Mariam A Legitimate End to a Life of Illegitimate...

â€Å"Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. You remember that, Mariam† (Hosseini 11). Mariam, a child born out of wedlock, grew up lacking the genuine love she yearned for. Despite everything, her mother told her, she believed that her father, Jalil, meant the best for her. That was until she made the shocking discovery on her own; he actually wanted to get rid of her. Pressured by his many wives, Jalil forces Mariam to marry an abusive shoemaker. As the last tear rolls down her cheek, she starts to understand the hardships that her mother went through. Emotionally neglected, they left her alone to live in a two-story house in Kabul; this becomes a life changing experience. On her journey†¦show more content†¦This shows how Mariam did not let oppression turn her mind against those who were close to her. In those tough times however, she still looked at the bigger picture. She turned herself in, took the blames, and paid for the crimes. Additionally, Mariam is courageous. When Mariam sees that Rasheed had the intention of killing Laila, she takes matters into her own hands. A typical woman during the Taliban era would be much too afraid to even think of touching their husband without permission. While Rasheed was choking Laila, she scratches Rasheed and ends his life ultimately with a shovel. She then sacrifices her life by turning herself to protect Laila and her children instead of fleeing out of the country with Laila. She accepted her fate and her consequences of being the inferior gender even if she felt that it was not just. â€Å"No. It was not so bad, Mariam thought, that she should die this way. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate belonging† (Hosseini 359). In other words, she did not keep what she did as a secret. She was proud to die for what she did. In the end, Mariam contradicts the expectations of women in her culture through her acts of courageousness and her endurance through hardships. Mariam never cam from a family that supported the prominence of women; she was an illegitimate product of an outcast. Realizing the power of her accomplice, Laila, she risked her own life because sheShow MoreRelatedThe Effects of Afghanistan War on Women777 Words   |  4 Pagesyoung women, Laila and Mariam, who face and overcome many hardships and live in a country destroyed by political oppression and war. Hosseini exposes the inner strength of Afghan women through the point of view of these two women; a strength that enables them to endure difficult situations including forced marriages, the Taliban insurrection, and a lack of educational opportunities. The novel begins with Mariam who has to endure life since birth. Being a harami, or an illegitimate child, grows up in

Software Development Life Cycle Free Essays

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE SUMMARY SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE is basically a framework which describes the activities performed at each stage of a software development Project. These activities involve stages like the requirements, design, implementation, testing, installation and maintenance. In the information technology industry, SDLC plays a big role. We will write a custom essay sample on Software Development Life Cycle or any similar topic only for you Order Now No software development process will ever be completed efficiently and also meeting the budget client requirements without SDLC. This is because SDLC involves a structural framework which describes the phases involved in information system development. SDLC in management is an important factor which needs to be taken into consideration if you want a software development project to be resounding success. The phases of SDLC can vary somewhat but generally include the following: Conceptualization Requirements and cost/benefits analysis Detailed specification of the software requirements Software design Programming Testing User and technical training; and Maintenance The following are some basic popular models that are adopted by many software development firms System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Model Prototyping Model Rapid Application Development Model Component Assembly Model As part of my research project I would be studying the core principles of SDLC. I would also perform research on available SDLC models in the information technology industry. System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Model This is also known as Classic Life Cycle Model (or) Linear Sequential Model (or) Waterfall Method. This model has the following. Most software teams still use a waterfall process for development projects. Taking an extreme waterfall approach means that you complete a number of phases in a strictly ordered sequence: requirements analysis, design, implementation/integration, and then testingg activities. 1. System/Information Engineering and Modeling As software is always of a large system (or business), work begins by establishing the requirements for all system elements and then allocating some subset of these requirements to software. This system view is essential when the software must interface with other elements such as hardware, people and other resources. System is the basic and very critical requirement for the existence of software in any entity. So if the system is not in place, the system should be engineered and put in place. In some cases, to extract the maximum output, the system should be re-engineered and spruced up. Once the ideal system is engineered or tuned, the development team studies the software requirement for the system. 2. Software Requirement Analysis This process is also known as feasibility study. In this phase, the development team visits the customer and studies their system. They investigate the need for possible software automation in the given system. By the end of the feasibility study, the team furnishes a document that holds the different specific recommendations for the candidate system. It also includes the personnel assignments, costs, project schedule, target dates etc†¦. The requirement gathering process is intensified and focussed specially on software. To understand the nature of the program(s) to be built, the system engineer or â€Å"Analyst† must understand the information domain for the software, as well as required function, behavior, performance and interfacing. The essential purpose of this phase is to find the need and to define the problem that needs to be solved . 3. System Analysis and Design In this phase, the software development process, the software’s overall structure and its nuances are defined. In terms of the client/server technology, the number of tiers needed for the package architecture, the database design, the data structure design etc†¦ are all defined in this phase. A software development model is thus created. Analysis and Design are very crucial in the whole development cycle. Any glitch in the design phase could be very expensive to solve in the later stage of the software development. Much care is taken during this phase. The logical system of the product is developed in this phase. 4. Code Generation The design must be translated into a machine-readable form. The code generation step performs this task. If the design is performed in a detailed manner, code generation can be accomplished without much complication. Programming tools like compilers, interpreters, debuggers etc†¦ are used to generate the code. Different high level programming languages like C, C++, Pascal, Java are used for coding. With respect to the type of application, the right programming language is chosen. 5. Testing Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. Agile methods generally promote a disciplined project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability, a set of engineering best practices intended to allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals. Agile methods have much in common with the â€Å"Rapid Application Development† techniqu How to cite Software Development Life Cycle, Essays

Alcohol Ruins Lives free essay sample

When We Talk About Love is a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver. Named â€Å"One of the true contemporary masters,† by Robert Towers of The New York Times Review of Books, Carver creates fiction that opens the reader’s eyes to a seldom spoken of, but all too real, part of American life. Alcoholism, and its ability to destroy families and escalate domestic disputes into violence, was a common theme throughout Carver’s short stories. Though there are many equally powerful themes in all of the stories, alcoholism is the driving force behind most of the misfortune in â€Å"Gazebo† and â€Å"A Serious Talk. † â€Å"Gazebo† opens with a married couple whose relationship is on the brink of collapse. Both alcoholics, Duane and Holly struggle to maintain a motel that they had decided to manage years earlier. Duane, probably as a result of his alcoholism, had gone outside the marriage with a maid named Juanita. As a result, Holly had lost all her will to be married to Duane, as well as her will to live. Carver describes the couple, locked in one of the motel rooms, drinking and arguing over each others’ faults and marital discrepancies. The story ends when Holly reminisces about a time when Duane and she had visited the house of an elderly couple that they didn’t know to ask for a drink of water. She remembers how Duane and she had imagined that someday they, too, would grow old and have a house of their own. Then perhaps some young couple would come to call on them for a glass of water just as they had done. â€Å"Gazebo† shows just how many hopes and dreams alcoholism can take away. Illustrating this point, Carver writes, There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had (27). By writing in the first person from Duane’s point of view, Carver shows how Duane feels that their lives have been expended, that any plans they might have had were now so far out of reach that they are impossible. The couple’s drinking problem is the obvious culprit, as Carver describes the couple’s usual decision making process: â€Å"Drinking’s funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on our drinking, we’d be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six pack or whiskey† (25). Since most of the couple’s important life decisions were made under the influence of alcohol, any of their sober aspirations remain impossible unless they change their lifestyle. With Duane’s betrayal destroying their marriage, any hope of restraining their drinking habit is probably long gone, and the story leaves the couple drowning in their own misery. Though the story is sad, just as most of Carver’s stories tend to be, it really sheds light on alcohol’s ability to destroy lives, as well as perpetuate actions that drive people to drink more. Alcohol addiction even leads one to consider drastic actions such as suicide; just as Holly tries to jump out the window in â€Å"Gazebo. † Howard C. Becker, Ph. D, author of a paper published by the Alcohol Research Health division of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, attests to alcohol’s life destroying and addictive nature. In his paper titled, â€Å"Alcohol Dependence, Withdrawal, and Relapse,† Becker focusses on the viscious cycles that alcoholism can lead one into. According to Dr. Becker, heavy drinking not only perpetuates a dependence for alcohol, but also increases a heavy drinker’s likelihood to relapse as a reaction to stressful situations when compared to light or non-drinkers. Clinical studies demonstrated that alcohol ­dependent people are more sensitive to relapse-provoking cues and stimuli than nondependent people† (Becker). Such behavior is of the sort that people like Duane and Holly allowed to grow until consuming alcohol became not only an obsession, but their entire life purpose. Becker delves deeper into the research and writes that â€Å"[F]or some dependent individuals, the fear that withdrawal symptoms might emerge if they attempt to stop or significantly curtail drinking may prominently contribute to the perpetuation of alcohol use and abuse† (Becker). With this in mind, it is clear that it can be all too easy to fall into the same sort of alcoholic cycle as Duane and Holly, and that without help, addicts like them may never escape the clutches of alcoholism. To elaborate on what can be done to help people with the disease of alcoholism from a pharmaceutical standpoint, Becker writes: The relationship between withdrawal, stress, and relapse also has implications for the treatment of alcoholic patients. Interestingly, animals with a history of alcohol dependence are more sensitive to certain medications that impact relapse ­like behavior than nimals without such a history, suggesting that it may be possible to develop medications that specifically target excessive, uncontrollable alcohol consumption. (â€Å"Alcohol Dependence†) With the possibility of drugs capable of suppressing the urge to consume alcohol in addicts, many people who normally would not be helped by a simple 12 step program, could use such drugs in combination with standard treatment in the future to help combat their addiction. Carver’s â€Å"A Serious Talk† is another short story that perfectly demonstrates the damaging affects of alcohol addiction on both the addict and those who surround them. In the story, a woman named Vera is visited by her ex-husband Burt, who arrives to give his and her children Christmas gifts. â€Å"Vera served sodas, and they did a little talking† (Carver 106). Here, Carver uses inconspicuous props such as sodas to show the emphasis of the absence of alcohol in this particular scene. Carver implies that the adults of the house are usually drinking something far stronger than soda. Vera also likely served soda as an attempt to prevent Burt from having a relapse or alcoholic episode in front of their children. Later on in the story, Burt puts the entire bundle of logs into the fireplace just before leaving, not thinking about the amount of fire that it would create. Carver describes the mantle as being charred and covered in smoke stains. The next day, Burt returns to apologize for his actions the night before. After being allowed entry, Burt asks vera for a drink, and she tells him there’s vodka in the freezer. Burt drinks the vodka with juice and asks Vera about her smoking habits. The phone rings and Vera takes the call in the other room, telling Burt not to listen to the conversation. Burt takes a large knife and cuts the phone line, ending the call out of jealousy, anger, or some other suppressed emotion. When Vera finds the phone cord cut, she screams for Burt to leave and he threatens to throw the ashtray but takes it with him instead as he leaves. Burt walks out to his car fuming with anger that he still failed to have a reasonable conversation with Vera, â€Å"The thing was, they had to have a serious talk soon. There were things that needed talking about, important things that had to be discussed† (Carver 113). Anger seems to both drive Burt’s rash actions and prevent him from doing anything too violent. Burt’s alcoholism is made apparent by his morning vodka drinking and is the definite cause of the couple’s separation. Vera tells Burt of the last straw that ended their marriage, â€Å" ‘Do you remember Thanksgiving? ’ she said. ‘I said then that was the last holiday you were going to wreck for us. Eating bacon and eggs instead of turkey at ten o’clock at night’ † (Carver 108). Actions like the destruction of the family’s Thanksgiving are examples of alcoholism’s role in marital disputes, and Burt’s actions – in particular the wielding of a large, heavy ash tray at his ex-wife – are clearly out of desperation and regret. Burt probably struggles on a daily basis to keep his drinking in check, but for him and all alcoholics, being sober just makes him irritable and leaves him desperate for some sort of drink. An important point to note is that regardless of the emotional and psychological torment that is ravaging Burt’s mind, he holds it back, acting tough and manly around his ex-wife, only wishing secretly to have a sincere conversation. This implosion of emotion and acting against his true feelings is one of the underlying reasons that Burt is an alcoholic in the first place. If he had been taught how to express his emotions, than he might have avoided this tragedy and still have a family. Michael Hemmingson, in his review of Carver’s â€Å"A Serious Talk,† writes about the motifs of Carver’s fiction, and how this story in particular not only has all of said motifs, but is a summation of Carver’s entire writing career. â€Å"[T]he failed marriage, the drunken exploits, the other lover waiting in the wings, the children having to deal with a broken family, smoking and drinking, doing regrettable things, and not saying the words that are inside the heart† (Hemmingson). Here, Hemmingson’s work drives home the importance of expressing one’s fears, regrets, and addictions. Without expressing these powerful feelings due to the need to feel strong and masculine, many men like Burt, particularly those who are alcoholics, are forced into violence. Simply because being violent is the only means to express their anger and other feelings whilst retaining their masculine appearance. Helping such people learn to express their pent-up feelings is not as much difficult, as it is borderline impossible. Burt for example, is not about to go to his neighborhood shrink and talk things out until he feels better. Men like Burt are far too concerned about their masculinity to notice the damage they are doing to those around them, at least until it is too late. Masculinity, in the traditional sense of Carver’s fiction, is men’s role as the economic provider of the family, showing only a tough as nails attitude, and having control over the household and their wife. As times began to change in the 1960s and to today, gender roles changed and men and women became more equal than ever before. This upset many men of the time period, who had been raised by traditional, controlling and masculine fathers. These men are unintentionally responsible for domestic violence and marital disputes of which Carver so accurately portrays in his writing. Raymond Carver has an astounding ability to not only capture the reader within his fiction, but put them in the driver’s seat when it comes to filling in the details. Having to use one’s imagination where Carver has intentionally left out details makes reading his short stories both vivid and enthralling. By leaving out details, Carver allows the reader to envision the scenes of his short stories as if they, or their family, were a part of the conflict. This style shows how Carver to not only writes to any audience, but also teaches the reader important life lessons such as the consequences of alcoholism. In â€Å"Gazebo,† and â€Å"A Serious Talk,† Carver throws the reader into the battleground of destroyed marriages. Themes such as suppressed male anger and alcohol addiction make the stories as serious as they are realistic. Duane, Holly, Burt, and Vera become characters as familiar as those in a novel, showing just how much power Carver has condensed into these short stories. Carver’s stories are not just words on paper, but a protest to his own experience. Carver himself, born in the 1930s, grew up knowing the masculine image he – as a man – was supposed to keep his entire life. Carver became an alcoholic and through near death experiences and a willingness to express himself and change his ways, overcame the disease, adding years to his life and inspiring works as influential as â€Å"Gazebo,† and â€Å"A Serious Talk. † With such a personal experience inspiring his works, the accuracy of Carver’s short stories is unquestionable and the writing itself is nothing short of extraordinary.