The Other Side Of The River, By Alex Kotlowitz

The Other Side Of The River, By Alex Kotlowitz The book, The Other Side of the River, by Alex Kotlowitz, investigates the relationship between two Michigan cities, as well as the death of Eric McGinnis. The two towns, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor, are called the twin cities, though they are anything but. For one, St. Joseph is predominantly white, while the majority of the population in Benton Harbor is African American. Throughout the novel Kotlowitz questions how people are affected by their environment. When interviewed about his book he said, your perspectiveall depends on which side of the river you live on. This statement is undoubtedly the backdrop for Kotlowitzs book. Erics death is just one of the many ways in which disagreement between the two cities took place. Another death that sparked a commotion between the two cities, and possibly more important, between the two races, was the death of Norris Maben. January 18, 1990, a year before Erics death was when Norris Maben was killed. Maben was shot by Marv Fiedler, a white cop. Fiedler thought Maben was the suspect he had been looking for and when it appeared that Maben was about to pull out a gun, Fiedler shot him. There was a logical explanation behind the shooting, but to the public this was just an unjust act of violence. To make matters worse, Maben was unarmed. The citizens of Benton Harbor saw this as a racial attack. Right before Fiedlers trial was when Erics dead body was found floating in the St. Joseph river. Immediately the residents of Benton Harbor thought he was murdered by a white citizen of St. Joseph. On the other hand, the citizens of St. Joseph thought it was possibly a suicide, or they didnt really care. One St. Joseph resident commented , That nigger came on the wrong side of the bridge. He Should have stayed on his side of the river. Erics untimely death stirred up stagnant feelings of the Maben shooting, as well as forming new a feud between the two cities. Residents of both St. Joseph and Benton Harbor grew up learning that the people on the other side of the river are corrupt. Chris Adams, the owner of a popular teen hangout, told Kotlowitz during an interview, You grow up around here learning that bad things happen in Benton Harbor. You grow up afraid to go across the river. This fear of venturing to the other side of the river was true for adults as well as teens. The author, Alex Kotlowitz, recounts how black teens asked cops for rides back to Benton Harbor because they were so afraid of being left alone in St. Joseph, but more importantly, they were afraid of the whites. Situations such as these bring into question whether this fear of the opposite race is a learned behavior as suggested by Chris Adams, or if prejudice is a behavior you are born with. This idea of behaviors being learned, or being born with the behaviors, is referred to Nature vs. Nurture. Nature refers to ones instinct and the concept that a persons behaviors can be traced back to their genetic makeup. On the contrary, nurture refers to the theory that people act a certain way because they learned so from their parents or peers. Growing knowledge of the human genome is helping scientists form theories in which both sides are partly right, but as of now the subject is still in debate amongst sociologists. In my opinion, I feel that a persons behaviors are learned by observing their parents or their peers. The characters from The Other Side of the River grew up learning that the other race is inferior and the other town across the river is corrupt. There are a few people, who are white, and live on the Benton Harbor side of the river. These people often interact with both races. It is people like this who learned growing up that neither race is superior. Furthermore, there are also a few characters, such as Ruth McGinnis, who are sociable and cordial with whites, and many other inhabitants of St. Joseph. As I began to read this book I expected a story about the death of Eric McGinnis, but as I read more and more I realized that this book was about much more. It told the underlying story of the two Michigan towns, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. It also told of various other controversies that helped me, as the reader, to identify why the townspeople felt the way they did about Erics death. This book also left me feeling unsettled. Living in a country that takes such pride in its diversity, it makes me wonder how two towns such as Benton Harbor and St. Joseph can exist. There are hundreds of towns just like these two, and if people will cease to be ignorant than they will be able to see each other for who they are, and no longer define each other according to their race.

How E.E. Cummings uses form in his poems Essay

Form is an integral part of poetry. The form used by E. E. Cummings is quite unique, and is different in each of his poems. His poems, â€Å"nobody loses all the time,† â€Å"pity this busy monster,manunkind,† and â€Å"r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r† illustrate this fact. The poem, â€Å"nobody loses all the time† is a good representation of Cummings’ work, written in no traditional form. It is 37 lines long, divided into six stanzas of six lines each, and one line standing alone at the end. This poem is unique in that it does not contain any punctuation other than apostrophes and parentheses. Cummings does not follow the traditional practice of capitalizing the first word of each line, either. In fact, the capitalization in this poem is quite unusual. Cummings does not have sentences, since there is no punctuation, so almost all of the words are written in lower-case. He does not even capitalize the word ‘I.’ He capitalizes only the proper nouns â€Å"Uncle Sol,† â€Å"Victor Victrola,† â€Å"Missouri† and â€Å"McCann,† as well as the words in line five, â€Å"He Was a Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself.† Written in open form, this poem has a very conversational tone. The lines vary in length, showing no pattern, and there is no consistent meter. The number of accents and syllables per line varies throughout the poem as well, and all of this poem’s lines are enjambed except the last. Another interesting characteristic of this poem is that it contains no clear caesurae, or pauses within a line, as it lacks punctuation. The reader can only estimate where caesurae should be. Finally, the poem has no rhyme scheme, or rhyme of any kind. These characteristics all aid in giving this poem its conversational tone, and makes it very different from his poem, â€Å"pity this busy monster,manunkind.† Unlike the previous poem, â€Å"pity this busy monster,manunkind† is written in a very specific form. It is fourteen lines long, and written in blank verse– iambic pentameter with no end rhyme. This particular poem has no internal rhyme in it, either. Like others written in blank verse, this poem contains what are called verse paragraphs. These are stanzas containing varying numbers of lines. In this poem, there are seven of these verse paragraphs, with one, two, three, two, one, three, and two lines, respectively. Cummings does manage to stray slightly away from the restrictions of iambic  pentameter by using metrical substitution. Throughout the poem, a handful of trochees, as well as pyrrhics, can be found. In another digression from tradition, this poem does not have capitalization at the beginning of each line, only at the beginning of each sentence. On a similar note, only two of the poem’s lines–two and fourteen–are end-stopped. This makes for many other pauses, found within the lines of the poem. Caesurae are present in lines one, two, six, eight, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. Overall, for E. E. Cummings, this poem is very structured–unlike some others he has written. The poem â€Å"r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r† is unique, to say the least. Seen written on a piece of paper, this poem looks like a hand in a scrabble game. Comparing this poem to most other poetry is like comparing a Pablo Picasso painting to a Leonardo da Vinci. This poem is in no way written in any traditional form. It is composed of fifteen lines, and has only one stanza. The fifteen lines of this poem are indented in eight different ways, with no apparent pattern of indentation. Spacing between ‘words’ within the lines also varies throughout the poem. Those words, are barely decipherable at first glance, and with seemingly haphazard placement of punctuation and use of capitalization, this poem can be easily mistaken for a meaningless jumble of characters. It has no meter and it has no rhyme. One might say that this poem must not be a poem at all, but through careful scrutiny, a reader can see that this jumble of letters and symbols does, in fact say something. This poem revolves around the letters in its title: r, p, o, p, h, e, s, s, a, g and r. These letters are seen together four times throughout the poem, only arranged in different orders and with different capitalization. By the last line of the poem, and the fourth time the letters appear, they spell the word grasshopper. The third time the letters appear, they are set up so that every other letter is capitalized, with the lower-case letters being the first six of the word, and the capitals being the last five (â€Å"gRrEaPsPhOs†). The second time the letters appear, they are written as â€Å"PPEGORHRASS,† not significantly altered from the original â€Å"r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r.† The other words of the poem are a puzzle as well. Only the words ‘who’ and ‘to’ are written as simple as they are written here. In line three, the words ‘as,’ ‘we,’ and ‘look,’ are written as â€Å"a ) sw (e loo )k.† In line four, the words ‘up’ and ‘now’ can be drawn out of â€Å"upnowgath.† Two other words, ‘become’ and a word that Cummings himself probably invented, ‘rearrangingly,’ are intertwined as â€Å"rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly† in line fourteen. Within the parentheses are fragments of one word, and outside of the parentheses are fragments of the other. All of the other words of this poem are split up between two or more lines. Altogether, there are fifteen to sixteen words in this poem, and there are a number of different conclusions that can be drawn from the form they take. One conclusion could be that the poem reads, ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r who as we look up, now gathering into PPEGORHRASS, he leaps, arriving at gRrEaPsPhOs, to rearrangingly become grasshopper.’ Another conclusion could be that E. E. Cummings used form in a way that only he could ever duplicate. Form, in many different varieties, is found in all poetry. E. E. Cummings poetry, though often atypical, and sometimes downright peculiar, is a perfect example of that.

Pareto Principle Essay

The term â€Å"Pareto principle† can also refer to Pareto efficiency. The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Business? management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; he developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e. g. , â€Å"80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients. † Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there must be a number k between 50 and 100 such that â€Å"k% is taken by (100 ? k)% of the parcipants. † The number k may vary from 50 (in the case of equal distribution, i. e. , 100% of the population have equal shares) to nearly 100 (when a tiny number of participants account for almost all of the resource). There is nothing special about the number 80% mathematically, but many real systems have k somewhere around this region of intermediate imbalance in distribution. The Pareto principle is only tangentially related to Pareto efficiency, which was also introduced by the same economist. Pareto developed both concepts in the context of the distribution of income and wealth among the population. In economics The original observation was in connection with population and wealth. Pareto noticed that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population. He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied. Due to the scale? invariant nature of the power law relationship, the relationship applies also to subsets of the income range. Even if we take the 10 wealthiest individuals in the world, we see that the top three (Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helu, and Bill Gates) own as much as the next seven put together. A chart that gave the inequality a very visible and comprehensible form, the so? alled ‘champagne glass’ effect was contained in the 1992 United Nations Development Program Report, which showed the distribution of global income to be very uneven, with the richest 20% of the world’s population controlling 82. 7% of the world’s income. The Pareto principle has also been used to attribute the widening economic inequality in the United States to ‘skill? biased technical change’—i. e. , income growth accrues to those with the education and skills required to take advantage of new technology and globalization.

Luke s Ethical Dilemma Of A Adult Entertainment Retail...

FACTS Luke has been asked to work on a project that involves developing land recently bought by ABC to build an adult entertainment retail store. According to the plan, Luke’s brother, Owen, whom he is very close to, lives in the neighborhood that the adult entertainment retail store plan will be built. Luke knows that as soon as the plans for the store become public, the property value of the homes in Owen’s neighborhood are expected to decrease significantly. Luke is concerned about his confidentiality obligations to the company. Owen has openly expressed to Luke that he has thought about putting his home on the market for sale; this is concerning for Luke. He knows that Owen has received and acceptable offer for his home already, but wonders if the market for real estate in the area will increase in the next few years. ISSUE Luke’s ethical dilemma is clear: The conflict that Luke faces is between disclosing confidential information about his company to his brother and being 100% and/or remaining loyal to his close family member. Luke is faced with the dilemma of choosing whether or not he should disclose workplace sensitive information about project plans of ABC. In conjunction with such, Luke must also decide if he should revile insider information, against company obligation policy, that the in expectation of the property value in the area is expected to go down drastically to his brother Owen. ANALYSIS-APPLICATION OF ETHICAL THEORIES Utilitarianism One methodShow MoreRelatedStephen P. Robbins Timothy A. Judge (2011) Organizational Behaviour 15th Edition New Jersey: Prentice Hall393164 Words   |  1573 Pagesand permission should be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission(s) to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458, or you may fax your request to 201-236-3290. Many of the designations by manufacturersRead More_x000C_Introduction to Statistics and Data Analysis355457 Words   |  1422 Pagesand Power Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Used herein under license. Library of Congress Control Number: 2006933904 Student Edition: ISBN-13: 978-0-495-11873-2 ISBN-10: 0-495-11873-7 ââ€"   To my nephews, Jesse and Luke Smidt, who bet I wouldn’t put their names in this book. R. P. ââ€"   To my wife, Sally, and my daughter, Anna C. O. ââ€"   To Carol, Allie, and Teri. J. D. ââ€"   About the Authors puter Teacher of the Year award in 1988 and received the Siemens