The Meaning of Home (Tim Obrien, Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Lessing) Essay Example for Free

The Meaning of Home (Tim Obrien, Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Lessing) Essay By showing what home means for their characters, authors can render certain themes of the novel, demonstrate several different meanings of the word home, or, underscore significant aspects of the personality of the figure in question. In Doris Lessings novel The Fifth Child, the characters Harriet and Davids home represents their dream about the perfect family and the perfect life and by illustrating this to the reader Lessing reveals how they are committing hubris . Also, in the novel The Things They Carried by Tim OBrien, the character Norman Bowker returns home in order to gain understanding of his own feelings, and therefore home is more seen as a place for support and acceptation. Furthermore, in Joyce Carol Oates short story Stray Children, Charles Benedicts study and the nature of it reflects the characters personal qualities. Firstly, home can be seen as a dream of the future. In The Fifth Child, Harriet and David dream about the perfect family and life. They buy a house that is too big for them, wishing to fill it with smiling and happy children. On the other hand, they are experiencing economical hardships and are forced to borrow money from Davids father in order to cope with the situation they have put themselves in. Still, even though they have to have access to extra money in order to endure, they continue the get more and more children. It is mentioned how they believe that David would a higher salary some time soon and everything will work out. They, in a way, buy the house for what they wish it will represent in the future. Lessing conveys this by showing how Harriet and David take the money they receive for granted and promise their families that it will pay off in the long run. This concept of taking something for granted because they think that they are worth it can be seen as an act of hubris. Thus, by showing what home signify for Harriet and David Lessing underlines the theme of hubris. Secondly, home can also represent the characters essential needs. In The Things They Carried, Norman Bowker returns home from the warfront and the thing he requires the most from society and his family is understanding. He desperately needs to talk, but there is no one there who wants to listen to him. It revealed how he circles the lake in his home town and honks his horn to a few boys while he passed them, but how neither of them even looked up. This can be seen as a metaphor for how Bowker was trying to tell society about his experiences and emotions and how society did not even care to hear him out. The scene ends with him continuing to drive around the lake more than ten times and imagining how a conversation between his father and him about his wartime experiences would turn out. By not getting what he needed and therefore resorting to taking his own life, Bowker embodies the damage war can do to a soldier long after the war is over. OBrien shows how the idea of home represents our deepest and fundamental needs and that when those are not fulfilled we suffer. Thirdly, the characters idea of the perfect home can also reflect upon certain traits of this person. In Stray Children, Charles Benedict lives a successful, immaculate and steady life. These aspects of his life also characterise his study. It is rendered how Benedict always liked his study because it was always the same and unharmed. By mentioning the fact why he likes his room, Oates can highlight some important aspects of his personality. In sum, by showing what home means, authors can convey what the character dreams of and want, needs and can not live without, and, draw attention to certain personal qualities off the character. Rendering what home means can be significant in many different ways. In the first example, Lessing conveys the theme of hubris by showing Harriet and Davids dream and then contrasting it to their reality; they take the money they receive for granted since they think that they are worth it and therefore should have the money. Also, in the second case, OBrien renders how home may not always literally mean home as in the place where you live, but it can also stand for our basic needs. Moreover, in the third instance, Oates uses the meaning of home in order to stress certain features of the character in question. However, the meaning of home is not restricted to being just one thing. OBrien can also show how Bowker is a character who needs constant support and is too weak to handle the hardships himself by rendering how Bowker desperately needed comfort when he returned home. As in the case with Charles Benedict and his study, home can also be used to show how he thinks, how he wants the city to look like in his role as a city planner. Oates can therefore also deliver social criticism through illustrating the meaning of home; how Benedict wants everything to look perfect and therefore he plans the city without taking the living conditions of certain people into consideration. In addition, the first example with Harriet and David and their view of home can also help the reader characterise them as determined people with set goals in the future and perhaps somewhat inconsiderate of their future troubles that they may face by ignoring the problems they are already experiencing. Hence, home does not only mean one thing but the reader can often draw several significant pieces of information out from it.

Female Spirituality and Sexuality Explored Through Zora Neale Hurston’s

Zora Neale Hurston, while living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was researching voodoo on the most scholarly level. She was studying with Haiti’s most well known hougans and mambos, or priests and priestesses. At this time she was gathering knowledge about voodoo so she could write the text, Tell My Horse. Also, at this same time Hurston had finished writing, Their Eyes Were Watching God in only seven short weeks. A close reading of this novel provides the reader with a relationship between voodoo and the text. Hurston not only explores female spirituality and sexuality in, Their Eyes Were Watching God, but weaves the two together revealing that voodoo culture plays an important role within the novel especially in the comparisons between the voodoo goddess Erzulie and the texts main character Janie Crawford. Hurston exploits the society in which Janie Crawford lives in. Hers is a society in which she is not allowed to live freely and express herself freely. She is suppressed in her society because she is a woman and because she is African-American. Hurston understands this oppression and she uncovers the truth on the status of black females at this time. There were no powerful roles available to them in their American culture or in their African-American culture. Women were looked down on and they were not seen as potentially strong spiritual and sexual people. Hurston opens the door for her protagonist, Janie Crawford, to create a more substantial and empowering life for herself after the many hardships she faces. She leads her down a path to self-determination and this path is embodied by the spirituality of voodoo. â€Å"The old, old mysticism of the world in African terms...a religion of creation and life† (Tell My Horse 376).This i... ...oodoo, which stands in the novel to tie in the value of self-discovery is integral to the story’s comparisons between Janie and Erzulie. Voodoo is believed to have played a shapely role in the Haitian revolution in which Haiti won its independence from France. The integration of voodoo imagery and symbolism throughout, Their Eyes Were Watching God, reflects Hurston’s belief that self-discovery for African-American women lies not in their male dominated society, but rather in their understanding of their own sexual and spiritual strength. Hurston achieves this idea greatly by linking the female goddess Erzulie with Janie Crawford. Works Cited Tell My Horse. 1938. rptd. in Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs and Other Writings. ed. Cheryl A Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995. 269-555. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

Real Time Road Sign Recognition System

Real Time Road Sign Recognition System Using Artificial Neural Networks For Bengali Textual Information Box An Automated Road Sign Recognition system using Artificial Neural Network for the Textual Information box inscribing in Bengali is presented on the paper. Signs are visual languages that represent some special circumstantial information of environment. Road signs, being among the most important around us primarily for safety reasons, are designed, and manufactured and installed according to tight regulations. The system captures real time images every two seconds and saves them as JPG format files. Firstly some road sign are already stored in the memory. Like: Warning Sign, Prohibition Sign, Obligation Sign and Informative Sign. Car Driver concentration and illiterateness isn’t always focused on what it should be and not always notice the road signs. For these reasons, automation of Bangla Road Sign Recognition system is highly essential. Previously several works are done by Mueller, Piccioli, Novovicova, Yuille, Escalera and others. But those are not in Bengali. Real Time Road Sign Recognition System Using Artificial Neural Networks for Bengali Textual Information Box which is done by Mohammad Osiur Rahman, Fouzia Asharf Mousumi, Edgar Scavino, Aini Hussain, Hassan Basri whose are from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Chittagong, Chittagong-4331, Bangladesh, Faculty of Engineering, University Kebangsaan Malaysia. For doing this they divide the total Concept in Steps: 1. Image Acquisition: From several video sequences from a moving vehicle for a certain period are consecutive frames recorded within 2 seconds are similar. For this they have used Application Programming Interface functions of VB 6. 0. Every 2-second a frame is collected and stored in JPG format. 2. Preprocessing: Median filter is used to reduce impulsive or salt-and-pepper type noise from captured images and then normalized into 320 X 240 pixels. 3. Text Detection and Extraction: An algorithm was developed for textual information detection and extraction from Bangla Road Signs on the basis of the Sobel Edge Detection technique. Like the following: I. Read input image in . jpg format II. Convert colored image into gray scale image III. Apply 3Ãâ€"3 median filter convolution masks on gray scale image IV. Calculated edges by applying Sobel convolutions mask V. Thicken the calculated edges by dilation VI. Apply vertical Sobel projection filter on dimmed image VII. Create a histogram by computing projection values VIII. Find the threshold value of the image IX. Loop on the possible positive identifications based on the histogram values X. Extract the possible positive identifications based on the histogram values XI. Apply Sobel horizontal edge-emphasis for other possible text area searches XII. Convert detected text region into binary image XIII. Calculate height and width of detected region of text XIV. Crop the image 4. Bangla OCR using MLP: An ANN based approach is used for Bangla OCR of road signs’ text. It has 3 sub modules – Character segmentation, Feature Extraction and Character Recognition by MLP NN. 5. Confirmation of Textual Road Signs and Conversion 6. Speech synthesis The Proposed system works like the following: 1. From video sequences capture a single frame in JPG format in each 2 seconds. 2. Preprocess the captured image each time . Detect the Text and Extract that and then Extracted Text will recognize by Bengali Optical Character Recognition System. 4. Recognized characters of textual information compared with the stored knowledge and then give decision valid or invalid. 5. If Valid then recognize and according to users choice it provide Bengali or it convert to English and provide audio stream. The system processes the images to find out whe ther they contain images of road signs or not. The textual information of the road signs is detected and extracted from the images. The Bengali OCR system takes the textual information as an input to recognize individual Bengali characters. The Bengali OCR is implemented using Multi-layer Perceptron. The output of the Bengali OCR system is compared with the previously enrolled standard Bengali textual road signs. The throughput which comes from the matching process is used as input for the speech synthesizer and finally the system delivers the audio stream to the driver, either in Bengali or in English based on the user settings. After testing this system, the obtained accuracy rate was evaluated at 91. 48%. Our Idea by using Hopfield Associative Memory Our work to done this thesis by using Associative Memory. Which are two types – Hetero Associative Memory & Auto Associative Memory. We will use the Auto-associative / Autocorrelators Memory for our purposes. It’s now most easily recognized by the title of HAM(Hopfield Associative Memory), were introduced as a theoretical notation by Donald Hebb. To do this we need to first generate Matrices (Row or Column Matrix) in the Bipolar Boolean format (-1 and +1) from the Image. Then the matrices need to transpose of each of the matrices and then create the encoding process (The Connection Matrix) by [pic] And then need to Recognized of the stored patterns or feed each of the matrix by [pic] Introducing the Bipolar Function to [pic]. If [pic] >= 0 set the value +1 otherwise set the value -1 for each of the Element of the Matrix of [pic]. Now Recognition of Noisy Patterns by finding the Hamming Distance (HD) with the Given Noisy Pattern N by [pic] Which Hamming Distance of noisy and stored pattern are less the probability of matching to noisy pattern with the stored pattern are most. And then need to Recognized of the Noisy patterns or feed each of the matrix with Encoding Process by [pic] By using Bipolar Function to [pic]. If [pic] > 0 set the value +1 otherwise set the value -1 for each of the Element of the Matrix of [pic]. In this method we need to store all road sign text segmented by each blank will generate Matrices. And by the above method generate correlation matrix. If the Bipolar Noisy Matrix matched with the Transposed Matrix of the stored Image Transpose Matrix, in the case of partial vectors, an Auto-Correlator results in the refinement of the pattern or removal of noise to retrieve the closest matching stored pattern. Our Idea by using WANG et al. ’s Multiple training encoding strategy (WANG MTES): The algorithm of the WANG MTES is like the following: Step-1:Initialize the correlation matrix M to null matrix M ( [0]. Step-2:Compute the M as, For I ( 1 to N M ( M ( [qi * (Transpose Xi’) ( Yi’] [where Xi’ and Yi bipolar patterns] End Step-3:Read input bipolar Pattern A’ Step-4:Compute A_M where A_M ( A’ ( M Step-5:Apply threshold function ( to A_M to get B’ [(=bipolar of Matrices] Step-6:Output B’ which is the associated Pattern Pair. In this method, as like the HOPFIELD ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY we need to store all road sign text segmented by each character will generate Matrices Associated with the equivalent ASCII of Bengali Character Matrix. And by the above method generate correlation matrix of the stored Pattern. Now from the input image text need to generate matrix of called noisy pattern will must in bipolar form. And Feed with the Correlation Matrix. Equation like the following: [pic] qi’s are positive real number called generalized correlation matrix, will be change according to the improving feeding necessity. Figure: Schematic view of Bangla Road Sign Recognition System ———————– Speech Language Choose? Speech synthesis Convert into equivalent English text English Bengali Audio stream Valid Bangla road Sign Recognized Unrecognized Yes Prememorized Knowledge (Bangla Sign Textual info Database) Image (JPG format) Processing Text detection& extraction Matching Bangla OCR using WANG MTES Extracted Text Recognized Characters of Texture Information Single Frame Video Sequences No

Essay - 972 Words

Who knew one thing could cause such an impact on someones life? Danny was impacted by a moment in his life that changed him and caused him to be different. Danny was a guy who lived alone in a home he once shared with his parents. He was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps, where he and his K9 partner Cody were assigned to the K-9 bomb unit. Danny and K9 Cody were sent to search areas to make sure no explosives existed before troops moved in. Danny was honorably discharged from the Marines and is now a war veteran. The war was not good for Danny and it really changed him. First, he became an amputee. Danny lost his leg below the knee on his left side. The other thing that made him different was he now suffered from PTSD. Danny doesn’t†¦show more content†¦Danny spent days, sometimes weeks without even going outside. Danny was sad, lonely and just wanted someone in his life. All he did was stare at his gray wall. As he went to his room he saw a picture of him and Cod y and the flashback came into his mind. He could hear were the whimpers of Cody as he lay there dying. He became sad and filled with rage. Danny slammed the picture down and began to cry. Most nights, Danny would wake up screaming and sweating because of the dreams he had of the war. He was always alone and stayed in his house. He was very shy and self conscious because of his leg. He would say to himself, â€Å"I can’t do this anymore, I hate my life!† He spent so much time home alone, he forgot how to socialize, and was becoming more and more depressed. One day he decided to take a drive, and ended up at a local pet store. He walked inside and saw that the puppies were on sale. Danny wanted to go check out what kind of puppies they had. He looked around for a while, when one started to try to play with him. This puppy was special because it only had three legs, but was very playful. Danny knew he and this dog could develop a special bond. He knew this puppy could be the one thing that could help him turn his life around. Danny decided to take the puppy home and name him Rex. At first Danny was very worried that this could affect him in a negative way by bringing up memories of the war and Cody. A big part of him hoped this puppy would be a very positiveShow MoreRelatedWhat Is an Essay?1440 Words   |  6 PagesBuscemi Essay #3 Rough Draft An essay is a creative written piece in which the author uses different styles such as diction, tone, pathos, ethos or logos to communicate a message to the reader using either a personal experience, filled with morals and parables, or a informative text filled with educational terms. Educational terms could mean the usage of complicated and elevated words or simply information you would get in schools. 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