Short stories Essay Example for Free

Short stories Essay Traditional detective stories fall into three groups, whodunit murders,mysteries with a twist in the tale and locked room stories.  A whodunit mystery is a story where the detective has to find out who commited the murder by unravelling a series of clues that will eventually lead him to the murderer.There are usually a group of characters who are potential suspects because they have either a method or a motive for the crime.As the story moves on the detective slowly eliminates all the suspects in his mind until only one remains. The detective then usually calls all the suspects together and reveals the perpetrator.When the villain is taken away the detective them goes on to explain how he assembled all the clues and how they led him to the murderer. An example of how Conan Doyle exploits this is in the Cardboard Box when a cardboard package is sent to Miss Susan Cushing with a pair of preserved human ears in it and no-one knows why or who the ears belong to.Conan Doyle exploits this by removing the elimination process and turning it into a hunt for who the ears belong to and who must have killed the owners. After using his powers of observation, I percieved that her ear corresponded exactly with the female ear which I had just inspected. The matter twas entirely beyond coincidence.There was the same shortening if the pinna,the sam broad curve of the upper lobe,the same convolution of the inner cartilage.In all essentials it was the same ear. He comes to the conclusion, that one of Miss Cushings sisters, who is mentioned at the beginning of the story, and her lover were killed by her jealous husband.He was driven back to drinking by the rumours spread about him by the third of the Cushing sisters. The Mystery with a twist is a story that appears to follow the traditional lines of a murder or a crime story but then has an unexpected twist at the end.An example of how Conan Doyle exploits this is in the Silver Blaze story.In Silver Blaze a prize winning horse has been stolen and its trainer murdered.Sherlock Holmes is then called in and after following a series of clues he comes to the startling conclusion that Silver Blazes trainer,John Straker was not murdered but was kicked in the head by his horse when trying to sabotage its chances in its next race. The horse had then run away from its stables and was picked up by a rival stable owner; then kept hidden by painting it brown and passing it off as one of his own horses.A long series of clues were pieced together to lead to this conclusion.So the twist in this tale was that there was no murder when from the start all the evidence make it appear so. The locked room story type is a story where a murder has been commited in a locked room but there is no murderer,no murder weapon and no evidence of a suicide.In the Speckled Band a murder was commited two years ago but no-one knows how or why the girl died because she was in a locked room with barred windows and there was no evidence to show how she died apart from fright.Conan Doyle exploits this by having Holmes be visited by the sister of the murderd girl and say that she is afraid that the same thing will happen to her. Yet if the lady is correct in saying that the flooring and walls are sound,and that the door,window,and chimney are impassable,the her sister must have undoubtedly been alone when she met her mysterious end. Holmes is trying to find out from the beginning how a murder could take place in a locked room with no way to enter. After visiting the house, Holmes and Watson decided to stay in Ms.Stoners room and while they are there a snake drops through the ventilation shaft, which was intended to kill Ms.Stoner.The snake then retreats back through the ventilation shaft and bites Dr.Gimesby Roylott the owner of the snake.It can seem very obvious from the beginnning of the story that Dr.Roylott has something to do with the murder but there is no evidence to prove this.Holmes then using his powers of deduction and observation uncovers Dr.Roylotts plans but inadvertantly causes his death. The genre used in the Red Headed League is that of a simple mystery.At the beginning it is not obvious that a crime is being commited but it is obvious that something very strange is happening.Conan Doyle exploits this by not giving us a target to point our suspicions at because there is no murderer that needs to be found or stolen property that needs to be recovered.There is just a simple mystery that leads on to a much larger one. The mystery is that a Mr.Wilson had been admitted to this organisation called the Red Headed league who would pay him four pounds per week to copy out the Encylopaedia Britannica. He thought this a bit odd but carried on with it for a number of weeks until one day the offices of the League were closed.He then went to see Sherlock Holemes,who after investigating the mystery found out that a much larger plot was at work. Mr.Wilsons apprentice pawnbroker Vincent Spaulding is really a wanted criminal who set up the League with a friend as a way of getting Mr.Wilson to leave his shop for a few hours a day.During that time they were digging a tunnel from the basement of the shop to a nearby bank.This kind of mystery cannot be solved from the start and readers can only suspect that the apprentice has anything to do with the mystery. This kind of plot could be called a Hidden-crime mystery. In conclusion I would say that Arthur Conan Doyle exploits many different kinds of traditional detecitve stories and gives them his own unique twist.He uses logic mixed with intricate plots and a sometimes a few red herrings, as in the Red Headed League.Some devoted readers prefer his earlier stories when Sherlock Holmes performed his observational miracles,however,one can only say that which ever you prefer Conan Doyles work is still read and admired today.

Long Swings In The Exchange Rate And The Excess Returns Puzzle: The Ro :: essays research papers

Long Swings in the Exchange Rate and the Excess Returns Puzzle: The Role of Imperfect Knowledge The paper is a clear breath of "dirty" air in the sterile world of perfect foresight. The authors offer a well worked out model of how agents persistently bid the exchange rate away from the expected long-run equilibrium rate. It seems intuitively comfortable to see the mathematical justification for the unexplained excess returns to be a function of the distance from the bench-mark (PPP). The uncertainty of a switch occurring in a regime (the Peso Problem) is an interest-ing form within which to embed the imperfect information. It is a format that seems ready to ex-pand into many other areas of economic modeling in which expectations are at the core of the model's dynamics. Of course, the choice of the benchmark is key to the mechanics of the process. In this case, PPP is an obvious choice†¦ but, since the idea of PPP drives this model so strongly, it is interesting to look at its place and its characteristics. In the paper, the authors note that if PPP holds, "relative excess demand for domestic and foreign goods is zero." The obvious suggestion, based on the model, is that the flow of goods and services is the foundation for the equilibrating dynamic. Behind the flow of goods and services is the gap between the gap between, domestic and foreign short-term rates, and the steady state long-run interest rate gap that sets goods flows to zero. The assumption is that the prices of the domestic and foreign goods in their respective for- eign currencies are "incorrect" based on the fundamentals of the respective countries and that agents know this (and know that the exchange rate path is unstable) but cannot be sure of the de-gree of "incorrectness" or the persistence of the di vergence. Embedded into this model are as-sumptions about PPP that provide comfort about this benchmark's ability to give the "correct" relative prices. It is possible that these assumptions, to some degree, mask the complexity of the situation with respect to PPP's ability to proxy relative prices. At the theoretical level, PPP should simply offer equal purchasing power for equal commodity bundles through the exchange rate. Unfortunately, the problem of explaining stylized facts requires some matching with reality. Set- tling for getting the signs right mitigates much of the angst, but, as has been

Linguistics Classes, Verb and Noun

â€Å"Discuss and contrast some of the main features of the classes VERB and NOUN in English and any other language. † In this essay I will make an attempt to discuss differences between two classes of lexemes, which are verb and noun. In order to conduct that analysis in a detailed manner I will refer to two languages, English and Polish (minor references to French will also help my studies). I will start from defining what one can refer to as class in linguistics. I will to refer to certain shadows of doubt that may be casted on that categorization.This will be followed by elaborating subtleties of what constitutes a verb providing examples and showing contrasts between two languages examined. With the help of studying materials I’ll manage to outline empirical criteria for how the concept of verb can be understood by a linguist. Then, I will implement similar methodology to clarify the concept of a noun class. Finally I will arrive at a conclusion that beyond any dou bt those two categories are distinctly different and minor similarities emphasized by two drastically different languages simply make the case more interesting.A scholar is able to divide every language into two diverse, but mutually supplementing, categories. Grammar is a set of closed system that determines how items of the language interact with each other. Lexicon, on the other hand provides a glossary of lexemes. Lexeme is more than a word, as it refers to all possible variations of linguistic items used within language. Its relation to the meaning can sometimes proves difficult to define without implementing a variety of terms in the definition. To fully explain what a given lexeme means it has to be placed in a variety of contexts and supported with examples.An alternative to lexicon is called a thesaurus and it groups words accordingly to their semantic similarities. Lexicon can be further divided into classes of lexemes. Unlike grammar, these systems of lexical concepts are open, which means their content varies depending on the language. Before drawing the line between nouns and verbs I’d like to draw attention to possible blurs of that line. In English language words such as [walk] relate to both a noun and a verb. This is not exactly a homonym (lexeme that has the same form but varies in its meaning) as both words refer to the same activity.Interesting comparison with the Polish language is that it never uses verbs as noun but still has large variety of verb derived nouns such as zapalenie (inflammation) or skojarzenie (association). Despite that fact verb derived noun in Polish such as bieg (a run) is not its noun form of the verb – bieganie (running). It also contains a significantly smaller number of homonyms, most of which either differs in spelling (kot-kod) or has a foreign origin (pilot – tv remote and pilot – one that steers a plane) and is usually a noun. English uses multiple homonyms within different classes a nd semantic distances: pitch, division.As no universal differentiation can be drawn for classes of verb and noun they are most commonly identified by several categories of lexemes. Verb in every language refers to motion, rest, giving, affect, corporeal, attention and speaking. Some languages allow further distinction to nuclear and non-nuclear verbs. Nuclear verb of rest in Polish would be lezec (means to lay, applied to either an object or a person) and the non-nuclear item that can be defined only by a reference to the nuclear verb – zalegac (to lay somewhere for a long time/to stand in the way of everyday activities).English, on the other hand cannot provide a good example of such a lexical item. A scholar can also mark off verbs to be transitive or non-transitive. A transitive verb needs to be completed by an object of the action (We left John. ) while the intransitive is complete without any object to follow (We could not stand it so we left. ). In Polish transitive (pr zesuwac – to move an object) are entirely different words than intransitive verbs (skakac – to jump). Categories that will only refer to verbs class are modality and tense aspect.Both in Polish and English future past and present tenses occur, however in Polish perfect tenses are only implied by the context: Patrze na niego od godziny – I’ve been watching him for an hour. What’s also fascinating is that in past and future continuous tense Polish verbs suddenly have gender. Discussing modality it’s worth mentioning that in Polish imperative mode of a verb is always a different form any regular conjugation (which wouldn’t be the case in French). English modality is most likely to be contained within the context of the sentence.Comparing these languages from the perspective of verbs scholar should also bear in mind that while English has phrasal verbs (put it off) that are quite different from their lexeme of origin (put) Polish does not . I’d risk a statement that this function is associated with a complex system of prefixes (wlaczyc, wylaczyc – turn on, turn off). Following the applied logic one ought to explain the lexical class of noun with its typical references. Nouns describe parts of the human body and components of other things, fauna, flora, sun moon and stars, elements, and artefacts.They also stand for abstract terms such as emotions, colour or time. Latter one often leads to interesting observations when examined from a linguistic perspective. In Polish and French instead of asking for the time, one asks for the number of the hour. A noun could be derived from verbs or adjectives (swim, hatred) or underived (beauty, fish). Dixon stated that transitivity value of verbs is equally important to the gender of the noun. In English nouns don’t have gender, while in Polish and French even objects have gender. Distribution of gender qualities within these lexemes can be conditioned by the c ontext of culture.It’s also often implied by vowel suffix in French and Polish (e in French and a in Polish). Nouns can take singular form or plural form when added a suffix (s in English and i in Polish). There are exceptions both grammatical (fish) and mass-nouns (mud). Some languages include use of a possessive suffix, however neither English nor Polish would be an example. Class of nouns also includes generic terms, which mean a word that can mean a variety of things depending on the implied intention. An example that is close to perfection is the noun â€Å"thing† which can stand for any other noun.It can as well be a feature of speech style. Curious detail is, when translated, the word thing in Polish can take two forms (cos/rzecz), both have a similar meaning but are used in different context and the latter one has a female gender. Less obvious example would be a Polish word wiersz, which can refer to a poem as well as to a single text line. According to scholar s like Marantz certain lexical items can be used in a variety of syntactic structure and implementation of any lexicon, therefore classes such as nouns or verbs are entirely futille.I beg to differ as the summary of my analysis shows multiple differences and distinctive features of each class. Verbs and nouns are defined with a variety of different concepts. Every additional term that refers to categories within a class is like an additional dimension, which outline boundaries of semantic field necessary for understanding the concept. Therefore, provides a valuable methodology for linguistic studies. Blake Lezenski Word Count: 1235 Bibliography: R. M. W. Dixon, 2012. Basic Linguistic Theory Volume 3: Further Grammatical Topics. Edition 1. Oxford University Press, USA. Erkelens, M. A. , 2009.Learning to categorize verbs and nouns: studies on Dutch. Ultrecht: Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication ————————— Ã¢â‚¬â€Ã¢â‚¬â€Ã¢â‚¬â€Ã¢â‚¬â€Ã¢â‚¬â€œ [ 1 ]. Dixon R. M. W. Dixon, 2012. Basic Linguistic Theory Volume 3: Further Grammatical Topics. Edition 1. Oxford University Press, USA, p. 290. [ 2 ]. Ibid 291. [ 3 ]. Ibid 291. [ 4 ]. Ibid 300. [ 5 ]. Ibid 293. [ 6 ]. Ibid 300. [ 7 ]. Ibid 305. [ 8 ]. Ibid 291. [ 9 ]. Ibid 302. [ 10 ]. Ibid 301. [ 11 ]. Erkelens, M. A. , 2009. Learning to categorize verbs and nouns: studies on Dutch. Ultrecht: Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, p. 26.

Bachelor Degree in Management Making a Career Out of Project Management 2019

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is currently developing the James Webb Space Telescope, a piece of equipment with over 400 technical requirements. The intended mission of the telescope is to circle the earth more than 1 million miles away and record facts about the expanding universe. Completing this surreal task requires the expertise of a project manager. This type of management goes far beyond conventional bachelor degree in management careers like retail management. What is a Project Manager? The position of project manager was recently profiled in the Occupational Outlook Quarterly from the Department of Labor. Bachelor degree in management graduates may serve as project managers for everything from planning an annual awards ceremony to designing a new company product. Management degree graduates who work as project managers have the responsibility of providing direction for an assigned project while balancing the time, money, and scope involved in the venture. .udd5adc931f613eb57ae988f63712d5dc { padding:0px; margin: 0; padding-top:1em!important; padding-bottom:1em!important; width:100%; display: block; font-weight:bold; background-color:#eaeaea; border:0!important; border-left:4px solid #34495E!important; box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -moz-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -o-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); text-decoration:none; } .udd5adc931f613eb57ae988f63712d5dc:active, .udd5adc931f613eb57ae988f63712d5dc:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; text-decoration:none; } .udd5adc931f613eb57ae988f63712d5dc { transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; } .udd5adc931f613eb57ae988f63712d5dc .ctaText { font-weight:bold; color:inherit; text-decoration:none; font-size: 16px; } .udd5adc931f613eb57ae988f63712d5dc .post Title { color:#000000; text-decoration: underline!important; font-size: 16px; } .udd5adc931f613eb57ae988f63712d5dc:hover .postTitle { text-decoration: underline!important; } READ Computer Programming - What is itAlthough projects vary widely throughout the profession, the central process for project management involves setting goals, creating a plan, monitoring progress, and, lastly, wrapping up the final details required for completion of the project. During the course of the project, the project manager facilitates efficient work by maintaining good communication among team members and upper management. Some bachelor degree in management graduates act as project managers within the scope of a job description, while other business management degree graduates fashion an entire career out of project management. Required Education to be a Project Manager According to the Department of Labor, project managers typically must have a bachelor degree in management or another discipline related to the job in order to enter the profession. Training in subjects such as team building, risk management, and planning can be helpful. Completing courses in the specific industry one plans to enter can also be useful in gaining a competitive edge in the employment market. .u4c2e989e13219c8c38aeeb75b9c46efe { padding:0px; margin: 0; padding-top:1em!important; padding-bottom:1em!important; width:100%; display: block; font-weight:bold; background-color:#eaeaea; border:0!important; border-left:4px solid #34495E!important; box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -moz-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -o-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); text-decoration:none; } .u4c2e989e13219c8c38aeeb75b9c46efe:active, .u4c2e989e13219c8c38aeeb75b9c46efe:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; text-decoration:none; } .u4c2e989e13219c8c38aeeb75b9c46efe { transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; } .u4c2e989e13219c8c38aeeb75b9c46efe .ctaText { font-weight:bold; color:inherit; text-decoration:none; font-size: 16px; } .u4c2e989e13219c8c38aeeb75b9c46efe .post Title { color:#000000; text-decoration: underline!important; font-size: 16px; } .u4c2e989e13219c8c38aeeb75b9c46efe:hover .postTitle { text-decoration: underline!important; } READ Sociology Degree A Jumpstart to a Management Career or a First Step to Becoming a SociologistThe Project Management Institute website contains more information related to being a project manager. PMI also has helpful information for students looking to attain a degree, finacial aid, or credentials in Project Management at http://www.pmiteach.org/student_resources/. For an extensive list of available bachelor degree in management programs, prospective students may visit College-Pages.com, the education and career resource website. Related ArticlesBachelor Business Degree in Management USAID Offers International Business Careers to GraduatesOhio Colleges and Universities Pursuing Online and Campus Based Education in Ohio, the Buckeye StateBachelor Business Administration Degree Online Learn What it Takes to Be a Chief Information OfficerCareer Overview College Admissions RecruiterCareer overview Retention Specialist CounselorConsider Earning Your Criminal Justice Degree Online

Essay on Methods of Overcoming Prejudice in Society

Prejudice can be seen from an individual having biased opinions about a certain group, with very little knowledge. Prejudice can be defined in many ways, such as an attitude of how people think about others or people judging ignorantly. But to Gordon Allport, â€Å"Prejudice is a thinking ill of others without a sufficient warrant.. This is how prejudice is defined to an individual who is still witnessing this crisis. This person discovered that apart from the race, color, national origin or gender, people in today’s world, share an universally existing problem: â€Å"PREJUDICE†. There is alot of evidence that a person’s prejudice is wrong, but still, individuals ignore it. There are several sources that lead to this problem, such as people†¦show more content†¦There are books that are read in school where it portrays examples of prejudice. For instance, a book called â€Å"Inherit the Wind† displays an excellent point of view of prejudice. A t own named Hills Bro believes in only one religion, and nothing else. They only believe in Christianity. Nevertheless, there was an individual named â€Å" Bertrim Cates† who introduces another belief, the Darwin theory. The town despises Cates for believing in a belief that is different from the town. Another book that portrays prejudice is â€Å"The Merchant of Venice†. This play teaches individuals about prejudice and why it is wrong. People would see how everyone was hurt at one time or another by prejudice, whether it was the Christians making fun of Shylock or Shylock showing his prejudice to the Christians. One quote that was said by Shylock who reveals his feelings about the prejudice that was laid upon him. â€Å" Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, affections, passions†¦..as a Christian is?† (Act 3 scene 1 lines 49-61). His feelings revealed of how he thinks that are Jews not the same as the Christians, and are they not b oth human. As education is one source to change prejudice, exposure to other cultures is as helpful. How does exposure to other cultures help to prevent prejudice? One may answer, it allows for an individual to have a worldly view of things, where it can be compare and contrast eachShow MoreRelatedKill A Mockingbird : Overcoming Stereotypes Reveals Truth About Characters1745 Words   |  7 Pages To Kill A Mockingbird: Overcoming Stereotypes Reveals Truth About Characters During the heart of the Great Depression in Maycomb County, Alabama, an individual s appearance, values, and reputation often are sources of limitation to the categorical minds of society. In Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, confinement of even the most complex characters expresses the limiting scope of view of the prejudice society. Atticus Finch, a prosperous small-town lawyer and single father of Scout and JemRead MoreMulan, By Tony Bancroft And Barry Cook1153 Words   |  5 PagesChinese Confucian and traditional values with unique regulation, culture, and traditional system in their society. According to diegetic elements of Mulan which is defined as elements that consists of events, characters, objects, settings, and sounds in the story, the main event is a story about how Mulan who is not suitable for traditional woman role in Chinese ancient society overcomes the prejudice of gender role with exceptional behaviors as joining Chinese military troop secretly inst ead of her fatherRead MoreAfrican Americans Fight For Liberation1670 Words   |  7 Pagesacclamation. While it is clear that America’s history of African American oppression is explicitly cruel and barbaric, I argue that the aftermath of such a grim past has helped to affirm a culturally rich, strong, and resilient race. 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Essay about The ECommerce Environment of Singapore

The ECommerce Environment of Singapore Geography The Republic of Singapore is located in southeast Asia, south of Malaysia and northwest of Indonesia. The island measures a total of 637 square kilometers with a coastline 193 kilometers long. Singapore is generally comprised of lowland areas with a central plateau in the middle of the island. Its elevation ranges from the Bukit Timah, (166 m.), to the Singapore Strait which is at sea level. Its climate is tropical and wet. Precipitation occurs on 40% of all days, (70% of days in April). Singapores two biggest natural recourses are its fishing industry, and its deep water ports. Singapore is also a focal point for most Southeast Asian sea routes. History Singapore†¦show more content†¦The E-commerce environment consists of the physical internet network, components, and internet services. The environment also includes a collection of supports and incentives to assist and promote the on-line community. Internet Awareness and Usage Approximately Ninety-two percent of adults aged 18 to 55 years old are aware of the Internet. About one third (32%) of the total population have used the internet. This gives Singapore roughly 667,000 adult internet users. However, only 13% of internet users have ever made online purchases. When surveyed only 21% of internet users were aware that these services existed. The bulk of the population uses the internet primarily for information searches and electronic mail (38% and 30% respectively) Infrastructure Services In order to develop, E-businesses need an operating environment including network services, payment services, and trust systems. The information technology industry in Singapore has been working with the government to develop online payment systems, security systems, directory services, and other E-commerce services essential to a developing online industry. Connectivity Singapore has a 45 Mbps (Megabytes per second) direct connection the US Internet system. The Singapore Telecom Internet Exchange (STIX) is an Asian-Pacific Rim internet hub connecting 15 countries with sub-marine fiber optic cables. The STIX boasts a 34 Mbps connection and providesShow MoreRelatedPestle Analysis Essay example2031 Words   |  9 Pages1. Introduction to the assignment and summary of the selected business. This assignment is about the factors that influences the business environment in different ways. This is about environmental analysis which is dynamic process that comprises scanning, monitoring, disseminating and forecasting. There are different factors which influences the business in 21st century. 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What Broke My Fathers Heart free essay sample

What Broke My Father’s Heart by Katy Butler, published June 14, 2010 in the New York Times One October afternoon three years ago while I was visiting my parents, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to fulfill. She had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey from her Japanese iron teapot, shaped like a little pumpkin; outside, two cardinals splashed in the birdbath in the weak Connecticut sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her voice was low. â€Å"Please help me get Jeff’s pacemaker turned off,† she said, using my father’s first name.I nodded, and my heart knocked. Upstairs, my 85-year-old father, Jeffrey, a retired Wesleyan University professor who suffered from dementia, lay napping in what was once their shared bedroom. Sewn into a hump of skin and muscle below his right clavicle was the pacemaker that helped his heart outlive his brain. The size of a pocket watch, it had kept his heart beating rhythmically for nearly five years. Its battery was expected to last five more. After tea, I knew, my mother would help him from his narrow bed with its mattress encased in waterproof plastic.She would take him to the toilet, change his diaper and lead him tottering to the couch, where he would sit mutely for hours, pretending to read Joyce Carol Oates, the book falling in his lap as he stared out the window. I don’t like describing what dementia did to my father — and indirectly to my mother — without telling you first that my parents loved each other, and I loved them. That my mother, Valerie, could stain a deck and sew an evening dress from a photo in Vogue and thought of my father as her best friend.That my father had never given up easily on anything. Born in South Africa, he lost his left arm in World War II, but built floor-to-ceiling bookcases for our living room; earned a Ph. D. from Oxford; coached rugby; and with my two brothers as crew, sailed his beloved Rhodes 19 on Long Island Sound. When I was a child, he woke me, chortling, with his gloss on a verse from â€Å"The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam†: â€Å"Awake, my little one! Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry! † At bedtime he tucked me in, quoting â€Å"Hamlet† : â€Å"May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! Now I would look at him and think of Anton Chekhov, who died of tuberculosis in 1904. â€Å"Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill,† he wrote, â€Å"there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death. † A century later, my mother and I had come to long for the machine in my father’s chest to fail. Until 2001, my two brothers and I — all living in California — assumed that our parents would enjoy long, robust old ages capped by some br ief, undefined final illness.Thanks to their own healthful habits and a panoply of medical advances — vaccines, antibiotics, airport defibrillators, 911 networks and the like — they weren’t likely to die prematurely of the pneumonias, influenzas and heart attacks that decimated previous generations. They walked every day. My mother practiced yoga. My father was writing a history of his birthplace, a small South African town. In short, they were seemingly among the lucky ones for whom the American medical system, despite its fragmentation, inequity and waste, works quite well.Medicare and supplemental insurance paid for their specialists and their trusted Middletown internist, the lean, bespectacled Robert Fales, who, like them, was skeptical of medical overdoing. â€Å"I bonded with your parents, and you don’t bond with everybody,† he once told me. â€Å"It’s easier to understand someone if they just tell it like it is from their heart and their soul. † They were also stoics and religious agnostics. They signed living wills and durable power-of-attorney documents for health care. My mother, who watched friends die slowly of cancer, had an underlined copy of the Hemlock Society’s â€Å"Final Exit† in her bookcase.Even so, I watched them lose control of their lives to a set of perverse financial incentives — for cardiologists, hospitals and especially the manufacturers of advanced medical devices — skewed to promote maximum treatment. At a point hard to precisely define, they stopped being beneficiaries of the war on sudden death and became its victims. Things took their first unexpected turn on Nov. 13, 2001, when my father — then 79, pacemakerless and seemingly healthy — collapsed on my parents’ kitchen floor in Middletown, making burbling sounds. He had suffered a stroke.He came home six weeks later permanently incapable of completing a sentence. But as I’ve said, he didn’t give up easily, and he doggedly learned again how to fasten his belt; to peck out sentences on his computer; to walk alone, one foot dragging, to the university pool for water aerobics. He never again put on a shirt without help or looked at the book he had been writing. One day he haltingly told my mother, â€Å"I don’t know who I am anymore. † His stroke devastated two lives. The day before, my mother was an upper-middle-class housewife who practiced calligraphy in her spare time. Afterward, she was one of tens of millions of people in America, most of them women, who help care for an older family member. Their numbers grow each day. Thanks to advanced medical technologies, elderly people now survive repeated health crises that once killed them, and so the â€Å"oldest old† have become the nation’s most rapidly growing age group. Nearly a third of Americans over 85 have dementia (a condition whose prevalence rises in direct relationship to longevity). Half need help with at least one practical, life-sustaining activity, like getting dressed or making breakfast.Even though a capable woman was hired to give my dad showers, my 77-year-old mother found herself on duty more than 80 hours a week. Her blood pressure rose and her weight fell. On a routine visit to Dr. Fales, she burst into tears. She was put on sleeping pills and antidepressants. My father said he came to believe that she would have been better off if he had died. â€Å"She’d have weeped the weep of a widow,† he told me in his garbled, poststroke speech, on a walk we took together in the fall of 2002. â€Å"And then she would have been all right. It was hard to tell which of them was suffering more. As we shuffled through the fallen leaves that day, I thought of my father’s father, Ernest Butler. He was 79 when he died in 1965, before pacemakers, implanted cardiac defibrillators, stents and replacement heart valves routinely staved off death among the very old. After completing some long-unfinished chairs, he cleaned his woodshop, had a heart attack and died two days later in a plain hospital bed. As I held my dad’s soft, mottled hand, I vainly wished him a similar merciful death.A few days before Christmas that year, after a vigorous session of water exercises, my father developed a painful inguinal (intestinal) hernia. My mother took him to Fales, who sent them to a local surgeon, who sent them to a cardiologist for a preoperative clearance. After an electrocardiogram recorded my father’s slow heartbeat — a longstanding and symptomless condition not uncommon in the very old — the cardiologist, John Rogan, refused to clear my dad for surgery unless he received a pacemaker. Without the device, Dr. Rogan told me later, my father could have died from cardiac arrest during surgery or perhaps within a few months. It was the second time Rogan had seen my father. The first time, about a year before, he recommended the device for the same slow heartbeat. That time, my then-competent and pre-stroke father expressed extreme reluctance, on the advice of Fales, who considered it overtreatment. My father’s medical conservatism, I have since learned, is not unusual.According to an analysis by the Dartmouth Atlas medical-research group, patients are far more likely than their doctors to reject aggressive treatments when fully informed of pros, cons and alternatives — information, one study suggests, that nearly half of patients say they don’t get. And although many doctors assume that people want to extend their lives, many do not. In a 1997 study in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 30 percent of seriously ill people surveyed in a hospital said they would â€Å"rather die† than live permanently in a nursing home.In a 2008 study in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 28 percent of patients with advanced heart failure said they would trade one day of excellent health for another two years in their current state. When Rogan suggested the pacemaker for the second time, my father was too stroke-damaged to discuss, and perhaps even to weigh, his tradeoffs. The decision fell to my mother — anxious to relieve my father’s pain, exhausted with care-giving, deferential to doctors and no expert on high-tech medicine. She said yes.One of the most important medical decisions of my father’s life was over in minutes. Dr. Fales was notified by fax. Fales loved my parents, knew their suffering close at hand, continued to oppose a pacemaker and wasn’t alarmed by death. If he had had the chance to sit down with my parents, he could have explained that the pacemaker’s battery would last 10 years and asked whether my father wanted to live to be 89 in his nearly mute and dependent state. He could have discussed the option of using a temporary external pacemaker that, I later learned, could have seen my dad safely through surgery.But my mother never consulted Fales. And so on Jan. 2, 2003, at Middlesex Hospital, the surgeon implanted my father’s pacemaker using local anesthetic. Medicare paid him $461 and the hospital a flat fee of about $12,000, of which an estimated $7,500 went to St. Jude Medical, the maker of the device. The hernia was fixed a few days later. It was a case study in what primary-care doctors have long bemoaned: that Medicare rewards doctors far better for doing procedures than for assessing whether they should be done at all. The incentives for overtreatment continue, said Dr.Ted Epperly, the board chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, because those who profit from them — specialists, hospitals, drug companies and the medical-device manufacturers — spend money lobbying Congress and the public to keep it that way. And so my father’s electronically managed heart — now requiring frequent monitoring, paid by Medicare — became part of the $24 billion worldwide cardiac-device industry and an indirect subsidizer of the fiscal health of American hospitals. The profit margins that manufacturers earn on cardiac devices is close to 30 percent.Cardiac procedures and diagnostics generate about 20 percent of hospital revenues and 30 percent of profits. Shortly after New Year’s 2003, my mother belatedly called and told me about the operations, which went off without a hitch. She didn’t call earlier, she said, because she didn’t want to worry me. My heart sank, but I said nothing. It is one thing to silently hope that your beloved father’s heart might fail. It is another to actively abet his death. The pacemaker bought my parents two years of limbo, two of purgatory and two of hell.At first they soldiered on, with my father no better and no worse. My mother reread Jon Kabat-Zinn’s â€Å"Full Catastrophe Living,† bought a self-help book on patience and rose each morning to meditate. In 2005, the age-related degeneration that had slowed my father’s heart attacked his eyes, lungs, bladder and bowels. Clots as narrow as a single human hair lodged in tiny blood vessels in his brain, killing clusters of neurons by depriving them of oxygen. Long partly deaf, he began losing his sight to wet macular degeneration, requiring ocular injections that cost nearly $2,000 each. A few months later, he forgot his way home from the university pool. He grew incontinent. He was collapsing physically, like an ancient, shored-up house. In the summer of 2006, he fell in the driveway and suffered a brain hemorrhage. Not long afterward, he spent a full weekend compulsively brushing and rebrushing his teeth. â€Å"The Jeff I married . . . is no longer the same person,† my mother wrote in the journal a social worker had suggested she keep. â€Å"My life is in ruins. This is horrible, and I have lasted for five years. † His pacemaker kept on ticking.When bioethicists debate life-extending technologies, the effects on people like my mother rarely enter the calculus. But a 2007 Ohio State University study of the DNA of family caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease showed that the ends of their chromosomes, called telomeres, had degraded enough to reflect a four-to-eight-year shortening of lifespan. By that reckoning, every year that the pacemaker gave my irreparably damaged father took from my then-vigorous mother an equal year. When my mother was upset, she meditated or cleaned house.When I was upset, I Googled. In 2006, I discovered that pacemakers could be deactivated without surgery. Nurses, doctors and even device salesmen had done so, usually at deathbeds. A white ceramic device, like a TV remote and shaped like the wands that children use to blow bubbles, could be placed around the hump on my father’s chest. Press a few buttons and the electrical pulses that ran down the leads to his heart would slow until they were no longer effective. My father’s heart, I learned, would probably not stop. It would just return to its old, slow rhythm.If he was lucky, he might suffer cardiac arrest and die within weeks, perhaps in his sleep. If he was unlucky, he might linger painfully for months while his lagging heart failed to suffuse his vital organs with sufficient oxygenated blood. If we did nothing, his pacemaker would not stop for years. Like the tireless charmed brooms in Disney’s â€Å"Fantasia,† it would prompt my father’s heart to beat after he became too demented to speak, sit up or eat. It would keep his heart pulsing after he drew his last breath. If he was buried, it would send signals to his dead heart in the coffin.If he was cremated, it would have to be cut from his chest first, to prevent it from exploding and damaging the walls or hurting an attendant. On the Internet, I discovered that the pacemaker — somewhat like the ventilator, defibrillator and feeding tube — was first an exotic, stopgap device, used to carry a handful of patients through a brief medical crisis. Then it morphed into a battery-powered, implantable and routine treatment. When the government-sponsored Medicare system approved the pacemaker for reimbursement in 1966, the market exploded.Today pacemakers are implanted annually in more than 400,000 Americans, about 80 percent of whom are over 65. According to calculations by the Dartmouth Atlas research group using Medicare data, nearly a fifth of new recipients who receive pacemakers annually — 76,000 — are over 80. The typical patient with a cardiac device today is an elderly person suffering from at least one other severe chronic illness. Over the years, as technology has improved, the battery life of these devices lengthened. The list of heart conditions for which they are recommended has grown.In 1984, the treatment guidelines from the American College of Cardiology declared that pacemakers were strongly recommended or recommended as â€Å"reasonable† for 56 heart conditions and â€Å"not recommended† for 31 more. By 2008, the list for which they were strongly or mildly recommended expanded to 88, with most of the increase in the lukewarm â€Å"reasonable† category. The research backing the expansion of diagnoses was weak. Experts are as vulnerable to conflicts of interest as researchers are, some researchers warned, because â€Å"expert clinicians are also those who are likely to receive honoraria, consulting fees or research support from industry. Not long afterward, my mother declined additional medical tests and refused to put my father on a new anti-dementia drug and a blood thinner with troublesome side effects. â€Å"I take responsibility for whatever,† she wrote in her journal that summer. â€Å"Enough of all this overkill! It’s killing me! Talk about quality of life — what about mine? † Then came the autumn day when she asked for my help, and I said yes. I told myself that we were simply trying to undo a terrible medical mistake. I reminded myself that my dad had rejected a pacemaker when his faculties were intact.I imagined, as a bioethicist had suggested, having a 15-minute conversation with my independent, pre-dementia father in which I saw him shaking his head in horror over any further extension of what was not a â€Å"life,† but a prolonged and attenuated dying. None of it helped. I knew that once he died, I would dream of him and miss his mute, loving smiles. I wanted to melt into the arms of the father I once had and ask him to handle this. Instead, I felt as if I were signing on as his executioner and that I had no choice. Over the next five months, my mother and I learned many things.We were told, by the Hemlock Society’s successor, Compassion and Choices, that as my father’s medical proxy, my mother had the legal right to ask for the withdrawal of any treatment and that the pacemaker was, in theory at least, a form of medical treatment. We learned that although my father’s living will requested no life support if he were comatose or dying, it said nothing about dementia and did not define a pacemaker as life support. We learned that if we called 911, emergency medical technicians would not honor my father’s do-not-resuscitate order unless he wore a state-issued orange hospital bracelet. We also learned that no cardiology association had given its members clear guidance on when, or whether, deactivating pacemakers was ethical. (Last month that changed. The Heart Rhythm Society and the American Heart Association issued guidelines declaring that patients or their legal surrogates have the moral and legal right to request the withdrawal of any medical treatment, including an implanted cardiac device. It said that deactivating a pacemaker was neither euthanasia nor assisted suicide, and that a doctor could not be compelled to do so in violation of his moral values.In such cases, it continued, doctors â€Å"cannot abandon the patient but should involve a colleague who is willing to carry out the procedure. † This came, of course, too late for us. ) In the spring of 2008, things got even worse. My father took to roaring like a lion at his caregivers. At home in California, I searched the Internet for a sympathetic cardiologist and a caregiver to put my Dad to bed at night. My frayed mother began to shout at him, and their nighttime scenes were heartbreaking and frightening. An Alzheimer’s Association support-group leader suggested that my brothers and I fly out together and institutionalize my father.This leader did not know my mother’s formidable will and had never heard her speak about her wedding vows or her love. Meanwhile my father drifted into what nurses call â€Å"the dwindles†: not sick enough to qualify for hospice care, but sick enough to never get better. He fell repeatedly at night and my mother could not pick him up. Finally, he was weak enough to qualify for palliative care, and a team of nurses and social workers visited the house. His chest grew wheezy. My mother did not request antibiotics. In mid-April 2008, he was taken by ambulance to Middlesex Hospital’s hospice wing, suffering from pneumonia.Pneumonia was once called â€Å"the old man’s friend† for its promise of an easy death. That’s not what I saw when I flew in. On morphine, unreachable, his eyes shut, my beloved father was breathing as hard and regularly as a machine. My mother sat holding his hand, weeping and begging for forgiveness for her impatience. She sat by him in agony. She beseeched his doctors and nurses to increase his morphine dose and to turn off the pacemaker. It was a weekend, and the doctor on call at Rogan’s cardiology practice refused authorization, saying that my father â€Å"might die immediately. † And so came five days of hard labor.My mother and I stayed by him in shifts, while his breathing became increasingly ragged and his feet slowly started to turn blue. I began drafting an appeal to the hospital ethics committee. My brothers flew in. On a Tuesday afternoon, with my mother at his side, my father stopped breathing. A hospice nurse hung a blue light on the outside of his hospital door. Inside his chest, his pacemaker was still quietly pulsing. After his memorial service in the Wesleyan University chapel, I carried a box from the crematory into the woods of an old convent where he and I often walked. It was late April, overcast and cold.By the side of a stream, I opened the box, scooped out a handful of ashes and threw them into the swirling water. There were some curious spiraled metal wires, perhaps the leads of his pacemaker, mixed with the white dust and pieces of bone. A year later, I took my mother to meet a heart surgeon in a windowless treatment room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She was 84, with two leaking heart valves. Her cardiologist had recommended open-heart surgery, and I was hoping to find a less invasive approach. When the surgeon asked us why we were there, my mother said, â€Å"To ask questions. She was no longer a trusting and deferential patient. Like me, she no longer saw doctors — perhaps with the exception of Fales — as healers or her fiduciaries. They were now skilled technicians with their own agendas. But I couldn’t help feeling that something precious — our old faith in a doctor’s calling, perhaps, or in a healing that is more than a financial transaction or a reflexive fixing of broken parts — had been lost. The surgeon was forthright: without open-heart surgery, there was a 50-50 chance my mother would die within two years.If she survived the operation, she would probably live to be 90. And the risks? He shrugged. Months of recovery. A 5 percent chance of stroke. Some possibility, he acknowledged at my prompting, of postoperative cognitive decline. (More than half of heart-bypass patients suffer at least a 20 percent reduction in mental function. ) My mother lifted her trouser leg to reveal an anklet of orange plastic: her do-not-resuscitate bracelet. The doctor recoiled. No, he would not operate with that bracelet in place. It would not be fair to his team.She would be revived if she collapsed. â€Å"If I have a stroke,† my mother said, nearly in tears, â€Å"I want you to let me go. † What about a minor stroke, he said — a little weakness on one side? I kept my mouth shut. I was there to get her the information she needed and to support whatever decision she made. If she emerged from surgery intellectually damaged, I would bring her to a nursing home in California and try to care for her the way she had cared for my father at such cost to her own health. The thought terrified me. The doctor sent her up a floor for an echocardiogram.A half-hour later, my mother came back to the waiting room and put on her black coat. â€Å"No,† she said brightly, with the clarity of purpose she had shown when she asked me to have the pacemaker deactivated. â€Å"I will not do it. † She spent the spring and summer arranging house repairs, thinning out my father’s bookcases and throwing out the files he collected so lovingly for the book he never finished writing. She told someone that she didn’t want to leave a mess for her kids. Her chest pain worsened, and her breathlessness grew severe. â€Å"I’m aching to garden,† she wrote in her journal. But so it goes. Last August, she had a heart attack and returned home under hospice care. One evening a month later, another heart attack. One of my brothers followed her ambulance to the hospice wing where we had sat for days by my father’s bed. The next morning, she took off her silver earrings and told the nurses she wanted to stop eating and drinking, that she wanted to die and never go home. Death came to her an hour later, while my brother was on the phone to me in California — almost as mercifully as it had come to my paternal grandfather.She was continent and lucid to her end. A week later, at the same crematory near Long Island Sound, my brothers and I watched through a plate-glass window as a cardboard box containing her body, dressed in a scarlet silk ao dai she had sewn herself, slid into the flames. The next day, the undertaker delivered a plastic box to the house where, for 45 of their 61 years together, my parents had loved and looked after each other, humanly and imperfectly. There were no bits of metal mixed with the fine white powder and the small pieces of her bones.