Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripol Essay examples - 643 Words

Shakira â€Å"In this life, to earn your place you have to fight for it.†- Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll, singer/ songwriter . Shakira did indeed fight for her placement in the celebrity lifestyle. In 1979, Shakira’s half brother was killed when a drunk driver hit the motorcycle he was riding. Just 2 at the time, the singer says that her first memory is learning of his death. Shakira had been composing songs since she was 8 years of age. When Shakira was a young girl with huge aspirations to become a singer and dancer in her native Colombia, she was unceremoniously rejected from the choir at her Catholic school. Some criticism towards her lowered her self esteem. She has been a fighter and is still a fighter. Shakira is a popular singer born†¦show more content†¦Now Shakira is now a coach on The Voice and is about to release a highly anticipated new self-titled album. I believe Shakira is living after her name. Shakira is an Arabic female given name meaning thankful and â€Å"grateful†. It is a derivative of shukran, which is Arabic for thanks. Shakira’s most passionate mission has been helping thousands of deprived Colombian children whose lives have been torn apart by the country’s civil conflict. Shakira’s project, for which she is the honorary chair, is the Pies Descalzos Foundation, a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to improving the lives of young Colombians who have been forced to live on the side lines of society. Shakira is one of the most inspiring people in the world and great model to look up to. She is beautiful, kind, a creative and great singer, and simply amazing, with her projects to help Colombians that are dealing with conflict in society. She has evolved into this amazing woman and I believe she should be looked up to from all over the world. She is a Saint and a great coach. She is simply a work of God’s insane love. Cite page Wang, Julia. â€Å"Shakira.† People.com. Time Inc., n.d. Web. 20 May 2014. http://www.people.com/people/shakira/.

An Interview With A Student Intern - 1451 Words

Introductory Client is a twenty-year-old bi-racial female. She has never been married and does not have any children. She is currently living with her boyfriend of about one year. Client works two jobs and has aspirations to go back to school one day. Client signed the Informed Consent and was notified of my status as a student intern. Client does not know her biological father and was raised by her mom and stepfather. She describes having a happy childhood as well as feeling supported by her mom. Client did well in school, and after graduating high school begun taking classes at the local university. She later dropped out of school causing a rift between her and her parents. Client had been working on repairing her relationship with†¦show more content†¦She wants to make sure they remain close and connected throughout this time, as my client knows things are going to get harder once she goes to the authorities. She then would like help focusing on safety planning, and begin ning her own healing process associated with her abuse. While her situation is difficult, my client does not appear to be in crisis at this time. She seems to have an active and extended support system through her family and friends. She denied any thoughts or feelings related to self-harm and denied any past history of self-harm. Client could benefit from regularly scheduled psychotherapy and case management, including resource referrals. Strengths My client has many redeeming qualities and strengths. She is a hard worker, funny, and most importantly she has much optimism about what is happening in her life right now. She knows that getting through this trauma will be difficult and the path may not be easy, but she has hope that things will work out the way they are supposed to. Difficulties The difficulties my client currently faces is helping her mom stabilize. Not only did my client’s mother leave her husband she also found out that he had been sexually molesting her daughter. My client’s mother is in crisis. This client also faces many neigh Sayers, people who are saying she is lying and that the abuse never happened. Relevant History During

Water Scarcity free essay sample

Water scarcity already affects every continent. Around 1. 2 billion people, or almost one-fifth of the worlds population, live in areas of physical scarcity, and 500 million people are approaching this situation. Another 1. 6 billion people, or almost one quarter of the worlds population, face economic water shortage (where countries lack the necessary infrastructure to take water from rivers and aquifers). Water scarcity is among the main problems to be faced by many societies and the World in the XXIst century. Water use has been growing at more than twice the rate f population increase in the last century, and, although there is no global water scarcity as such, an increasing number of regions are chronically short of water. Water scarcity is both a natural and a human-made phenomenon. There is enough freshwater on the planet for six billion people but it is distributed unevenly and too much of it is wasted, polluted and unsustainably managed. We will write a custom essay sample on Water Scarcity or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Click on map to enlarge Sources: Vital Water Graphics. UNEP Human Development Report 2006. UNDP, 2006 Coping with water scarcity. Challenge of the twenty-first century. UN-Water, FAO. 2007 Water Scarcity and the MD6s The way water scarcity issues are addressed impacts upon the successful achievement of most of the Millennium Development Goals. Water stress versus water scarcity Hydrologists typically assess scarcity by looking at the population-water equation. An area is experiencing water stress when annual water supplies drop below 1 700 m3 per person. When annual water supplies drop below 1 000 m3 per person, the population faces water scarcity, and below 500 cubic metres absolute scarcity. Water scarcity is defined as the point at which the aggregate impact of all users impinges on the supply or quality of water under prevailing institutional arrangements to the extent that the demand by all sectors, including the environment, cannot be satisfied fully. Water scarcity is a relative concept and can occur at any level of supply or demand. Scarcity may be a social construct (a product of affluence, expectations and customary behaviour) or the consequence of altered supply patterns stemming from climate change for example. 2007 Did you know? Around 700 million people in 43 countries suffer today from water scarcity. By 2025, 1. 8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the worlds population could be living under water stressed conditions. With the existing climate change scenario, almost half the worlds population will be living in areas of high water stress by 2030, including between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa. In addition, water scarcity in some arid and semi-arid places will displace between 24 million and 700 million people. Sub- Saharan Africa has the largest number of water-stressed countries of any region. UN initiatives that are helping to raise the issue World Water Day 2007: Coping with water scarcity World Water Day 2007 was dedicated to the theme Coping with water scarcity. It highlighted the increasing significance of water scarcity worldwide and the need for increased integration and cooperation to ensure sustainable, efficient and equitable management of scarce water resources, both at international and local levels.

Tma free essay sample

People, being naturally inquisitive, have often been referred to as scientists. Even as young children, people are constantly testing and evaluating the boundaries to decipher their own social environment and quickly recognise what is acceptable and what is not. This soon evolves into intuition and whether it is constructed in a logical and rational way depends on a number factors. However, when considering cognitive psychology and the information processing that underpins judgements and risks, peoples cognitive processes are often likened to computers in the way that these processes interact. This essay begins by looking at Fritz Heider (1944, as cited in Buchanan et al. , p. 60) an influential psychologist in this area who coined the phrase naive psychology. It then progresses onto the advantages and disadvantages of the attribution theories using Kelleys covariation method and MacArthurs vignettes to test the theory. This is followed by looking into optimistic bias and whether this bias can prevent people from constructing rational and logical theories when making sense of their social environment. We will write a custom essay sample on Tma or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Finally, the essay evaluates the HIV/AIDs and smoking progression and how people can conceptualise risk, resulting in laying blame elsewhere other than in their social group. Heider was one of the first psychologists to study in detail social cognition. He believed that delving into how people made sense of their social environments was fundamental in understanding social behaviours, he believed people actively built models of cause and effect to find predictability and regularity which would help control their lives, operating like naive psychologists. Heider also believed people used this method when people perceive others and their actions. He constructed a study using animated cartoons of moving shapes consisting of a circle, a box and a rectangle. When asked to describe what they saw, all but one of the participants described the shapes movement in terms of human action. The fact that these people were perceiving these shapes automatically to be people goes some way to provide support for Heiders theory and prove that people are certainly trying to make sense of their social environment. However this, albeit simple use of experimental social psychology, has a few limitations. As this was a simplified experiment and disimilar to what would happen in a real social environment, Heider was not able to prove that the results would be the same outside in real life. In fact, often results obtained outside of the laboratory conclude opposite results to that of the laboratory. There is also a possibility that the participants, upon hearing that they would be attending a psychological experiment, subconciously associated psychology with people or themselves and their answers reflected this. In an experimental condition there will always be confounding variables no matter what measures are taken to eliminate them, it is certainly difficult to take research on perception and attention out of everyday life and into a controlled experiment. In a social environment because people are not manufacturing social situations, people see them as they are, this could put them in good stead to construct rational and logical theories on their environment. What Heiders theory lacks is specific procedures and data. Harold Kelley (1967, as cited in Buchanan et al. , p. 2) who developed the covariation model, used testable predictions and data in his attribution theory. The attribution theories suggest people distinguish between external/disposition factors and internal/disposition factors to recognise the causes of social behaviour. Kelley proposed that when people use information in causal reasoning, three variables are decided upon, distinctiveness, consensus and consistency, this was known as the covariation model. He supported the belief that people behave like intuitive scientists. MacArthur (1972, as cited in Buchanan et al. , p. 4) tested this theory in her studies, she wanted to test the effect of different types and level of information on the nature of causal attributions. She used 16 vignettes, a short description of a behaviour event that contained different types of the three variables, CCD. They then assigned an internal or external cause to the event. The results were supportive of MacArthurs theory and imply that we tend to favour internal rather than external attributions, the FAE (fundamental attribution error). However, it has been proven that people do not use always use all the information available to them. This shows that the way people view risk is not particularly logical, people overlook risk and when comparing people to experts, people do not usually conceptualise risks as well as experts Vignettes are easy to use and provide much needed data and from a large number of participants which is likely to produce more accurate results. The kind of control applied in this study would not have been able to take place if it took place in real life. However they do have low ecological validity because of this very reason, it is still constructed. Attribution theories have also been criticised for overstating the rationality of peoples causal reasoning. When considering the idea of people as intuitive scientists it is important to understand that people can tend to be more optimistic about risk than statistics warrant. This results in optimistic bias. For example, irrespective of empirical evidence, some people think smoking wont harm them. Some people know that they are likely to become ill from it and still continue because the immediate gain overcomes any alternative, albeit potentially deadly. This may be as a result of a motivational source which can result in judgemental biases. There are several explanations for this optimistic bias. The availability heuristic, which involves making decisions based on generating examples in peoples cognitive system, perhaps someone they know who has smoked constantly for 60 years has other any side effects. These are good examples to use when deciphering whether people are intuitive scientists and can make rational and logical judgements because the risk of smoking can be estimated using mathematics. The amount of people that still smoke however is a strong argument that people may be intuitive scientists but the concept of making rational, logical decisions can still be lost if alternative factors get in the way, like smoking or HIV. When people have to make decisions quickly, they often unconsciously rely on incomplete information as a result of the environment in which the social cognition takes place, rather than just the basic cognitive processes, this could account for people rejecting the possibility of HIV leading to death, perhaps because the information they have in incomplete. The fact that people have survived despite this however goes some way to suggest that although peoples cognitive processes do not always lead them to the mathematically correct answer, perhaps that element of risk, optimistic bias and inquisitiveness has prolonged peoples evolution so far. The studies involving optimistic bias and indeed many studies involving how people conceptualise risk however, have been conducted in largely Western cultures and having found previous contradictions between studies in Western cultures, (which tend to focus largely on the individual rather than the social group, as is more popular in many Asian cultures), these theories may not apply to the majority of people and therefore more research entailing diverse cultures would build a more successful conclusion as to why optimistic bias occurs. One reason could be evolution, natural selection could have resulted in humans having evolved with optimistic bias meaning that the people who took the risks were more sexually successful. Another reason for this could that in the urgency of everyday life, people do not use all the information available. One could argue that as we do not process everything we see, we connect the dots based on our rational judgement. The people in many of these experiments drew from their own conclusions and upon their own schema which could be wrong. This kind of error highlights one of the disadvantages of people drawing from their own logical and rational theories. Although it is important to note that the above examples are experiments and the situations are unlikely to occur in everyday life, however research has also shown our schema is highly tuned and usually correct. Both cognitive psychology and experimental social psychology initiate ideas of people thinking in machine ways, operating like scientists but the studies have shown otherwise. Perhaps logical and rational ideas are ideologies and are not appropriate in the context of our own social environments. People, in general tend to perceive events as being more under their own control than they perhaps are, it is clear from these studies that people can sometimes become more optimistic when is comes to risks when comparing the true scientific statistics. From the research into varying theories it appears that the majority of people are intuitive scientists, that to a certain extent people do use logical and rational theories to make sense of their social environment, however these are not always successful. As the evidence of several theories suggests, intuition in people is not always correct. Mistakes are bound to be made, especially when motivation factors overcomes logic and experience and imagination interferes with the process. If people have survived thus far using their own rational and logical judgements than anything further may be seen as striving for improvement, where one could argue, it is unnecessary. Word count 1,503 References K. Buchanan, P. Anand, H. Joffe K. Thomas (2007) Perceiving and understanding the social world. In D. Miell, A. Phoenix, K. Thomas (Eds. ), Mapping Psychology (2nd ed. , pp. 5-49). Milton Keynes: The Open University