Safe Drinking Water

Issue: Safe Drinking Water When looking alot of the big issues within today's environment I took great interest in safe drinking water. There is not that much of safe drinking water to efficiently hydrate every single person on the planet. Alot of third world countries, especially within Africa and Asia, have issues with their own water supplies being safe to drink. Now if there is safe enough water, they may not be readily available or within a close area to where people are living. One of the reasons why safe drinking water is such a high concern has to deal with the pollution in the water and what the pollution causes.Research done by many organizations, such as the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), have found out that over 75 percent of all diseases in developing countries arise from polluted drinking water. How and what are some of the solutions that are going to be taken into action? Many Organizatio ns have taken the steps to working towards a solution and some even have already initiated their solutions. Some of the Organizations that have focused on the issues are: Global Water, EPA, TWAS, The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and Operation Safe Drinking Water.To start off, I am going to introduce to you Global Water. Global Water is an international, non-profit, humanitarian organization. This organization was founded in 1982 and their primary focus started with creating safe water supplies, sanitation facilities, and hygiene-related facilities for rural villagers in developing countries. This volunteer-based organization has quite a few successful projects utilizing water and sanitation as a tool to create sustainable socioeconomic development in the poor rural villages. The organization became pretty successful base on their â€Å"Technology Push† program.This program consisted of low-maintenance, state of the art, water equipment that would be used in the wa ter, sanitation, and hygiene-related facilities. Not only were these devices low-maintenance, volunteer groups would reach out to the villagers and teach them how to use and maintain the devices. With this equipment the villages were able to access, purity, and distribute new sources of safe water. The water projects of Global Water have an immediate life-changing impact on the families of the villages. This Organization has been around for 25 years and has brought over 1. billion people safe drinking water and 769 million people sanitation facilities. This organization wasn't always successful. The problems they had were not that many. The main issue was the size of the volunteer teams and the time and donations given. The speed of the process to reach such a number that they have today had taken over 2 decades to complete. Not nearly as fast as they wanted to do. If they were able to get larger teams and obtain more money, they could have saved more lives and put down for faciliti es for more poor communities. Next is the EPA.EPA, also known as the United States Environmental Protection Agency, passed the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) in 1974. The SDWA is the main federal law that ensures the quality of Americans' drinking water. Under this law, the EPA sets standards for drinking water quality and oversees the state water suppliers who implement those standards. This policy was set in 1974 to ensure Americans receive high quality drinking water every day from a public water system. The reason mainly for the policy set was to ensure the safety of the Americans health.There are over 160,000 public water systems, not including private systems, that provide the drinking water to almost all living Americans. There are a number of threats to drinking water in America due to the number of improperly disposed chemicals, animal wastes, pesticides, human wastes, and even wastes that have been injected deep underground. This policy controls any treatment use, chemical contaminants, underground injection control, and monitoring programs for all public water systems as well as some private water systems.Unfortunately this does not include some well water systems that very few individuals have. Now passing this policy was not cheap. It has been estimated over a 5 billion dollars has already been spent since 2003 on the SDWA. The US EPA has taken a infrastructure survey, released in 2001, estimating that drinking water systems will need to invest about 150 billion over a 20-year period to ensure the continued development, storage, treatment, and distribution of safe drinking water. When the estimate was set down, many did agree that it was a conservative low estimate. Now we are coming to TWAS.TWAS stands for Third World Academy of Sciences. TWAS is an international autonomous scientific organization dedicated to promoting scientific capacity and excellence for sustainable development. TWAS was founded in Italy, 1983. Since 1986, TWAS has supported scientific research in over 100 countries through a variety of programs with more than 2000 eminent scientists world-wide. What the scientists of TWAS were looking into different ways of using and recycling water that we already have. Now what they discovered is not the lack of freshwater in rural areas, but the access to the fresh water.From there research, 77 percent of city and towns people have access to save drinking water, but only 17 percent of rural inhabitants have access in the Congo. Now this varies from one country to another, but all similar percentages for rural communities are still quite low. There were many solutions that had come about from TWAS, but some of the simple ones were for example, Pipeline water supplies. What I mean by that is innovative micro level methods to capture and harvest rainwater on rooftops, soak pits, and village ponds.Not only did this ease the water-shortage problems, but it was an efficient starting method to obtaining water and used wate r treatment pills to make the water safe to drink. Next is UNICEF. UNICEF stands for The United Nations Children's Fund. UNICEF works in over 190 countries to save and improve children's lives by providing clean water and sanitation, nutrition, education, health care, and emergency relief. UNICEF works towards the day when zero children die from preventable causes and every child has a safe and healthy childhood.One of the solutions for safe drinking water that UNICEF has provided are simple plastic buckets and inexpensive water purification tablets that provide safe drinking water. Now this is just a temporary method versus some of the permanent ones. Alot of the challenges that were being faced for the UNICEF was mainly ways to build dams and other facilities on the rivers in remote communities. Unfortunately the lack funding came into play. The goal of UNICEF is to deliver over 15000 water buckets by this year and hoping to build water purification facilities in the remote commun ities.Last but not least, Operation Safe Drinking Water. Operation Safe Drinking Water is a small charity that has been working to install rain-catchment systems for school systems in south and central America. This is probably the least effective system without purification. But the main goal for the charity was to prevent the communities and especially the young students to stop drinking the polluted waters of streams or contaminated wells. Not only did the sickness drop over 50% for absent rates, fewer students have gotten sick or missed any classes.This is a newer all-volunteer group that has successfully helped over 50 schools with 500 or more students attending. This method is pretty effective only for preventing the drinking from the polluted streams and wells, but there is no purification system within the tanks that are provided. In conclusion, safe drinking water is probably one of the most important things within a humans life. It is a necessity. Without water, we cannot live. A human being can survive 3 days without water. Without safe water, a human being might only survive 3 days with some of the water sources that are only available to some.With the progression of the different Organizations around the world, more and more areas are being either treated or in the process to being treated so that third world countries as well as even first rate countries have safe drinking water. Organizations today estimate that within the next 30 years, we could have over 60% of the third world countries converted to safe, treated, drinking water. References Bass, J. (n. d. ). The Solution. Operation Safe Drinking Water. Retrieved November 13, 2012, from operationsafedrinkingwater. org/the-solution Kuepper, T. (n. d. ). Water Shortage, Drinking Water Crisis Solutions.Water Shortage, Drinking Water Crisis Solutions. Retrieved November 13, 2012, from http://www. globalwater. org/ Nybo, T. (n. d. ). Simple solutions to provide safe drinking water to remote communi ties in Haiti :: News from the Field :: Media Center :: U. S. Fund for UNICEF – UNICEF USA. Help Children :: Humanitarian Aid & Emergency Relief :: U. S. Fund for UNICEF – UNICEF USA. Retrieved November 13, 2012, from http://www. unicefusa. org/news/news-from-the-field/simple-solutions-help-provide-water-in-remote-areas-in-haiti. html Rao, C. (n. d. ). Safe Drinking Water aâ‚ ¬Ã¢â‚¬  TWAS Portal. Welcome to TWAS aâ‚ ¬Ã¢â‚¬  TWAS Portal. Retrieved November 14,

Bibliography and Description of Theoretical Framework and Methods Essay

Bibliography and Description of Theoretical Framework and Methods - Essay Example In addition, the interviews were conducted on the third stage amongst transnational migrant workers in the creative knowledge sector. These were aimed at collecting information about their reasons behind their settlement at certain areas and the factors that aided their decision making process. The results derived from the empirical surveys were then synthesized in order to identify the attracting and retaining qualities of the BMR. The study has used a SWOT analysis to the data obtained concerning the BMR (135). The study identifies job, career and education opportunities as the main motivational factors for the settlement of transnational migrant workers (136). On the other hand, hard and soft factors influence the leaders and managers decisions to locate businesses in the BMR. In this study, the researcher analyses the urban planning and territorial systems, which have realized changes as a result of the urbanization process (15). This is evident from the increased commercial exchanges and the integration of work as well as financial markets. Moreover, an improvement in communication and a readjustment in the urban hierarchy are predominant. The researcher employs a bibliographical review to assess urbanization and reconfiguration in Spanish and Portuguese cities. This mainly involves reviewing published works of certain authors and other joint works. A cautious approach is taken to ensure only studies of metropolises that have been analyzed in a European, Iberian or nationally are used (17). From these studies, the urban changes that have transpired over the past decades are highlighted. In addition, the study examines the effects of compartmentalization of land use, fragmentation and the role of transport networks in urban areas (18). A field study is e mployed, which enables the researcher to gather information concerning urban and territorial planning. The information

A Critical Analysis of Hemingway's A Clean, Well-lighted Place Essay

A Critical Analysis of Hemingway's A Clean, Well-lighted Place - Essay Example Ernest Hemingway’s 1954 Nobel Prize winner â€Å"A Clean, Well-lighted Place† effectively illustrates human beings’ different answers of the mostly asked question: â€Å"What is the meaning of life?† From toddlerhood to late adulthood, as people grow mature, their response to this question gets influenced with their life’s experiences whether good or bad. They either turn out to be hopeful amidst life adversities or become cynical of life’s real meaning. In a much closer look, Hemingway’s work undoubtedly reflects his own experiences (Ernest Hemingway). He himself has committed suicide in the year 1961(Redouane, Abouddahab, 2). And as a result, most critical analyses of his works become mostly biographical in nature. Hemingway’s work undoubtedly reflects a considerable amount of his life’s experiences as a soldier, writer, and reporter. It can be also noted that most of the criticism of Hemingway’s works is ideolog ically based and is greatly influenced by the accumulated facts about his life and work. His works usually present male personas whose characters evolve around the themes on â€Å"losing hope and faith† (Ernest Hemingway). This short story â€Å"A Clean, Well-lighted Place† somehow progresses on the same theme: of losing hope and faith to live, and of nursing the moments of despair to finding that something that will push one to continue living. These themes were well illustrated by three characters of different walks of life, three people who see life in different perspectives: the young waiter, the old waiter and the old-drunk man. They have different stories to tell and only in the clean, well-lighted cafe that their mind-sets get exposed to the readers’ critical scrutiny. In Erickson’s Psychosocial Theory, he pointed out that in each stage of a person’s life one experiences psychosocial crisis represented by two opposing dispositions also terme d by Erickson as â€Å"contrary dispositions†. If one can successfully manage each stage, he/she can get through the rest of the stages. On the other hand, If one failed, he may develop â€Å"reduced ability to complete further stages† (Saul McLeod). In relation to this, the young waiter represents those in the young adulthood stage, the sixth stage of Erickson’s Psychosocial Theory of Human Development, who views life with much positivity and idealism while the old-drunk man and the old waiter who sympathizes with the former represent those in the late adulthood stage, the last stage of Erickson’s Psychosocial Theory. They are the ones who are caught between developing ego integrity and wallowing up the feeling of despair. The story, set in a clean, well-lighted cafe somewhere in Spain, opens with an old man drinking brandy and sitting on his favourite spot in the cafe, â€Å"in the shadow of the leaves of the tree made against the electric light† . The two waiters in the cafe were talking about the old-drunk man as he drowns himself with his liquor. Their conversation wound up with the latter’s attempted suicide to the significance of a clean, well-lighted cafe of which young waiter finds no difference with other bars and bodegas. The young waiter who seems oblivious of the old-drunk man’s personal issues finds the attempt ridiculous because for him the latter â€Å"has plenty of money† and that there’s no reason why should the old man try to end his life. On one hand, the old waiter feels what the old man was exactly feeling as he understands what â€Å"it† feels like. He confesses that, he himself needs a clean, well-lighted place once in a while. As the story progresses, the young and old waiter, both representations of two different generations, demonstrate the different worldviews

Sydney Harbour Bridge Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Sydney Harbour Bridge - Essay Example In other words, Carl Hooper asserts that there should be a 'depoliticisation' of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and he makes use of the theories of Roland Barthes to explain this depoliticisation, as well as the aura and allure of the Bridge. In the explanation of the bitter conflicts between sectional interests as well as the tensions between public and private, Hooper makes use of the theories of Roland Barthes and the method has been greatly effective. "The explanation of this event is found nor in history nor politics, but in the function of mythology. The celebratory phenomenon enveloping the harbour bridge is similar to that analysed by Roland Barthes. In this explanation the harbour bridge constructed out of concrete, granite and steel acts as a mythic signifier, situated in a particular environment and history. This is its 'sensuous' dimension."2 Therefore, Carl Hooper explains the concept of the 'depoliticisation' of the Sydney Harbour Bridge as well as the aura and allure of the Bridge by the use of the theories of Roland Barthes. The Sydney Harbour Bridge, according t... Thus, Hooper suggests the significance of the mythology concerning the Sydney Harbour Bridge which depoliticises the bridge through the generation of images that conceal or deform the material, historical and political dimensions of the real Sydney Harbour Bridge. Through these images one may imagine that the bridge is something eternal and that it belongs to the natural order of things. Such perceptions make the bridge as something beyond question and beyond politics. Two of the most important vehicles for the bridge mythology are provided by the souvenir histories and the visual arts and Hooper is engaged in a critical reading of the mythology by examining some sample vehicles and he recovers the Sydney Harbour Bridge as a material, historical and political entity. In its planning, construction and continued maintenance, the Sydney Harbour Bridge has been identified as a public work, though the idea of public is limited here. The bridge is also identified as a vampire and as the ci ty as such because it represents the city's interests in relation to other cities. As the symbolic and aesthetic considerations were involved in the design of the characteristic shape of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it has never been understood in purely utilitarian terms. There were several dangers and issues involved in the construction of the bridge and the estimates of its cost impressed the popular imagination with the specialness and uniqueness. The extraordinary benefits which would flow from the bridge were stressed by the supporters of the task. There were several other factors which contributed to the mythology concerning the bridge. "The spectacle of its construction in the midst of the daily life of the city

Psychology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 28

Psychology - Essay Example With reference to humans, excellent semantic and episodic memory is present. We are able to remember and recall events with accordance to time, place and manner. Also, humans have the ability to learn and retain tasks and perform them successfully. Using memory is not confined to humans but also to non human animals. Considering animals, it has been difficult to prepare models to test the episodic memory of animals, which can be mainly due to the difference of level of consciousness between humans and non humans. Nevertheless the studies that have been carried out, though they have not yet been able to successfully differentiate between episodic recollection of events from semantic factual knowledge in animals; however, in the main it is assumed that animals recall incidents with no past-time orientation . A dog may be able to remember a familiar face, but would be unable to remember when or where it saw previously. Contradictory to this theory, episodic-like memory has been observed in certain birds. Experiments involving food-caching trials show that some type of birds have been able to successfully recollect the location of their caches, while other types are also able to recall the contents of the cache. These experiments do provide us with substantial evidence that animals do not possess episodic memory as highly developed as humans but certain animals do exhibit some level of episodic-like memory. While taking semantic memory also in view, Tulving, a world-renowned experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist, suggested that episodic memory is unique to humans and not found in animals. Therefore an animal responding to a stimulus for reward basis is demonstration of semantic memory rather than episodic memory (Grondin, 2008). On the other hand, other theories suggest that animals do not have enough semantic networks to develop this type of memory. Therefore their experiences are based on episodic memory. Apes however do display some

European Business Environment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

European Business Environment - Essay Example The UK became a member of the EC (now the EU) in 1973.) (McKean, 2005). The European Union (EU) refers to the 25 nations that have joined together to form an economic community (EC), with some monetary, political, and social aspirations. (Law, 2006). The European Union was created in 1993 from the EC, which itself emerged from the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Atomic Energy Community, and the European Economic Community (EEC). (Law, 2006). The 12 nations of the EC (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the UK) were joined by Austria, Sweden, and Finland in 1995 and by (Greek) Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia in May 2004. The Executive Body of the European Union is the European Commission, which was formed in 1967 with the Council of the European Communities. (Law, 2006). EU policy emerges from a dialogue between the Commission, which initiates and implements the policy, and the Council, which takes the major policy decisions. The European Parliament, formed in 1957, exercises democratic control over policy, and the European Court of Justice imposes the rule of law on the EU, as set out in its various treaties. Although a draft EU Constitution, proposing the creation of an EU president and foreign minister, was published in 2004, its future is now uncertain following rejection by the electorates of France and the Netherlands. (Law, 2006). The United Kingdom became a member of the EU on 1st January 1973. (http://www.eurofaq.freeuk.com/#130). According to section 2 of the enabling legislation, the European Communities Act, 1972, established the principle of the European Law would always prevail over British Law in the event of a clash, thereby overthrowing the supremacy of the British Parliament. (http://www.eurofaq.freeuk.com/#130). The issue as to whether The UK continues to be nothing but a hindrance to the process of European Integration, to the disadvantage of business throughout Europe is a controversial one. On the one hand it might be argued that the UK's continuous refusal to join the EMU's single currency the euro makes it difficult for the EU as a whole to eliminate foreign exchange risk in European firms given that the pound continues to fluctuate against the euro and other European currencies such as the Swedish Krona, the Norwegian Krona and the Danish Krona. On the other hand one can also argue that the UK's economy is significantly ahead of many economies in the euro zone, and therefore becoming a member of the EMU can have devastating effects on the UK's economy. In the final analysis, this paper will argue against the above claim that the UK is a hindrance to the progress of European Integration and to the disadvantages of business throughout Europe. The following points can be advanced to refut e these claims. The European Union established a single market, which refers to the concept of a single integrated market that underlies trading in the European Union, as codified in the Single European Act (1986), which was introduced in 1987 with a target date of 31 December 1992 for completion. (Law, 2006). According to Law (2006), The Single Market came into force on 1 January 1993 with between 90% and 95% of the necessary legislation enacted by all member countries. In practice, however, some of its terms

Core Competencies Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

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