Saturday, May 23, 2020

What Date Is Earth Week How to Celebrate

Earth Day is April 22nd, but many people extend the celebration to make it Earth Week. Earth Week usually runs from April 16th to Earth Day, April 22nd. The extended time allows students to spend more time learning about the environment and the problems we face. Sometimes when Earth Day falls in the middle of the week, people chose to select that Sunday through Saturday to observe the holiday. How to Celebrate Earth Week What can you do with Earth Week? Make a difference! Try making a small change that will benefit the environment. Keep at it all week so that by the time Earth Day arrives it might become a lifelong habit. Here are ideas for ways to celebrate Earth Week: Use the full week. Start by identifying an environmental concern in your home or community. Make a plan to improve the situation. Ask yourself what you can do. Can you do it by yourself or do you need help from friends or permission from someone? Put your plan into action, get out there, and make a change.​Get educated. Set aside time during Earth Week to read up on ecology and the environment. Learn how to save energy and about what you can recycle.Start a journal to track changes you make and the impact they make. For example, how much trash did you take out last week? Start recycling and choosing products that dont waste packaging, grow some of your own food, compost what you can. How much does that impact your trash? Did you make energy efficiency change? How did that affect your utility bills from one month to the next?Identify areas where you and your family are wasteful. How can you reduce the waste? Do you have items you no longer use that you could donate to other peo ple? Once you find a problem, find a solution and act on it.Turn down the thermostat on your water heater. Even a couple of degrees makes a big difference in energy consumption. Similarly, adjusting your home thermostat up a degree in the summer or down a degree in the winter wont really affect your comfort, but will save energy.If you water your lawn, plan to water it in the early morning to make the best use of the resource. Consider ways to make your yard greener. This has nothing to do with the color of grass and everything to do with reducing the energy required for upkeep and finding ways to use the space outside your home to enhance the environment. Adding trees, for example, can dramatically affect heating and cooling costs and lower the amount of water needed to keep grass healthy.Replace light bulbs with ones that are energy efficient. Even if you can only switch out one bulb, it can save energy.Start composting or start a garden.Plant a tree!Lend a helping hand. Volunteer to help recycle or pick up litter. Of course, what matters is not  when  you celebrate Earth Week, but  that  you celebrate Earth Week! Some countries turn this into a month-long celebration, so there is Earth Month rather than just Earth Day or Earth Week. Sources Bastian, Jonathan (April 21, 2017). How the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill sparked Earth Day. KCRW.  Wright, Sylvia (July 1980). Canadas First Earth Day Scheduled for Sept. 11.  The Kingston Whig Standard.

Monday, May 11, 2020

The Continuous Injustice And Discrimination Have Served

The continuous injustice and discrimination have served as a motivation for African Americans to create a voice for themselves. Although protests could be visualized as marches and sit-ins, they were not limited to these methods. African American writers made sure to create a space for themselves to protest and convince with their words and emotions put into their pieces.African American literature comprises of the African American culture itself. Works that fall into this genre focus on the hardships that African-American have and continue to face. These works are not restricted to the issue of slavery, although it may be incorporated with other important elements in a piece. In fact, some writers in this genre, while allowing for slavery†¦show more content†¦Hurston uses the themes of individuality, along with identity, to create a story of independence and freedom. To look further into the theme of individuality, Hurston uses many instances that set the main character, Ja nie, apart from others and deny her conformity with social norms. To explain, Janie in the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, demonstrates that her individuality can be found through redefining her morals and values. Janie marries three different men, and with each, she has a different experience that spurs her to reflect on herself and what she truly believes. Her first marriage to Logan Killicks, a wealthy farmer, is forced by her grandmother. Janie’s grandmother is one of the many characters that demonstrates the submission to the rules and standards of the dominant, white societal rules and standards. For example, after Janie visits her grandmother and tells her that she does not love Logan, her grandmother tells her, â€Å"You come head wid yo’ mouf full foolishness on uh busy day. Heah you got uh prop tuh lean on all yo’ bawn days, and big protection, and everybody got tuh tip dey hat tuh you and call you Mis’ Killicks, an you come worryinâ€℠¢ me ‘bout love† (Hurston 23). Her grandmother dismisses Janie’s feelings about love. Her grandmother believes that love will eventually come, but the status and wealth are what are important. Janie is entrapped, living how her grandmother wishes her to ratherShow MoreRelatedThe Nineteen Sixties Riots: Disasters Waiting to Happen Essay843 Words   |  4 Pagesjust waiting for a crack to burst out of. All of the racial disturbances that occurred in the sixties can really be traced back to three main reasons: (1) discrimination and deprivation, (2) the civil rights movement and its doctrine of civil disobedience and (3) continuous mistreatment by the police. Racial injustice and discrimination is, perhaps the most obvious reason for the uprisings of Negro citizens of the ghettos in the sixties. 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Wednesday, May 6, 2020

How do the brain and eyes jointly process information Free Essays

Introduction The intricacies of the human eye enable us to interpret light and distinguish colour to produce vision. It is, however, the complexity of the processing in the visual pathway from eye to brain along which this information is interpreted and manifested that allows us to create a representation of the surrounding world, otherwise known as visual perception (Gibson, 1950). Whilst vision begins with the eye and ends with the brain, the way these organs work together and the relative influence each has on our perception is fundamental to producing what we see. We will write a custom essay sample on How do the brain and eyes jointly process information? or any similar topic only for you Order Now Light is first refracted onto the cornea of the eye before passing to the pupil and lens. An image is then projected onto the retina, resulting in the production of ganglion cells specialised to describe depth, colour, shape, motion, and light intensity (Nelson, 2007). Nerve spikes from the ganglion cells containing this information transmit to the brain’s optic nerve, by which visual information is passed for interpretation in the visual cortex. The right and left visual cortices comprise part of the occipital lobe of the brain, both receiving information from the opposite hemisphere’s visual field. The estimated 140 million neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) (Lueba Kraftsik, 1994) fire when visual stimuli appear within their receptive field, and these fields are tuned to receive stimuli of specific orientations and colours (Kandal et al., 2000). The receptive fields of neurons in more complex visual processing areas are able to detect more intricate stimuli such as faces (Kanwisher, McDermott Chun, 1997) or direction (Allman et al. 1984). The five identified visual areas (V1-V5) are interconnected with varying strengths, allowing information to be projected forward from one to another and feedback to be given. As the visual information passes through this hierarchy, it is proposed that is processed by two pathways of neural representation. These pathways, named the dorsal and ventral streams, are hypothesise d to deal with spatial attention and the recognition and perception of visual stimuli respectively, and involve the passing of visual information and representation further into the brain integrating it with awareness, attention, and memory functions (Ungerleider Mishkin, 1982). The process of visual perception, as the eye’s sensory input is interpreted throughout the brain enables us to perceive and construct our own visual world. Gibson (1966) proposed a direct theory of perception, affording the richness of the sensory input with the construction of the perceived visual outcome. He claimed that a variety of environmental cues, or affordances, aid the interpretation of the visual scene. These include brightness, texture gradient, relative size, and superimposition (where one object blocks another). Gibson believed that when combined with invariants (constancies within the environment ie. parallel lines appearing to converge toward a horizon) and optic flow (the pattern of light movement within a visual scene) this was enough to enable the perceiver to orient themselves and the surrounding environment. There are, however, complexities to Gibson’s bottom-up theory of visual processing. It may be overly simplistic to underestimate the role of a top-down influence from the brain. Gibson’s theory does not account for times when the visual system is fooled, or becomes subject to an illusion. Rubin’s Vase (Rubin, 1915) is a classic example of how the human visual system is subject to ambiguity, where one single visual stimulus can be perceived as two distinct images. If the visual system directly processes light into an image, it would follow that a single visual input would lead to a universal and singular output. However, the existence of ambiguity in the perception of a visual stimulus suggests there may be times when the brain cannot decide as to what representation to assign to the visual input. Further questions are raised when looking at the influence of context, and how this can lead us to misinterpret visual stimuli. The Ebbinghaus Illusion, demonstrates perceptual distortion, highlighting the role of contextual cues, where a circle surrounded by large circles is judged as smaller than the same circle surrounded by small circles (Obonai, 1954). This is suggestive of a higher-level process in which the brain applies context relevant logic to the interpretation of a visual stimuli. Additionally, experience provides strong influence over the processing of visual information. ‘Impossible illusions‘ such as Escher’s Waterfall, and the Hollow Face Illusion (Gregory, 1997) exploit concepts of experiential perceptual learning, such as knowledge that adjacent edges must join, and human faces are always convex. These illusions demonstrate how the brain aims to perceive coherence in 3D objects to make sense out of its visual environment, creating a captivating paradox between what we know and what we are actually seeing. Visual perception can be ambiguous, distorted, paradoxical, and even fictitious (Gregory, 1980). It appears to be influenced by context, experience, and expectation, a concept asserted by Richard Gregory (1970) who theorised perception as a top-down process. Deduced from observations of when the human visual system makes errors, Gregory proposed that the brain constructs a visual hypothesis from information processed by the eye based on former experience and knowledge. If the top-down, constructivist theory holds true, there are implications for the constancy of percepts between individuals. We all have idiosynchratic knowledge and experience. Do differences in internal representation lead individuals to perceive visual stimuli differently from each otherAdditionally, what is to be said for the perception of those that have no knowledge or experienceDoherty et al. (2010) observed an absence of suceptibility to the Ebbinghaus illusion in a number of children under seven years of age, perhaps suggestive that experience and knowledge does have an influence on visual information processing. Without the knowledge base, the children were not affected by the contextual cues. MacLeod (2007) proposes that top-down theories are based on times when visual conditions are poor, and bottom-up theories are founded in ideal viewing conditions; neither of which is an all encompassing explanation of perception. Recent research highlights the interaction of both constructivist and direct processes (MacLeod, 2007), with the proposal that when bottom-up, sensory information is abundant there is less input from contextual hypotheses, and when there is an absence of stimulus information, the brain draws on its prior knowledge and experience to comprehend the input (Ramachandran, 1994). It becomes apparent that the study of human perception and how it is influenced by not only the anatomical structure of the visual pathway, but also psychological components such as experience and knowledge will enable us to further understand how the eyes and the brain interact to process visual information. References: Allman, J., Miezin, F., McGuinness, E. (1985) ‘Direction- and velocity-specific responses from beyond the classical receptive field in the middle temporal visual area (MT)† Perception, 14(2), pp. 105 – 126. Doherty, M., Campbell, N., Hiromi, T., and Phillips, W. (2010) ‘The Ebbinghaus illusion deceives adults but not young children’, Developmental Science, 13(5), pp. 714-721. Gibson, J. (1950). The perception of the visual world. Oxford: Houghton Mifflin. Gibson, J. (1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Oxford: Houghton Mifflin. Gregory, R. (1970). The Intelligent Eye. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gregory RL. (1980) ‘Perceptions as hypotheses’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 290(B), pp. 181-197. Gregory, R. (1997) ‘Knowledge in perception and illusion’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, vol. 352, pp. 1121–1128. Kandal, E., Schwartz,J., and Jessell, T. (2000). Principles of Neural Science. 4th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, Health Professions Division. Kanwisher, N., McDermott, J., and Chun, M. (1997) ‘The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception’, Journal of Neuroscience, 17, pp. 4302-4311. Leuba, G., and Kraftsik, R. (1994) ‘Changes in volume, surface estimate, three-dimensional shape and total number of neurons of the human primary visual cortex from midgestation until old age’, Anatomy of Embryology, 190, pp.351-366. McLeod, S. (2007). Simply Psychology. [online] Available at: [Accessed 22 February 2012]. Nelson, R. (2007) Visual responses of ganglion cells. In: H. Kolb, E. Fernandez, and R. Nelson (eds.), The Organisation of the Retina and Visual System. Salt Lake City (UT): University of Utah Health Sciences Centre. Obonai, T., (1954) ‘Induction effects in estimates of extent’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47, pp. 57-60. Ramachandran, V. (1994). In: R. Gregory, and J. Harris, (eds.) The Artful Eye. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 249–267. Rubin, E. (1915). Synsoplevede Figurer: Studier i psykologisk Analyse. Forste Del’ [Visually experienced figures: Studies in psychological analysis. Part one]. Copenhagen and Christiania: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag. Ungerleider, L., and Mishkin, M. (1982). Two cortical visual systems. In: D. Ingle, M. Goodale, and R. Mansfield, (eds). Analysis of Visual Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 549–586. How to cite How do the brain and eyes jointly process information?, Essay examples