Father and children Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Father and children - Essay Example n fathers and children depicted in the novel goes far beyond family ties - it is a social dispute of the old nobility and aristocracy, and the young revolutionary-democratic intellectuals. In particular, the question of fathers and children’s comprehension is revealed in the novel through the relationship of a young nihilist Bazarov with a representative of the nobility Pavel Kirsanov, as well as with his parents, and within the family of Kirsanov. As we can see the central point of contradictory and colliding views of the characters becomes Bazarov’s denial of everything that seems to be essential for the â€Å"fathers†. He does not just refuse to accept the knowledge of another generation but insists that there is a need to clear some beliefs for flourishing of his contemporaries. This is the moment which does not allow the representatives of so-called old school to compose, for it gainsays all the postulates they have believed all their lives. So Turgenev shows efforts to defend a particular opinion of both sides of the conflict. The problem of fathers and children stimulates the constant thinking over the mentioned issue of non-compliance betw een generations. The writer persistently rises the burning for his time issue, and the whole story begins from the speaking title of the novel. So what is presented in the novel’s title in verbal terms? The expression â€Å"Fathers and Sons† in the context of the work is ambiguous. Bazarov and Arkady’s fathers participate in the plot. Direct family ties of other characters are also mentioned. However, the heading of the work is metaphoric, for the older generation can be understood under the â€Å"fathers† that is followed by the young one, that is, â€Å"sons†. The title has an important organizing feature. The theme of â€Å"fathers† and â€Å"children† literally permeates the entire narrative. At the very beginning Nikolai Kirsanov is presented to readers as a father waiting for his son Arkady. It is mentioned in

Party Press Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Party Press - Essay Example Mass media refers to the transfer of knowledge and information to an unlimited mass audience. Phones or cell phones may not usually be considered as a mass medium; this is because telephones are the device meant for only two way communication between two or more than two people. Previously there have been only six categories of mass media; that is, Print, Recordings, Cinemas, Radio, Television and the Internet. Now a new category has been introduced in the mass media, which are cell phones. Cell phones are now being considered as the seventh mass media channel; also called as digital media. Cell phones are the only mass media that are always carried by the user. They also provide nearly 100% accuracy regarding the audience and that every content that has ever passed through the device could be traced back; whether it is calls, messages, or any other media content such as movies, videos, or music. In ancient times the Church was the sole source of information for the people. The Churc h had the complete power over the minds of the citizens and was very powerful. They were the ones responsible to disintegrate the information in whatever form and style that suits them. After the Gutenberg’s invention of metal movable type, books became widely available. They were then the source of knowledge and information. ... The 1960s saw the first innovation in the form of open reel audio tapes; then came the C-cassettes and music cartridges in the 1970s and later in 1990s the MP3 files were the new digital storage medium for music. The records were not only limited to music storage but also provided storage for videos and movies. In the 1970s, movies started appearing in video cassettes. Later recording also expanded to include categories such as computer programs, video games and TV shows. Due to these advancements the music industry also evolved to include the pop music, besides the orchestra. Cinemas were introduced in the 1910s as the third mass media channel. Watching a movie in cinemas is an exhilarating experience for many. Movies were the first mass media that involved moving images and pictures. The visual effect they created was unmatched by any other mass media. At first movies were thought as means that could diminish the value of books. But this was not the case. Some of the best sellers w ere converted into movies, while in other cases the best of the Hollywood movies were written in print. Not only books and novels, but comics were also made into super-hit films, such as Superman, Batman, and Spiderman etc. The radio became the next mass media. With the invention of radio, came a concept of broadcast schedule and audience were required to listen to the shows when they were aired, and not just as they wished; as was the case in all the previous mass medias. It became the channel for commercial communication and brought its audience a wide range consisting of news, information, dramas, music, debate etc. Radio first brought the concept of breaking news; disseminating news and information as it is happening. Radios were sustained by

Online Direct Competition Essay Example for Free

Online Direct Competition Essay The online airline ticket market is rife with cut-throat competition from a number of sources, including travel agencies, wholesalers and Internet travel agents such as Microsofts Expedia.com and CNNs BizTravel.com.  US-Airlines set competition for Priceline.com Six of the key US-Aircarriers have agreed to step up to the competition set by Priceline.com in the segment of consumer-self-pricing. United Airlines, American Airlines, Northwest, Continental, America West and US Airways will be selling their free allotments under www. hotwire.com.  Similar to Priceline.com, travellers will be quoting the rate at which they wish to travel and according to availability can be granted their requested price.  Increasing Competition  Priceline.com, which has patented several of its business models, faces increasing competition on multiple fronts. While companies like Budget Rent A Car have licensed one of priceline.coms business models, Microsoft has launched a name-your-price service for hotel rooms on its Expedia site. Priceline.com has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft.  In addition to worrying about protecting its business model, the consolidation of the online travel market could lead to increased competition for priceline.com. The upcoming merger of Preview Travel and Travelocity.com will create an online travel powerhouse, whose allies include America Online and Yahoo!. Both industry giants will have a stake in the new venture.  Intended as a comeback directed at its competitors, Priceline.com is focusing upon licensing its business models to other companies in other industries. For example, Alliance Mortgage will license the name-your-price business model and team up with priceline.com to launch an online mortgage service known as PricelineMortgage. The chart below shows the sites that customers visit both before and after visiting Priceline.com  All sorts of competing sites figure in the before and after surfing list above. These range from specific airline websites like www.delta.com to competing full-service travel sites like www.orbitz.com and www.expedia.com. A competitive site to note is www.hotwire.com as it figures prominently in both lists and is a site that drives customers to Priceline.com. Although it is compelling to see how competitors figure in the pre and post site visit categories, it is even more interesting to look at a typical Path that visitors take through Priceline.coms site. This path includes visits to off-site destinations. The figure below shows a typical path a visitor takes through the site and the sites they visit that are off-site  According to this path analysis, a visitor visits priceline.com, leaves the site and returns to the site to either continue surfing or make a purchase. Note the abundance of competing sites that visitors travel to: www.skyauction.com, www.expedia.com, www.orbitz.com, www.hotwire.com and also to banks perhaps to verify their account balances before booking their vacation. Legal issues: With the Name Your Own Price services, priceline.com and pricelinemortgage are the leaders in the field of electronic commerce and true innovators in the way people buy the things they need. They are very adamant about keeping customers privacy online. This is represented in their clearly displayed privacy policy and privacy promise.5 The information collected and stored by Priceline.com includes names, addresses, credit card numbers and other personally-identifying information of customers of the Site who make purchase requests. This information is saved in a secure environment and is kept in records to make it easier for customers to use the services on return visits. Priceline.com use cookies technology. Cookies are small bits of code, usually stored on a users computer hard drive, which enable a Web site to personalize itself for each user. They use cookies to reduce the time it takes for customers to submit purchase requests. No third party has access to the information they collect this way. Priceline.com also have a disable cookies button which will turn them off. Information collected by priceline.com or pricelinemortgage is stored in a single, secure database, accessible only by priceline.com and pricelinemortgage. Names, addresss, credit card numbers or any other personally-identifying information are not revealed to any participating seller, manufacturer, retailer, or sponsor of priceline.com. These are collectively referred to as Providers, unless a customer affirmatively respond to the Providers offer and/or the Provider agrees to provide the product or service the customer requested at a specified price.  From time to time, priceline.com or pricelinemortgage also contact customers to request feedback on their experience using the Site, to assist Priceline in improving the Site, or to offer special savings or promotions to customers. Priceline.com also offer an opt-out option on receiving these notices. Customers are also able to access and change any personal information kept by Priceline. To protect customers privacy and security, they verify your identity before granting access or making changes to your personally-identifying information. If you have registered your profile on any of the services available on their Site from priceline.com or pricelinemortgage, your e-mail address and password are required in order to access your profile information. Trade marks A trademark includes any word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination, used, or intended to be used, in commerce to identify and distinguish the goods of one manufacturer or seller from goods manufactured or sold by others, and to indicate the source of the goods. In short, a trademark is a brand name.  Pricelines patent covers its marketing system as embodied in a computer. The claims, which define what the patent covers, recite a method for using a computer to facilitate a transaction between a buyer and seller. The buyer inputs a conditional purchase offer into the computer and a payment identifier, such as a credit card number. The computer outputs the purchase offer to sellers. A seller can then input an acceptance, at which time the payment is made using the payment identifier. There are also claims for an apparatus that can perform the same functions. At a first pass, it appears that much of electronic commerce could fit within Pricelines patent. If so, Priceline could extract a royalty for use of its patent on all commerce over the Internet or over any other computer system including proprietary systems. This patent could severely limit the use of electronic commerce.  Priceline (www.priceline.com) filed its application in 1996, as electronic commerce was just starting to grow. Now, when electronic commerce is more firmly entrenched, the patent is granted, and that award threatens to thwart the growth of electronic commerce.  There are many issues yet to be explored with respect to Pricelines patent. To appreciate them, it helps to understand how the Patent Office could issue a patent on a system that is little more than business relationships communicated using a computer. Until recently such a patent would have been rejected. Priceline.com has had a hard time defending itself within this type of market against possible threats of infringement on there patents or trademarks.  An example of this is major dot-com, Pannell-Christ Inc., an Indiana-based provider of consulting and training services to facing accusations of hijacking intellectual property. Sued by Priceline.com the firm that provides name your own price services for hotels, car-hire and airline tickets. According to the, Pannell-Christ is disputing Pricelines use of the phrases Name Your Price and Name Your Own Price.  Pannell-Christ maintains it used the Name Your Price! trademark as far back as 1997. However, the company had not filed for a trademark on the phrase until several months after priceline.com had begun using the slogan in 1998. The U.S. Trademark Office granted Pannell-Christ federal registration of the mark on February 1, 2000.

Hans Asperger Overview

Hans Asperger Overview What Sister Viktorine Knew Neurotribes, neuodiversity, steve sibberman, autism In 1931, Gottfried K. was brought to the Childrens Clinic at the University Hospital in Vienna by his grandmother for an examination. He was nine and a half years old, but so physically uncoordinated that Anne Weiss, a young psychologist working at the clinic, assumed that he was feebleminded. His grandmother told Weiss that she too was often confused by his behavior, but Gottfried was clever and smart. Weiss listened carefully, taking notes. His grandmother had brought him to the right place. She looked forward to discussing this case with her colleagues, especially Hans Asperger, the new pediatrician who seemed to take a special interest in gifted, sensitive children. Hans Asperger, the eldest of three boys, was born in Austria in 1906. But his brothers died young, and he became the only child. In his early life, he joined a group of young people who called themselves the Wandering Scholars, heading off on month long hiking trips to read poetry aloud in the wilderness. He met his wife-to-be, Hanna Kalmon, on one of these trips. After graduating from the University of Vienna, Asperger was assigned by his mentor, Franz Hamburger, to the Childrens Clinic at the University Hospital. The University Hospital was one of the most prestigious hospitals in the city. Doctors from all over Europe came to the city to observe surgeries in vast operating theaters and consult with the leading experts in the field. Since the mid 1910s, Vienna had hosted ongoing salons where physicians and scientists mingled with artists and musicians to discuss politics, art, science, and philosophy. Much of this cultural ferment originated in Viennas lively Jewish community, which dated back to the 12th century. In the years after the World War I, one in five inhabitants of the city was Jews, as were many of the faculty members who taught at the university. The Childrens Clinic was founded by a physician and social reformer named Erwin Lazar. By combining elements of medicine, psychology, and progressive pedagogy, Lazar developed an approach to helping children attain their potential based on the 19th century concept of Heilpà ¤dagogik, therapeutic education. The tight-knit staff at the special-education unit, known as the Heilpà ¤dagogik Station, included Asperger, Weiss, psychiatrist Georg Frankl, psychologist Josef Feldner, and a nun named Sister Viktorine Zak. Their approach to diagnosis was based on a method of intensive observation developed by Lazar. Lazar believed a childs true condition could only be measured by watching the child in the course of his or her daily life. Putting children through a battery of tests was not enough. No one mastered this intimate style of observation better than Georg Frankl, who had become Aspergers chief diagnostician. On his first day at the hospital, Gottfried did nothing but cried. But he adapted to his new life gradually. The reliable rhythms of the daily schedule seemed to comfort him. As Weiss got to know him better, she came to see the nine-year-old Gottfried was precociously smart, but he was unaware of things that most kids know instinctively. He didnt know how to play the games around him to his own advantage. Weiss published her in-depth case study of Gottfried in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry in 1935 after she emigrated to America in 1934. *** Over the course of a decade, Asperger and his staff examined over two hundred children who displayed the same cluster of social awkwardness, precocious abilities, and fascination with rules, laws, and schedules. They also saw several teenagers and adults who fit the same profile. Asperger believed they represented a distinct syndrome that was not at all rare but had somehow escaped the notice of his predecessors. In fact a Russian psychiatrist named Grunia Sukhareva had written about a similar group of young people with prodigious abilities in art and music two decades earlier in Moscow. She believed her patients had a disorder resembled schizophrenia with an essential difference. While adult schizophrenics always deteriorated, her patients often made dramatic improvements. She called this syndrome schizoid personality disorder. Though Asperger was unaware of Sukharevas work, he noted his patients condition was similar to the condition referred to as autistic thinking by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. In 1908, Bleuler used the term autistic to describe a schizophrenic patient who had withdrawn into his own world. Asperger used the term autistic psychopathy to describe their condition. In a postgraduate thesis, Asperger described   prototypical cases named Fritz V., Harro L., Ernst K,. And Hellmuth L. Asperger was struck by these boys natural aptitude for science. He recognized that his patients blatant disregard for authority could be developed into the skepticism indispensable to any scientist. He called this distinctive cluster of aptitudes, attitudes, skills, and abilities autistic intelligence. His job as the staff of the Heilpà ¤dagogik Station was to teach these kids how to put their autistic intelligence to work. He called them his little professors. Asperger noted that many of these kids fathers and grandfathers were engineers and scientists, showing that the disorder might be genetic. But he cautioned that it would be foolish to search for a single gene responsible for such a complex range of behaviors and traits as these conditions were undoubtedly polygenetic. When Asperger submitted his thesis to Hamburger in 1943, the Nazis had occupied Austria five years earlier. Of the 200 senior members of the medical faculty, fewer than 50 remained. Aspergers colleagues, Anni Weiss and Georg Frankl, had fled the country, and many others were in exile, imprisoned in concentration camps, or dead of suicide.   Asperger was speaking out for the sake of children who had not yet been murdered by a monstrous idea of eugenics imported from America. *** The word eugenics (which means well-born) was coined in 1887 by a British named Francis Galton, the younger half cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton distinguished himself by his ability to recognize patterns. He popularized the notion of regression toward the mean in statistical analysis and the use of fingerprints in the science of forensics. Eugenics policies were first implemented in the United States. In 1909, the state of California passed a law granting public-health officials the right to sterilize convicts and the mental patients in California. Thirty other states had passed similar laws, and a wave of sterilization swept through asylums and prisons coast to coast. In October 1921, the Second International Congress of Eugenics was held as a gala week long event at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, New York. The event was sponsored by the nations most prestigious museums and promoted in journals like Science and the Scientific Monthly. In the welcome address to the congress, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museums president, urged his fellow scientists to enlighten government in the prevention of the spread and multiplication of worthless members of society, the spread of feebleemindedness, of idiocy, and of all moral and intellectual as well as physical diseases. As influential as they were at home, American eugenicists received an even warmer welcome in Germany. A 1913 textbook by Geza von Hoffman called Die Rassenhygiene in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (Racial Hygiene in the United States) became the seminal guide to applied eugenics students in Germany. Incarcerated in the Landsberg Fortress in 1924, Adolf Hitler learned about eugenics from The Passing of the Great Race, written by a Yale graduate named Madison Grant. Grant mentioned that Galtons strategies for encouraging men and women of the genius-producing classes to mate would not stop the rising tide of idiocracy. He directed his fellow eugenicists to develop more expeditious means of eliminating the weak and the unfit. It was music to Hitlers ears. From his prison in Landsberg, Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to his deputy Rudolf Hess saying that as a compassionate defense of the lives of children yet unborn, the future Fà ¼hrer put forced sterilization at the core of his vision of a new society. As the National Socialist party rose to power in the 1930s, the body of American eugenic law became the blueprint for Nazi policies to defend Aryan from negative genetic influences. Unlike their American counterparts, German eugenicists did not plan to limit their efforts to asylums, prisons, and mental institutions. Instead, they aimed to carry out the implications of eugenic theory to their fullest extent. In July 1933, they enacted the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring to sterilize any German citizen who showed signs of schizophrenia, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, Huntingtons disease, inherited blindness or deafness, or epilepsy. In June 1934, the Nazis assassinated the Fascist Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss and replaced him with a pro-German and anti-Semitic successor. By 1935, a massive exodus from Austria was under way, prompted by new laws stripping Jews of property, jobs, and basic rights of citizenship. Anni Weiss was the first of Aspergers team to leave, arriving in America in 1934. The clinics gifted diagnostician, Georg Frankl, left in 1937, emigrating to Maryland with the aid of a Jewish doctor who had left Austria years earlier. On March 12, 1938, the day of the Anschluss, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. Gangs of civilians calling themselves Rolllkommandos looted department stores and shops in the Jewish quarter, often assisted by the police. Within weeks, the University of Vienna was transformed into the intellectual center of an academic movement to put racial improvement and racial research at the top of the medical agenda. Before the Anschluss, more than 5,000 physicians were practicing in Vienna, by the fall of 1938, less than 750 would remain. Many former professors at the university died in concentration camps. Others took their own lives. In 1938, Aspergers mentor Franz Hamburger gave a lecture to the society titled National Socialism and Medicine, affirming his support of the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring. On October 3, Asperger gave the first public talk on autism in history, in a lecture hall at the University Hospital. He launched into the case histories of his patients, putting his audience on familiar turf. Then he proposed a radical way of thinking about cognitive disabilities that is opposite to the dogma of racial hygiene. He said the therapeutic goal must be to teach the person how to bear their difficulties, not to eliminate them. Unfortunately, his strategy of accentuating the positive to his Nazi superiors by basing his four prototypical cases on his chatty little professors rather than on the more profoundly impaired children he saw in the institutes, would contribute to widespread confusion in the coming decades. On the basis of the four prototypical boys in Aspergers thesis, many clinicians assumed that he saw only highly functioning children in his practice, which ended up obscuring his most important discovery that autism was found in all age groups, and had a broad ra nge of manifestations. That night was the beginning of Yom Kippur, the most sacred day in the Jewish calendar. For the next 24 hours, storm troopers and Rollerkommandos made brutal raids in the Jewish neighborhood, stealing, burning, plundering, and killing. A month later, on Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, ninety-five synagogues in Vienna went up in flames, and Jewish homes, hospitals, schools, and shops were demolished with sledgehammers. In Berlin, more than thirty thousand Jews were dragged off to concentration camps. Meanwhile, Aspergers old colleague, Erwin Jekelius, was rising through the party ranks and became the director of Am Spiegelgrund (formerly known as Am Steinhof), the largest mental hospital in Vienna. He was later called the mass murderer of Steinhof when he helped the Nazis started their euthanasia program. In 1941, Hitler arrested him when he fell in love with Hitlers sister, Paula Hitler. After a brief stint in jail, Jekelius was drafted into the army and sent to the Russian front, where he was captured by the Red Army soldiers. He died at the age of forty, from cancer of the urinary bladder. *** On February 20, 1939, a boy named Gerhard Kretschmar was born in Leipzig. He was born blind and intellectually disabled, with one arm and only a partial leg, and he was prone to seizures. The birth of Gerhard Kretschmar provided an opportunity that Hitler had been waiting for since his days in Landsberg prison. Hitler dispatched his personal physician to examine the child and gave orders to carry out euthanasia. In August, the Committee for the Registration of Severe Hereditary Ailments issued a decree calling for the registration of all children born with congenital abnormalities of any kind. Doctors and midwives were required to report all cases to the committee. On September 1, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, officially starting World War II. In December, Hitler signed a secret order authorizing the creation of a program call Aktion T-4, short for Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of the Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care in Berlin. Closed door meetings were held throughout Germany and Austria to educate medical students about child euthanasia and T-4, which primarily targeted disabled adults. These programs became fertile ground for medical research that could not have been conducted in contexts where the patient was expected to live. More than 200,000 disabled children and adults were murdered through these official programs, and thousands more were killed by doctors and nurses on their own initiative. *** Asperger had never joined the Nazi party, according to his daughter, because of his loyalty to the Wandering Scholars. He refused to report his young patients to the Reich Committee, which created a dangerous situation for him. The Gestapo had showed up twice at his clinic to arrest him. Both times, Franz Hamburger had used his power as a prominent Nazi party member to intervene in his favor. By then, the Reich needed doctors on the front lines, and Asperger was drafted into the German army to serve as surgeon in a field hospital in Croatia. In September 1944, while Asperger was still in Croatia, the Allies bombed the Childrens Clinic, reducing the Heilpà ¤dagogik Station to rubble. As the ceiling gave way, Sister Viktorine threw her arms around one of her boys to protect him. They were buried together.

Free Essays - Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn :: Adventures Huckleberry Huck Finn Essays

Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn Essays In the Style of Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is said to be " the source from which all great American literature has stemmed" (Smith 127). This is in part attributed to Mark Twain's ability to use humor and satire, as well as incorporating serious subject matter into his work. Throughout the novel Twain takes on the serious issue of Huck's moral dilemma. One such issue which is particularly important in the novel is pointed out by Smith: He swears and smokes, but he has a set of ethics all his own. He believes that slaves belong to their rightful owners, yet in his honest gratitude toward his friend Jim, he helps him to escape the bonds of slavery. (181) This is something that tears at Huck throughout the novel and helps Twain show how complex Huck's character really is. "The recognition of complexity in Huck's character enabled Twain to do full justice to the conflict of vernacular values and the dominant culture" (Smith 125). Throughout Huck and Jim's adventures Huck is constantly playing practical jokes on Jim who seems to take them all in stride. But unknown to the reader Twain uses this aspect as another notch in Huck's moral 2 growth. Critic Frank McGill points this out: Huck's humble apology for the prank he plays on Jim in the fog is striking evidence of growth in Huck's moral insight. It leads naturally to the next chapter in which Twain causes Huck to face up for the first time to the fact he is helping a slave escape.(119) Another serious issue addressed by Twain is the abuse that was given to Huck by his father. Huck was kidnaped from the Widow Douglas by his father who had heard of his inheritance. Huck's father then took him to a cabin far away in the woods where he kept the boy a prisoner, beating him and half starving him. Twain tells us how Huck felt about life with his father: Before long Huck began to wonder why he had even liked living with the widow. With his father he could smoke and swear all he wanted, and his life would have been quiet pleasant if it had not been for all of the constant beatings.

Essay --

People all around the world have dreams of opening a business by creating a service, or product that is consumed by customers. Opening a new business requires a lot of hard work, patience, and extensive planning in order to operate a successful and legal business. However, before a person attempts to open a business, they must be sure they are up for the challenge, and they must be guaranteed that they have the right tools, personality, and experience to be a successful entrepreneur. Pick a mentor that owns a business who can give you advice. They can advise you of things you never knew, or things you should be aware of. Having this kind of person can save you a lot of trouble, and encourage you on the way. When opening a business you must have motivated, strong-minded, and goal oriented people that will provide the proper effort, planning, organization, funding, and structure of the entire business. To begin, creating a business plan for your company is essential for the future of y our company, and how it intends to create revenue 3-5 years down the line. It is the most important step, and the first step of beginning your business. A business plan is an essential roadmap for business success; it is a formal statement of a set of goals for your business, the reasons they should be completed, and how you plan on reaching those goals for further success. Your business plan should contain an executive summary. An executive summary includes what you want out of your business, where you plan on taking it, and why it will be successful. Also, if you are seeking financing to get a loan, an executive summary is a great way to grab the investor’s interest. It shows the investor your intensions with your business, the structured guidelines... ..., it must be registered with the appropriate authorities in order to maintain everything legal. This process is knows as â€Å"Doing Business as† (DBA name), which is a business that is named something different than your personal name. â€Å"For example, consider this scenario: John Smith sets up a painting business. Rather than operate under his own name, John instead chooses to name his business: â€Å"John Smith Painting†. This name is considered an assumed name and John will need to register it with the appropriate local government agency.† (www.sba.gov) Not all states require registering a business under â€Å"DBA†, which is why it is imperative to conduct precise research. Generally, every business must have an Employer identification number, which is used to identify the entity of a business. In order to be assigned an (EIN), you must apply for one. One way to apply is online.

Sex Change

The issue of sex (besides being a national obsession) is reasonably interesting from a psycoanalytic and existential perspective. A lot of what drives us is sexual energy (in line with what Freud told us). This so-called energy isn't explicit, but if you stop to think about questions like â€Å"Why am I here? † the â€Å"I† refers to you as a being and your sexuality is intimately tied with that. That â€Å"I† differs quite radically based on whether you are male or female. From a purely reductionist perspective, we are simply â€Å"ugly bags of mostly water† (to use a phrase from Star Trek) for our genes. The main reason we have sex is so our genes can last. The reason that there's sexual dimorphism (as opposed to having only females reproducing asexually) is so the gene pool can be enriched and it is thus capable of withstanding sudden changes in environment. This is actually the reason why there is sex in the first place, but having dimorphism means having a gene pool (thereby phenotype) that's more varied. The sociological perspective is somewhat interesting, but I think it's very irrelevant. In the end, the psychological (perhaps biological) dominates and therefore it it is the one I will consider. I have always wondered what it would be like to be female. I have wondered what it feels like to experience the menstrual cycle each month, to give birth, etc. My perception of what â€Å"I† consitutes would be radically different, I assume, notwithstanding the sociological consequences of becoming female. Human males and females are pretty different in their genetic makeup, given that an entire chromosome present in males is not present in females (and this doesn't even address the issue of expression). This brings us to the interesting fact that a lot of textbooks quote: chimpanzees and humans have DNA which is more than 99% identical. I wonder what the basis of their comparison is, but I digress†¦ A few decades ago, the above sort of thinking would've been mere speculation. Existentially speaking, we are prisoners of our bodies and this sucks. But we humans, being the creatures with superior intellect (yeah, right), have taken control of our environments and now it is possible to reasonably answer some of the questions I ask above in a physical sense. I read an article (parts of which are reproduced here without permission) about this dude who underwent a sex-change operation to be female because he wanted to be a lesbian. He was considered a womaniser, but he really identified with girls and expressed his sexuality by cross-dressing, etc. But after a while he began the process of change. He took females hormones—the most effective blend being premarin, derived from the urine of a pregnant mare—-to produce breasts, greater sub-surface fat, diminished muscle mass and less skin oil than a man normallly secretes. However, hormone treatments cannot shrink the Adam's apple, alter the hips, or raise the voice; male vocal chords are irreversibly developed by adolescence. He also underwent a lot of sartorial changes as well. Finally the irreversible operation known as â€Å"neo-colporrhaphy†, or â€Å"new vagina†, was performed on him. Contrary to popular myth, this two-and-a-half-hour surgery does not involve the penis being cut off. It is instead emptied of its spongy tissue and, like the finger of a rubber glove, turned inside out. The skin of the penis is gently pushed into a cavity formed by separating the lower abdominal muscle fibres, and this inside-out formation becomes the vaginal lining. The scrotum is used to create the frontal lips of the vagina; some of the skin at the base of the inverted penis can be surgically sculpted to look like a clitoris. Enough of the urethra is preserved from the penis to tunnel it under the tissue and place it in the female position. (There was a reasonable discussion during the Beer Social here regarding the logistics of such an operation—in particular the issue of providing lubrication was thought important. ) According to John Money, a professor emeritus at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who's an expert on this procedure (I can see a lot of demand for it): â€Å"The majority of transsexuals no longer have the spasmodic sensation that comes from squirting out semen. They have, instead, more of a spreading glow that is very satisfactory indeed. † This dude (now dudette) is also married with kids and they still call her â€Å"daddy†. She and her wife get along very well and they find the relationship physically very satisfying. While I share a lot of the philosophy that prompted him to become a transvestite, I doubt if I would undergo such an operation. Perhaps if technology advances so that it can be done in a â€Å"perfect† way, but approaches like this somehow don't grab me. This isn't the only way to go. If you're female, you might contemplate becoming male. I read a while ago about how a female had an operation to have a penis implant. Such physical moves seem very drastic to me, even given what I said earlier about sexual energy driving us. Is the artificial physical change necessary in order to experience a female (or male) existence? While the reason for contemplating what it is to be female is mostly curiousity, it might have to do with my nurture as well. It is said that transsexuals are unhappy with their identities and that they seek an out, but will a physical transformation help them? Shouldn't reconcilation of one's identity with one's self, and transcendence of that identity beyond societal norms, be enough? If you are Cartesian (and to some extent I am), it should be. Maybe Freud was completely off about the Oedipus complex—maybe it's something akin to the Penis Envy thing he proposed—there's some sort of a Vagina Envy among males. Thanks to modern science, this envy can be sated. The surgery costs about $11,000. If you include other plastic surgery such as a nose job and breast implants, the total cost is about $25,000. Now to raise some money†¦