Summarise The Preparations That Need Essay Example for Free

Summarise The Preparations That Need Essay The preparations required will include the planning of appropriate approaches to information collection There should be interrogation/analysis of the data collected during implementation of internal quality assurance. Preparations should be made to ensure clear and effective communication and negotiation with learners/assessors/colleagues/employers. Preparations should be made for administrative arrangements such as timing, venue, agenda. Within the administrative arrangements for CPD activities schemes need to be set up to prepare participants. Preparations should also include resources such as assessors’ records, assessment plans, sampling schedules, organisation documentation, templates for recording outcomes, and new technology.

Erins Causal Argument :: Essays Papers

Erin's Causal Argument "Nothing meant more to people who went West in the 1840's and 1850's than mail from home." - National Park Service Pony Express Historic Trail Brochure People moved West for many reasons: the prospect of a new beginning, free land, even Gold! Leaving family behind was a hardship that many settlers dealt with. And at this time, the only way to communicate with those left behind was to write letters. Moving was, and still is, a very traumatic process. Picking up and moving everything you own and leaving behind everything familiar – it was a very trying experience. Letters from home brought back a little bit of familiarity†¦a little bit of family†¦a little bit of security. While the Pony Express wasn't the quickest mode of transporting mail to be developed, it was the first of any speed. In an attempt to create a quick and efficient mode for transporting mail, the U.S government spent more than $30,000 researching and purchasing camels. However, the use of camels did not prove practical because, while camels move quickly on flat dessert ground, the camels were not able to climb and maneuver the rocky terrain of the mountains with any great speed (National Park Service). At this time, the only way to send a letter was by stagecoach, a method which could take up to 4 weeks. Mail was too slow to be of any use to families and friends. In the case of a death, letters would reach their destination more than a month after the fact. If help was needed in certain situations, up to two months could pass before any correspondence would be returned. The fact was short and simple – sending letters simply took too long. Although not always practical, it was much quicker to go deliver the message in person. The Pony Express was not the first of this type of mail transportation. Actually, the idea of a sort of "mailbag relay race" originated in China. During Gengis Khan's rule in the 13th century, mail was transported across much of Russia and China by riders on horses (Moody 181). The Pony Express was developed by William Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Waddell of the Russell, Majors, and Waddell freighting company. The Pony Express trail ran from Saint Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California. Along this 1,6000 mile route were 190 relay stations, where riders would stay to rest and wait for their next delivery home.

Is there water and life on mars?

Unlike Earth, since there are no oceans to obscure the planet Mars, its topography is now better explored and known than that of Earth (Australian Geographic 2003). It has the largest known volcano in the Solar System, Olympus Mons, three times as high as Mt Everest, arid the longest and deepest known canyon, Valles Marineris, 4000 km long and 10 km deep (Australian Geographic 2003).Mars has no continental plate movement, so its surface isn't constantly reworked by mountain-building processes. As a result, much of the landscape is as it was billions of years ago (Australian Geographic 2003).NASA researchers are taking lessons from the debate about life on Earth to Mars. Their future missions will incorporate cutting-edge biotechnology designed to detect individual molecules made by Martian organisms, either living or long dead (Zimmer 2005).The search for life on Mars has become more urgent thanks in part to probes by the two rovers now roaming Mars' surface and another spaceship tha t is orbiting the planet. In recent months, they've made a series of astonishing discoveries that, once again, tempt scientists to believe that Mars harbors life or did so in the past. At a February conference in the Netherlands, an audience of Mars experts was surveyed about Martian life. Some 75 percent of the scientists said they thought life once existed there, and of them, 25 percent think that Mars harbors life today (Zimmer 2005).The search for the fossil remains of primitive single-celled organisms like bacteria took off in 1953, when Stanley Tyler, an economic geologist at the University of Wisconsin, puzzled over some 2.1 billion-year-old rocks he'd gathered in Ontario, Canada (Zimmer 2005). His glassy black rocks known as cherts were loaded with strange, microscopic filaments and hollow balls. Working with Harvard paleobotonist Elso Barghoorn, Tyler proposed that the shapes were actually fossils, left behind by ancient life-forms such as algae. Before Tyler and Barghoorn' s work, few fossils had been found that predated the Cambrian Period, which began about 540 million years ago (Zimmer 2005). Now the two scientists were positing that life was present much earlier in the 4.55 billion-year history of the planet. How much further back it went remained for later scientists to discover (Zimmer 2005)?In the next decades, paleontologists in Africa found 3 billion-year-old fossil traces of microscopic bacteria that had lived in massive marine reefs (Zimmer 2005). Bacteria can also form what are called biofilms, colonies that grow in thin layers over surfaces such as rocks and the ocean floor, and scientists have found solid evidence for biofilms dating back 3.2 billion years (Zimmer 2005).Fluvial Landforms geologic features putatively formed by water were identified in images of Mars taken by the Mariner and Viking spacecraft in the 1970s (Bell 2006). These landforms included enormous channels carved by catastrophic floods and large-scale valley networks s omewhat reminiscent of river drainage systems on Earth. Over the past decade, images from the Mars Global Surveyor, which has been orbiting Mars since 1997, have revealed spectacular examples of extremely small and seemingly young gullies formed in the walls of some craters and canyons. These observations indicate the past presence of liquid water on the Martian surface or just below it but not necessarily for long periods (Bell 2006). The water from the catastrophic floods, for example, may have lasted only a few days or weeks on the surface before freezing, seeping back into the ground or evaporating.Furthermore, the networks of river-like valleys shown in the Viking orbiter images do not have the same characteristics as terrestrial river valleys when seen at higher resolution (Bell 2006). The Martian valleys could have formed entirely from subsurface water flow and ground erosion a process known as sapping-rather than from water moving over the surface. The gullies observed in th e Mars Global Surveyor's images may also be the result of water seeping underground below ice or from buried snow deposits (Bell 2006). Although these features are stunning and dramatic indicators of water on Mars, they do not firmly prove that the Red Planet once had a warmer, wetter, more Earth-like environment with long-lasting lakes and rivers.In the past few years, however, new satellite images have provided much more convincing evidence that stable, Earthlike conditions prevailed on Mars for long periods (Bell 2006). One of the most exciting discoveries is a class of features that look like river deltas. The best and largest example, photographed by the Mars Global Surveyor, is at the end of a valley network that drains into Eberswalde Crater in a region southeast of the Valles Marineris canyon system (Bell 2006). This drainage system terminates in a 10-kilometer-wide, layered, fan-shaped landform characterized by meandering ridges that crosscut one another and show varying de grees of erosion. To many geologists, this feature has all the characteristics of a delta that formed at the end of a sediment-bearing river flowing into a shallow lake.Further evidence of an Earth-like climate in Mars's past comes from high-resolution images, taken by the Mars Odyssey and Global Surveyor orbiters, of the small-scale valley networks on the plateaus and walls of the Valles Marineris canyon system. Unlike previously identified valley networks that seem to have formed largely from subsurface flow, these newly found networks have characteristics that are consistent with their formation by rainfall or snowmelt and surface runoff. For example, the networks are arranged in dense, branching patterns, and the lengths and widths of the valleys increase from their sources to their mouths. Moreover, the sources are located along the ridge crests, suggesting that the landscape was molded by precipitation and runoff. Indeed, these landforms provide the best evidence to date that it may have rained on Mars.A more exploratory possibility is that these runoff features arose relatively recently, perhaps one billion to 1.5 billion years after Mars formed. To estimate the ages of Martian landforms, researchers count the number of impact craters on the feature the more impacts the region has endured, the older it is. This dating method, however, has many uncertainties; it can be difficult to distinguish between primary and secondary impact craters and volcanic calderas, and erosion has destroyed the evidence of craters in some regions (Bell 2006). Still, if these surface runoff valleys do turn out to be relatively young, Mars may have had an Earth-like climate for as much as a third of the planet's history and perhaps longer if even younger valleys are eventually identified.Yet another piece of evidence supporting persistent liquid water on Mars is the observation of truly enormous amounts of erosion and sedimentation in many parts of the planet. Making calculatio ns based on new orbital imaging data, researchers have determined that the rate at which sediments were deposited and eroded in the first billion years of the planet's history may have been about a million times as high as the present-day rate (Bell 2006).But what process could have transported the massive amount of sediment needed to bury almost everything in the Gale Crater region? (Bell 2006) Scientists believe flowing water offers the best explanation. Studies of erosion and sedimentation rates on Earth suggest that wind could have moved some of the Martian sediment in the past (just as it is doing today, albeit at a very slow pace). No viable wind-based scenario, however, can explain the rapid transport of millions of cubic kilometers of material across large fractions of the planet's surface, which apparently occurred repeatedly during Mars's early history. Flowing water, though, has routinely moved gargantuan amounts of sediment on Earth and could have done so on the Red Plan et as well.In addition scrutinizing the shape of Martian landforms, scientists have searched for hints of liquid water in the composition of the planet's minerals (Bell 2006). One of the reasons why researchers had long believed that Mars never enjoyed an extensive period of warm and wet climate is that much of the surface not covered by wind-borne dust appears to be composed of material that is largely unweathered pristine volcanic minerals such as olivine and pyroxene. If water had flowed over the surface for a long time, the argument went, it would have chemically altered and weathered the volcanic minerals, creating clays or other oxidized, hydrated phases (minerals that incorporate water molecules or hydroxide ions in their crystal structure).The emerging paradigm is that Mars had an extensive watery past: puddles or ponds or lakes or seas (or all of them) existing for long periods and exposed to what must have been a thicker, warmer atmosphere. During the first billion or so y ears of Martian history, the Red Planet was a much more Earth-like place, probably hospitable to the formation and evolution of life as currently known. The Martian environment began to change, however, as sulfur built up, the waters became acidic and the planet's geologic activity waned (Bell 2006). Clays gave way to sulfates as the acid rain (of sorts) continued to alter the volcanic rocks and break down any carbonates that may have formed earlier. Over time, the atmosphere thinned out; perhaps it was lost to space when the planet's magnetic field shut off, or maybe it was blown off by catastrophic impacts or sequestered somehow in the crust. Mars eventually became the cold, arid planet recognized today.This new view of Mars is not yet universally accepted, however. Key questions remain unanswered (Bell 2006): How long did the waters flow in the Eberswalde delta; for decades or millennia? Where are all the sediments that appear to have been eroded from Meridiani Planum and places such as Gale Crater? And were they eroded by water or wind or something else? What is the global abundance of clay minerals on Mars, and were they ever major components of the planet's crust? And, most vexing, where are the carbonates that should have formed in the warm, wet, carbon dioxide-rich environment but have not yet been observed anywhere on Mars, not even in the older terrains where clays have been detected? Acidic water could have destroyed the bulk of the carbonates but surely not all of them!Perhaps the most important question of all is: Did water or life ever exist on Mars, and if so, was it able to evolve as the environment changed so dramatically to the present-day climate? (Bell 2006) The answer depends in large part on how long the Earth-like conditions lasted. What can be deduced is that the past decade of discoveries on Mars may be only a small taste of an even more exciting century of robotic and eventually human exploration.ReferencesAustralian Geographic, (2003 ) Life on Mars. 08161658, Jul-Sep2003, Issue 71Bell, J., (2006) The Red Planet's Watery Past. Scientific American, 00368733, Dec2006, Vol. 295, Issue 6Zimmer, C., (2005) Life on Mars? Smithsonian, 00377333, May2005, Vol. 36, Issue 2

The criticism of the pledge of allegiance of the United States and is user in public schools Free Essay Example, 2000 words

The words where altered to read â€Å"†¦to the flag of the United States of America†¦Ã¢â‚¬ . In 1942, the Pledge of Allegiance actually was entered into United States law, setting the stage for the official title to become ‘The Pledge of Allegiance’ back in 1945. By then, there was an entire set of policies and procedures put into place governing the display of the flag and its place in American Society. By this time, several wars had been fought and patriotism in America was at its highest level since the Revolutionary War. As a result, the flag evoked feelings of strong emotion by all Americans, and there was a near unanimous contention that the public should recite it at certain times and occasions. One of those occasions was in the public school classroom. A final change to the Pledge, ironically, involved religion. It was not until 1954 that the words ‘Under God’ were added after that phrase ‘One nation’ in the pledge. Most sc holars agree that this is likely when the debate began, although there was not much discussion about the change at first. We will write a custom essay sample on The criticism of the pledge of allegiance of the United States and is user in public schools or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/pageorder now People mostly accepted and agreed with the changed. In explaining the rationale for this change in the first place, McCarthy (2005) wrote, â€Å"The amendment’s sponsors indicated that the purpose of the addition to the Pledge was to affirm the United States as a religious nation, distinguished from countries practicing atheistic communism† (p. 93). The change was actually reflected in the form of a federal law signed into effect by President Eisenhower. In doing so, he said, â€Å"In this way, we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most power resource in peace and war† (McCarthy, 2005, p. 93). In essence, it was decided about 60 years that the Pledge of Allegiance should reflect to all that America was a Christian nation and that all citizens agreed to that effect. At first, it appeared that the public would be in stark agreement with this idea. As the next section will argue, however, the feeling is not necessarily the same today. In the end, there are two parts to the argument supporting the idea that public school children should recite the pledge. The first is civic responsibility. Americans, just as every other country in the world, should feel proud of their heritage and country. This is instilled from childhood, so the simple act of reciting the pledge can further that cause. The second is to better understand where we have come from as a nation and to remember the sacrifices that have been made.