Beautiful Blueberries Essays - English-language Films, Films

Beautiful Blueberries Christopher McCandless' last journal entry before dying of starvation in the Alaska bush was simply the words Beautiful Blueberries. Over the previous two years he bought a secondhand canoe on impulse and paddled to Mexico. Then he lived on the streets of Los Angeles with vagrants, camped in the Arizona dessert with hippies, tramped through almost every western state, occasionally holding odd jobs. He also lived completely off the land in the Alaskan backcountry. McCandless' epic journey separated him from his parents and peers, a world of security and material excess, and a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence. It was a journey that would have been a complete waste if it weren't for Jon Krakauer's book entitled Into the Wild. A lot of people believe that McCandless was an idiot. He was simply one more dreamy half-caulked greenhorn who went into the country expecting to find answers to all his problems and instead found only mosquitoes and a lonely death. Some people blamed Krakauer, in the magazine article that preceded the book, for glorifying a foolish, pointless death. But the beauty of Krakauer's writing is that he doesn't glorify Chris McCandless' life or even try to hide his personal weaknesses. Instead, that which becomes evident is a vivid portrait of McCandless' journeys and an examination of why people are attracted to high-risk activities. Krakauer begins the book with Chris McCandless hiking into the Alaskan wilderness to his ensuing death. He does not return to this scene until the next to last chapter, effectively forcing the reader to see McCandless as more than an unprepared misfit who deserved to die because of the risks he took. We learn of his adventures tramping around the continent, discern how McCandless differs from people whom he had been favorably compared to in the outdoors community, learn of his family and upbringing, and we are told of a similar adventure in Alaska which almost claimed the authors life. Only then are we returned to the morbid Alaskan scene and the controversies surrounding McCandless' death. Krakauer succeeds in writing a powerful book because we become attached to McCandless' dream and sympathize to a greater degree with his desire to undertake what he labeled as the ultimate challenge. There are some unconventional aspects of the book, which turn it into something greater than a story of Chris McCandless. These are the way in which Krakauer goes about examining Chris McCandless through his own life, through others who have a similar desire for adventure, and through an examination of the novels he read. Into the Wild is not a fluff story about a misdirected youth; it has themes to which anyone who has ever dreamed of undertaking their own adventure, however large or small, can relate and gain insight. Overall Krakauer believes Chris McCandless wasn't that different from anyone else who liked adventure. Throughout the book there is an underlying battle against McCandless' critics by trying to justify the journey. Krakauer confesses that after writing a magazine article on McCandless he remained haunted by the particulars of the boy's starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those in my own. Unwilling to let McCandless go, Krakauer spent more than a year retracing the convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska bush, chasing down the details with an interest that bordered on obsession until he finished writing the book. In this fierce passion, Krakauer is not only telling of McCandless' life but his own, and in the process trying to make a world of critics understand why he, McCandless, and countless others are drawn to a life of potentially suicidal adventure. This passion draws the reader in, spins them around and spits them back out int o the world with a different perception of life. This passion makes Into the Wild an amazing book.

Confidence Intervals and Confidence Levels in Sociology

Confidence Intervals and Confidence Levels in Sociology A confidence interval is a measure of estimation that is typically used in quantitative sociological research. It is an estimated range of values that is likely to include the population parameter being calculated. For instance, instead of estimating the mean age of a certain population to be a single value like 25.5 years, we could say that the mean age is somewhere between 23 and 28. This confidence interval contains the single value we are estimating, yet it gives us a wider net to be right. When we use confidence intervals to estimate a number ​or population parameter, we can also estimate just how accurate our estimate is. The likelihood that our confidence interval will contain the population parameter is called the confidence level. For example, how confident are we that our confidence interval of 23 – 28 years of age contains the mean age of our population? If this range of ages was calculated with a 95 percent confidence level, we could say that we are 95 percent confident that the mean age of our population is between 23 and 28 years. Or, the chances are 95 out of 100 that the mean age of the population falls between 23 and 28 years. Confidence levels can be constructed for any level of confidence, however, the most commonly used are 90 percent, 95 percent, and 99 percent. The larger the confidence level is, the narrower the confidence interval. For instance, when we used a 95 percent confidence level, our confidence interval was 23 – 28 years of age. If we use a 90 percent confidence level to calculate the confidence level for the mean age of our population, our confidence interval might be 25 – 26 years of age. Conversely, if we use a 99 percent confidence level, our confidence interval might be 21 – 30 years of age. Calculating The Confidence Interval There are four steps to calculating the confidence level for means. Calculate the standard error of the mean.Decide on the level of confidence (i.e. 90 percent, 95 percent, 99 percent, etc.). Then, find the corresponding Z value. This can usually be done with a table in an appendix of a statistics text book. For reference, the Z value for a 95 percent confidence level is 1.96, while the Z value for a 90 percent confidence level is 1.65, and the Z value for a 99 percent confidence level is 2.58.Calculate the confidence interval.*Interpret the results. *The formula for calculating the confidence interval is: CI sample mean /- Z score (standard error of the mean). If we estimate the mean age for our population to be 25.5, we calculate the standard error of the mean to be 1.2, and we choose a 95 percent confidence level (remember, the Z score for this is 1.96), our calculation would look like this: CI 25.5 – 1.96(1.2) 23.1 andCI 25.5 1.96(1.2) 27.9. Thus, our confidence interval is 23.1 to 27.9 years of age. This means that we can be 95 percent confident that the actual mean age of the population is not less than 23.1 year, and is not greater than 27.9. In other words, if we collect a large amount of samples (say, 500) from the population of interest, 95 times out of 100, the true population mean would be included within our computed interval. With a 95 percent confidence level, there is a 5 percent chance that we are wrong. Five times out of 100, the true population mean will not be included in our specified interval. Updated  by Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D.

Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty at Sambal Express Research Paper

Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty at Sambal Express - Research Paper Example The first question was designed for the localities’ of South Harrow. The question consists of the name of four renowned restaurants of South Harrow including Sambal Express such as Eastern Eye, Jaflong, Golden Sovereign and Barcelos. When the respondents were asked about their most favourite restaurant among the five, 10% customers replied that they would love to go to the restaurant Eastern Eye. 24% voted for Jaflong while 26% of the customers selected Golden Sovereign to be their most favourite. Another 10% opted for Barcelos. However, more than 30% customers had chosen Sambal Express to be the first restaurant they consider when they think of a perfect dine out.  Ã‚   The next question concentrates on counting the frequency of the consumers visiting Sambal Express. 26% of the customers select Sambal Express as their weekend destination whereas 28% of them have expressed their wish to visit the restaurant again during holidays and festivals. 22% customers visit Sambal Expr ess over fortnight. The number of customers visits the restaurant once in a month or after an interval of 2 to 3 months is comparatively less (12% each).  Ã‚  Ã‚   The third question attempts to understand the overall satisfaction level of the consumers. Excellence of Sambal Express is reflected when 52% customers revealed that they are extremely satisfied with the overall services of the restaurant. 22% of the customers are moderately satisfied whereas.