound confidence, bolstered by a chance they took on me and the support my project hosts gave me. It was about rediscovering Computer Science, and realizing that when you put together a band of the brightest minds in the world, what you create more closely resembles sorcery than machinery. It was about people who loved their work, and were more than their work. It was about excellent food, and new friends, and going to bed each night feeling incredibly content. One of the things that especially stood out to me was the mostly clean separation between “work” and “life”. At MIT, even when you weren’t doing problem sets, the specter of undone work, unmet deadlines hung around you at every moment. 3 P.M. was just as potential a time to be doing some work at 3 A.M. But for both summers, while I did occasionally have to work overtime, as soon as I logged out and left, there was no lingering specter. It made for a great balance that sometimes gets missing at MIT. There were off-kilter moments at times, whether it was from noticing how few engineers of color were around (although Google’s efforts at diversity are immense and well-documented), or just from my own anxiety kicking in right before a presentation. However, the memories of that summer are imprinted in a hallway of all my best life memories. And just before my last internship ended, when I received the e-mail about interest in moving forward, I already knew what I wanted to do. ** In September 2016, I accepted a full-time Software Engineering job offer from Google. I’ll be starting sometime in September of this year, in their New York Office. Needless to say, I am beyond excited. In just a few days, I graduate from MIT, a crazy fact I still haven’t quite processed yet. But as the chapter on the Institute reaches a conclusion that part of me isn’t entirely ready for, a whole new book awaits. And I can’t wait to turn the page. Post Tagged #Career Fair

Struggle for Freedom - 2308 Words

Andrew Papis 1 May, 2012 Perspectives on the Individual Final Course Paper The Struggle for Freedom Human beings are emotional individuals. Their feelings direct them in one direction or the next, and brutally establish who they are, and what they do. It is the human environment that activates these emotions, and these emotions that in turn impact the human environment. They can be either positive or negative in nature, and are centered with government and society. When life is attained from a human being, their outlook on life becomes devious. Having a positive on life conceives comfort in many people’s lives. When an outside fury comes along and changes someone’s life, his or her attitude is going to change drastically. In three†¦show more content†¦At the end of Wiesel’s novel when Elie’s father grows sick, he is always near his father because he fears the death of his father’s is near. After his father passes away Elie says, â€Å"I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last† (Wiesel 112)! The only freedom Elie believes his people will see is through death. That is the only way to achieve freedom and no longer be conducted by the Nazis. Freedom seemed improbable and impossible to the Jews, and their attitude mirrored this through their darkened views. Not only were they hopeless towards liberty, they were also extremely hopeless towards human life itself. The victims of the Holocaust depended mostly on the mere hope that they would be freed. Many had the realization that freedom was only through their death, so they forfeited their lives and took the hopes out of many. Individuals are capable of both love and greatness, but to go along with that, they’re also capable of cruelty and evil. In â€Å"Night† evil conquered all and Elie’s main struggle for freedom was competing to escape from evil. Escaping evil was Elie’s only freedom. Even though Elie escaped, he still had the horrific memories. He said when he looked himself in the mirror, â€Å"From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at meShow MoreRelatedThe Struggle For Freedom And Freedom1277 Words   |  6 Pages The struggle between nations may take on different forms but ultimately at the core all people fight for the same personal and political freedoms. Everyone wants to live a life full of e quality and prosperity. In some extreme cases these freedoms are blocked by few cruel individuals who for a period of time shape the course of nations. Regardless of the region or slight difference in ideology, all dictators share the same appetite for complete control and oppression. The struggle for freedomRead MoreA Struggle For Freedom Essay744 Words   |  3 PagesA Struggle For Freedom In 1831 in Southampton county, a slave named Nat Turner did something so revolutionary that to this day it is still an uncomfortable subject for a small town in Virginia. With very little documented history, Stephen B. Oates tells how one slave turned the entire south upside down on one hot August Sunday. Oates own struggle in finding the truth about the past was something that this small town of Southampton was tying to forget. 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Yet, looking on the TV, radio, newspapers or socialRead MoreAfrican American Struggle for Freedom2198 Words   |  9 PagesAfrican-American Struggle for Freedom Beverly Garrett Axia College In the early nineteenth century, the African American went from slavery to the struggle for freedom. They had to do several activities in order to survive. Even though food affected the lifestyle during slavery, with religion, soul food like greens, and hamburger meat was prepared and grown to help families survive. There were several kinds of slavesRead MoreThe Black Freedom Struggle For Equality Essay1980 Words   |  8 PagesThe black freedom struggle has not yet come to an end – there are still prejudiced and racist radicals that try to negotiate white supremacy and dominance in order to prevent the blacks from their long wait for equality. Consequently, the movement has progressed very sluggishly in the past few centuries. Nevertheless, the campaign for equal rights has led to the triumph over slavery and has led to the accrual of suffrage rights. However, this is still not enough, not after centuries of enslavementRead MoreThe Freedom Of Struggles By Adriane Lentz Smith1250 Words   |  5 Pageswrote the book called the Freedom of Struggles, Who is an associate Professor of History at Duke University. Adriane had studied history and African American studies. She was successful in everything Adriane did, she had many goals to achieve. One of the goals were to get across one point about how war world 1 and African Americans goes to Europe with American expeditionary forces in World War 1. How the story was a critical movement in the book â€Å"freedom of struggles†. Adriane was an aggressiveRead MoreBlack Americans And The Black Freedom Struggle1372 Words   |  6 Pages However, real freedom hasn’t been present to them. Discriminations against Black Americans were transformed and still exist in other aspects. The life of a Black American was planned before he or she was born, not much freedom in their hands. Black American experience disadvantage and discrimination in many different institutions that all prove the existence of Neocolonialism. From housing to education, formal and informal social controls prevented them from equality and freedom. Moreover, BlackRead MoreFrederick Douglass : The Struggle For Progress And Freedom900 Words   |  4 Pages On August 3, 1857, Frederick Douglass declared, â€Å"If there is no struggle, there is no progress.† Frederick proved to be correct. For progress and advancement to occur, it must be fought for rather than just gained by ease and simplicity. Life’s simple trials, tribulations, ups and downs are the stones paving the road to growth and advance. Even throughout history, Douglass’s statement has been resonated and portrayed through various mediums of literature. From Martin Luther King’s â€Å"I Have A Dream†

The Definition of an Angle

Angles are an integral facet in the study of mathematics, particularly geometry. Angles are formed by two rays  (or lines) that begin at the same point or share the same endpoint. The point at which the two rays meet (intersect) is called the vertex.  The angle measures the amount of turn between the two arms or sides of an angle and is usually measured in degrees or radians. An angle is defined by its measure (for example, degrees) and is not dependent upon the lengths of the sides of the angle. History of the Word The word angle  is derived from the  Latin  word  angulus, meaning corner and is  related to the  Greek  word ankylÃŽ ¿s,  meaning crooked, curved, and the  English  word ankle. Both Greek and  English  words come from the Proto-Indo-European  root word ank-  meaning to bend or bow.   Types of Angles Angles that measure exactly 90 degrees are called right angles. Angles that measure less than 90 degrees are called acute angles. An angle  that is exactly 180 degrees is called a straight angle  (this appears as a straight line). Angles that measure greater than 90 degrees but less than 180 degrees are called  obtuse angles. Angles that are larger than a straight angle but less than one turn (between 180 degrees and 360 degrees) are called  reflex angles. An angle that is 360 degrees, or equal to one full turn, is called a full angle or complete angle. For example, a typical rooftop is formed using an obtuse angle. The rays span out to accommodate the width of the house, with the apex located at the centerline of the house and the open end of the angle facing downward. The angle chosen must be sufficient to allow the water to flow off the roof easily but not so close to 180 degrees that the surface would be flat enough to allow water to pool. If the roof were constructed at a 90-degree angle (again, with the apex at the centerline and the angle opening outward and facing down) the house would likely have a much narrower footprint.  As the measurement of the angle decreases, so too does the space between the rays. Naming an Angle Angles are usually named using alphabet letters to identify the different parts of the angle: the vertex and each of the rays. For example, angle BAC, identifies an angle with A as the vertex. It is enclosed by the rays, B and C. Sometimes, to simplify the naming of the angle, it is simply called angle A. Vertical and Adjacent Angles When two straight lines intersect at a point, four angles are formed, for example, A, B, C, and D angles. A pair of angles opposite each other, formed by two intersecting straight lines that form an X-like shape, are called  vertical angles  or  opposite angles. The opposite angles are mirror images of one another. The  degree of angles will be the same. Those pairs are named first.  Since those angles have the same measure of  degrees, those angles are considered equal  or  congruent.   For example, pretend that the letter X is an example of those four angles. The top part of the X forms a V shape, that would be named angle A. The degree of that angle is exactly the same as the bottom part of the X, which forms a ^ shape, and that would be called angle B. Likewise, the two sides of the X form and shapes. Those would be angles C and D. Both C and D would share the same degrees, as they are opposite angles and are congruent. In this same example, angle A and angle C and are adjacent to each other, they share an arm or side. Also, in this example, the angles are supplementary, which mean that each of the two angles combined equals 180 degrees (one of those straight lines that intersected to form the four angles). The same can be said of angle A and angle D.

The Chrysanthemums’s Character Analysis Elisa Allen Free Essays

Tran, Hillary John Steinbeck, â€Å"The Chrysanthemums† Character Analysis: Elisa Allen Elisa Allen is first portrayed as a woman who can take on any job as well as any man but in the end, becomes a woman of submissive femininity. The plot revolves around her journey of realization and conversion to femininity, which conclusively, labels her as a dynamic protagonist. We will write a custom essay sample on The Chrysanthemums’s Character Analysis: Elisa Allen or any similar topic only for you Order Now She works in a garden and farms and cultivates just as well as a man and never fails to amaze her husband of her skills. The story starts with her husband asking her to go into town for a nice dinner date night after he goes into the hills with their sun to look for some steers. As her husband goes off with the son, a stranger comes along their ranch and seeks for directions, as he is lost. His wagon cover reveals that he is a repairman for scissors, pans, and all other sorts of tools. He strikes a conversation and seems to be extremely interested in Elisa. However, there is slight tension within their conversation because it is obvious that he is looking for work to feed himself for the night, but she does not want to give in to his marketing scheme. He advertises that he can make any old tool or pan look brand new and it will be of an advantage to Ms. Allen; it is not until he asks for her chrysanthemums as a gift to an old lady friend down the road that Elisa begin to loosen up. Flattered by his praise to her planting work and feeling as if she should owe him something, Elisa digs out some old aluminum stove pots for him to fix. As he is repairing them, she asks him about life on the road and shows that she would love to live like a man despite his comments that it is dangerous for a woman to live like him. She pays him fifty cents and jokes that he might be coming along some new competition on the road because she too, can ring out the dents of any pots and sharpen scissors better than anyone else out there. They say their farewells and Elisa begins to get ready for dinner. She showers and glams up herself for night and her husband compliments her from looking â€Å"nice† to looking â€Å"strong†. She questions when he first says nice because she would rather look strong, as she prefers to be portrayed. This marks her transition from a masculine woman to a woman of femininity. Later, as they ride into town, Elisa asks her husband about the entertainment fights, that do women participate and go watch as well. He answers yes they do and asks if she would like to go although he knows she probably will not enjoy it. She replies no and turns up her collar to weep silently â€Å"like an old woman†. Her weeping symbolizes the end of her transition from a masculine dominant woman to a submissive female. Her transition seems to come from society rejection of the idea that woman are just as good as males. The society of Steinbeck’s story portrays women as not being able to take care of themselves – that they need a man to protect and do hard work for them. Ms. Allen knows that she can do work just as well as a man but she is continuously stricken down and discouraged by the comments from her husband and the repairman. She feels that even though she has the skills to prove, she will never be seen as equal to a man because of her gender. She may be a strong woman, but she is not strong enough to rise against society. She can well prove herself to the world that woman can be just like men by riding around in a wagon by herself or participating in a fight, but her chances of proving herself are slimmer than her chances of being taunted and picked on by other males. This realization, is the motor behind her stepping down from an independent female to a submissive old woman. How to cite The Chrysanthemums’s Character Analysis: Elisa Allen, Essay examples

Othello Play Essay Example For Students

Othello Play Essay Shakespeares trajedy, Othello is a play based on passion unchecked. The desire for money, power, and love drive the characters to commit acts thatbetray any hint of rational thinking. Readers are given a taste of howpassionate Othello is in Act Two, Scene Three. Now, by heaven, My bloodbegins my safer guides to rule, And passion, having my best judgement collied,Essays to lead the way. Swounds, if I stir. Christs wounds if I stir?Othello knows he is a man capable of terrible destruction. Yet it is love thathe is afraid of not mortal men. This emotion is not so powerful that he deniesit? No. Instead he attempts to temper his love, yet this seems like a denial ofbeing uxorious. When Othello lands upon the shore of Cyprus and sees hisbeautiful Desdemona he exclaims, I cannot speak enough of this content. Itstops me here, it is to much joy. This joy of being in love stops hiswarrior heart. How can he not feel foolishy fond of his precious jewel. Afterthe sword fight in Act Two, Scene Three Othello utters, in line 23, Cassio,I love thee. Is he not doting upon his handsome leiutenant? He loves thesepeople, but instead of his love becoming his salvation, it is his Achillesheel. That love becomes a serpant that constricts around his heart and breaksit. The belief in alove turned sour is to much for poor Othello. Now he cannever love. Othello will never become oversubmissive to his wife because he canonly love as much as he sees he will receive in return. The answer to thequestion then appears to be that he is not uxorious because it is not allowed tobloom. The hateful seeds planted by Iago grow like weeds in Othellos mind andover take it. The gentle fruit of Desdemona and Cassio take to long to bear andare strangled out of existence. Shakespeare

Treatment Factors that Affect Adolescent Substance Treatment Placement

Iliad Book XXII - Achilles Kills Hector

Iliad Book XXII - Achilles Kills Hector Iliad - Public domain English translationExcept for Hector, the Trojans are inside the walls of Troy. Apollo turns to Achilles to tell him he is wasting his time pursuing a god since he cant kill him. Achilles is angry but turns around to return to Troy where Priam is the first to spot him. He tells Hector he will be killed since Achilles is much stronger. If not killed he will be sold into slavery as has already happened to others of Priams sons. Priam cant dissuade Hector, even when his wife Hecuba joins the effort. Hector gives some thought to going inside but fears the ridicule of Polydamas, who had given sage advice the day before. Since Hector wants to die in glory, he has a better chance of facing Achilles. He thinks about giving Achilles Helen and the treasure and adding to it an even split of the treasure of Troy, but Hector rejects these ideas realizing Achilles will just cut him down, and there would be no glory in that. As Achilles bears down on Hector, Hector begins to lose his nerve. Hector runs towards the Scamander River (Xanthus). The two warriors race three times around Troy. Zeus looks down and feels sorry for Hector, but tells Athena to go down and do what she wants without restraint. Achilles is chasing Hector with no chance of reprieve unless Apollo steps in (which he does not do). Athena tells Achilles to stop running and face Hector. She adds that she will persuade Hector to do the same. Athena disguises herself as Deiphobus and tells Hector the two of them should go fight Achilles together. Hector is thrilled to see his brother has dared to come out of Troy to help him. Athena uses the cunning of disguise until Hector addresses Achilles to say its time to end the chase. Hector requests a pact that they will return each others body whoever dies. Achilles says there are no binding oaths between lions and men. He adds that Athena will kill Hector in just a moment. Achilles hurls his spear, but Hector ducks and it flies past. Hector does not see Athena retrieve the spear and return it to Achilles. Hector taunts Achilles that he didnt know the future after all. Then Hector says its his turn. He throws his spear, which hits, but glances off the shield. He calls to Deiphobus to bring his lance, but, of course, there is no Deiphobus. Hector realizes he has been tricked by Athena and that his end is near. Hector wants a glorious death, so he draws his sword and swoops down on Achilles, who charges with his spear. Achilles knows the armor Hector is wearing and puts that knowledge to use, finding the weak point at the collarbone. He pierces Hectors neck, but not his windpipe. Hector falls down while Achilles taunts him with the fact that his body will be mutilated by dogs and birds. Hector begs him not to, but to let Priam ransom him. Achilles tells him to stop begging, that if he could, he would eat the corpse himself, but since he cant, hell let the dogs do it, instead. Hector curses him, telling him Paris will kill him at the Scaean Gates with the help of Apollo. Then Hector dies. Achilles pokes holes in Hectors ankles, ties a strap through them and attaches them to the chariot so he can drag the body in the dust. Hecuba and Priam cry while Andromache is asking her attendants to draw a bath for her husband. Then she hears a piercing wail from Hecuba, suspects what has happened, emerges, looks down from the rampart where she witnesses her husbands corpse being dragged and faints. She laments that her son Astyanax will have neither land nor family and so will be despised. She has the women burn the store of Hectors clothing in his honor. Next: Major Characters in Book XXII Read a public domain translation of Homers Iliad Book XXII. Hector - champion of the Trojans and son of Priam.Priam - King of the Trojans and father of Hector, Paris, Cassandra, and Helenus, among others.Achilles - best warrior and most heroic of the Greeks. After Agamemnon stole his war prize, Briseis, Achilles sat out the war until his beloved comrade Patroclus was killed. Although he knows his death is imminent, Achilles is determined to kill as many Trojans as possible, including Hector whom he blames for Patroclus death.Xanthus - a river near Troy known to mortals as Scamander.Zeus - king of the gods. Zeus attempts neutrality.Known as Jupiter or Jove among the Romans and in some translations of the Iliad.Athena - favors the Greeks. Also known by the Romans as Minerva.Apollo - god of many attributes. Favors the Trojans.Deiphobus - brother of Paris.Andromache - wife of Hector and mother of Astyanax. Profiles of Some of the Major Olympian Gods Involved in the Trojan War HermesZeusAphroditeArtemisApolloAthenaHeraAres Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book I Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book II Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book III Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book IV Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book V Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book VI Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book VII Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book VIII Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book IX Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book X Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XI Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XII Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XIII Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XIV Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XV Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XVI Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XVII Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XVIII Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XIX Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XX Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XXI Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XXII Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XXIII Summary and Main Characters of the Iliad Book XXIV

Women in construction Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Women in construction - Essay Example omen had training on the handling of construction equipment to gain first hand experience on heavy machinery like dumpers etc to learn more on such equipment so that these women can help in building venues and infrastructure for 2012 games in London. This, in turn also increased the job opportunities for women Although presently the share of women placement in construction sector is very low, the aim of the tester event is to provide gainful job opportunity to a minimum of 50 women in a year. The mister did really encourage women to go for such training, while meeting those female workers also who are already helping in this project to build the required infrastructure. As per the London 2012 Olympic news, women manual workforce is just two percent of the total in national construction sector. However the ODA initiative has certainly helped to improve this dismal figure as, according to the â€Å"Olympic News†, there are presently around 155 women workers engaged for working in the Olympics project and almost 35 of them were placed by the â€Å"Women into construction† initiative. The females work under this program in jobs like dumper truck or digger drivers and operators for other machines and equipment. During the visit to the Olympic Park, the minister Tessa Jowell remarked that the London 2012 ‘women into construction’ project is an excellent example of the games being used to become the providers for equal opportunity employment irrespective of the gender. The minister opined that this will further strength the job opportunities for women in the national construction sector, while helping more women to get jobs in the ‘women into construction’ projects. suited for males only. Hence, very few female aspirants wanted to get into this field while seeking employment opportunities. However, the Director of Construction, ODA, Howard Shiplee, who also attended the event remarked that this project is a wonderful opportunity to highlight the excellent and

Knowledge Management Techniques Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Knowledge Management Techniques - Essay Example Knowledge management solutions enable the company or organization implementing it to share relevant and useful information at all levels of the organization. Knowledge management reduces redundancy, creates efficiency and allows a company to utilize information for innovativeness. New recruits require minimal training and allow the company to utilize time effectively. Intellectual property can be retained after employees stop working. The two case studies are: Northbridge Model Train Shop and Food Festival. CASE STUDY I NORTHBRIDGE  MODEL  TRAIN  SHOP  (NMTR) 1. PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION 1a) Northbridge  Model  Train  Shop intends to continue utilizing the existing network and improve the organizations knowledge base. The activities within and outside Northbridge   Model   Train   Shop affects knowledge management preparaedness; hence there is need to conduct an audit. NMTR knowledge management structure requires retructuring and development to accomaodate increas ing tasks. Since the management already poses a knowledge system, the existing system can be effectively used to enhance and achive a competent managements system. A central place where all the knowledge can be accessed and controlled lacks in the oragnization. There is explicict information that can be used to further generate unambigous information for knowledge management as Bennett (1999) points out1. 1b) As a knowledge management expert, it is posible to identify knowledge management gaps that exist. NMTR has acquired knowledge over the knowledge and requires expertese to adequately use the knowledge for the correct person when required. It is necessary to intergrate tacid and explict knowledge in the organization to achive competency and adequately meet NMTR knowledge management needs. Tacid sources of the organizatoin assist in identifying the knowledge gaps that exist. Moreover, the customers needs will be considered when implimenting knowledge management system and ensure t hat NMTR obtains competitive advantage. 1c) Knowledge management needs in NMTR can be adressed with an aim of assisting the company realise its goals. NMTR strategy is dependent on strategy designed by the owner, Jim. For knowledge management to be sucessful, the knowledge Jim possess together with the organizational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and strengths will influence the outcome. Efficiency will be achived if NMTR stategy is propertly articulated in knowledge management. NMTR will use the existing knowledge to create competitiveness. As an expert, knowledge management mapping, the role of information technology and innovation can be considered as necessary. 1. KNOWLEDGE AUDIT 2a) Knowledge gaps and blockages identify what should be done to achieve knowledge management needs. NMTR has published materials on the train inventory system and wants to develop a new knowldge management that includes the train and slot car materials. There is need standardize the available ma terials and categorize them to allow their effective use in the new venture in train and slot car materials. Additionaly, a system where new information is documented in a procedural way can be identified to absorb information from the new area. There is need for ontology and creation of terms within the new area. Terms that are commonly used in the

Personal Learning Statement for Dissertation

Personal Learning Statement for Dissertation Careful, precise and comprehensive planning is the key to success. Having known the importance of planning, I carefully planned my project with a step by step approach. The first step at this stage was the analysis of my strengths and weaknesses in order to decide the topic of my research project. I have always been interested in stock markets and business analysis of companies. This interest helped me learn more about business and financial analysis of companies and the different ways by which their financial performance and position can be analysed. The next important step was the formulation of a strategy as to how I would carry out the task in hand i.e. How to conduct the research? When to start? And most importantly whom should I choose as a mentor? In regards to the selection of a suitable mentor the article titled Making the most of your Mentor by Pippa Riley (11th August, 2005) published on ACCA website proved to be a life saver. I gave it a deep thought and after carefully considering all my options I chose my mentor to be my tutor Mr Muhammad Yasser Naqvi Syed, who is a Member of ACCA. A person who has helped me a great deal since the day I joined ACCA and has been a role model for me over the years. After concluding my decision I approached my mentor and I was extremely delighted when he accepted to be my mentor and guide me through the project. 2. Meetings with Mentor The role of Project Mentor is of great significance in the success of a research project. I had my first meeting with my chosen mentor on 5th January 2010, just after December 2009 ACCA examinations. In that meeting I introduced my mentor to the topic I had chosen and the reason behind my selection. I told him about my strategy and the means and methods I intended to use. I was confident that I had properly communicated the reasons and objectives of the topic I chose and my mentor seemed to be satisfied with my choice and strategy. Furthermore, I sought his advice on the matters such as research methods and we had a fruitful discussion. All in all, the first meeting was highly successful and cemented my ideas showing me a clear path to my objective. After my first meeting I was much more confident as I had a clear direction towards preparing the project. Our second meeting was scheduled for 12th March 2009. Before the meeting I reviewed my project at every stage and tried to make sure that there are no spellings or grammatical mistakes and after that I sent the completed part to my mentor for reviewing the progress. I also noted all the feed back from my mentor and tried to improve the quality of my work. In the meeting I demonstrated all the information I had gathered from different sources and asked my mentors advice on some unresolved issues. Before the 3rd meeting I sent a draft copy of the project to my mentor and noted his feed back and then I prepared slides in Microsoft PowerPoint along with extra slides showing charts and share prices. We held our third and final meeting on 14th April 2009. I was very confident of the work I had done and prepared for the presentation beforehand. I had a clear set of mind of what I had done and how I wanted to express that work in the presentation. My mentor was satisfied and equally amazed at my effort and congratulated me on my work. As stated in the guidelines, I had 15 minutes for the presentation; therefore I planned for my presentation well in advance and made sure that I included all the relevant information. Before I started my presentation, I handed out printed copies of my presentation to my mentor and my colleagues. I started my presentation by introducing J Sainsbury and giving a brief history of the company. After that I explained the various analyses and comparisons I had performed in order to analyze the financial position of J Sainsbury and to reach at a conclusion. I also explained the potential opportunities and the threats faced by the company. I used Microsoft Power Point to convey my message more efficiently and used graphical analysis to help my cause. My presentation was indeed a success and I felt all my hard work and dedication paid off. My mentor was pleasantly surprised and gave me a pat on my back. My strengths included a thorough understanding of the topic, detailed research work and good presentation skills while my weaknesses included taking a few more minutes outside my allowed quota. This experience was a massive confidence booster for me and it proved to me that I am very well capable of delivering top class professional presentations. 3. Self Assessment / Critical Evaluation As part of the skills and learning statement, I would now try to critically evaluate my performance and the skills I learned during the preparation of my project. One of the ways of evaluating the success of a project is to analyse whether it has answered all the relevant research questions satisfactorily or not. In formulating the strategy of my research project, I identified a few research questions which were critical to the overall success of my project. I focused my energies to finding the answers of these questions. Although I think I managed to answer most of the research questions in a satisfactory manner, there were a few areas where I could have done more research and allocated more time and resources. The feedback I got back from my mentor suggested that I have been able to achieve the objectives of my research project successfully. This being the first extensive research project carried out by me made the task a little bit daunting in the beginning and made me a little apprehensive about my abilities of carrying out the task with perfection. But as the project progressed, things started becoming clearer and my confidence levels were boosted. I chose to assess the business and financial performance of J Sainsbury plc over the last three years. J Sainsburys plc is a United Kingdom-based company principally engaged in grocery and related retailing, and financial services. Financial ratios were used to asses the financial performance of the company over a three year period and then I tried to explain the reasons for variations in the ratios. I kept sending my draft incomplete project to my mentor and requested him to assess my performance under the guidelines of Oxford Brookes University so I could judge the quality of my work done so far. For this purpose I sent several emails to my mentor and made notes of every feed back. I carefully assessed the external position by looking at the macro environment by using Porters Five Forces Model. I tried to do well on this analysis by giving a detailed overview and try to look at the wider side of the picture. I highlighted critical strengths and weaknesses and the resulting opportunities and threats faced by the company by using a technique called SWOT analysis. This exercise was very beneficial to get a thorough understanding of the company and also helped me to come up with some recommendations to capitalise on the strengths of the company and eliminate or neutralize its weaknesses. 4. Interpersonal and Communication Skills The term interpersonal skill is very often used to measure the personal ability to operate within the business organization through social communication and interaction. And the Communication skills are the skills which enable people to communicate effectively with each other. It also includes the ability to speak in public, meetings, presentations and writing letters. In my RAP it relates to the communication skills which I demonstrated during the meetings with my mentor and customers. The meetings with my mentor helped me to assess my interpersonal and communication skills and identify the areas which needed improvement. Questioning is one of the most important utensil in communication in order to derive answers and achieve confirmation. Since it is a fundamental tool in seeking information it is was imperative to get direct answers during the initial stages of the project as I required direction from my mentor. However I realised that getting direct information was not easy as the response is directly dependent on the style of question. During the project I used both closed questions where I needed a confirmation of what I knew and open questions where the intention was to get as much information as possible. Towards the end of the project, when I had passed the data gathering stage I was seeking specific answers, this also entailed asking probing questions in order to clarify many areas. Restating information in a form of a question enabled me to understand difficult factors. Effective communication also entails speaking and listening. I used both gestures and a variety of verbal and non verbal means for instance, nodding my head, making notes of important points, and basic words of confirmation to express a form of acknowledgement seen as a verification or feedback that is identified as active or reflective listening, as I would continuously be seeking to understand what my mentor was stating. This was reinforced with the use of eye contact to show that I understood and was interested in what was being communicated to me by my mentor. Prior to meetings I would make sure that my mobile phone was switched off, to reduce disturbance that was in my control. These activities helped me to improve my interpersonal and communication skills and also made me more confident in my approach. 5. How RAP Helped In Studies / Employment The preparation of RAP has helped me to gain certain invaluable and precious skills which have helped me both in my studies and my working life. I learned a lot of new skills and techniques which has given me an edge over my competitors in the job market. The preparation of RAP helped me immensely in better understanding of professional subjects of ACCA such as P3 (Business Analysis) and P2 (Corporate Reporting). As a part of my RAP I used different financial and non financial techniques described in these subjects to asses the business and financial performance of JS Sainsbury. It was a great exercise for me and gave me a chance to apply all my knowledge gained from ACCA qualification in to a practical company scenario. RAP also improved my skills in Microsoft Office. I learned a lot of new features of MS Word, MS Excel and MS Power Point. These skills are still helping me in my current job and have increased my work efficiency. I have also had a pay rise from my employer since preparing my RAP, underlining the improvement I have made. RAP has also helped me polishing my interactive skills as I improved this skill by collecting financial and non financial information about the company from different sources. These interactive skills have helped me a lot in my current job and as a result I am much more confident while interacting with clients during audits and client visits. The project helped me develop my IT skills. I added not only to my accounting knowledge, but also learned different aspects of planning, organising, time management, writing, and public speaking. These skills will be of use to me in all aspects of my life.

Lady Macbeth, Macbeths One-of-a-Kind Woman Essay -- Macbeth essays

Macbeth's One-of-a-Kind Woman      Ã‚  Ã‚   Shakespeare's Macbeth portrays the indomitable, manipulative character of Lady Macbeth through bold, sinister actions. Her character will be the subject of this essay.    Lily B. Campbell in her volume of criticism, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion, examines the effect of sin on the life of the first lady:    Act v presents swiftly and relentlessly the results of passion, of the passion which has become mortal sin. First it is Lady Macbeth that we see enduring the fate of the sinful in whom fear and remorse have already begun to effect the punishment for evil. That Shakespeare chose to manifest Lady Macbeth's melancholy as a disturbance in her sleep shows that he was a student of the moral philosophy of the time, for as we have seen earlier, all the accounts of fear are concerned with the effect of fear on sleep. (232)    In Shakespeare and Tragedy John Bayley interprets Lady Macbeth's character through her speech:    'The milk of human kindness' and the 'illness' that should attend ambition are cruder concepts, in Lady Macbeth's mouth, than they now seem to be. She is not saying her husband is too kind a man for this business, and with too healthy a spirit; 'kindness' means human nature, and Macbeth's is not mature or manly, has not learnt the necessary hardness of the world. Her husband is in a sense her child, fed with the milk which is natural to her, and when the word recurs in the Senecan speech which follows, she calls on the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, schemes of murder, to turn her milk to gall. She will feed him on that to produce an appropriate response, as the armed men in the tale sprang from the sowing of dragon's teeth... ...Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972.    Knights, L.C. "Macbeth." Shakespeare: The Tragedies. A Collectiion of Critical Essays. Alfred Harbage, ed. Englewwod Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964.    Mack, Maynard. Everybody's Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.    Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. http://chemicool.com/Shakespeare/macbeth/full.html, no lin.    Siddons, Sarah. "Memoranda: Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth." The Life of Mrs. Siddons. Thomas Campbell. London: Effingham Wilson, 1834. Rpt. in Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, eds. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997.    Wilson, H. S. On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1957.

The Golden Lily Chapter 14

â€Å"OH, LORD,† I SAID. â€Å"What's wrong?† asked Brayden. â€Å"Is everything okay?† â€Å"Hard to say.† I put the phone back in my purse. â€Å"I hate to do this, but I have to go take care of something outside. I'll be back as quickly as I can.† â€Å"Do you want me to go with you?† I hesitated. â€Å"No, it's okay.† I had no idea what to expect out there. It was best if Brayden wasn't subjected to it. â€Å"I'll hurry.† â€Å"Sydney, wait.† Brayden caught hold of my arm. â€Å"This†¦ this is the song you requested, isn't it?† The one we'd been dancing to had just ended, and a new one was on – or, well, an old one. It was about thirty years old. I sighed. â€Å"Yes. It is. I'll be fast, I promise.† The temperature outside was pleasant, warm but not oppressively so. We were allegedly due for a rare bit of rain. As I walked toward the parking lot, some of Wolfe's lessons came back to me. Check your surroundings. Watch for people lurking near cars. Stay in the light. Make sure to – â€Å"Adrian!† All reasonable thoughts vanished from my head. Adrian was lying on my car. I ran over to Latte as fast as the dress would allow me. â€Å"What are you doing?† I demanded. â€Å"Get off of there!† I automatically checked for dents and scratches. Adding insult to injury, Adrian was actually smoking as he lay on the hood and stared up at the sky. Clouds were moving in, but a half-moon could occasionally be seen. â€Å"Relax, Sage. I won't leave a scratch. Really, this is surprisingly comfortable for a family car. I would've expected – † He turned his head toward me and froze. I had never seen him so still – or so quiet. His shock was so thorough and intense that he actually dropped his cigarette. â€Å"Ahh,† I cried, springing forward, lest the burning cigarette damage the car. It landed harmlessly on the asphalt, and I quickly stamped it out. â€Å"For the last time, will you get off of there?† Adrian slowly sat up, eyes wide. He slid off the hood and didn't seem to leave any marks. Obviously, I'd have to check it later. â€Å"Sage,† he said. â€Å"What are you wearing?† I sighed and stared down at the dress. â€Å"I know. It's red. Don't start. I'm tired of hearing about it.† â€Å"Funny,† he said. â€Å"I don't think I could ever get tired of looking at it.† Those words drew me up short, and a rush of heat went through me. What did he mean? Was I so outlandish-looking that he couldn't stop staring at the crazy spectacle? Surely†¦ surely he wasn't implying that I was pretty†¦ I promptly got back on track, reminding myself that I needed to think about the guy inside, not out here. â€Å"Adrian, I'm on a date. Why are you here? On my car?† â€Å"Sorry to interrupt, Sage. I wouldn't have been on your car if they'd let me into the dance,† he said. A little of his earlier awe had faded, and he relaxed into a more typical Adrian pose, leaning back against Latte. At least he was standing and less likely to do damage. â€Å"Yeah. They generally frown on letting twenty-something guys into high school events. What did you want?† â€Å"To talk to you.† I waited for him to elaborate, but the only response I received was a brief flash of lightning above. It was Saturday, and I'd been around campus all day, during which he could've easily called. He'd known the dance was tonight. Then, inhaling the smell of alcohol that hung in the air around him, I knew nothing he did should really surprise me tonight. â€Å"Why couldn't it have been tomorrow?† I asked. â€Å"Did you really have to come here tonight and – † I frowned and looked around. â€Å"How did you even get here?† â€Å"I took the bus,† he said, almost proudly. â€Å"A lot easier getting here than to Carlton.† Carlton College was where he took art classes, and without his own transportation, he'd come to rely heavily on mass transit – something he'd never done before in his life. I'd been hoping Sonya or Dimitri had dropped him off – meaning they'd pick him up again. But of course that wouldn't happen. Neither one of them would have brought a drunken Adrian here. â€Å"So I guess I have to take you home then,† I said. â€Å"Hey, I got myself here. I'll get myself home.† He started to take out a cigarette, and I gave him a stern headshake. â€Å"Don't,† I said sharply. With a shrug, he put the pack away. â€Å"And I have to take you home. It's going to storm soon. I'm not going to make you walk in the rain.† Another flash of lightning emphasized my words, and a faint breeze stirred the fabric of my dress. â€Å"Hey,† he said, â€Å"I don't want to be an incon – â€Å" â€Å"Sydney?† Brayden came striding across the parking lot. â€Å"Everything okay?† No, not really. â€Å"I'm going to have to leave for a little bit,† I said. â€Å"I have to give my brother a ride home. Will you be okay waiting? It shouldn't be that long.† I felt bad even suggesting it. Brayden didn't really know anyone at my school. â€Å"Maybe you could find Trey?† â€Å"Sure,† said Brayden uncertainly. â€Å"Or I can come with you.† â€Å"No,† I said quickly, not wanting him and drunken Adrian in the car. â€Å"Just go back and have fun.† â€Å"Nice toga,† Adrian told Brayden. â€Å"It's a chiton,† said Brayden. â€Å"It's Greek.† â€Å"Right. I forgot that was tonight's theme.† Adrian gave Brayden an appraising look, glanced over at me, and then turned back to Brayden. â€Å"So. What do you think of our girl's ensemble tonight? Pretty amazing, huh? Like Cinderella. Or maybe a Greek Cinderella.† â€Å"There's really not much about it that's truly Greek,† said Brayden. I winced. I knew he didn't mean to be insensitive, but his words stung a little. â€Å"The dress is historically inaccurate. I mean it's a very nice dress, but the jewelry's anachronistic, and the fabric's nothing that ancient Greek women would have had. Certainly not that color either.† â€Å"What about those other Greek women?† asked Adrian. â€Å"The flashy smart ones.† His forehead wrinkled, as though it were taking every ounce of his brain to come up with the word he wanted. And, to my astonishment, he did. â€Å"The hetaerae.† I honestly hadn't believed he'd retained anything from our conversation in San Diego. I tried not to smile. â€Å"The hetaerae?† Brayden was even more astonished than I was. He gave me a scrutinizing look. â€Å"Yes†¦ yes. I suppose – if such materials were hypothetically possible in that era – that this is something you'd expect to see find on a hetaera instead of the average Greek matron.† â€Å"And they were prostitutes, right?† asked Adrian. â€Å"These hetaerae?† â€Å"Some were,† agreed Brayden. â€Å"Not all. I think the usual term is courtesan.† Adrian was completely deadpan. â€Å"So. You're saying my sister's dressed like a prostitute.† Brayden eyed my dress. â€Å"Well, yes, if we're still speaking in hypothetical – â€Å" â€Å"You know what?† I interrupted. â€Å"We need to go. It's going to rain any minute now. I'll take Adrian home and meet you back here, okay?† I refused to let Adrian continue to play whatever game he had going to torment Brayden – and, by extension, me. â€Å"I'll text you when I'm on my way back.† â€Å"Sure,† said Brayden, not looking very sure at all. He left, and I started to get into the car until I noticed Adrian trying – and failing – to open the passenger side door. With a sigh, I walked over and opened it for him. â€Å"You're drunker than I thought,† I said. â€Å"And I thought you were pretty drunk.† He managed to get his body into the seat, and I returned to my own side just as raindrops splashed on my windshield. â€Å"Too drunk for Jailbait to feel,† he said. â€Å"The bond's numb. She can have an Adrian-free night.† â€Å"That was very thoughtful of you,† I said. â€Å"Though I'm guessing that's not the real reason you were hitting the bottle. Or why you came here. As far as I can tell, all you've accomplished is to mess with Brayden.† â€Å"He called you a prostitute.† â€Å"He did not! You baited him into that.† Adrian ran a hand through his hair and leaned against the window, watching the rapidly unfolding storm outside. â€Å"Doesn't matter. I've decided I don't like him.† â€Å"Because he's too smart?† I said. I remembered Jill and Eddie's earlier comments. â€Å"And unmemorable?† â€Å"Nah. I just think you can do better.† â€Å"How?† Adrian had no answer, and I had to ignore him for a bit as my attention shifted to the road. Storms, while infrequent, could come up fast and furious in Palm Springs. Flash floods weren't uncommon, and the rain was now pouring down in sheets, making visibility difficult. Fortunately, Adrian didn't live that far away. That was a double blessing because, when we were a couple blocks from his apartment, he said: â€Å"I don't feel so well.† â€Å"No,† I moaned. â€Å"Please, please do not get sick in my car. We're almost there.† A minute or so later, I pulled up at the curb outside his building. â€Å"Out. Now.† He obeyed, and I followed with an umbrella for myself. Glancing over at me as we walked to the building, he asked, â€Å"We live in a desert, and you keep an umbrella in your car?† â€Å"Of course I do. Why wouldn't I?† He dropped his keys, and I picked them up, figuring I'd have an easier time unlocking the door. I flipped on the nearest light switch – and nothing happened. We stood there for a moment, together in the darkness, neither of us moving. â€Å"I have candles in the kitchen,† said Adrian, finally taking a few staggering steps in that direction. â€Å"I'll light some.† â€Å"No,† I ordered, having visions of the entire building going down in flames. â€Å"Lie on the couch. Or throw up in the bathroom. I'll take care of the candles.† He opted for the couch, apparently not as sick as he'd feared. Meanwhile, I found the candles – atrocious air freshening ones that smelled like fake pine. Still, they cast light, and I brought a lit one over to him, along with a glass of water. â€Å"Here. Drink this.† He took the glass and managed to sit up long enough to get a few sips. Then, he handed the glass back and collapsed against the couch, draping one arm over his eyes. I pulled up a nearby chair and sat down. The pine candles cast fragile, flickering light between us. â€Å"Thanks, Sage.† â€Å"Are you going to be okay if I leave?† I asked. â€Å"I'm sure the power will be on by morning.† He didn't answer my question. Instead, he said, â€Å"You know, I don't just drink to get drunk. I mean, that's part of it, yeah. A big part of it. But sometimes, alcohol's all that keeps me clearheaded.† â€Å"That doesn't make sense. Here,† I prompted, handing the water back to him. As I did, I cast a quick look at my cell phone's clock, anxious about Brayden. â€Å"Drink some more.† Adrian complied and then continued speaking, arm back over his eyes. â€Å"Do you know what it's like to feel like something's eating away at your mind?† I'd been about to tell him I needed to leave, but his words left me cold. I remembered Jill saying something similar when she was telling me about him and spirit. â€Å"No,† I said honestly. â€Å"I don't know what it's like†¦ but to me, well, it's pretty much one of the most terrifying things I can imagine. My mind, it†¦ it's who I am. I think I'd rather suffer any other injury in the world than have my mind tampered with.† I couldn't leave Adrian right now. I just couldn't. I texted to Brayden: Going to be a little longer than I thought. â€Å"It is terrifying,† said Adrian. â€Å"And weird, for lack of a better word. And part of you knows†¦ well, part of you knows something's not right. That your thinking's not right. But what do you about that? All we can go on is what we think, how we see the world. If you can't trust your own mind, what can you trust? What other people tell you?† â€Å"I don't know,† I said, for lack of a better answer. His words struck me as I thought how much of my life had been guided by the edicts of others. â€Å"Rose once told me about this poem she'd read. There was this line, ‘If your eyes weren't open, you wouldn't know the difference between dreaming and waking.' You know what I'm afraid of? That someday, even with my eyes open, I still won't know.† â€Å"Oh, Adrian, no.† I felt my heart breaking and sat down on the floor near the couch. â€Å"That won't happen.† He sighed. â€Å"At least with the alcohol†¦ it quiets the spirit and then I know if things seem weird, it's probably because I'm drunk. It's not a great reason, but it's a reason, you know? At least you actually have a reason instead of not trusting yourself.† Brayden texted back: How much longer? Irritated, I answered back: Fifteen minutes. I looked back up at Adrian. His face was still covered, though the candlelight did a fair job of illuminating the clean lines of his profile. â€Å"Is that†¦ is that why you drank tonight? Is spirit bothering you? I mean†¦ you seemed to be doing so well the other day†¦Ã¢â‚¬  He exhaled deeply. â€Å"No. Spirit's okay†¦ in as much as it ever is. I actually got drunk tonight because†¦ well, it was the only way I could bring myself to talk to you.† â€Å"We talk all the time.† â€Å"I need to know something, Sage.† He uncovered his face to look at me, and I suddenly realized how close I was sitting. For a moment, I almost didn't pay attention to his words. The flickering dance of shadow and light gave his already good looks a haunting beauty. â€Å"Did you get Lissa to talk to my dad?† â€Å"What? Oh. That. Hang on one second.† Picking up my cell phone, I texted Brayden again: Better make that thirty minutes. â€Å"I know someone got her to do it,† Adrian continued. â€Å"I mean, Lissa likes me, but she's got a lot going on. She wouldn't have just thought one day, ‘Oh, hey. I should call Nathan Ivashkov and tell him how awesome his son is.' You got her to do it.† â€Å"I've actually never talked to her,† I said. I didn't regret my actions at all but felt weird at being called out on them. â€Å"But I, uh, may have asked Sonya and Dimitri to talk to her on your behalf.† â€Å"And then she talked to my old man.† â€Å"Something like that.† â€Å"I knew it,† he said. I couldn't gauge his tone, if it was upset or relieved. â€Å"I knew someone had to have prompted her, and somehow I knew it was you. No one else would have done it for me. Not sure what Lissa told him, but man, she must have really won him over. He was crazy impressed. He's sending me money for a car. And upping my allowance back to reasonable levels.† â€Å"That's a good thing,† I said. â€Å"Isn't it?† My phone flashed with another text from Brayden. The dance will nearly be over by then. â€Å"But why?† Adrian asked. He sat down on the floor beside me. There was an almost distraught look to him. He leaned closer to me and then seemed shocked as he realized what he was doing. He leaned back a little – but only a little. â€Å"Why would you do that? Why would you do that for me?† Before I could answer, another text came in. Will you even be back in time? I couldn't help be annoyed that he wasn't more understanding. Without thinking, I typed back: Maybe you should just leave now. I'll call you tomorrow. Sorry. I flipped the phone over so I wouldn't see any other messages. I looked back at Adrian, who was watching me intently. â€Å"I did it because he wasn't fair to you. Because you deserve credit for what you've done. Because he needs to realize you aren't the person he's always thought you were. He needs to see you for who you really are, not for all the ideas and preconceptions he's built up around you.† The power in Adrian's gaze was so strong that I kept talking. I was nervous about meeting that stare in silence. Also, part of me was afraid that if I pondered my own words too hard, I'd discover they were just as much about my own father and me as Adrian and his. â€Å"It should have been enough for you to tell him who you are – to show him who you are – but he wouldn't listen. I don't like the idea of using others to do things we can do ourselves, but this seemed like the only option.† â€Å"Well,† Adrian said at last. â€Å"I guess it worked. Thank you.† â€Å"Did he tell you how to get in touch with your mother?† â€Å"No. His pride in me apparently didn't go that far.† â€Å"I can probably find out where she is,† I said. â€Å"Or†¦ or Dimitri could, I'm sure. Like you said before, they must let letters in.† He almost smiled. â€Å"There you go again. Why? Why do you keep helping me?† There were a million answers on my lips, everything from It's the right thing to do to I don't know. Instead, I said, â€Å"Because I want to.† This time, I got a true smile from him, but there was something dark and introspective about it. He shifted closer to me again. â€Å"Because you feel bad for this crazy guy?† â€Å"You aren't going to go crazy,† I said firmly. â€Å"You're stronger than you think. The next time you feel that way, find something to focus on, to remind you of who you are.† â€Å"Like what? Got some magic object in mind?† â€Å"Doesn't have to be magic,† I said. I racked my brain. â€Å"Here.† I unfastened the golden cross necklace. â€Å"This has always been good for me. Maybe it'll help you.† I set it in his hand, but he caught hold of mine before I could pull back. â€Å"What is it?† he asked. He looked more closely. â€Å"Wait†¦ I've seen this. You wear this all the time.† â€Å"I bought it a long time ago, in Germany.† He was still holding my hand as he studied the cross. â€Å"No frills. No flourishes. No secret etched symbols.† â€Å"That's why I like it,† I told him. â€Å"It doesn't need embellishment. A lot of the old Alchemist beliefs focused on purity and simplicity. That's what this is. Maybe it'll help you have clarity of mind.† He had been staring at the cross, but now he lifted his gaze to meet mine. Some emotion I couldn't quite read played over his features. It was almost like he'd just discovered something, something troubling to him. He took a deep breath and, his hand still holding mine, pulled me toward him. His green eyes were dark in the candlelight but somehow just as enthralling. His fingers tightened on mine, and I felt warmth spread throughout me. â€Å"Sage – â€Å" The power suddenly came back on, flooding the room with light. Apparently, with no concern for electrical bills, he'd left all the lights on when he went out earlier. The spell was broken, and both of us winced at the sudden brightness. Adrian sprang back from me, leaving the cross in my hand. â€Å"Don't you have a dance or a curfew or something?† he asked abruptly, not looking at me. â€Å"I don't want to keep you. Hell, I shouldn't have bothered you at all. Sorry. I assume that was Aiden texting you?† â€Å"Brayden,† I said, standing up. â€Å"And it's okay. He left, and I'm just going to go back to Amberwood now.† â€Å"Sorry,† he repeated, moving toward the door with me. â€Å"Sorry I ruined your night.† â€Å"This?† I nearly laughed, thinking of all the crazy things I contended with in my life. â€Å"No. It'd take a lot more to ruin my night than this.† I started to take a few steps and then paused. â€Å"Adrian?† He finally looked directly at me, once again nearly knocking me over with his gaze. â€Å"Yeah?† â€Å"Next time†¦ next time you want to talk to me about something – anything – you don't have to drink to work up the courage. Just tell me.† â€Å"Easier said than done.† â€Å"Not really.† I tried for the door again, and this time, he stopped me, resting a hand on my shoulder. â€Å"Sage?† I turned. â€Å"Yeah?† â€Å"Do you know why I don't like him? Brayden?† I was so astonished he'd gotten the name right that I couldn't voice any answers, though several came to mind. â€Å"Because of what he said.† â€Å"What part?† Seeing as Brayden had said many things, in great detail, it wasn't entirely clear which Adrian was referring to. â€Å"‘Historically inaccurate.†Ã¢â‚¬Ëœ Adrian gestured at me with his other hand, the one not on my shoulder. â€Å"Who the hell looks at you and says ‘historically inaccurate'?† â€Å"Well,† I said. â€Å"Technically it is.† â€Å"He shouldn't have said that.† I shifted, knowing I should move away†¦ but I didn't. â€Å"Look, it's just his way.† â€Å"He shouldn't have said that,† repeated Adrian, eerily serious. He leaned his face toward mine. â€Å"I don't care if he's not the emotional type or the complimentary type or what. No one can look at you in this dress, in all that fire and gold, and start talking about anachronisms. If I were him, I would have said, ‘You are the most beautiful creature I have ever seen walking this earth.'† My breath caught, both at the words and the way he said them. I felt strange inside. I didn't know what to think, except that I needed to get out of there, away from Adrian, away from what I didn't understand. I broke from him and was surprised to find myself shaking. â€Å"You're still drunk,† I said, putting my hand on the door knob. He tilted his head to the side, still watching me in that same, disconcerting way. â€Å"Some things are true, drunk or sober. You should know that. You deal in facts all the time.† â€Å"Yeah, but this isn't – † I couldn't argue with him looking at me like that. â€Å"I have to go. Wait†¦ you didn't take the cross.† I held it out to him. He shook his head. â€Å"Keep it. I think I've got something else to help center my life.† The Golden Lily: A Bloodlines Novel