Frederick Douglass Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Frederick Douglass - Essay Example Colonel Lloyd himself, the boss of Anthony and the wealthiest slaveholder in Maryland whose plantation was known as the Great House Farm had cruel overseers himself who would brutally beat slaves. But the cruelest of the slaveholders in Douglas narrative all was Edward Covey, the famous â€Å"slave breaker† who had the perversion of taking pride in taming the slaves. According to the narrative of Frederick Douglas, â€Å"Mr. Covey had acquired a very high reputation for breaking young slaves, and this reputation was of immense value to him. It enabled him to get his farm tilled with much less expense to himself than he could have had it done without such a reputation† [53]. Thus, this reputation was deliberately concocted by Mr. Covey in order to profit from the slave by making them till his land at a lesser cost under the pain of fear. Douglass also portrayed his masters as hypocrites particularly Edward Covey who had the pretension of righteousness by donning the mantle of Christian religiosity. In Douglass narrative, Mr. Covey was singled out as the exemplar of slave owner’s hypocrisy of pretending to be a good and charitable man but in fact oppresses another human being through slavery and worst, brutally maltreats the slaves with the pride of breaking them. In Douglass words, â€Å"Mr. Covey, he was a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church. All of this added weight to his reputation as a â€Å"nigger-breaker† [53]. ... It may sound strange but in Douglass eyes, Mr. Covey’s religiosity did not impress him but rather compounded his anxiety as it added to Mr. Covey’s reputation as â€Å"nigger breaker†. Douglass also portrayed slaveholders to be greedy and unjust. This portrayal was present in his narrative in the characters of his favorite tormentor Mr. Covey, the wealthy landowner Colonel Lloyd and his benign master Thomas. Mr. Covey deliberately instilled fear among slaves with his reputation as â€Å"nigger breaker† to short change them in tilling his lands. Colonel Lloyd on the other hand would provide meager allowances to his slaves while overworking them. Thomas is more subtle in his ways of letting Douglass find employment by calking but still, he was unjust to Douglass. He let Douglass work but his earnings in calking goes to Thomas. Douglass bitterly resented this set up with his narrative that â€Å"He received all the benefits of slaveholding without its evils; while I endured all the evils of a slave, and suffered all the care and anxiety of a freeman. I found it a hard bargain. But, hard as it was, I thought it better than the old mode of getting along [84]. But just when he thought that Thomas was different of all the slaveholders in a sense that he do not beat them, he was proven wrong when he came home late from work because the remittance of his earnings was also given late to Thomas. Douglas recalled â€Å"I found him very angry; he could scarce restrain his wrath. He said he had a great mind to give me a severe whipping [84]. Almost unanimously, almost all slaveholders in Douglas narrative were either cruel or unjust except of a little exception in the person of Mrs. Auld who did not maltreat him. In fact, in her kindness, she offered to

(GIS) Geographical Information System Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

(GIS) Geographical Information System - Essay Example The hardware component of GIS is the central processing unit (CPU) or computer. It also includes a digitizer scanner whose function is to change data for example those found in maps into digital form then send the converted data to the CPU. There are also a tape device whose function is to store programs or data on magnetic tap, and a display device which is used to display data that has been processed. People as a component of GIS include end users and specialists whose function is to design the GIS for the end users. Methods refer to those procedures or techniques used data collection or processing. The functional elements of GIS are data manipulation, data input and output, data retrieval and display, data analysis and modelling and data management. Data input refers to incorporating data into the GIS whereas data output refers to removing data or information from the GIS. Data analysis and modelling involves obtaining an understanding of relationships in the data collected and de veloping a model of the spatial phenomena. Data retrieval entails taking out data from a stored format for use whereas data display is the showing off of the derived or primary data (Delaney and Niel 2006). In GIS, spatial data represent features that are location-specific or geographic in nature. They include cell location like column and raw, and coordinates like longitudes and latitudes. On the other hand, attribute data give a description of feature in a specific location and they can be in numbers or text strings. Unlike spatial data, attribute data can be measured in ratio, ordinal, interval and nominal ratios. According to Delaney and Niel (2006), topology creates an awareness of the surrounding for the GIS by developing a spatial data relationship. It links spatial and attribute data to give information on what surrounds a feature. When representing continuous and discrete geographic features, vector data structure uses points, polygons and lines whereas raster data structur e make tessellation on the representation surface through a repeated use of a square cell or a pixel. However, raster data structures are better at representing a continuous surface. Vector data structure support typology better and are more accurate in representing geographic features compared to raster data structure. Generally, raster data structure requires has a lower processing power requirement compared to vector data structure. On-screen digitising, converting, importing and geo-locating/geo-rectification are the four common methods of incorporating digital data into a GIS. On-screen digitising involves locating features from digital sources for example satellite or scanned images using a computer mouse. Attribute data is entered through computer keyboard. Geo-locating is used to input non-geographic/non-georeferenced data into GIS because it converts spatial data into geographic data. Converting is done if GIS data is in a format that cannot be used by certain software. Imp orting involves obtaining data from other sources like geo-coded textual data, satellite images or digital aerial photographs into the GIS. There exist differences in cost, effort, time, and editing requirements between on-screen digitising, converting, importing and geo-locating/geo-rectification, scanning and vectorisation, table digitizing and keyboard entry as data input methods. Both importing and converting are fast, cheaper, need less efforts and have less editing requireme