How Laughter Works Essay Example for Free

How Laughter Works Essay The essay that I chose from the book was the one by Marshall Brain â€Å"How Laughter Works†. I chose to write about this essay because this one is more in depth of where laughter actually comes from how its more than just jokes that people laugh at every day. Start off with a dash of sarcasm and a dash of vulgarity. At least that’s what my friends and I do. Laughter is a form of enjoyment towards one another. Means we are remotely comfortable to be openly laughing at something. Laughter is defined as â€Å"A voluntary reaction to certain external or internal stimuli.† It is also most commonly considered a visual expression of a number of positive emotional states such as joy, mirth, happiness, relief etc. Laughter usually occurs when one is comfortable to be around another person. Researchers believe that the purpose of laughter is related to making and strengthening human connections. A psychological study showed that laughter has its own name gelotology. Gelotology is from the Greek word â€Å"gelos† meaning laughter. Brain mentions people that are ticklish often wonder â€Å"Why can’t I tickle myself?† In order for tickling to work the brain needs tension and surprise. Obviously when you try to tickle yourself you know its coming so the brain does not react to you tickling yourself. But if someone starts to tickle you, your brain has that surprise and then you tense up. This made sense to me but not completely. Laughter also benefits one’s health and fight disease. The purpose of laughter is to relieve ourselves from stress of everyday life and laughter also increases our white blood cells and our immune system. Laughter releases endorphin which is the body’s natural pain killer and so is a pleasant act, producing a general feeling of well-being. Mental health professionals are suggesting â€Å"laughter therapy†, which teaches the patients to laugh at things that are not usually funny. It also helps the patients cope with difficult situations. Laughter just in general makes anyone feel great about one ’s self. Laughter is considered one of the best medic ations. Laughter predates human speech by millions of years, scientists think. It likely evolved as an early form of communication to help people negotiate group dynamics and establish hierarchy. Laughter nowadays is a form of expression. We rarely laugh when we are by ourselves but when we are with other people we laugh more out loud. People usually laugh at anything that they find humorous, even other people for the most part. For instance, The Darwin awards are stories about people who Brain mentions people make careers based on laughter, like comedians. No matter where you go, what city you visit, more than likely there will be a comedy club somewhere in that town. Or you can just go to the local bar and find amusement there. Comedy is also found on television. You can watch your daily dose of Scrubs or Friends and get your endorphins flowing. Laughter always helps other people get people out of a funk that they are in, laughter is contagious. When someone laughs it triggers circuits in our brains then a grin appears which makes more laughter happen. Brain said that depending on age, we laugh about different things. Like if you were a pre-teen in your teenage years basically they laugh at anything mentioning sex, peers, and food and authority figures. As you mature our taste in what we think is funny changes. As we get into adulthood, they usually joke about something less judgmental and more on specific things like referring to movies or plays etc. Brain made me think hard about this. As I read about the pre-teens and teenage years I was thinking what I joked about during that time, and he’s right. Even as we mature we joke around but our jokes now are not like what we used to joke about as kids. I never really thought about it until I read it in this essay. Brain also mentions researchers say that people often store their negative emotions of anger and sadness and fear rather than talking about it someone. Laughter releases all of that built up stress of keeping all of those emotions in. If we start to laugh too much or too hard we start to burst out into tears. Not in a bad way but a good way. This triggers our emotions and the tears are just squeezed out because we scrunch our face when we laugh. When we laugh harder it makes our body want to release some hormones, which are found in tears. The higher the hormones in the tears means the more you have stress. In this essay I believe Brain gave a lot of detailed information and actually made it an easy read. Going through I noticed Brain categorized every section so you knew what you were reading about and not confused about jumping from one subject to another. I did do some more research to verify and find something new on the subjects. Like how laughter was a form of communication 10 million years ago and how laughter is contagious, but I think everyone knows about that one. In Brains’ essay I have learned pretty much everything there is to know on laughter. Where it comes from, what we laugh at, and how it affects our health. I know we laugh about more than just jokes but I had no idea it helps our health. Basically laughter is a cure for anything nowadays. References Brain, M.(2009). How laughter works In , W.H Thelin (Ed.), Writing without Formulas (pp.428-435 ). Mason,OH ; Cengage Learning. Reflective Letter The essay I chose to do a critique on was â€Å"How Laughter Works† by Marshall Brain. This essay grabbed my attention because as I just skimmed the pages deciding which one I was going to read, this essay was very well organized and just by the titles of the sections it was very in depth. This essay was a good read in my eyes. If readers want to know basically the history of laughter or where it comes from, then I would suggest this to any reader. My main point of my essay is basically highlighting all the sections that Brain had wrote about. Brain fascinated me with all the in depth information about the brain itself and the functions of laughter. I believe the audience that would be interested in reading my paper are people who might have thought Brains’ essay was too long for them to read or basically someone who enjoys information more than just reading something to get a laugh out of it. Brains’ essay was filled with information basically over flowing, and I just highlighted some of the main points that he talked about in each section. As I read Brains’ essay, I took notes but I typed them so I could start paragraphs from them. I also did research on some of his topics that interested me , like the section of the brain where laughter or emotion comes from. At the beginning of writing my paper basically I had all these paragraphs typed but not in order, I just type what comes to mind. I then would read over all the paragraphs and try and make sense of them and put them in order. I then went through and edited the paragraphs that needed to be edited.

Immigrations to Turkey from Greece between 1911 and 1923 :: essays research papers

Immigrations to Turkey from Greece between 1911 and 1923 In 1911, 51% of the Ottoman Europe (Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro) population was Muslim but with emigrations, it downed to minorities of Muslims in some territories (McCarthy, 1995). Most of these immigrations were forced immigrations. If person immigrate, because she does not have the minimum basic needs in domicile that called forced immigration (à pek, 2000). Forced immigrations are not only the problem of present days but with twentieth century, forced immigration becomes a legal issue. Forced immigrations have an objective that to un-mix the population of the selected territories or to homogenise the territories (Barutciski, 2004). Homogenous communities are easier than mixed ones to be controlled and homogenous communities are less likely to have intercommunity conflicts. Thus forced immigrations are the reason of consolidating political power. â€Å"Bà ¼yà ¼k Mà ¼badele† or 1923 exchange of Greek and Turkish populations was not the first attempt to forma lise the population exchange but it is one of the earliest and most controversial international treaties on this subject (Barutciski, 2004) and the first internationally ratified compulsory population exchange. With the convention concerning the exchange of Greek and Turkish populations at Lausanne, after 1st May 1923 Muslims in Greek territories and Greek Orthodox in Turkish territories were compulsorily exchanged except Muslims in Western Trace and Greeks in Istanbul. 1.5 million Greek and Turk were forced to leave their homelands. There is a difference between Greek movement and Turkish movement; Greeks mostly emigrate with retreating Greek army as a result of Greek rout in 1922 and without waiting permission, but most of the Turks emigrate after the convention. More than 1 million Greek escaped from Turkey before convention of population exchange (Arà ½, 1995). According to official record of the Mixed Commission only 189.916 Greek were transferred to Greece after 1923 conventi on but 354.647 Turks transferred in this period (Hirshchot, 2004). There were not many Turks who immigrate in 1922 because, for Turkish immigrants the 1923 exchange is the only way to escape from Greek oppression in that period. The term â€Å"refugee† is not suitable for these groups as defined in international laws because they were immediately granted full citizenship. The term that is used in Turkish is â€Å"Muhacir† to refer to people who forcibly leave their homeland and enter the Ottoman Empire and Turkey and specifically the word â€Å"Mà ¼badil† is referring to the 1923 exchange (Hirshchot, 2004).

Enterprise Resource Planning Essay

There are twenty KSFs considered in this study. They were chosen from literature review. The KSFs are classified into five stages of ERP implementation life cycle; namely: project preparation, technology selection, project formulation, implementation/development and deployment. To address the study objectives, a survey questionnaire was considered the most appropriate research method. It was sent to 74 companies that have been implementing ERP system for at least one year. The respondents are staff at management level, IT staff and users involved in the development and use of the ERP system. The survey received 248 responses from 740 quesitionnaires that were sent to the companies. To find the priority of KSFs on ERP implementation life cycle, a quantitative analysis is applied to identify the weighting of KSFs toward ERP implementation success. The success of ERP implementation can be measured through five indicators; namely: system quality, information quality, service quality, tactical impact and strategical impact. Based on the weighting of KSFs on each stage of ERP implementation life cycle, it is found that the communication is most critical KSF on project preparation stage (? 0. 664). While the strong ERP product (package selection) is most critical KSF on technology selection stage (? = 0. 554). The change management is most critical KSF on project formulation stage (? = 0. 406), and on implementation/development stage, user training is the most critical KSF (? = 0. 422). This study is expected to improve knowledge in ERP implementation, especially the role of KS F on each stage of ERP implementation life cycle. Keywords: Priority of KSFs, ERP Implementation Success, ERP Implementation Life Cycle, Key Success Factors (KSFs) _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Introduction Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is an integrated information system that is used to support business processes and resource management within an organization. These systems integrate between one business unit with other business units. With the implementation of this system in an organization to support the company’s operations, it is expected to provide optimum benefit for the company. This is especially needed by the various industrial sectors in this era of lobalization. So, the company can compete with competitors or even create a competitive advantage. In addition, ERP selection is also done with various strategic reasons both tangible and intangible. ERP software has grown rapid ly the last 10 years. According to AMR Research, ERP system sales increased dramatically in 2004 reached 23. 6 billion dollars. Market Journal of Enterprise Resource Planning Studies 2 growth rate remained stable in 2005, and the end of 2009 the ERP software sales reached 24. 5 billion dollars (Hestermann, Anderson ; Pang, 2009). One of the largest ERP companies is SAP AG (a German Company). The company controls about 40% of the market and it is the third largest software company in the world. Based on data from SAP AG, about 80% of SAP’s sales occur in Europe and the United States, while the remaining 20% spread in Asia. The main reason of the investment made by companies is due to the ERP system integration business and it promises to improve the company’s competitive position in the market (Luo and Strong, 2004). Some benefits have also been frequently cited in several studies related to the ERP system, such as: data and pplication integration as a substitute for legacy systems, lower cost and faster deployment compared with in-house development, adopting ERP best practices into business company processes (Markus, 2004). However, some other cases show that investments of Information Technology (IT) with substantial funds may not necessarily bring optimal benefits. This is shown by Dantes & Hasibuan (2010) who i llustrate that nearly 60% of ERP implementation in Indonesia in both public and private companies have failed. Even big companies in the world such as: FoxMeyer Drug and Dell Computer have pent quite a lot of funds for implementation of ERP but the benefits obtained are not optimal (Kalakota and Robinson, 2001). It was reported that FoxMeyer like all large companies engaged in pharmaceutical declare themselves bankrupt because of failure in implementing the system. In line with the above data, a survey conducted by Robbins-Giowa in American companies in 2001 found that about 51% of companies in America have failed in the implementation of ERP (IT Cortex, 2003), In China, it is estimated that the ERP implementation success rate is only 10% (Zhang et al. , 2003). Success and failure of ERP system implementation is influenced by several aspects of both internal and external organizations. Various factors are influencing the success of ERP implementation. Many researchers found critical success factors on ERP implementation, but they were not put in practice. Therefore, in this study we examine the KSF and propose a priority of KSFs on ERP implementation life cycle, both technical and non technical issues that influence the ERP implementation success. Theoretical Background The following sub sections discuss ERP implementation life cycle, KSFs on ERP mplementation process, and measurement of ERP implementation success model. Implementation Life Cycle ERP implementation is changing from legacy systems into ERP system. It is more on process change instead of technology change itself. This section will describe the stages on ERP implementation from previous research, in which each model has different stages. In general, ERP implementation process has three main stages: pre-implementation, implementation and post-implementation (Capaldo and Rippa, 2009). However, some researchers considered each stage to be sub-stages according to their perspectives.

Diaz Surname Meaning and Origin

The surname Diaz comes from the Latin dies which means days. Although it is a common Hispanic surname, Diaz is believed to have Jewish origins, predating the Hispanic world. It is related to the Spanish surname DIEGO; numerous historical examples point to the use of Diaz as a patronymic of Diego (son of Diego). DIAZ is the 14th most popular Hispanic surname and the 73rd most popular surname in the United States. Surname Origin:  Spanish, Portuguese Alternate Surname Spellings:  Dias Famous People with the Surname DIAZ El Cid (born  Rodrigo Dà ­az) - medieval military leader and hero of SpainPorfirio Diaz - Mexican general; president from 1876 to 1911Nate Diaz - American MMA fighterNick Diaz - American MMA fighter; brother of Nate DiazJunot Diaz - Dominican-American author and Pulitzer Prize winner Where Do People With the DIAZ Surname Live? According to surname distribution data from  Forebears, Diaz is the 128th most common  surname in the world, ranking as most prevalent in Mexico and with the highest density based on population in Puerto Rico. Diaz is the 4th most common last name found in Chile; 7th most common in Peru, Cuba and the Dominican Republic; 8th in Panama; 9th in Venezuela and Argentina; and 10th in Colombia and Puerto Rico. Within Europe, Diaz is most frequently found in Spain, where it ranks as the 14th most common surname. It is most frequently found in the northern region of Asturias, as well as the Canary Islands. Genealogy Resources for the Surname DIA 100 Common Hispanic Surnames Their MeaningsGarcia, Martinez, Rodriguez, Lopez, Hernandez... Are you one of the millions of people sporting one of these top 100 common Hispanic last names? How to Research Hispanic HeritageLearn how to get started researching  your Hispanic ancestors, including the basics of family tree research and country-specific organizations, genealogical records, and resources for Spain, Latin America, Mexico, Brazil, the Caribbean and other Spanish speaking countries. Diaz Family Crest - Its Not What You ThinkContrary to what you may hear, there is no such thing as a Diaz family crest or coat of arms for the Diaz surname.  Coats of arms are granted to individuals, not families, and may rightfully be used only by the uninterrupted male line descendants of the person to whom the coat of arms was originally granted.   GeneaNet - Diaz RecordsGeneaNet includes archival records, family trees, and other resources for individuals with the Diaz surname, with a concentration on records and families from France, Spain, and other European countries.