Saturday, February 15, 2020

The Act of Reading in America Culture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The Act of Reading in America Culture - Essay Example This essay targets the current inclination towards reading that is prevalent in the American society and tries to lookup the reasons behind it. It was not very long ago that the greatest asset of the current generation's grandparents used to be was their large collection of books. Their best pastime was to indulge in the reading of books for hours and hours. Each person of the household was instructed to take extreme care of the books and to keep them clean and put them bake at their original places right after reading. Discussion upon the theme of the latest book being read by the family used to be the main modes of dinner table conferencing. All this seems like just a dream nowadays. The fast paced lives of the present times have bought a distant gap between man and what used to be his most cherished hobby-the reading of books. It would not be incorrect to say that the infusion, rather explosion of technology changed the mode of the entire American society. It is quite natural to r ealize that youngsters were and are mesmerized with the advancements technology bought to them due the fast pace associated with digital gadgets and the immediate responses social media and chat forums gave to youngsters but for many the transition being experienced by elders specially the older generation was not too comprehensible. They probably were mesmerized to see the way technology was changing life. The changes life was gone through with the help of technology were probably taking them into a world of fantasy making them neglect their most cherished pastimes. Assessing the above mentioned change many authors have discussed this transition. Mitchell Stephens mentions this issue in one of his remarkable works titled "The death of Reading" (1991) in the following words: " Our homes barely make room for reading. Those old islands of quiet -- libraries, studies and dens -- long ago were invaded by flat screens and Nintendos. Now they are called "family rooms" or, more accurately, "television rooms." And our architects seem to have given up providing us with bookshelves; instead they busy themselves designing "entertainment centers." (Stephens, 1991) The author highlights a very major fact by emphasizing that this infusion of technology was being taken very well in the sense that even the living styles of men were being shaped according to it. The architects also began making room for the attention laden technology rich devices and in order to make room for them omitted the conventional and much cherished book shelves that used to house memories of hours of family time spent together and the treasure of priceless book collections. The authors mentions that his arguments may not seem real statistically because figures showed a percentage increase in sales among the number of printed books being sold Also, there was an amazing fact that after fast food outlets, print book outlets were the next largest number of growing retail outlets in the society. But there was less good reason behind these figures. Most of the retail outlets showed that they did not have an increase in number of sales during the holiday season signifying that books were being sold merely as objects of gifts. Books were being trended as favorite gifts mainly because everyone knew they needed to a lot sometime for reading but were unable to do so. So in order to satisfy their feeling of guilt they would buy books as gifts instead. Stephens(1991) mentioned some more figures that the number of people who had admitted to have not read a book in the past year had doubled from 8 eight percent to sixteen percent since the last year. It was also

Sunday, February 2, 2020

Web Sites. The Web development methods Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Web Sites. The Web development methods - Essay Example As Taylor writes, "Over the years, web sites have become quite a phenomenal and developers are developing web sites using an ad hoc approach, which is causing problems. Developing efficient web sites requires meeting user needs by producing high quality web sites. One way of solving the problems developers are having is by developing a web development process for developers to use." (Taylor, n.d.)The web development methods include a process that describes the steps to follow during development of web sites. The web site development process is driven by use cases that are created based on user requirements, that's why it's so important to build up comprehensive user requirements. As Tran writes, "Requirements and specifications are very important components in the development of any embedded system. Requirements analysis is the first step in the system design process, where a user's requirements should be clarified and documented to generate the corresponding specifications." (Tran, 1999)According to Kaner et al. cited in Sisson (2002), "A requirement is an objective that must be met. Planners cast most requirements in functional terms, leaving design and implementation details to the developers. They may specify price, performance, and reliability objectives in fine detail, along with some aspects of the user interface. Sometimes, they describe their objectives more precisely than realistically." Website projects are usually done on tight schedules, with limited resources, and without a well-defined approach for achieving usability. For many developers it's easy to dismiss usability methods as an unnecessary overhead cost. But usability methods can be integrated efficiently and effectively into each stage of the website design process. Employing this process, and by using forms, checklists, and other tools to improve communication and workflow, website projects can be managed successfully achieving a highly-usable product. (Gergle, Brinck, Wood 1999) One very useful technique for implementing usable website requirements described by Rhodes (2006) is Pareto Principle. He writes, "Usability provides another benefit to product teams. It is very likely that you have one or more people on the team who live and die by the Pareto Principle. Everything is defined in terms of the 80/20 rule, where the majority of issues seem to stem from a small fraction of items. Similarly, most of the value seems to come from just a few features or functions." Various literature (Bolchini and Randazzo 2005; Tran, 1999; Cockburn, 2000; Courage, Baxter, 2004; Lauesen, 2002) mention 3 phases of user requirements life-cycle in web site development: Requirements Identification, Requirements Analysis and Requirements Definition/Specification. Requirements Identification Requirements Identification is the requirements engineering task during which raw new potential requirements are identified. The typical responsibilities of Requirements Identification are to: Identify the desires, potential needs, and expectations of the application's stakeholders. Transform these desires, potential needs and expectations into potential new raw (unanalyzed) requirements. (Cockburn, 2000; Lauesen, 2002) Requirements identification typically involves the requirements team performing the following steps: Identify possible sources of requirements, such as stakeholders, experts, reusable requirements and requirements specifications, documentation, etc. Interview customer representatives, user representatives, domain experts, marketing personnel, and user support agents. Observe representative users at work. Informally identify and capture the resulting potential requirements. (Cockburn, 2000; Lauesen, 2002) Requirements identification for website development can typically be performed using the following techniques: Website Studies. Reverse engineer requirements from legacy websites, competing websites, similar websites, and website databases. Textual analysis of websites (e.g., noun/verb for object/operation, shall/must/will for