Stop smoking Essay Example for Free

Stop smoking Essay Whether you’re a teen smoker or a lifetime pack-a-day smoker, quitting can be tough. But the more you learn about your options and prepare for quitting, the easier the process will be. With the right game plan tailored to your needs, you can break the addiction, manage your cravings, and join the millions of people who have kicked the habit for good.Smoking tobacco is both a physical addiction and a psychological habit. The nicotine from cigarettes provides a temporary, and addictive, high. Eliminating that regular fix of nicotine will cause your body to experience physical withdrawal symptoms and cravings. Because of nicotine’s â€Å"feel good† effect on the brain, you may also have become accustomed to smoking as a way of coping with stress, depression, anxiety, or even boredom. At the same time, the act of smoking is ingrained as a daily ritual. It may be an automatic response for you to smoke a cigarette with your morning coffee, while taking a break from work or school, or during your commute home at the end of a long day. Perhaps friends, family members, and colleagues smoke, and it has become part of the way you relate with them. To successfully quit smoking, you’ll need to address both the addiction and the habits and routines that go along with it.While some smokers successfully quit by going cold turkey, most people do better with a plan to keep themselves on track. A good plan addresses both the short-term challenge of quitting smoking and the long-term challenge of preventing relapse. It should also be tailored to your specific needs and smoking habits.

Female Genital Circumcision Essay -- female genital mutilation, FGM

The process of female genital mutilation (FGM) or female circumcision is served as a ritual practice in African countries and cultures, yet doctors are faced with an issue of illegality and immorality when African immigrants want these procedures performed here in the US. Ever since the beginning of religion, Jews, Muslims, and Christians have practiced male circumcision. This practice was scene as both sanitary, holy, and if done properly, harmless. This practice became so popular that civilization has carried out into current time, in which male circumcision still serves as a very popular procedure today. However what most Americans don’t know is that this procedure isn’t only done on males in other areas of the world. In countries like Africa, this procedure is also performed on fema...

Critical Analysis of the US Electoral College Essay

Electoral College is a term that refers to a selected group of representatives who perform the task of electing candidates for particular powerful offices such as presidents or church leaders. The selection process of electing candidates usually involves participants from different and competing political or religious entities. In the recent past, the Electoral College has been conspicuously practiced in electing the President of the United Stats and the Pope of the Catholic Church. It is the US Electoral College that has particularly drawn much concern as to its effectiveness and reliability in electing the president of the federal republic. This essay identifies some of the problems associated with the Electoral College and analyses the implications of the suggested modifications and alternatives. Analysis of the US Electoral College In the United States, the Electoral College system is used to elect the President from competing candidates from either the Republican Party, the Democratic Party of independent candidates. See more: how to write an analysis Rather than elect a president and a vice-president directly through national elections, the US conducts separate elections in all its 51 states during which the winner in each state is allocated the number of electoral votes proportional to the total representation of the state in Congress which has a total of 538 electoral voters. The winner of the presidential contests is expected to win a total of 270 votes of the Electoral College. Although the design of the Electoral College was clever and well intentioned, the system is susceptible to inherent flaws, some of which were resolved by constitutional amendments while others remain unresolved to date (Miller, 2008). Indeed, as Miller (2008) noted, the selection system established by the Electoral College has at its core the objective to foster fairness in the election of candidates in non-partisan environment, the motive was rendered irrelevant with the formation of competing political parties to compete in the selection process for the presidency. There is no doubt that the Electoral College system presents many challenges and problems to the fairness of the Presidential election in the US which include the problem of election reversal, problems with the voting power, partisan biasness, excessive focus on battleground states and the likelihood of pledge violations. One obvious problem that emerges from the Electoral College system is that the results of adding up the total electoral votes in the states may end up being different from adding up the total popular votes in all those states. Miller (2008) identifies the situation of the 2000 elections where the eventual winner, George W. had more electoral votes but less popular vote than the loser, Albert Gore. Moreover, in the event that there emerges a serious third party contestant, then it would be impossible for any candidate to garner the mandatory 270 electoral votes. According to the US constitution, the emergence of such an eventuality would require that the election process be taken to the Congress where voting should be conducted repeatedly until a victor emerges. Whereas there are concerns if the Electoral College represents adequate allocation of voting powers to all the states, there are also concerns as two whether the bipartisanship of the two-party system in the US is likely to represent non-partisan election of the president. Moreover, the focus of the Electoral College on the battleground states attracts disproportionate attention from parties and their candidates, effectively raising questions on the voting powers of the other states. Conclusion Some of the suggested proposals suggested include: (1) amending the constitution to empower the American with the constitutional rights to directly elect the president through a popular vote; (2) apportionment of the electoral votes fractionally according to the population of states so as to eliminate the problem of election reversal; and (3) equal apportionment of the electoral votes to all states to eliminate the problem of state voting powers. The proposal to amend the constitution so as to give American the constitutional rights to directly elect the president stands out as the most superior suggestion because it will eliminate all the problems and challenges associated with the Electoral College. References Miller, N. R. (2008). The US electoral college: Origins, transformation, problems and prospects. UMBC, retrieved on 22 May 2009 from: .

Definition and Examples of Universal Grammar

Universal grammar is the theoretical or hypothetical system of categories, operations, and principles shared by all human languages and considered to be innate. Since the 1980s, the term has often been capitalized.  The term is also known as  Universal Grammar Theory. Linguist  Noam Chomsky  explained,  [U]niversal grammar is taken to be the set of properties, conditions, or whatever that constitute the initial state of the language learner, hence the basis on which knowledge of a language develops. (Rules and Representations. Columbia University Press, 1980) The concept is connected to the ability  of  children to be able to learn their native language. Generative grammarians  believe that the human species evolved a genetically  universal grammar  common to all peoples and that the variability in modern languages is basically on the surface only, wrote  Michael Tomasello. (Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Harvard University Press, 2003) And Stephen Pinker elaborates thusly: In cracking the code of language...childrens minds must be constrained to pick out just the right kinds of generalizations from the  speech  around them....It is this line of reasoning that led Noam Chomsky to propose that  language acquisition  in children is the key to understanding the nature of  language,  and that children must be equipped with an innate  Universal Grammar: a set of plans for the grammatical machinery that powers all human languages. This idea sounds more controversial than it is (or at least more controversial than it should be) because the logic of  induction  mandates that children make  some  assumptions about how language works in order for them to succeed at learning a language at all. The only real controversy is what these assumptions consist of: a blueprint for a specific kind of rule system, a set of abstract principles, or a mechanism for finding simple patterns (which might also be used in learning things other than language). ( The Stuff of Thought. Viking, 2007) Universal grammar is not  to be confused with universal language, noted Elena Lombardi, or with the  deep structure of language, or even with grammar itself (The Syntax of Desire, 2007).  As Chomsky has observed, [U]niversal grammar is not  a grammar, but rather a theory of grammars, a kind of metatheory or schematism for grammar (Language and Responsibility, 1979). History and Background The concept of a  universal grammar  (UG) has been traced to the observation of Roger Bacon, a 13th-century Franciscan friar, and philosopher, that all languages are built upon a common grammar. The expression was popularized in the 1950s and 1960s by Chomsky and other linguists. Components that are considered to be universal include the notion that words can be classified into different groups, such as being nouns or verbs and that sentences follow a particular structure. Sentence structures may be different between languages, but each language has some kind of framework so that speakers can understand each other vs. speaking gibberish. Grammar rules, borrowed words, or idioms of a particular language by definition are not universal grammar. Challenges and Criticisms Of course, any theory in an academic setting will have challenges, comments, and criticisms by others in the field; such as it is with peer review and the academic world, where people build on the body of knowledge through writing academic papers and publishing their opinions. Swarthmore College linguist K. David Harrison noted in The Economist,  I and many fellow linguists would estimate that we only have a detailed scientific description of something like 10% to 15% of the worlds languages, and for 85% we have no real documentation at all. Thus it seems premature to begin constructing grand theories of universal grammar. If we want to understand universals, we must first know the particulars. (Seven Questions for K. David Harrison. Nov. 23, 2010) And Jeff Mielke finds some aspects of  universal  grammar theory to be illogical: [T]he  phonetic  motivation for  Universal Grammar is extremely  weak. Perhaps the most compelling case that can be made is that phonetics, like  semantics, is part of the grammar and that there is an implicit assumption that if  the syntax  is rooted in Universal Grammar, the rest should be too. Most of the evidence for UG is not related to  phonology, and phonology has more of a guilt-by-association status with respect to innateness. (The Emergence of Distinctive Features. Oxford University Press, 2008) Iain McGilchrist disagrees with Pinkner and took the side of children learning a language just through imitation, which is a behaviorist approach, as opposed to the Chomsky theory of the poverty of the stimulus:   [I]t is uncontroversial that the existence of a universal grammar such as Chomsky conceived it is highly debatable. It remains remarkably speculative 50 years after he posited it, and is disputed by many important names in the field of linguistics. And some of the facts are hard to square with it. Languages across the world, it turns out, use a very wide variety of syntax to structure sentences. But more importantly, the theory of universal grammar is not convincingly compatible with the process revealed by developmental psychology, whereby children actually acquire language in the real world. Children certainly evince a remarkable ability to grasp spontaneously the conceptual and psycholinguistic shapes of speech, but they do so in a far more holistic, than analytic, way. They are astonishingly good imitators—note, not copying machines, but imitators. (The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press, 2009)