Genetic Engineering: DNA Testing and Social Control :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

DNA Testing and Social Control    Pragmatism is the name of the game when it comes to taking away freedom. The public tends to be against any attempt to curtail civil liberties across the board. It is standard practice, however, to for the government to violate the rights of certain groups in the name of public safety or to fight crime. This is what is happening with the government collection of DNA samples.    The state of New York announced on August 5 that it intends to collect DNA samples from every person in prison, on parole, or in probation in that state for one of a specified list of crimes. Included on this list are murder, sex crimes, drug dealing, and some drug offenses. The samples will be digitized and placed on state computers. Once this database has been establish, police will be able to search it in order to find a match with evidence found at crime scene.    New York is not alone in doing this. All 50 states maintain a DNA database of some type. Mostly though it is only individuals convicted of sex crimes that have their records stored. Eight states sample DNA at a level comparable to the New York proposal. In Louisiana the police actually take and keep DNA samples from any person that they arrest.    Proponents of expanding the use of DNA tests in the legal arena like to point out that these tests will exonerate truly innocent individuals. DNA tests have exonerated some wrongly imprisoned people but it is disingenuous to think this is the real reason for growing use of DNA tests. The real reason for all of this is, of course, to help prosecutors obtain more convictions. It is thus worth keeping in mind that the criminal justice system currently reflects deep class and race biases. Journalist and attorney David Cole argues persuasively in his recently published book No Equal Justice that this is no accident. Rather law enforcement, the legal system, and the prison system operate in a way that insures the disproportionate imprisonment of poor people and people of color. If the government only conducts DNA tests of people convicted of crimes, it will fortify and expand this already unfair process.    Of course one possible way to blunt these biases is to take DNA samples from absolutely everybody. This might seem Orwellian but there is a certain logic to it.

King Lear Shakespeare’s Essay

Dylan Thomas’s â€Å"Do not go gentle into that good night† was influenced by William Butler Yeats’s â€Å"Lapis Lazuli† and William Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ but the villanelle bears a stronger resemblance to Shakespeare’s play. The attitudes toward how an individual lives in the face of impending death, explored by Thomas, are similarly examined with the portrayal of Gloucester and Lear. Dylan Thomas’s â€Å"Do not go gentle into that good night† has been noted to bear the influence of and even echo W. B. Yeats, especially â€Å"Lapis Luzuli,† and, secondarily via this poem, Shakespeare’s King Lear. One scholar notes its â€Å"Yeatsian overtones† (Fraser 51); another judges Thomas’s villanelle to have â€Å"much of the concentrated fury of expression which the poetry of the older Yeats contained, but †¦ more tenderness and sympathy† (Stanford 117), and goes on to say. , citing â€Å"Lapis Lazuli,† that â€Å"Yeats described the poet as one who knows that `Hamlet and Lear are gay'† (118). William York Tindall cites not only â€Å"Lapis Lazuli† but also Yeats’s â€Å"The Choice† as sources (204). Another scholar seems to skip over Yeats entirely (though his own phrasing echoes line 1 of â€Å"Lapis Lazuli†), seeing the â€Å"Grave men/blind† tercet (which contains the injunction to â€Å"be gay†) as â€Å"perhaps invok[ing] the Miltonic† (Tindall also mentions Milton 205) and the effect of the phrase â€Å"be gay† as â€Å"rather hysterical sentimentality† (Holbrook, Dissociation 53); of the earlier â€Å"Wise men/lightning† verse, however, he says â€Å"The images are merely there, histrionically, to bring in the phrase `forked no lightning’ to give a Lear-like grandeur to the dirge† (52). I would like to propose that â€Å"Do not go gentle into that good night† bears a much stronger and more direct connection to Shakespeare’s play than is suggested by references to Yeats or to â€Å"Lear-like grandeur. † I would like to propose that the attitudes towards death–or, more precisely, the attitudes towards how one lives in the face of impending death–that Thomas explores in this poem–the implied attitude his speaker attributes to his direct audience, and the one he urges be adopted in its place–are similarly explored in King Lear and dramatized in the characters of Gloucester and Lear. I also propose that the voice we hear in â€Å"Do not go gentle† may not be a directly lyric speaker but an obliquely drawn persona, that of Gloucester’s son Edgar. Further, when read in the shadow cast by King Lear, the tone of Thomas’s poem grows dark indeed. â€Å"Do not go gentle into that good night† is addressed to Thomas’s father, David John, known as D. J. According to biographer Paul Ferris, D. J. was â€Å"an unhappy man †¦ a man with regrets† (27); born with brains and literary talent, his ambition was to be a man of letters, but he was never able to advance beyond being â€Å"a sardonic provincial schoolmaster† in South Wales, feared for his sharp tongue (26-33). After his first serious illness, though–cancer in 1933–â€Å"A mellowing is said to have been noticeable soon after; his sarcasm was not so sharp; he was a changed man† (104). As he grew more chronically ill in the 40’s, mostly from heart disease and with one of the complications being trouble with his sight, the mellowing intensified: As Ferris puts it, â€Å"It must have been [D. J. ‘s] backbone of angry dignity that his son grieved to see breaking long after, when he wrote `Do not go gentle into that good night'† (27), and the poem is â€Å"an exhortation to his father, a plea for him to die with anger, not humility† (259). The poem was first published in November, 1951, in Princess Caetani’s Botteghe Oscure, on consecutive pages with â€Å"Lament,† a dramatic monologue spoken by an old man on his deathbed who recalls his rollicking youth and middle-age spent in the pursuit (and capture) of wine, women, and song, but who has married at last in order to obtain a caretaker, and must suffer pious comforting in his final, helpless days. (Bibliographic evidence suggests the two were also composed, or at least finalized, more or less simultaneously; Kidder 188.) In the letter to Caetani that contained â€Å"Do not go gentle,† Thomas remarked that â€Å"this little one might well be printed with [â€Å"Lament†] as a contrast† (qtd. in Kidder 188). As Ferris suggests, it would be difficult to over-estimate D. J. ‘s influence on his son: â€Å". . . the pattern of [Dylan’s] life was in some measure a response to D. J. Thomas and his wishes. For the early books that Dylan Thomas read, the rhythms he absorbed, and probably for his obsession with the magic of the poet’s function, he was indebted to D. J. † (283). Prominent among those â€Å"early books† read by Thomas are the works of Shakespeare. In 1948 (and Thomas might have begun his, as usual, protracted drafting and revision of â€Å"Do not go gentle† in 1945, after D. J. suffered a nearly fatal illness; Tindall 204), Thomas wrote a journalist that D. J. ‘s â€Å"reading aloud of Shakespeare seemed to me, and to nearly every other boy in the school, very grand indeed; all the boys who were with me at school, and who have spoken to me since, agree that it was his reading that made them, for the first time, see that there was, after all, something in Shakespeare and all his poetry. . . † (qtd. in Ferris 33; his ellipses). That Thomas was familiar with and admiring of Shakespeare is, of course, no surprise, but his direct linkage of his father with Shakespeare, particularly at this point in time, is interesting, and he demonstrated more than familiarity with King Lear: In 1950, during one of his reading tours in America, he spent an evening with novelist Peter de Vries (who would later use Thomas as the basis for the poet Gowan McGland in Reuben, Reuben) and, among other conversational gambits, â€Å"declaimed some Lear† (de Vries, qtd. in Ferris 233). That he was equally well-immersed in Yeats is verified by the fact that poems by Yeats were among those he performed on his 1950 tour of

Philosophy of mechanism Essay

Mechanism is the philosophical argument that every natural phenomenon (activity) has physical causes that explain it. Consequently, material subjects with whom natural phenomena can be defined in should have their reference subjects to the state of motion, laws as well as the matter that makes its subjects. The developments of mechanism were to eliminate various materials states of unobservable from the actual state of science.   ( Miller 2002) Mechanists had the view that the nature of organisms was not far different from what composed the subtle machines like the machine that were composed of different arrangements of parts so that the internal system could adequate conduct its inbuilt program. Organisms were is possession of radically and substantially well organized and formulated system of regular conduction between their different parts. (Madell, 1998) Elsewhere, materialism is the believe that matter is the only substance /thing whose existence can be proved without any philosophical doubt. They believe that the basic composition of things is material substance, which implies that such material interactions cause various phenomenological pursuits. ( Miller 2002) Both the old (ancient) and the new (modern) sets of materialism have fundamentally close bargain of equality. Modern materialism is the believe that the matter can only be described after an adequate system of hypothesis which can adequately help to define the material substance for its proof ratification. ( Miller 2002) It is the belief that the finest description of material facts should be pursuit of physical process if not their physical redaction. On the other hand, the ancient (old) materialism was in the view of the physical characteristics of a substance to fully define its material hood. However, according to the ancient materialism, a hypothesis would not quantify in defining the scope of materiality unlike in the modern materialism were full hypothetical analysis should be used to describe the essence of materiality. However, the two proclaim the essence of fact that material of the matter is subject to undoubted presence in describing physical outlay of such substance. (Madell, 1998) REFERENCE Madell, G. (1998) Mind and Materialism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Miller, E (2002) Questions that Matter: An Invitation to philosophy,McGraw – Hill

Storytelling in a modern world essays

Storytelling in a modern world essays We humans are all storytellers, or story-listeners, or both. That's a crucial element of our humanity. Passing down the generations, constantly changing under the pressure of altering circumstances, stories link humanity together in chains of narrative. Odysseus sets out on the wine-dark sea, fights ferocious monsters, endures endless hardships, and eventually finds his way home; and so does Tim OBrien in The Things They Carried; and so do many thousands of other heroes conceived in the 2,900 years between Odysseus and OBrien. Storytelling has been, since the earliest times, the way people have ordered their reality. It is the fundamental use of language, that which creates and defines reality. As James Baldwin said in his essay, If Black Language Isnt a Language, Then Tell Me What Is?, People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. . .What joins all languages, and all men [sic], is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death (37). Baldwins understanding of the use of language can be extended to the purpose of storytelling. By telling a story, not only do we create reality, we defeat death. This concept of stories as constructing reality is not unique to Baldwin. In Narrative Means To Therapeutic Ends, by Michael White and David Epston, the same ideas of storytelling are enumerated, In striving to make sense of life, persons face the task of arranging their experiences of events in sequences across time in such a way as to arrive at a coherent account of themselves and the world around them. . .This account can be referred to as a story... (47) Ours has been the storytelling century: never before have so many of us had the chance to absorb so many stories. Earlier centuries heard stories face-to-face, figured them out ...

Mental Maps - How We See the World

Mental Maps - How We See the World A persons perception of the world is known as a mental map. A mental map is an individuals own internal map of their known world. Geographers like to learn about the mental maps of individuals and how they order the space around them. This can be investigated by asking for directions to a landmark or other location, by asking someone to draw a sketch map of an area or describe that area, or by asking a person to name as many places (i.e. states) as possible in a short period of time. Its quite interesting what we learn from the mental maps of groups. In many studies, we find that those of lower socioeconomic groups have maps which cover smaller geographic areas than the mental maps of affluent individuals. For instance, residents of lower-income areas of Los Angeles know about upscale areas of the metropolitan area such as Beverly Hills and Santa Monica but really dont know how to get there or where they are exactly located. They do perceive that these neighborhoods are in a certain direction and lie between other known areas. By asking individuals for directions, geographers can determine which landmarks are embedded in the mental maps of a group. Many studies of college students have been performed around the world to determine their perception of their country or region. In the United States, when students are asked to rank the best places to live or the place they would most like to move to, California and Southern Florida consistently rank very high. Conversely, states such as Mississippi, Alabama, and the Dakotas rank low in the mental maps of students who dont live in those regions. Ones local area is almost always viewed most positively and many students, when asked where theyd like to move, just want to stay in the same area where they grew up. Students in Alabama rank their own state as a great place to live and would avoid the North. It is quite interesting that there are such divisions in the mental maps between the northeast and southeast portions of the country which are remnants of the Civil War and a division over 140 years ago. In the United Kingdom, students from around the country are quite fond of the southern coast of England. Far northern Scotland is generally perceived negatively and even though London is near the cherished southern coast, there is an island of slightly negative perception around the metropolitan area. Investigations of mental maps show that the mass medias coverage and stereotypical discussions and coverage of places around the world has a major effect on peoples perception of the world. Travel helps to counter the effects of the media and generally increase a persons perception of an area, especially if it is a popular vacation destination.

20 paragraphs relating to the Rio Grande Valley Research Paper

20 paragraphs relating to the Rio Grande Valley - Research Paper Example This paper is going to focus on some of the natural physical features in the region of Rio Grande. The earth space pictures of Rio Grande shows that there exists only one major basin in the region. This is the Piceance Basin. This basin exists in the northwestern parts of Colorado. The Piceance Basin is a geologic formation. Its formation dates back from Cambrian to Holocene periods. It is important to note that the basins in the Rio Grande have large reserves of coal and natural gas. In addition, the basins contain oil shale reserves (Phillips et al, 73). This is very critical in the economy of the region. The extraction of such natural resources is important in industrial development as well as strengthening of the economy. This is because these natural resources are good sources of energy needed in many sectors of development in the region. Forests are some of the natural features found in the earth space pictures of Rio Grande. The picture shows that there is only one large forest in Rio Grande. The forests in Rio Grande is very crucial in modifying the ecosystem of the region. The Rio Grande National Forest is important in maintaining high diversity of species in the region. The pictures of earth space science show that several flats are found within the Rio Grande. The flats are natural phenomena that have certain roles in the region. In Rio Grande, there are a total of twenty four flats. Some of these flats include Dry Lake Flats, Big Park Flats as well as Corral Park Flats among others (Phillips et al, 78). Some of these Flats are found within areas suitable for hiking, bird watching as well as other activities. The earth space pictures shows that several lakes are found in the Rio Grande region. These lakes are important sites for several economic activities. They provide water necessary for irrigation purposes. In addition, the lakes are

Inferential Statistics (m4c) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Inferential Statistics (m4c) - Essay Example Therefore, identification of the population among whom the new and the current combination of drugs are to be compared is necessary. Let the population thus selected be the adult and adolescent population in the United States. There are literature considering differential effectiveness of highly active antiretroviral therapy among patients of different gender and race. (King et al., 2008; Campo, Alvarez, Santos, & Latorre, 2005). However, part of the difference may be attributed to availability of the drug, following the prescribed regimen and lifestyle, rather than any inherent difference in genetic composition. Nevertheless, it will be a good policy at the initial stage to limit the experiment among adult and adolescent Caucasian males to protect against possible confounding effects. Once the population is identified, a sample of specific size needs to be selected. The sample size will depend on the power of the testing procedure, which is outside of the purview of the present consideration. Current guidelines recommend start of antiretroviral therapy when the disease has progressed to WHO Stage III when CD4 cell count is less than 350/ÃŽ ¼l. This may be taken to be the baseline criterion for inclusion. Also, the standard guidelines for adherence to the protocol, testing for baseline resistance etc must be satisfied to be included in the drug testing. Any one of these regimens needs to be chosen for the new drug to be compared against. Ideally this experiment would be a matched case-control study. Two HIV/AIDS patients with very similar profiles with respect to advancement of disease, CD4 cell counts, age, sexual orientation and other possible factors that may have bearings on the disease are to be randomly assigned either to the cocktail drug regimen or to the new drug regimen. However, there may be ethical consideration to such assignment. Without informed