Lord of the Flies Challenge Project Essay Example for Free

Lord of the Flies Challenge Project Essay Any of several mammals of the family Suidae, having short legs, cloven hooves, bristly hair, and a cartilaginous snout used for digging, especially the domesticated hog, Sus scrofa domesticus, when young or of comparatively small size. Even though a pig is one animal, they have several symbolic meanings. The various meanings of pigs change from region or culture though. In an earlier culture such as the Ancient Egyptians the pig was a symbol for fertility. Here, the pig was sacred to Isis, a fertility goddess of the Ancient Egyptians. In many other cultures the pig represents strength, and vitality. In the Native American culture the Indians would use a pig to sacrifice to the rain Gods in order for their crops to grow. This is another example of pigs being used to represent growth and fertility. Pigs are not always viewed as a good thing though. In the Jewish and Islamic cultures pigs are viewed as unclean and therefore they are forbidden to eat pork. And in an interesting note, in dream symbolism domestic pigs indicate fertility but a wild pig represents overindulgence and lust. This relates to Lord of the Flies in the sense that Jack never wanted to give up his passion for hunting. He became greedy and his desire to hunt inevitably lead to the separation of the group. In the Christian religion pigs are associated with gluttony. In Lord of the Flies Simon is the Christ like figure and when he views the decaying pig head he becomes nauseated. Christians believe that a pig is in common relation with the Devil. In Lord of the Flies it shows the struggle between good and evil, Christianity and the devil. Jack and his followers use the pig as a sacrifice to the â€Å"Beast† and this is an example of the loss of religion in the novel. This is another reason why a pig is not considered a positive thing in Christianity because the main reason Jesus came around was due to the overwhelming practice of sacrificial acts to Pagan Gods. When Jack renews this blasphemous act, Simon was killed shortly after which confirmed the loss of religious values on the island. Here are examples from the bible prohibiting the digestion pigs. Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcass shall ye not touch, they are unclean to you.(Leviticus 11:7-8) and And the swine, because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto you. Ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch their dead carcass.(Deuteronomy 14:8). In folklore, superstitious sailors would not sail on a boat with a pig aboard. And often time’s sailors would refuse the admittance of pigs on their vessels. Sailors associated the hooves on pigs to the hooves on the devil. Because of this bad omen, if a sailor were to see a pig on their way to work, they would rather turn around and go home. This further explains the theme of the devil in Lord of the Flies. Even though it seems impossible for evil to be involved with young boys, it certainly was proven in this novel. Simon was an innocent little boy and when he was in the jungle the Lord of the Flies was talking to him. Obviously, the pig’s head was NOT talking to him but it shows that Simon’s subconscious talking to him. This shows that even the most innocent has an innate sense of evil in them. When Simon is in the jungle, this is when the reader realizes that the â€Å"beast† is not an external force but that it is part of the boys themselves, which is even more frightening. â€Å"Fancy thinking the beast was something you could hunt and kill! Ãâ€" You knew, didnt you? Im part of you? (p. 143). In Lord of the Flies the pig represents the evil that lies within every person, innocent or not. The pig becomes a game, no longer being a hunt for sustenance. As mentioned earlier, Jack wanted more. He became greedy and his hunts led all of the boys to shift from being playful little boys to savages. That is why in the Christian religion pigs are not appreciated. They are unclean, which in the novel the pig is described as disgusting with the flies hovering around it and black grime in its teeth. The Muslim religion views the pig in the same manner. It is interesting though to compare the thoughts of modern religions to the ancient ideas of pigs. In the ancient cultures like the Greeks, Egyptians and Romans the pig was seen as a fertile being and therefore they were heavily worshiped in order for their own people to experience the gift of fruitful abundance. The literal translation of the Lord of Flies is Beelzebub which is Hebrew for the Devil. The Lord of the Flies has the theme of religion in it, and the pig’s head plays an important part in allowing the shift of innocence to evil to be seen easily to the reader. Due to the many symbolic meanings of pigs in various cultures, there is no definite idea of what a pig stands for. In Lord of the flies though, the pig demonstrates the evil that each of the boys was capable of undergoing.

performance apraisal critique Essay -- essays research papers

The performance appraisal system used by our organization is done annually. The purpose of the review is for employee as well as manager, to aptitude performance from the past year relating to the specific responsibilities and objective of that employee. This gives the opportunity for managers to give feedback on the strengths and development areas that are summarized from that previous year. Employees must also use this opportunity to give feedback on how they can best perform and develop themselves. This Annual review period is an opportunity to communicate and work together to build unity in the workplace. Realistic plans may be made for the employee’s development and growth.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The supervisor and the employee review the job description standards and compare the employee’s accomplishments against the standards set. The data comes from established performance metrics, employee self-assessment and customer or coworker feedback from daily activities.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  There are five levels of the performance rating. Outstanding is the highest rating. To get an outstanding rating means the employees contribution to the business far exceeds requirements. The employee is personally committed to the company’s mission, values and goals at a consistent level. The employee takes the initiative to identify challenging work goals and tries to find solutions. The employee’s quality is never a question, even under challenging situations.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The next rating is an excellent rating. The employee who receives an excellent rating produces more than required. The employee takes the initiative in developing and finding challenging work goals. Each responsibility is finished with quality and on time. That employee needs little direction or supervision. The employee thinks beyond the details of the job and contributes to the objectives of the department. All of the employee’s decisions and actions are higher than expectations.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The next level of rating is commendable. This employee performs what is expected of an experienced individual in the department. The employee’s errors are minimal and they have learned from their mistakes, some improvements from them are expected. They schedule projects and work on problems in an orderly manner. They understand suggestions and recommendatio... ...sp;These conditions do not empower employees. Employees are told what to do and they have a small amount of insight on what their actions are contributing to. Employees feel powerless; we are reluctant to take the initiative for fear of doing the wrong thing. We do our jobs as told, and have little sense of personal responsibility or commitment. Our goals are set for what is measurable rather than what goals are important. We have very few interactions with our manager over the course of the year to discuss how things our going. Employees have lack of information about the company’s goals. We are discouraged from asking for help or coaching assistance from our supervisor. Our goals are assigned to us without mutual agreement.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  We must change the organization to give employees the understanding for how our work contributes to the organization. Employee’s goals are achieved by our freedom to choose the best way to take on these goals. Supervisors must be supportive and actively coach employees. There must be minimum supervisor control and interests of discovering better ways of working. When employees discover this, it will be reflected in our reviews.

Five ways to kill a man Essay

In Wilfred Owen’s poem â€Å"Dulce et Decorum Est,† the narrator is Owen himself. The story tells the tale of one particular day when he has to watch one of his fellow soldiers gruesomely suffocate to death from inhalation of chlorine gas. Owen paints the soldiers as not necessarily heroic, but rather more desperate and terrified, â€Å"like old beggars under sacks,† (Owen line 1), also â€Å"coughing like hags† (Owen line 2). I feel that Owen portrays his fellow soldiers this way to try and illustrate the point that these people are terribly afraid of death and are faced with it every day they live. They also aren’t this indestructible super human killing machine, but rather a group of terrified 20 year olds who just want to go home. Owen speaks about the need to press on regardless of how bad it gets: â€Å"But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind,† (Owen line 6). This illustrates how bad the circumstances are for the soldiers fi ghting, and goes against the idealistic image of what a battle should look like or how a soldier should appear after a battle. The way Owen tells this story shows that his view of the war was that the soldiers have no comprehension of a righteous cause or a meaning behind their sacrifice. Specifically, the rhyming, tone, and imagery will all help to demonstrate that point. Owen uses the rhyming in the poem to help reflect his own personal beliefs about war onto the reader. The rhymes that Owen chooses are particularly useful for finding out what his message to the reader here is. He uses rhymes such as â€Å"sludge – trudge† (Owen lines 2 and 4), â€Å"blind – behind† (Owen lines 6 and 8), â€Å"fumbling – stumbling† (Owen lines 9 and 11), and perhaps the rhyme that is most telling to Owen’s underwriting theme is when he rhymes â€Å"drowning – drowning† (Owen lines 14 and 16). This last rhyme using the anaphora is chosen solely for the purpose of drawing the reader’s attention to the word and further emphasizing the vividness of which Owen witnessed a friend of his suffocate in front of him, and then they had to carry his corpse with them along their travels. The repetition of the word makes it more important and draws more attention to it. The rhyme scheme is regular a,b,a,b,c,d,c, d,e,f,e,f and the lines are end-stopped. Furthermore, the sounds themselves of the rhymes are cacophonous in nature and are helpful for showing the reader Owen’s emotional mindset at the time  this is all happening. The short vowel sounds in the rhymes of sludge – trudge (Owen lines 2 and 4), fumbling – stumbling (Owen lines 9 and 11), and blood – cud (Owen lines 21 and 23) are meant to help portray a somber mood void of any heroic undertones. This is again done for the purpose of helping to show these soldiers as lost, terrified young men struggling to survive, and not fighting for glory or love of one’s nation. The shortness of the rhymes of sludge and trudge gives the reader an idea of the hurried pace at which the soldiers are walking and talking. According to Daniel Moran, † -â€Å"trudges† along in the reader’s ear as the men â€Å"trudge† toward their unattainable relief. (Also note the rhyming of â€Å"trudge† with â€Å"sludge†, which con nects the action of trudging with the terrain.)† (Moran). Moran here makes the case that Owen is attempting to tie the setting into the action and connect the two, thus aiding the mental picture the reader has of the scene at hand. The tone can also be analyzed to sense the author’s negative outlook on war. Focusing on the two line stanza in the middle of the poem where Owen describes the death of his maskless comrade in the gas attack is a prime example. â€Å"In all my dreams, before my helpless sight. He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.† (Owen lines 15 and 16). According to John Hughes, a writer for The Explicator, â€Å"This recurrent nightmare is the climax of the poem’s tendency, in its first half, toward an unfolding of the poet’s interiority, his personal responses, amid the texture of events it describes. So, from the opening line, the impersonal world of high literary culture, patriotism, and upstanding soldierly endeavor conjured in the title (and to a degree in the early dedication) yields with a jolt to the antithetical world notated with such feeling in the first stanza.† (Hughes). Basically Hughes is stating that in his opinion the entire poem is tak ing place inside Owen’s nightmares while he sleeps at night after the war is over. And in line 15 and 16 Owen is stating how he is forever tormented by the mental image of his fellow soldier and friend in combat being killed in front of his eyes. This work also can be said to contain a great deal of imagery for the reader to delve into. Each one providing a horrible, gruesome firsthand look into  what it would have been like to see the battle of World War 1 from the front lines. In lines 4-6, Owen writes â€Å"And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;† (Owen lines 4-6). These lines early on in the poem give the reader a sense of what the terrain is like and what the men are experiencing just to stay alive. The soldiers are not being portrayed as conquering heroes riding across the countryside, defeating all you stand in their path, as such was the popular way to write war poetry at the time Dulce et Decorum Est was written. According to Kimberly Lutz writing for Poetry for Students, â€Å"This sensibility of the cost of war to both the dead and surviving soldier stands in stark contrast to the types of poetry with which Owen’s readers would have been familiar. Take for instance, â€Å"The Charge of the Light Brigade,† a famous poem by the Victorian era’s most famous poet (and poet laureate) Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Written in 1854 in response to a newspaper account of a military mistake that sent hundreds of men to die battling the Russians in the Crimean War, the poem acknowledges the awful cost of war. However, the reader learns only that â€Å"horse and hero fell.† The bloodshed, the smells, the confusion that go along with battle are not depicted.† (Lutz). This seems to be yet another reason for Owen feeling the need to portray his side of the story of war ever so vividly. The popular thing at the time was for poets to paint war in a positive light and fail to mention the horrible aspects of it. Owen saw these things firsthand and wasn’t going to remain silent about them. â€Å"Dulce et Decorum Est† is a powerful work by a very young Wilfred Owen. He is speaking from experience and first hand traumas which help add relevancy to the work. The meter was regular for the most part, helping to echo the military uniformity of march and speech. While also irregular at other times of high excitement and scramble, showing that even if you have been conditioned to behave a certain way, your survival instincts take hold once your life depends on it. The work isn’t quite as polished as it could have been, perhaps it could have benefited from some final edits. However, Owen wasn’t just writing this from afar, he was involved in battle, and he believed what he was saying. This can be proven by the fact that Wilfred Owen was killed on the battlefield with 1 week remaining in World War.

4 Senses Animals Have That Humans Dont

Radar guns, magnetic compasses, and infrared detectors are all man-made inventions that enable humans to stretch beyond the five natural senses of sight, taste, smell, feel, and hearing. But  these gadgets are far from original. Evolution equipped some animals with these extra senses millions of years before humans evolved. Echolocation Toothed whales (a family of marine mammals that includes dolphins), bats, and some ground- and tree-dwelling shrews use echolocation to navigate their surroundings. These animals emit  high-frequency sound pulses, either very high-pitched to human ears or completely inaudible, and then detect the echoes produced by those sounds. Special ear and brain adaptations enable these animals to build three-dimensional pictures of their surroundings. Bats, for example, have enlarged ear flaps that gather and direct sound toward their thin, super-sensitive eardrums. Infrared and Ultraviolet Vision Rattlesnakes and other pit vipers use their eyes to see during the day, like most other vertebrate animals. But at night, these reptiles employ infrared sensory organs to detect and hunt warm-blooded prey that would otherwise be completely invisible. These infrared eyes are cup-like structures that form crude images as infrared radiation hits a heat-sensitive retina. Some animals, including eagles, hedgehogs, and shrimp, can also see into the lower reaches of the ultraviolet spectrum. Human beings are unable to see either infrared or ultraviolet light with the naked eye. Electric Sense The omnipresent electric fields produced by some animals function like senses. Electric eels and some species of rays have modified muscle cells that produce electric charges strong enough to shock  and sometimes kill their prey. Other fish (including many sharks) use weaker electric fields to help them navigate murky waters, home in on prey or monitor their surroundings. For instance, bony fish (and some frogs) possess lateral lines on either side of their bodies, a row of sensory pores in the skin that detect electrical currents in the water. Magnetic Sense The flow of molten material in the earths core and the flow of ions in the earths atmosphere generate a magnetic field that surrounds the planet. Just as compasses point humans toward magnetic north, animals possessing a magnetic sense can orient themselves in specific directions and navigate long distances. Behavioral studies have revealed that animals as diverse as honey bees, sharks, sea turtles, rays, homing pigeons, migratory birds, tuna, and salmon all have magnetic senses. Unfortunately, the details about how these animals actually sense the earths magnetic field are not yet known. One clue may be small deposits of magnetite in these animals nervous systems. These magnet-like crystals align themselves with the earths magnetic fields and may act like microscopic compass needles.   Edited by Bob Strauss