What Is Buddhism Is It A Philosophy Or Religion Essay

What Is Buddhism Is It A Philosophy Or Religion - Essay Example This proliferation contributes to the emergence of different cultures while maintaining basic beliefs based on Buddha’s teachings. Studies indicate that the term Buddhism has its origin from the West as opposed to the practitioners. The different cultures provide a variety of interpretations of Buddhist teachings leading to vigorous debate on the practice. This necessitates the goal of this paper, which seeks to explore Buddhism from its philosophical and religious perspectives. As a religion, Buddhism involves basic religious aspects with regard to a godhead, creation theory, and faith. The godhead is manifested in Buddha, an Indian prince renowned for his wisdom while faith develops from the dependence on divine authority. Faith entails believing and upholding Buddha’s teachings. Buddhism indicates that there is no deity involved in creation of the world nor was there a beginning in the universe. In essence, there only exists a transformation of matter to energy in an endless cycle of coming to being while the concept of beginnings according to Buddhists exists only in the realm of illusion. These elements are borrowed from the predominant Brahmanical traditions that were the major religious practice in ancient India. It is important to note that Buddhism emerged from the conservative social force in ancient India having rejected some aspects of the dominating religion (Oslon 3). Buddhism principles are indicated as realistic and based on the reality of life, which can be seen. It focuses on real issues of light and a better society for all, which creates a niche in the world. The realistic nature of the tradition reveals dedication to a solitary life characterised by meditation and self-preservation. As such, Buddhism serves the spiritual needs of its followers by teaching how to experience freedom of the soul through meditation. Meditation allows one to find peace and enjoy a personal connection with the self, which serves to liberate needless suffering. Meditation in Buddhism is crucial undertaking geared towards the induction of a stable mental condition and equilibrium, as well as tranquillity. It exists in two forms; one where it is meant to develop mental concentration that leads to highest mystic states, where the mystic states have nothing to do with reality, truth, or nirvana, but are not purely Buddhist. Buddhist mediation facilitates discernment of the essence of things leading to comprehensive liberation of the mind and subsequent disclosure of the truth (Clark 378). It builds on mindfulness, awareness, vigilance, and observation, where it does not attempt to escape from reality, but is intertwined with daily life. This is in line with the body, feelings, the mind, and moral, as well as intellectual subjects. As a religion, Buddhism teaches tolerance that allows the existence of various spiritual forms under its benign protection. This facilitates diversity that meets challenges posed by other religious and ph ilosophical systems including science and technology. It is for this reason that Buddhism continues to flourish as a multi-faceted religious system, with its teaching being readily accepted in the world. When compared to other religious systems in the world, Buddhism reveals significant philosophical aspects that demand assessment as they are. Studies suggests that Buddhism is a metaphysic seeking to manifest a religion as opposed to other religious systems, which to seek the metaphysic aspect. The Buddha’s teachings (Dharma) are geared to evoke critical thinking among followers seeking enlightenment. In this light, Dharma consists of narratives with hidden meanings and vast symbolism of the intended message. This serves to encourage intellectual involvement to

Fall of Roman Empire Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Fall of Roman Empire - Essay Example They did not have a concept of saving resources and using them in time of need. The first emperor who tried to fix this problem was Diocletian 284-385 A.D. He tried to freeze everything as it was most suitable to preserve the economic situation of the empire. For example slaves could not be free anymore, intermarrying between social classes was severely restricted and social mobility became more restricted (Mathisen, 2006). In 301 Diocletian imposed a ceiling on prices to control the economic crisis but it was impossible to control this big empire. Also, in the regions where he tried to impose price ceilings, riots and black markets broke out. Diocletian understood that commanding economy do not work in this kind of government. He understood that commanding economy can provide food and things to keep the place stable but it needed more money and due to no productivity, the halt of territorial expansions, and weak frontiers there was no flow of money and the economy was becoming weaker day by day. In early Rome, slaves were a very important part of the labor force, but as the Empire began to collapse slave labor became much harder to control (Temin, 2004). Diocletian tried to control the slave labor shortage by forbidding workers to leave their jobs, restricting social mobility, and increasing taxes but all of this did not restore economic stability. The empire faced inflation; the currency was no more in gold and silver coins but copper. Some of these coins still exist today. More than 2,000 were found in a concrete lined box in Scotland in 2002 (Kaplan, 2003). Therefore the people refused to be paid in money and they started to trade objects of wealth. This was the best solution for the people, but this further perpetuated the economic problems by causing structural problems in the empire. The empire was built upon the labor of slaves but they could not benefit from their work (New Internationalist, 2001). Peter

Examine the responses of single women that dont participate in active Assignment

Examine the responses of single women that dont participate in active physical recreation with single men that dont participate in active physical recreation - Assignment Example He also adds that people with high school education are also inactive. However, in some countries there are barriers like lack of safe places to walk and cycle that prevent them from exercising or take part in physical recreation. Individuals also face other barriers to recreation. For example, organizational barriers like lack of financial resources, supportive policies and facilities. There are also cultural barriers where minorities feel unwelcome and uncomfortable in recreation facilities. Additionally, communication is another barrier where low-income families do not have information about recreation services and resources, and gender barriers where, men are favored than women, when it comes to offering recreation facilities. Men get a lot of attention when it comes to sports recreation and therefore, women tend to withdraw themselves from such activities. To add to this, women and men do not exercise because of general barriers like, the recreation department lacking creativity of involving men and women in involving themselves in physical activities. Women or men from poverty would also feel uncomfortable exercising with wealthy individuals. Some staff can also be unwelcoming and insensitive to sexual stereotypes like lesbians and gays and therefore, they feel discouraged from participating in physical activities. This analysis will answer why single men and women do not actively participate in physical exercises, from the research method used to conduct the study (Hamblin, 2005). The research method used to conduct the study was a questionnaire, in the form of an interview. Both single men and women were asked why they do not participate in physical recreation activities and their responses were different. The questionnaire was just a closed question where that was easy to answer as well as to code. The responses were only presented as No/yes choice with small explanation required about why the

Employment Law Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 10

Employment Law - Essay Example He complains of unfair elimination of his unused vacation. There was no proper written notice of termination of Tomas employment. The company provided a two-week termination payment in lieu of notice. Tomas promotion to a data entry manager made him work for about 55 hours in a week. This made him eligible for overtime because he worked for more than 44 hours in a week. This is because he was promoted a month after his overtime work that is within three months as stated in the Employment Standards Act of 2000. In Zsoldos v. MMMC Inc. Architects, 2005 CanLII, it the plaintiff signed an agreement with the defendant that was legally binding to both parties. Tomas needs compensation for the time off not taken, in addition to the hours he worked during public holidays. He should get time off for the holidays he worked in addition to the three weeks off as stated in the Employment Standards Act. It was not appropriate to eliminate the unused vacation because it could only be legally binding if there was a proper agreement signed in writing and not an oral agreement. This should be effective within seven days of employment termination. The withdrawal of the health benefits was inappropriate because Tomas was still an employee before the major clients seized to do business with Crowne Company. The company should provide the health benefits for the period stated in the contract agreement with the employee. In case of termination of the health benefits, there must be a written notice to the employee. Tomas termination of employment was inappropriate, as his employment with Crown Company lasted for more than three months. In addition, the employer did not give him a proper written notice informing him of the termination of his employment or a pay for the termination. The termination pay in lieu of notice was inappropriate. This is because in case of employment termination the pay in lieu of notice is effective within seven

Business Ethics Position Paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Business Ethics Position Paper - Essay Example The first issue is regarding the working hours of employees in our supply chains. The study indicates that three of our supply chains allow their employees to work for more than 60 hours a week, thus allowing the employees not to utilize their day off. However, I would like to point out here that this is in blatant violation of the Supplier Requirements of the company. The Supplier Requirements point out that the maximum number of hours that can be allowed for an employee in a week is 40 hours (Article 25, Supplier Requirements). Yet another serious issue observed in the assessment was the compulsory overtime enforced by our suppliers. I would like to mention here that this is against the human right policies followed by the company in its entire operation. In addition, it is pointed out in the Supplier Requirements that all kinds of overtime should be strictly voluntary (Article 33, Supplier Requirements). The company has decided to take strict corrective steps in this regard. As yo u rightly know, Motorola is committed to the principles of the United Nations Global Compact in its labor issues. So, the company always upholds the principle that businesses should uphold the elimination of all forms of forced and compulsory labor (Motorola Corporate Responsibility Report 2011). Seeing these violations despite the company’s best efforts to ensure human rights in its entire operations is highly disappointing. ... OTOVOICE’ and it will provide the employees of the supplier chains a chance to raise their concerns and grievances in the workplace keeping anonymity. Most important of all, all the supply chains are required to take corrective measure within 2 months from hereof and duly inform the company. An additional inspection will be conducted by the company on receipt of this intimation. I would like to inform here that failure to meet this deadline would lead to the cancellation of the contract with the respective suppliers. I’m sure that you will take necessary steps in this regard to uphold the values and working culture of Motorola. Expecting your continuing cooperation, To : All the supply chain employee unions of Motorola From : (Name) Date : March 15, 2011 Re : The work environment in supplier chains – STR-CSCC assessment 2011 I am profoundly happy to see your support and cooperation in the company operations making the company a huge success in its operations. How ever, we are seriously saddened to see that some of our employees are denied the basic human rights as evident from the findings by the Specialized Technology Resources (STR) Cal-Safety Compliance (CSCC) in its 2011 assessment in our major supply chains. The issues found in the STR-CC assessment were as follows. The first issue is regarding the working hours of employees in our supply chains. The study indicates that three of our supply chains allow their employees to work for more than 60 hours a week, thus forcing the employees not to utilize their day off, in blatant violation of the Supplier Requirements of the company. The Supplier Requirements point out that the maximum number of hours that can be allowed for an employee in a week is 40 hours (Article 25, Supplier Requirements). Yet another serious

Film review ( Run Lola Run ) Movie Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 1

Film ( Run Lola Run ) - Movie Review Example The film has three alternative storylines with different endings. The film has adopted a unique and fast approach in telling the story and is a must watch for those interested in small budget films that are fast and with simple and direct themes. Director of the film is Tom Tykwer who has directed films such as Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, The International and Cloud Atlas, Heaven and others. Main actors are Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup, Nina Petri and others (Maslin, 2011). Actors Roles/ Performance: The main characters are Lola, played by Franka Potente, A German actor and singer who has acted in more than 30 films including the Bourne film series and won many awards. The boyfriends role of Manni is played by Moritz Bleibtreu who has acted in more than 20 films such as World War Z, Young Goethe in Love, The Fourth State and others. The role of Papa is played by Herbert Knaup who has acted in about nine films such as In Darkness, Jerry Cotton and others. Narration is provided by Hans Paetsch, a famous narrator for German documentaries and children films and who has acted in more than six films (IMDB, 2010). Other characters in the film include the punk with a dog, a blind woman, a homeless man, banker, security guard the cyclist and others (Film Education, 2013). Story line/ Plot/ Location: Shot in Berlin, the film starts with Lola getting a call from Manni, a petty criminal who has collected 100,000 DM and forgotten the bag with the cash on a train. Manni frantically tells Lola that he must obtain the cash in 20 minutes else his mafia boss will send a gangster to kill him. Lola then starts running to ask her Papa, a bank manager for the money and the film is made of three runs. In each run, Lola collides with people and each collision leads to a different story. In the first run, Lola sees a dog that she avoids and bumps into a woman with a baby carriage. After a series of events, Lola reaches the bank only to be told that his

A Preprocessing Framework for Underwater Image Denoising Essay Example for Free

A Preprocessing Framework for Underwater Image Denoising Essay Abstract A major obstacle to underwater operations using cameras comes from the light absorption and scattering by the marine environment, which limits the visibility distance up to a few meters in coastal waters. The preprocessing methods concentrate on contrast equalization to deal with nonuniform lighting caused by the back scattering. Some adaptive smoothing methods like anisotropic filtering as a lengthy computation time and the fact that diffusion constants must be manually tuned, wavelet filtering is faster and automatic. An adaptive smoothing method helps to address the remaining sources of noise and can significantly improve edge detection. In the proposed approach, wavelet filtering method is used in which the diffusion constant is tuned automatically. Keywords: underwater image, preprocessing, edge detection, wavelet filtering, denoising. I. INTRODUCTION The underwater images usually suffers from non-uniform lighting, low contrast, blur and diminished colors. A few problems pertaining to underwater images are light absorption and the inherent structure of the sea, and also the effects of colour in underwater images. Reflection of the light varies greatly depending on the structure of the sea. Another main concern is related to the water that bends the light either to make crinkle patterns or to diffuse it. Most importantly, the quality of the water controls and influences the filtering properties of the water such as sprinkle of the dust in water. The reflected amount of light  is partly polarised horizontally and partly enters the water vertically. Light attenuation limits the visibility distance at about twenty meters in clear water and five meters or less in turbid water. Forward scattering generally leads to blur of the image features, backscattering generally limits the contrast of the images. The amount of light is reduced wh en we go deeper, colors drop off depending on their wavelengths. The blue color travels across the longest in the water due to its shortest  wavelength. Current preprocessing methods typically only concentrate on local contrast equalization in order to deal with the nonuniform lighting caused by the back scattering. II. UNDERWATER DEGRADATION A major difficulty to process underwater images comes from light attenuation. Light attenuation limits the visibility distance, at about twenty meters in clear water and five meters or less in turbid water. The light attenuation process is caused by the absorption (which removes light energy) and scattering (which changes the direction of light path). Absorption and scattering effects are due to the water itself and to other components such as dissolved organic matter or small observable floating particles. Dealing with this difficulty, underwater imaging faces to many problems: first the rapid attenuation of light requires attaching a light source to the vehicle providing the necessary lighting. Unfortunately, artificial lights tend to illuminate the scene in a non uniform fashion producing a bright spot in the center of the image and poorly illuminated area surrounding. Then the distance between the camera and the scene usually induced prominent blue or green color (the wavelength corresponding to the red color disappears in only few meters). Then, the floating particles highly variable in kind and concentration, increase absorption and scattering effects: they blur image features (forward scattering), modify colors and produce bright artifacts known as â€Å"marine snow†. At last the non stability of the  underwater vehicle affects once again image  contrast. To test the accuracy of the preprocessing algorithms, three steps are followed. 1) First an original image is converted into grayscale image. 2)  Second salt and pepper noise added to the grayscale image. 3) Third wavelet filtering is applied to denoise the image. Grayscale images are distinct from one-bit bi-tonal black-and-white images, which in the context of computer imaging are images with only the two colors, black, and white. Grayscale images have many shades of gray in between. Grayscale images are also called monochromatic, denoting the presence of only one (mono) color (chrome). Grayscale images are often the result of measuring the intensity of light at each pixel in a single band of the electromagnetic spectrum and in such cases they are monochromatic proper when only a given frequency is captured. Salt and pepper noise is a form of noise typically seen on images. It represents itself as randomly occurring white and black  pixels. An image containing salt-and-pepper noise will have dark pixels in bright regions and bright pixels in dark regions. This type of noise can be caused by analog-to-digital converter errors, bit errors in transmission. Wavelet filtering gives very good results compared to other denoising methods because, unlike other methods, it does not assume that the coefficients are independent. III. A PREPROCESSING ALGORITHM The algorithm proposed corrects each underwater perturbations sequentially.  addressed in the algorithm. However, contrast equalization also corrects the effect of the exponential light attenuation with distance. B. Bilateral Filtering Bilateral filtering smooth the images while preserving edges by means of a nonlinear combination of nearby image values. The idea underlying bilateral filtering is to do in the range of an image what traditional filters do in its domain. Two pixels can close to one another, occupy nearby spatial location (i.e) have nearby values. Closeness refers to vicinity in the domain, similarity to vicinity in the range. Traditional filtering is a domain filtering, and enforces closeness by weighing pixel values with coefficients that fall off with distance. The range filtering, this averages image values with weights that decay with dissimilarity. Range filters are nonlinear because their weights depend on image intensity or color. Computationally, they are no more complex than standard nonseparable  filters. So the combination of both domain and range filtering is known as bilateral filtering. A. Contrast equalization Contrast stretching often called normalization is a simple image enhancement technique that attempts to improve the contrast in an image by ‘stretching’ the range of intensity values. Many well-known techniques are known to help correcting the lighting disparities in underwater images. As the contrast is non uniform, a global color histogram equalization of the image will not suffice and local methods must be considered. Among all the methods they reviewed, Garcia, Nicosevici and Cufi [2] constated the empirical best results of the illuminationreflectance model on underwater images. The low-pass version of the image is typically computed with a Gaussian filter having a large standard deviation. This method is theoretically relevant backscattering, which is responsible for most of the contrast disparities, is indeed a slowly varying spatial function. Backscattering is the predominant noise, hence it is sensible for it to be the first noise Anisotropic filtering Anisotropic filter is used to smoothing the image. Anisotropic filtering allows us to simplify image features to improve image segmentation. This filter smooths the image in homogeneous area but preserves edges and enhance them. It is used to smooth textures and reduce artifacts by deleting small edges amplified by homomorphic filtering. This filter removes or attenuates unwanted artifacts and  remaining noise. The anisotropic diffusion algorithm is used to reduce noise and prepare the segmentation step. It allows to smooth image in homogeneous areas but it preserves and even enhances the edges in the image. Here the algorithm follow which is proposed by Perona and Malik [5]. This algorithm is automatic so it uses constant parameters selected manually. The previous step of wavelet filtering is very important to obtain good results with anisotropic filtering. It is the association of wavelet filtering and anisotropic filtering which gives such results. Anisotropic algorithm is  usually used as long as result is not satisfactory. In our case few times only loop set to constant value, to preserve a short computation time. For this denoising filter choose a nearly symmetric orthogonal wavelet bases with a bivariate shrinkage exploiting interscale dependency. Wavelet filtering gives very good results compared to other denoising methods because, unlike other methods, it does not assume that the coefficients are independent. Indeed wavelet coefficients in natural image have significant dependencies. Moreover the computation time is very short. IV. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND EVALUATION To estimate the quality of reconstructed image, Mean Squared Error and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio are calculated for the original and the reconstructed images. Performance of different filters are tested by calculating the PSNR and MSE values. The size of the images taken is 256256 pixels. The Mean Square Error (MSE) and the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) are the two error metrics used to compare image compression quality. The MSE represents the cumulative squared error between the compressed and the original image, whereas PSNR represents a measure of the peak error. The lower the value of MSE, the lower the error. In Table 1, the original and reconstructed images are shown. In table 2, PSNR and MSE values are calculated for all underwater images. PSNR value obtained for denoised images is higher, when compare with salt and pepper noise added images. MSE value obtained for the denoised images has lower the error when compared with salt and pepper noise added images. e D. Wavelet filtering Thresholding is a simple non-linear technique, which operates on one wavelet coefficient at a time. In its most basic form, each coefficient is thresholded by comparing against threshold, if the coefficient is smaller than threshold, set to zero; otherwise it is kept or modified. Replacing the small noisy coefficients by zero and inverse wavelet transform on the result may lead to reconstruction with the essential signal characteristics and with the less noise. A simple denoising algorithm that uses the wavelet transform consist of the following three steps, (1) calculate the wavelet  transform of the noisy image (2) Modify the noisy detail wavelet coefficients according to some rule (3) compute the inverse transform using the modified coefficients. Multiresolution decompositions have shown significant advantages in image denoising. best denoised image. In clearly, the comparisons of PSNR and MSE values are shown in Fig -1a and Fig -1b. V. CONCLUSION In this paper a novel underwater preprocessing algorithm is present. This algorithm is automatic, requires no  parameter adjustment and no a priori knowledge of the acquisition conditions. This is because functions evaluate their parameters or use pre-adjusted defaults values. This algorithm is fast. Many adjustments can still be done to improve the whole pre-processing algorithms. Inverse filtering gives good results but generally requires a priori knowledge on the environment. Filtering used in this paper needs no parameters adjustment so it can be used systematically on underwater images before every pre-processing algorithms. REFERENCES [1] Arnold-Bos, J. P. Malkasse and Gilles Kervern,(2005) â€Å"Towards a model-free denoising of underwater optical image,† IEEE OCEANS 05 EUROPE,Vol.1, pp.234256. [2] Caefer, Charlene E.; Silverman, Jerry. Mooney,JonathanM,(2000) â€Å"Optimisation of point target tracking filters†. IEEE Trans. Aerosp. Electron. Syst., pages 15-25. [3] R. Garcia, T. Nicosevici, and X. Cufi. (2002) â€Å"On the way to solve lighting problems in underwater imaging†. In Proceedings of the IEEE Oceans 2002, pages 1018–1024. [4] James C. Church, Yixin Chen, and Stephen V., (2008) â€Å"A Spatial Median Filter for Noise Removal in Digital Images†, page(s):618 – 623. [45 Jenny Rajan and M.R Kaimal., (2006) â€Å"Image Denoising Using Wavelet Embedded anisotropic Diffusion†, Appeared in the Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Visual Information Engineering, page(s): 589 – 593. [6] Z. Liu, Y. Yu, K. Zhang, and H. Huang.,(2001) â€Å"Underwater image transmission and blurred image restoration†. SPIE Journal of Optical Engineering, 40(6):1125–1131. [7] P. Perona and J.Malik, (1990) â€Å"Scale space and edge detection using anisotropic diffusion,† IEEE Trans on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, pp.629-639. [8] Schechner, Y and Karpel, N., (2004) â€Å"Clear Underwater Vision†. Proceedings of the IEEE CVPR, Vol. 1, pp. 536-543. [9] Stephane Bazeille, Isabelle, Luc jaulin and Jean-Phillipe Malkasse, (2006) â€Å"Automatic Underwater image PreProcessing†, cmm’06 characterisation du milieu marine page(s): 16-19. [10] Yongjian Yu and Scott T. 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