Theme

Human Interest Stories

Title

Digital Cameras

Throughout the ages humanity has always been fascinated by the possibility of capturing moments or in other words perpetuating moments of high significance and outstanding beauty. This provided the opportunity to share something that nobody else has seen or perceived. This idea has made a long way from canvaspaintings to using cameras. Cameras, in their turn have also experienced a rather fast evolution and nowadays everybody has a notion of what a digital camera is and the majority of people use digital cameras. According to a standard definition a digital camera is opposed to a film or video camera, uses an electronic sensor to transform images and video into electronic data[1]. Years ago people used to possess two different devices in order to take pictures and to make video. The need to spare space and make it more comfortable for people to do both things with higher quality results catalyzed the creation of digital cameras. The multifunctionalism of digital cameras and the combination of several devices in one make it the best possible choice for a modern man. For years a digital camera has been unaffordable for many families, nevertheless, nowadays the great variety of digital cameras of different manufacturers and diverse prices make a digital camera a potential purchase of almost every single family. The formula: price + quality = satisfied customer used by the digital cameras manufacturers is especially reflected in the wide choice of cameras that offer the best quality standards for the price-range they belong to.

The transition of digital photography from the privilege of rich people to an ordinary home appliance has caused some problems. That is the reason a modern man has a set of questions concerning digital cameras, especially the whats, whys and wheres of digital cameras. Nobody wants to make a miscalculation! The basic problem in choosing a digital camera is a guarantee that the device you are purchasing will grow old in couple of month due to a constant improvement and development of the sphere. The only factor that may delay this process of growing old is purchasing a device with the price twice or three times higher of the average market price for a digital camera at the moment. If a person chooses a digital camera there are several criterions of a great priority he needs to keep in mind: price of the device, the image resolution of the camera, the capacity of the memory card, presence of a LCD-display, the interface of the camera, its weight and size. The price of a digital camera depends on its quality factors. The resolution of a digital camera, or in other words the size of a digital image is measured in pixels. Pixels in their turn are photosensitive elements. It is common knowledge, that the bigger is the amount of pixels indicated in the camera properties the better it is. Therefore, if a high-detailed photo is required, the usage of zoom on a digital camera with small resolution will not give the desired result. In this case a person choosing a digital camera needs to exactly know what it will be used for and to choose it according to its future destination. It is necessary to mention that the resolution of 640"x"480 is the lowest resolution any customer should be orientated to. It is the minimal resolution with witch the purchase of a digital camera still remains reasonable. The lens of the camera or the zoom properties mentioned above allows saving a lot on the price of the device but hits the quality of the pictures obtained. The memory card is a very important issue, too. It is much better to choose a better camera with a

lesser memory capacity than an overage digital camera with a larger memory capacity. The presence of the LCD-display is no longer a wish it is a requirement for any digital camera. It allows to choose the future image, to anticipate it and to delete bad images and therefore to save space.

Along with some advantages mentioned above there are more to digital cameras than that. It goes without saying that it is possible to examine and sort out the images, create a slide show, a digital photo album, create a presentation on your computer, a ordinary TV or a multimedia projector. A digital camera offers the ability of sending images for printing directly to the printer with a DPOF standard or throughout the USB without using the computer. The images from the digital cameras may be sent throughout the Internet. For instance, it is possible to send images to colleagues, friends or relatives using e-mail. In the era of the constant lack of time this advantages become issues of the highest priority.

Digital cameras find more and more place in the lives of contemporary people. Due to the comfort and quality of making images they are rightfully displacing ordinary old cameras from the market. After all, this is very simple: take the picture you want, connect the digital camera to your computer and open the boundless elbowroom of its opportunities. You may immediately print the images or by means of special programs make the images brighter, add shrill and so on. The quality of the images is much better than on the film cameras. Smart Media Card or ompact Flash memory cards store the images and do not let them to get old. Digital cameras are the right choice of the new millennium.

Theme Title

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Lifestyle Technology and modernity

Table of contents: Introduction Technology as a new religion. Is technology a shrine? Responsibility for people Technologies cause frustration. Causes of social isolation Technology and alienation Influence of Internet Conclusion Technology and modernity Essay

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite. Thomas Sowel The term technology is used in so many contexts nowadays that it is very hard to give one complex definition of this phenomenon. Ordinarily, this term implies

the collection of all the contemporary discoveries, inventions and innovations that get a physical entailment. It is common knowledge that the major priority of any terrestrial technology is to facilitate the process of working and living of every human being. In other words any technology is always a tool, a facility used to save time and perfect the life. Originally, technology was used in order to survive, as it was the primary goal of the mankind since their first day of existance. Technology was born thousands of years ago when a man started inventing new primitive instruments to improve the effectiveness of hunting and fishing. The industrial revolution of the 19th century changed the course of human development as it introduced industrial technologies to the world and gave birth to unattended operation. The quality of machinery grew and this fact opened the possibility of mass production and therefore was an enormous step into life-level improvement. The second step was the invention of the telegraph as it started the contemporary period of information technologies. The possibility of sharing the knowhow and other vital information influenced the economy of the countries and therefore significantly changed the standard of life. The benefits of the technological progress were obvious but nobody ever thought that this benefits would also have a flip side the side of isolation. Technology has influenced so many spheres of life that it can be even said that it actually takes responsibility and therefore controls at least four major blocks: culture, intelligence, personal identity and economy. Culture is affected through the ethics that accompanies technology in such manifestations as quality of life owing the modern house static and portable equipment and in the process of socialization, which implies the increase (or

decrease) of the cultural level. Intelligence is influenced by technology in a way that a lot of decisions are made by machines: up-to-date programs allow people to rely major tasks to computers to count everything themselves and simply give the result: a prognosis, an economic calculation etc. Personal identity is definitely influenced too, as technology provides the opportunity to chose the way of living, which corresponds to the inner condition of a person, but equalizes everybody at the same time, for each person is no more that just another user. Economy is not an exception as it helps to build corporation all over the globe crating strong economic alliances. Technology gradually leaves no limits for the possibilities of humanity and humanity gradually become desperately dependent on it. The major issue is that though technology is responsible for the changes in the society it cannot take this responsibility. It is the humanity that is to be responsible for what it invents and contributes into the world. And even more than that each person has to take responsibility for the technological goods his children use. In spite of the comfort modern technologies bring they cannot eliminate such powerful side effect as frustration. This frustration primarily deals with the domination of the technology over human values. The social side of the technological progress resulted in antisocial consequences. A man does not need a friend to come over to help him, or just to talk because everything that is to be done is done my machines and one can talk with a friend over the phone, or communicate through sms or Internet. Such social changes with an antisocial character grow with the growth of number of advanced technologies. Frustration remains invisible until people actually see that their children do not go out but spend hours playing computer games, talking on the ICQ or choosing avatars for their chat nicknames.

The lifestyle of the contemporary generation become more isolated and therefore result many frustrations. One of such frustrations is the inability to demonstrated advance social communicational skills. Two people feel more comfortable sharing personal information by means of the computer that in a face-toface conversation. Technology is a frustration also because it pollutes the atmosphere, uses too much natural resources, leaving lifeless earth and makes people useless, as the machines do everything instead of them. Psychologists are tired of repeating how important is the tactile contact for each person and that the weakest consequence of such deficit is aggression. Internet-communication, a computer deciding what is the best color gamut for the bedroom, virtual-traveling, remote education, computers telling fairy-tales to little children - this is just a small part of what is going on around us. Depression, isolation, alienation are looking for new victims that lose their contact with the outside world. Technological progress expands our contacts we can have hundreds of people in our contact-lists, but still we get the same result social isolation. We do not meet these people; we do not take them by their hands or give a hug when they need it. Technology brings up a generation of people without proper social skills and therefore immature people. New technologies have forgotten the values and human goals. Technology is above a man now, because it is in great demand, brings profit and dominates. Technologies promote human interactions through technical devices but many people understand this calling too literally. The term society means that a person belongs to a bigger formation, a conglomeration of many people with definite peculiarities . This group of people has

common goals and therefore is a unity. When a person loses this sensation of unity he becomes socially isolated of his own accord. When a person understands that he does not need to meet anybody in person in order to talk and finds it comfortable than he is trying to escape the reality. Why do so many people try to escape reality? The contemporary life has proved that people have so little time to talk to each other because of their jobs, not even mentioning the tactile contact that their social frustration leads them to search for a solution. The solution is often found in Internet and after some time the person becomes absolutely isolated he buys everything he needs in the internet-shops, communicates with people via Internet and falls in love in the same manner. Modern technology has converted contemporary life into a constant optimization machine. The amount of things that get under the process of optimization is enormous. Human social relations are not an exception. Technology will be dangerous for this sphere of interaction until people learn how to master and control the influence of the technological achievements of them. People started treating technology as a religion, as it is only technology from their opinion that can change our lives for better. The primary reason for that is because technology makes the mankind see themselves as powerful beings, which cannot be achieved without it. So, what once was created, as assistance to humanity, now has become a goal. In other words the goal of new inventions is to make more new inventions and it has nothing to do with helping the mankind. If men do not have time to share emotions with their relatives and close people even having all these devicesthan do they really need them? The malaise of modernity is something that technology has caused in its very essence. Humanity

needs to clearly define what invention needs to be made, why and what possible consequences it might have. Otherwise, the depression, loneliness, frustration, alienation of the modern society will only grow.

Bibliography: American psychological association/ Scott Sleek Isolation increases with Internet use / Vol. 29, No. 9/1998 Rotenstreich, Nathan, Alienation. The Concept and its Reception/ Brill Leiden/1989 Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance/Cornell University Press, 1990 McGinn, Robert E. Science, Technology and Society/ Englewood Cliffs/1991. Nobel, David. Forces of Production: a social history of industrial automation/Oxford University Press, 1990. Roussel, P.A., K. N. Saad, and T. J. Erickson. Third Generation R&D/Harvard Business School Press/1991. Monsma, S.V., C. Christians, E.R. Dykema, A. Leegwater, E. Schuurman, and L. VanPoolen. Responsible Technology/Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1986. technology has taken over the Christian faith as the most sacred thing in our western society. Where once we could not live without God, today we cannot live without gadgets, - Jaques Ellul, ex-professor at the University of Bordeaux. man is socially isolated in the performance of his work, if he interacts with no one, or only in an impersonal, detached and antagonistic manner; in other words, if the relation between fellow workers has a mechanistic character [ Rotenstreich, 1989] Some psychologists and sociologists are now talking about a new form of alienation they call technological alienation [Fletcher, 2003].

 In Europe today, 33 million people have regular access to the Internet; in North America, the number is 87 million [Fletcher, 2003]. Most reported instances of Internet use interfering with other aspects of their lives, including taking up time that they would have used for other activities[Psychological Reports (Vol. 80, No. 3, p. 879882)

Theme Title

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Health Dimensions of Health

It is widely known that a completely healthy human being is a person that is healthy in every single aspect of the term health. Health is maintained not only be physical exercising, and having a nice fit and string body cannot be a guarantee of a real health. This is because health has various dimensions. These dimensions include very single part of the life of a human a man, a woman or a child. The violation of the functioning of any of this dimension may have a deep impact on the weight management of a person. Before starting analyzing the exact ways these dimension influence the weight management it is necessary to mention all of them. The seven dimensions of health are the next: physical dimension, spiritual dimension, emotional (psychological) dimension, social, mental (intellectual), occupational and environmental dimensions. Psychical dimension is the first one to mention concerning the weight management as the primary aim of the weight management is the prevention of gaining weight and maintaining the body at its lower weight. It is obvious that the abuse of alcohol, drugs, smoking make a negative influence on the physical development of a person. Physical fitness in its turn may help to keep the body in a rather good condition. Spiritual dimension is responsible for the principles and believes that guide the person throughout the life. If the person cannot be the way he is it can cause a large number of problems. Therefore case of any interruptions, a misbalance in this dimension may result in the persons escape in passiveness. This in its turn will have an outcome in the weight management.

Emotional (psychological) dimension is closely related to the previous one. It deals primarily with the self-esteem of the individual, with the possibility of any emotional expressions he considers to be appropriate. This goes alongside with the ability to overcome stress. If the person has a low self-esteem, cannot accept himself and share his feeling it may influence on the weight management through gaining weight of losing too much weight. This completely depends on the peculiarities of the organism and on the duration and power of stress. As for the social dimension of health it is important to say that it is connected with the relations between the person and the outer world. It especially deals with the family relations and relation with friends. The lack of support from the side of these groups hits the health of a person by making the person feel needed and loved. Therefore any activity stops within the sphere of life of this individual once again resulting in the corruption of weight management. The mental dimension deals with the constant refill of intellectual knowledge, a constant seek of new information. If the intellectual developments stops is starts stopping the functioning of other spheres too, influencing the weight management not at once, but throughout them. Occupational and environmental dimensions are related to skills and talents of a person and the environmental possibility of their realizations, along with the general condition of earth surface. All the mentioned dimensions altogether form the image of a ideal and balanced man. To be completely healthy and maintaining the proper weight it is required to keep them in perfect balance.