Common SAT Essay Topics That You Should Know

Common SAT Essay Topics That You Should KnowCommon SAT essay topics cover a wide range of subjects. They include; class meetings, school fairs, community and sports events, lectures, conferences, experiments, theories, and new inventions. These are some of the essay topics that students will see on the SAT exams. In order to be effective in a presentation, you must consider the options available for you.It is a good idea to read up on topics that students will encounter in the essays. You may be able to find great resources online that will answer your questions. This can make preparing for your SAT essays a lot easier. Before you begin writing, though, it is important to sit down and write out a few topics that you might encounter.The main ideas in each topic should be clear. The rest of the details should be in the writing. It is important to make sure that your students understand your points. Many people find it helpful to write about their topics before they read them. If your s tudents already know the main ideas, they may be able to connect to the essay better.After you have a list of common topics, you will want to take a practice sample and review the topics. Keep in mind that some topics may be written in a different style than others. You may want to write in a more formal tone to avoid struggling in the topic.You can try to be more detailed in a specific topic. Write your analysis on topics that you already know well. Make sure that you know your point well enough to be effective. There are several different ways to do this. As an example, if you know the main ideas of a topic, try to write out your thoughts using a more formal tone.The best way to get a detailed understanding of a particular topic is to read a chapter or two of the book that is included in the test. You can ask your teacher or a tutor to help you with a chapter if you need to. You will also want to practice your written communication skills by reading some more articles or books rel ated to the topic.In the final step of your preparation, you will want to practice writing your essay. Make sure that you are able to sit down and write about the ideas that you are going to present. You will need to make sure that your student knows what to expect and how to process your information.You should also try to look up the sample essays for the common SAT essay topics. It will help you see how the actual exam will go. By making use of the resources that are available to you, you will be able to prepare for the exam better.

Cognitive behavioral therapy Essay Example

Cognitive behavioral therapy Paper Can a humanistic model of counselling be integrated with a cognitive (or cognitive – behavioural) one? Discuss with reference to Rogers and either Beck or Egan. In the first part of this essay I will summarise the main features of humanistic counselling and the cognitive approach. Rogers used a humanistic person centred approach to therapy and I will look at his view of people, their potential, what goes wrong and what can help them to change. Egan was a cognitive therapist and I will address the above points in relation to his â€Å"Skilled Helper† model. Similarities and key differences in theory, practise and value base between the two approaches will then be discussed. In the second part of the essay, I will use my own previous experience as a client to show how an experienced counsellor can integrate aspects of these two models effectively. I will then look at potential difficulties in making the humanistic and cognitive approach to therapy fit together successfully. I will give a critical analysis of these models, with particular reference to my own therapy and general diversity of needs within the client group. The concluding paragraph will contain an abridgement of the main points covered within the essay. Humanistic therapy emphasises the therapeutic relationship advocated by Rogers with the three core conditions of empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard. Without these conditions present Rogers asserts that the counselling will be ineffective. Humanistic therapy is non- directive and optimistic. Rogers, (2008 p. 137) supports this viewpoint â€Å"The person centred approach, depends on the actualising tendency present in every living organism, the tendency to grow, to develop, to realise its full potential†. We will write a custom essay sample on Cognitive behavioral therapy specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on Cognitive behavioral therapy specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on Cognitive behavioral therapy specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer A humanistic therapist s uses active listening skills including clarifying, paraphrasing, reflecting and summarising. The therapist being non-judgemental is essential to the success of person centred therapy. The only ‘tool’ required in the counselling Page two room is ‘the self’; the relationship in and of itself, with the ‘safe space’ for the client to freely express emotions accomplishing the healing. Egans cognitive approach is a directive, systematic, cumulative, problem solving three stage model of helping. Stage one considers the clients present scenario; the counsellor encourages the client to tell their story; using core conditions, active listening skills plus a few challenging questions enabling the counsellor to understand the client’s present frame of reference. Stage two considers the preferred scenario; using directive questions prefixed with words like ‘how’ and ‘in what way,’ the client is moved towards a more objective understanding, an alternative way of viewing their world. The client is encouraged to develop Goals and objectives based on opportunities for future action. Stage three A strategic action plan workable within the clients lifestyle moving them towards desired outcomes is formulated, with plans for future evaluation. Egan (1990 p. 29) identifies one of the main roles of the counsellor in this process â€Å"Counsellors can help their clients empower themselves by helping them identify and develop unused or underused opportunities and potential†. Egan’s model provides principles as guidelines, the correct formula; taking action to valued outcomes is individually tailored to each client, including homework for the client on agreed goals. Rogers views the person as having an inner core to his personality which he terms the organism. The instinctual, somatic, sensory unselfconscious aspect of a human being, as opposed to the reflective, measured and self-conscious part that he describes as the self. Rogers considers, as stated by Embleton, L. ( 2004 p. 32 ) â€Å" that the organism is trustworthy and does not need to be controlled or directed from the outside†. He considers people to be social, self-regulatory and responsible for their own actions, with a natural tendency towards growth and self-actualisation. Each person is valued as a unique individual. Within Humanistic therapy the potential is there for the re integration of self and organism, thus Page three enabling self-actualisation to take place. A phrase used by Kierkegaard the first modern existentialist – to be that self which one truly is – I feel expresses the idea of self-actualisation very well, indicating the potential for growth and change believed by Rogers to be inherent within all of us. Rogers puts forward the view that the client held in the therapeutic relationship, when given the freedom to fully experience his feelings realises his potential to experience being (increased self- awareness) and becoming (self-actualisation). What goes wrong, thus bringing a client into therapy? Rogers considers the problem to be lack of balance in a person’s life, conflict between what has been internalised as belief, conditions of worth and values, and what the person is presently experiencing. Dissolution of protective defence mechanisms that had previously enabled the client to function in their daily life, leads as they experience a life changing event to dysfunction with mental, emotional and sometimes physical disintegration. To reverse this process and bring about reintegration and balance through humanistic therapy, the relationship needs to be firmly established and the core conditions of the therapeutic relationship modelled by the therapist. Within this relationship conditions of worth are minimised. The positive regard offered by the counsellor facilitates an increase in the client’s positive self-regard leading to reintegration and ultimately self-actualisation. Egan views people as being subject to operant conditioning. In essence â€Å"in any situation or in response to any stimulus, the person has available a repertoire of possible responses and emits the behaviour that is reinforced or rewarded† (Mc Leod p. 126). Egan considers that the client’s repertoire of available responses and processing of information mostly learned during childhood will be uniquely theirs, and may not presently be serving their best interests. The cognitive therapist will Page four look for unused or unrecognised life enhancing potential within the client. Egan views peoples actions as a direct result of their feelings and the thinking (cognition) preceding them. People have the potential to unlearn behaviour that does not serve their vital interests and replace it with learned appropriate behaviour. The therapist using ‘The Skilled Helper’ model is able to facilitate the client’s understanding of what is going on for them right now, what they would like to be happening and to assist them in developing strategies, achievable goals and an action plan to get them there. Both cognitive and humanistic therapists are in agreement that the counsellor needs first to establish the core conditions of empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard with their client. During the first stage of the cognitive approach when the client is telling their story as in person centred therapy active listening skills are used. The cognitive therapist will also add challenging the client’s perception of their present situation, which is directly in opposition to the total acceptance of the clients frame of reference proffered by the humanistic therapist. Who has the answer to the client’s problem? The humanistic therapist places their trust in the client, and their innate ability to resolve their own issues and reach their full potential. The counsellor listens to the client clarifying even those issues which may be just below the client’s level of awareness. â€Å"Listening of this very special active kind is one of the most potent forces for change that I know† (Rogers2008p. 136). Cognitive therapy sees people as needing direction and guidance to resolve their problems. This therapeutic approach has a rather pessimistic view of people seeing them as innately sinful, destructive, and lazy or a combination of all three; the client being unable to be trusted without assistance to ‘find their own way’. A structured disciplined approach is used in cognitive therapy the value of the therapy is considered to be dependent upon the achievement of set goals and actions by the client. The desired end result Page five is discussed and set with the client very early on in the therapy. The counsellor has in mind at the outset how the therapy will progress, and what needs to be accomplished as the client is encouraged to move from stage one through to stage three. In humanistic therapy the client chooses what will be brought to each session not the counsellor. There is no structured problem solving or set goal, and the right time to end therapy is ideally decided by the client. The client’s autonomy is highly valued. Rogers speaks of a ‘directional flow’ moving the client towards growth, healing and the self-actualisation considered by Maslow to be the pinnacle of achievement that all human beings are striving for. For either therapy to work Egan and Rogers both agree that there has to be a willingness by the client to engage in the therapy. They put forward slightly different reasons for resistance in some clients. Rogers (2008 p. 213) feels that â€Å"resistance to the therapist is entirely due to too much probing or too rapid interpretation on the part of the counsellor†. Egan(1990 p. 169) puts forward the idea that resistance refers to â€Å" the reaction of clients who in some way feel coerced†. Both therapeutic approaches stress, that for therapy to be effective the inevitable power differential between client and counsellor needs to be minimised. Also individuality including aspects of the client’s culture religion and gender should be valued and respected by the therapist. I can foresee potential difficulties for myself as a newly qualified therapist in using the two approaches together effectively as I may lack the expertise to know when to use each model and with which client. As I gain in experience and self-awareness I anticipate making effective use of both therapeutic models within my practise. My training uses an integrative approach and I plan to use a variety of different therapies in my future work. I was fortunate to see cognitive and humanistic approaches well modelled by my Page six personal therapist over the eighteen months of our work together. When I entered personal therapy all of the structure in my life had vanished. My defence mechanisms spoken of by Rogers had been breached. I had little self-worth and low self-esteem blaming myself for remaining in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship for thirty four years. In April 2008 as I sat for the first time opposite a counsellor I was vulnerable, frightened and suicidal. I am sure for several months I would have been incapable of rising to the challenge of a cognitive approach. I did not at that time have the mental and emotional capacity to set goals or the motivation to see them through. Using a rather gentler person centred approach the therapeutic conditions of empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard were established as we worked through various issues and emotions. About half way through my therapy we came to a ‘sticking point’. I had developed an eating disorder and the humanistic model didn’t seem to be helping me. My counsellor opted for a cognitive approach at this stage and asked me to keep a food diary. Together we set goals; the desired outcome was for me to eat healthy food three times a day. At this point I was ready for a challenge. In achieving these goals my self-esteem was boosted. Egan 1990 p. 37 states â€Å"Ideally, clients by their actions come to â€Å"own† the helping process instead of being the objects of it†. This is exactly what happened to me; as from then on I took a more active part in my own therapy. The positive regard shown by my therapist at all times empowered me to ‘own my healing process’. For me the integration of the two different approaches gave the best therapeutic outcome. Had my therapist initially used only a cognitive approach I am sure I would have felt overwhelmed. My life had recently involved massive changes I did not feel capable at that time of working towards further change. It would have appeared too intrusive and directive. I would have been resistant to Page seven the therapy and stopped attending, possibly prejudicing future therapy. Later cognitive therapy was used very effectively when I reached a ‘sticking point’. People are unique bringing their own values and beliefs to therapy. These may be shaped by culture, religion, gender, class or ethnic origin. Any or all of these will have an impact on the counselling relationship, and which therapeutic approach might be most effective in helping a particular client. Native Americans tend to resent being coerced and motivated into doing things, they prefer to work things out for themselves; a counsellor therefore may find a humanistic approach suits this client. In contrast â€Å"A characteristic of certain ethnic minority groups is the desire for a structured relationship in which the counsellor is cast as an expert giving advice and solutions to problems, a therapist who is active, authoritative and directive† (Patterson C. H. ). This client may not be able to engage with person centred therapy but benefit from the more directive cognitive approach. Care must be taken however not to stereotype a particular client group In conclusion I have looked at both humanistic and cognitive therapies, their similarities and differences. Having myself experienced both therapies effectiveness in the healing process, I can see how they could be used at different times with the same client. However, therapy needs to be uniquely tailored to the individual clients needs with particular reference to the diversity of culture, religion, ethnicity and values found within all humanity. Word count 2166 Page eight References Egan, G. ed. (1990) The Skilled Helper. Loyola University of Chicago, Brooks/Cole. Publishing company Pacific Grove California. Embleton, L. et al. (2004) The Person Centred Approach. A contemporary introduction. U. K. Palgrave Macmillan. Mc Leod, J. ed. (2008) Behavioural methods in counselling. IN: Mc Leod, J. An introduction to Counselling. Finland. W. S. Bookwell. Patterson, C. H. Multicultural Counselling: From diversity to Universality. Available at. [Accessed 10 December 2010]. Rogers, C. ed. (2008). The therapeutic relationship. IN Kirshenbaum, H. Land Henderson, V. The Carl Rogers Reader. Great Britain. Constable. Rogers, C. ed. (2008). Theory and research. IN: Kirsenbaum,H. Land Henderson, V. The Carl Rogers Reader. Great Britain.

Medusa The Snake Haired Woman With A Deadly Stare Professor Ramos Blog

Medusa The Snake Haired Woman With A Deadly Stare Why is it that Medusa is considered a frightening monster? Is it the snakes on her scalp or, is it because with a mere stare directed your way she can literally petrify you? There are numerous myths surrounding this supernatural being that have been recorded through time. I will use some literary works to help better understand the story of Medusa and how she came to be this monster everyone knows today. Medusa is a woman who was very beautiful with healthy wonderful hair that was comparable to Athena, the goddess of wisdom. She was Athenas priestess, someone with an importance in religious position. The goddess of wisdom had gotten in an argument with her love interest and also being another god, Poseidon the god of the sea. Poseidon then became furious with Athena and he later on spotted Medusa who he could not take his eyes off of. With the knowledge of knowing Medusas rank in Athens where Athena would associate frequently, Poseidon decided to sexually abuse her because he knew that she believed and worshipped Athena. Medusa then quickly reached out to Athena for aid on the previous traumatic experiences she has been through. Once Athena was aware of these events she was with enraged with Medusa and curses her by creating the famous monster who could turn any man into stone with direct contact. This was a punishment from the goddess because she was sexually abused by Poseidon and because her beauty was compared to her own and Athena was not pleased with that. Medusa was banished from Athens and her location was told to be unknown. She was the only mortal out of the two sisters she had, making her a target to many onlookers. Eventually, Medusa was killed by a man named Perseus who received aid from the gods including Athena to defeat her because of her vile actions after she was cursed. One of the versions of Medusa is from the book Medusa: Solving the Mystery of The Gorgon where she is described as a deadly creature. Her appearance has varied from her having scaly skin with sharp teeth to being in human form with an unsightly face. â€Å"The Gorgons had scaly heads, boars tusks, brazen hands, and wings. They had protruding tongues, glaring eyes, and serpents wrapped around their waists as belts† (Wilk 21). Even though later in time Medusa’s appearance kept changing, her ability to turn any being into stone remained the same. Now, Medusa in Clash of The Titans† appears as a half woman half snake creature. In the film specifically her face only turns hideous at will when she makes direct contact with another person or living being. â€Å"The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters†characterizes Medusa as a vile and horrible monster. â€Å"In later narratives, which focus much more fully on Medusa than on her two sisters, Medusa is presented as an Underworld monster connected to death† (Kaleta). She is comprehended in these three sources as a woman with countless deaths in her hands due to the capability of converting humans into statues. Overall based on the illustrations of Medusa in these sources, she has not been changed a lot. Her look usually goes back and forth from her being in human form or part creature part human. Medusa’s story on the other hand typically stays the same. Medusa for me would easily get a rating of four out of five. She can straightforwardly be in the category of a monster. Not many monsters have snakes in replacement of ha ir, this is just part of Medusa’s unique appearance. Cohen has seven total theses that hypothesizes what a monster is. His first thesis â€Å"The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body† explains that appearance as well as the rituals done by the monster is based of off culture. This applies to this creature because in certain stories it is told that Medusa’s lair is full of statues from countless people and animals. Most people will clearly understand who is responsible for all the human figured stones. Medusa’s work is widely known throughout time and the world. Even after Perseus slays Medusa and decapitates her head, her ability to turn people into stone is still intact.The meaning of Medusa in Greek means to protect or rule. Perseus used Medusa’s bodiless head to defeat his foes and protect his loved ones. Her body is a cultural body and more specifically her head. Also the description of her skin is covered in scales and her lower body is part snake. These are signifying that snakes are dangerous, whe n one is in front of a snake one of the first instincts is to slowly move away because quick movements tells the animal that they are in danger and snakes defend themselves by biting with thier poisonous fangs. Thesis number two is all about how The Monster Always Escapes. This ties into medusas story and herself because in the article The Ashgate Enc of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, it reads that there have been a lot of fighters attempting to slay Medusa but all of them failed. The one to finally defeat her was Perseus but, he did not do it alone. Perseus got aid from Athena the goddess of wisdom who gave him a shield that could be used as a mirror to see Medusas reflection on the shield without staring at her directly. Hermes the messenger for the gods gave the young man a pair of shoes that had wings, that was used to travel to his destination. Perseus also got a sword from Zues the god of thunder. The last item was a cap of invisibility given to him by Hades the god of the Underworld. After her death, Medusa becomes a guardian in Hades, the land of the dead. It is there that Hercules later meets her (Kaleta). After death her soul still lives on and is introduced in other heros story meaning that she always escapes and reappears. The next thesis is his third one, The Monster is The Harbinger of Category Crisis. The is basically meaning that the monster Refuses easy categorization (Cohen 6). Categories such as appearance, time period, or the setting. Medusa perfectly fits into this thesis because she is part animal and part human. She also has snakes on her head instead of hair, and snake like fangs (Kaleta). Many people feared Medusa in the past because she kills people instantly with just a simple look in the eyes. Fear consumed people because Medusa causes death. â€Å"The monster is continually linked to forbidden practices, in order to normalize and to enforce. The monster also attracts.The same creatures who terrify and interdict can evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint† (Cohen 16). This is part of the passage from thesis number six, Fear of The Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire. Medusa is a creature that several fighters in the past that were eager to slay her. There was a type of thirst of being the one to defeat Medusa that many warriors urged to fulfil. This is a reason why there were a great amount of statues in Medusa’s lair. So many of the men failed up until Perseus won the battle against her. The final thesis that will be discussed from Cohen’s article will be thesis number seven â€Å" The Monster Stands at the Threshold†¦ of Becoming.† To sum up, we ourselves are the ones responsible for how monsters came to be, the monsters are our offspring. We are the reason they were created, it could be based on how they were treated or how the world classified them. Being seen as a certain thing can convince people to believe that is what they are. To summarize, Medusa is a great monster, throughout time she has been a woman of beauty who was cursed by the goddess Athena. Medusas physical form and appearance is then described as ugly and displeasing to the eye. Due to her change in appearance, she had the power to turn any man into stone with a simple glare. Cohens thesis apply to Medusa based on her story and physical features. She was not born a monster, but created and many feared her abilities. Because of her uniqueness and many desired to defeat her but only one succeeded, Perseus. After being defeated Medusa still managed to reappear in other heroes tale. Medusa is a monster that continuously comes to surface in literary work. Through time Medusa is somehow always reintroduced, a monster written throughout our time. Work Cited Page Clash of The Titans (2010)- Medusas Lair Scene (6/10). Youtube, uploaded by Movieclips, 22 December 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY00zwMZsqM.   Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. â€Å"Monster Culture: Seven Theses.† From Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 3-25. Kaleta, Marcin Konrad. Medusa. The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Ashgate Publishing, 1st edition, 2014. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/ashgtmonster/medusa/0?institutionId=5312. Kayden, Spencer. â€Å"The Hunt for Medusa’s Head. (Cover Story).† Scholastic Scope, vol. 60, no. 2, Sept. 2011, p. 14. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=truedb=f6hAN=70047471site=ehost-live. Leterrier, Louis, director. Clash of The Titans. Warner Brothers, 2010.Wilk, Stephen R. Medusa†¯: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon. Oxford University Press, 1999. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=truedb=e000xnaAN=41702site=ehost-live.

None Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 13

None - Essay Example The third factor as seen in the movie, appeal to pity takes place when an individual tries to endorse a conclusion by evoking sympathy or pity from the listener or reader (Damer 19). From the movie, twelve angry men; characteristics of critical thinking are diverse. Critical thinking process entails a deep thought process that requires a person to remain attentive to the issue at hand by focusing on the process from argumentation to summary. A person needs to exercise self-reflection so that they question and test their own thinking ability or process. Any form of critical thinking aims to tackle the issue at hand and remains attentive to a specific topic. In turn, the process focuses on identifying biases, strengths, weaknesses, personal opinion, and their influence on concepts or ideas (Damer 32). After careful evaluation of the issues, an individual gives his or her perception about what they think. Therefore, features of critical thinking

Entrepreneurial Self Reflective Analysis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Entrepreneurial Self Reflective Analysis - Essay Example The essay presents a self-reflection analysis done by the researcher and based on the GET2 test while providing any contradicting or supportive arguments based on previous encounters. The overall result of the test that are presented in the essay also challenges the ability of the researcher to develop innovative ideas. The researcher considers this assumption both wrong and highly prejudiced. Different people have different abilities and ideas. It is explained that since we all have a different set of abilities and personal characteristics, the researcher believes the test does not give an excellent analysis regarding his overall creativity. The researcher then councluds that these test results also seem to contradict each other seeing that the researcher considers his risks suggesting that he prefers taking calculated moves. An example of a contradictory review is the idea that the researcher prefers giving orders and also being the team leader. The same test results also state tha t the researcher would be well suited in an intrapreneurship letting someone take charge and engage in risky activities. If the two results are by chance considered to be factual, then the researcher would also have a strong desire to lead any partner, and that would translate to taking a higher risk than them. According to the GET2 test, the researcher have an overall score of 63 percent that implies he is likely to have strengths in various enterprising characteristics and could also be enterprising in some contexts.

Automatic Encoding Detection And Unicode Conversion Engine Computer Science Essay

Automatic Encoding Detection And Unicode Conversion Engine Computer Science Essay In computers, characters are represented using numbers. Initially the encoding schemes were designed to support the English alphabet, which has a limited number of symbols. Later the requirement for a worldwide character encoding scheme to support multi lingual computing was identified. The solution was to come up with a 16 encoding scheme to represent a character so that it can support up to large character set. The current Unicode version contains 107,000 characters covering 90 scripts. In the current context operating systems such as Windows 7, UNIX based operating systems applications such as word processors and data exchange technologies do support this standard enabling internationalization in the IT industry. Even though this standard has been the de facto standard, still there can be seen certain applications using proprietary encoding schemes to represent the data. As an example, famous Sinhala news sites still do not adapt Unicode standard based fonts to represent the conte nt. This causes issues such as the requirement of downloading proprietary fonts, browser dependencies making the efforts of Unicode standard in vain. In addition to the web site content itself there are collections of information included in documents such as PDFs in non Unicode fonts making it difficult to search through search engines unless the search term is entered in that particular font encoding. This has given the requirement of automatically detecting the encoding and transforming into the Unicode encoding in the corresponding language, so that it avoids the problems mentioned. In case of web sites, a browser plug-in implementation to support the automatic non-Unicode to Unicode conversion would eliminate the requirement of downloading legacy fonts, which uses proprietary character encodings. Although some web sites provide the source font information, there are certain web applications, which do not give this information, making the auto detection process more difficult. Hence it is required to detect the encoding first, before it has been fed to the transformation process. This has given the rise to a research area of auto detecting the language encoding for a given text based on language characteristics. This problem will be addressed based on a statistical language encoding detection mechanism. The technique would be demonstrated with the support for all the Sinhala Non Unicode encodings. The implementation for the demonstration will make sure that it is an extendible solution for other languages making it support for any given language based on a future requirement. Since the beginning of the computer age, many encoding schemes have been created to represent various writing scripts/characters for computerized data. With the advent of globalization and the development of the Internet, information exchanges crossing both language and regional boundaries are becoming ever more important. However, the existence of multiple coding schemes presents a significant barrier. The Unicode has provided a universal coding scheme, but it has not so far replaced existing regional coding schemes for a variety of reasons. Thus, todays global software applications are required to handle multiple encodings in addition to supporting Unicode. In computers, characters are encoded as numbers. A typeface is the scheme of letterforms and the font is the computer file or program which physically embodies the typeface. Legacy fonts use different encoding systems for assigning the numbers for characters. This leads to the fact that two legacy font encodings defining different numbers for the same character. This may lead to conflicts with how the characters are encoded in different systems and will require maintaining multiple encoding fonts. The requirement of having a standard to unique character identification was satisfied with the introduction of Unicode. Unicode enables a single software product or a single website to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. The latest Unicode has more than 107,000 characters covering 90 scripts, which consists of a set of code charts. The Unicode Consortium co-ordinates Unicodes development and the goal is to eventually replace existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes. This standard is being supported in many recent technologies including Programming Languages and modern operating systems. All W3C recommendations have used Unicode as their document character set since HTML 4.0. Web browsers have supported Unicode, especially UTF-8, for many years [4], [5]. Sinhala Legacy Font Conversion Requirement for Web Content Sinhala language usage in computer technology has been present since 1980s but the lack of standards in character representation system resulted in proprietary fonts. Sinhala was added to Unicode in 1998 with the intention of overcoming the limitations in proprietary character encodings. Dinamina, DinaminaUniWeb, Iskoola Pota, KandyUnicode, KaputaUnicode, Malithi Web, Potha are some Sinhala Unicode fonts which were developed so that the numbers assigned with the characters are the same. Still some major news sites which display Sinhala character contents have not adapted the Unicode standards. The Legacy Fonts encoding schemes are used instead causing the conflicts in content representation. In order to minimize the problems, font families were created where the shape of characters only differs but the encoding remains the same. FM Font Family, DL Font Family are some examples where a font family concept is used as a grouping of Sinhala fonts with similar encodings [1], [2]. Adaptation of non Unicode encodings causes a lot of compatibility issues when viewed in different browsers and operating systems. Operating systems such as Windows Vista, Windows7 come with Sinhala Unicode support and do not require external fonts to be installed to read Sinhalese script. Variations of GNU/Linux distributions such as Dabian or Ubuntu also provide Sinhala Unicode support. Enabling non Unicode applications especially web contents with the support for Unicode fonts will allow the users to view contents without installing the legacy fonts. Non Unicode PDF Documents In addition to the contents in the web, there exists a whole lot of government documents which are in PDF format but their contents are encoded with legacy fonts. Those documents would not be searchable through search engines by entering the search terms in Unicode. In order to overcome the problem it is important to convert such documents in to a Unicode font so that they are searchable and its data can be used by other applications consistently, irrespective of the font. As another part of the project this problem would be addressed through a converter tool, which creates the Unicode version of existing PDF document which are currently in legacy font. The Problem Sections 1.3, 1.4 describe two domains in which the Non Unicode to Unicode conversion is required. The conversion involves identification of non-Unicode contents and replacing it with the corresponding Unicode contents. The content replacement requires a Mapping engine, which would do the proper segmentation of the input text and map it with the corresponding Unicode code. The mapping engine can perform the mapping task only if it knows what is the source text encoding. In general, the encoding is specified along with the content so that the mapping engine could feed it directly. However, in certain cases the encoding is not specified along with the content. Hence detecting the encoding through an encoding the detection engine provides a research area, especially with the non-Unicode content. In addition to that, incorporating the detection engine along with a conversion engine would be another part of the problem, to solve the application areas in 1.3, 1.4. Project Scope The system will be initially targeted for Sinhala fonts used by local sites. Later the same mechanism will be extended to support other languages and scripts (Tamil, Devanagaree). Deliverables and outcomes Web Service/Plug-in to Local Language web site Font Conversion which automatically converts website contents from legacy fonts to Unicode. PDF document conversion tool to convert legacy fonts to Unicode In both implementations, the language encoding detection would use the proposed encoding detection mechanism. It can be considered as the core for the implementations in addition to the translation engine which performs the Non Unicode to Unicode mapping. Literature Review Character Encodings Character Encoding Schemes Encoding refers to the process of representing information in some form. Human language is an encoding system by which information is represented in terms of sequences of lexical units, and those in terms of sound or gesture sequences. Written language is a derivative system of encoding by which those sequences of lexical units, sounds or gestures are represented in terms of the graphical symbols that make up some writing system. A character encoding is an algorithm for presenting characters in digital form as sequences of octets. There are hundreds of encodings, and many of them have different names. There is a standardized procedure for registering an encoding. A primary name is assigned to an encoding, and possibly some alias names. For example, ASCII, US-ASCII, ANSI_X3.4-1986, and ISO646-US are different names for an encoding. There are also many unregistered encodings and names that are used widely. The character encoding names are not case sensitive and hence ASCII and Ascii are equivalent [25]. Figure 2.1 Character encoding Example Single Octet Encodings When character repertoire that contains at most 256 characters, assigning a number in the range 0255 to each character and use an octet with that value to represent that character is the most simplest and obvious way. Such encodings, called single-octet or 8-bit encodings, are widely used and will remain important [22]. Multi-Octet Encodings In multi octet encodings more than one octet is used to represent a single character. A simple two-octet encoding is sufficient for a character repertoire that contains at most 65,536 characters. Two octet schemes are uneconomical if the text mostly consists of characters that could be presented in a single-octet encoding. On the other hand, the objective of supporting Universal character set is not achievable with just 65,536 unique codes. Thus, encodings that use a variable number of octets per character are more common. The most widely used among such encodings is UTF-8 (UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format), which uses one to four octets per character. Principles of Unicode Standard Unicode has used as the universal encoding standard to encode characters in all living languages. To the end, is follows a set of fundamental principles. The Unicode standard is simple and consistent. It does not depend on states or modes for encoding special characters. The Unicode standard incorporates the character sets of many existing standards: For example, it includes Latin-I, character set as its first 256 characters. It includes repertoire of characters from numerous other corporate, national and international standards as well. In modern businesses needs handle characters from a wide variety of languages at the same time. With Unicode, a single internationalization process can produce code that handles the requirements of all the world markets at the same time. The data corruption problems do not occur since Unicode has a single definition for each character. Since it handles the characters for all the world markets in a uniform way, it avoids the complexities of different character code architectures. All of the modern operating systems, from PCs to mainframes, support Unicode now, or are actively developing support for it. The same is true of databases, as well.There are 10 design principles associated with Unicode. Universility The Unicode is designed to be Universal. The repertoire must be large enough to encompass all characters that are likely to be used in general text interchange. Unicode needs to encompass a variety of essentially different collections of characters and writing systems. For example, it cannot postulate that all text is written left to right, or that all letters have uppercase and lowercase forms, or that text can be divided into words separated by spaces or other whitespace. Efficient Software does not have to maintain state or look for special escape sequences, and character synchronization from any point in a character stream is quick and unambiguous. A fixed character code allows for efficient sorting, searching, display, and editing of text. But with Unicode efficiency there exist certain tradeoffs made specially with the storage requirements needing four octets for each character. Certain representation forms such as UTF-8 format requiring linear processing of the data stream in order to identify characters. Unicode contains a large amount of characters and features that have been included only for compatibility with other standards. This may require preprocessing that deals with compatibility characters and with different Unicode representations of the same character (e.g., letter à © as a single character or as two characters). Characters, not glyphs Unicode assigns code points to characters as abstractions, not to visual appearances. A character in Unicode represents an abstract concept rather than the manifestation as a particular form or glyph. As shown in Figure 2.2, the glyphs of many fonts that render the Latin character A all correspond to the same abstract character a. Figure 2.2: Abstract Latin Letter a and Style Variants Another example is the Arabic presentation form. An Arabic character may be written in up to four different shapes. Figure 2.3 shows an Arabic character written in its isolated form, and at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of a word. According to the design principle of encoding abstract characters, these presentation variants are all represented by one Unicode character. Figure 2.3: Arabic character with four representations The relationship between characters and glyphs is rather simple for languages like English: mostly each character is presented by one glyph, taken from a font that has been chosen. For other languages, the relationship can be much more complex routinely combining several characters into one glyph. Semantics Characters have well-defined meanings. When the Unicode standard refers to semantics, it often means the properties of characters, such spacing, combinability, and directionality, rather than what the character really means. Plain text Unicode deals with plain texti.e., strings of characters without formatting or structuring information (except for things like line breaks). Logical order The default representation of Unicode data uses logical order of data, as opposed to approaches that handle writing direction by changing the order of characters. Unification The principle of uniqueness was also applied to decide that certain characters should not be encoded separately. Unicode encodes duplicates of a character as a single code point, if they belong to the same script but different languages. For example, the letter à ¼ denoting a particular vowel in German is treated as the same as the letter à ¼ in Spanish. The Unicode standard uses Han unification to consolidate Chinese, Korean, and Japanese ideographs. Han unification is the process of assigning the same code point to characters historically perceived as being the same character but represented as unique in more than one East Asian ideographic character standard. These results in a group of ideographs shared by several cultures and significantly reduces the number of code points needed to encode them. The Unicode Consortium chose to represent shared ideographs only once because the goal of the Unicode standard was to encode characters independent of the languages that use them. Unicode makes no distinctions based on pronunciation or meaning; higher-level operating systems and applications must take that responsibility. Through Han unification, Unicode assigned about 21,000 code points to ideographic characters instead of the 120,000 that would be required if the Asian languages were treated separately. It is true that the same charact er might look slightly different in Chinese than in Japanese, but that difference in appearance is a font issue, not a uniqueness issue. Figure 2.4: Han Unification example The Unicode standard allows for character composition in creating marked characters. It encodes each character and diacritic or vowel mark separately, and allows the characters to be combined to create a marked character. It provides single codes for marked characters when necessary to comply with preexisting character standard. Dynamic composition Characters with diacritic marks can be composed dynamically, using characters designated as combining marks. Equivalent sequences Unicode has a large number of characters that are precomposed forms, such as à ©. They have decompositions that are declared as equivalent to the precomposed form. An application may still treat the precomposed form and the decomposition differently, since as strings of encoded characters, they are distinct. Convertibility Character data can be accurately converted between Unicode and other character standards and specifications. South Asian Scripts The scripts of South Asia share so many common features that a side-by-side comparison of a few will often reveal structural similarities even in the modern letterforms. With minor historical exceptions, they are written from left to right. They are all abugidas in which most symbols stand for a consonant plus an inherent vowel (usually the sound /a/). Word-initial vowels in many of these scripts have distinct symbols, and word-internal vowels are usually written by juxtaposing a vowel sign in the vicinity of the affected consonant. Absence of the inherent vowel, when that occurs, is frequently marked with a special sign [17]. Another designation is preferred in some languages. As an example in Hindi, the word hal refers to the character itself, and halant refers to the consonant that has its inherent vowel suppressed. The virama sign nominally serves to suppress the inherent vowel of the consonant to which it is applied; it is a combining character, with its shape varying from script to script. Most of the scripts of South Asia, from north of the Himalayas to Sri Lanka in the south, from Pakistan in the west to the easternmost islands of Indonesia, are derived from the ancient Brahmi script. The oldest lengthy inscriptions of India, the edicts of Ashoka from the third century BCE, were written in two scripts, Kharoshthi and Brahmi. These are both ultimately of Semitic origin, probably deriving from Aramaic, which was an important administrative language of the Middle East at that time. Kharoshthi, written from right to left, was supplanted by Brahmi and its derivatives. The descendants of Brahmi spread with myriad changes throughout the subcontinent and outlying islands. There are said to be some 200 different scripts deriving from it. By the eleventh century, the modern script known as Devanagari was in ascendancy in India proper as the major script of Sanskrit literature. The North Indian branch of scripts was, like Brahmi itself, chiefly used to write Indo-European languages such as Pali and Sanskrit, and eventually the Hindi, Bengali, and Gujarati languages, though it was also the source for scripts for non-Indo-European languages such as Tibetan, Mongolian, and Lepcha. The South Indian scripts are also derived from Brahmi and, therefore, share many structural characteristics. These scripts were first used to write Pali and Sanskrit but were later adapted for use in writing non-Indo-European languages including Dravidian family of southern India and Sri Lanka. Sinhala Language Characteristics of Sinhala The Sinhala script, also known as Sinhalese, is used to write the Sinhala language, by the majority language of Sri Lanka. It is also used to write the Pali and Sanskrit languages. The script is a descendant of Brahmi and resembles the scripts of South India in form and structure. Sinhala differs from other languages of the region in that it has a series of prenasalized stops that are distinguished from the combination of a nasal followed by a stop. In other words, both forms occur and are written differently [23]. Figure 2.5: Example for prenasalized stop in Sinhala In addition, Sinhala has separate distinct signs for both a short and a long low front vowel sounding similar to the initial vowel of the English word apple, usually represented in IPA as U+00E6 à ¦ latin small letter ae (ash). The independent forms of these vowels are encoded at U+0D87 and U+0D88. Because of these extra letters, the encoding for Sinhala does not precisely follow the pattern established for the other Indic scripts (for example, Devanagari). It does use the same general structure, making use of phonetic order, matra reordering, and use of the virama (U+0DCA sinhala sign al-lakuna) to indicate conjunct consonant clusters. Sinhala does not use half-forms in the Devanagari manner, but does use many ligatures. Sinhala Writing System The Sinhala writing system can be called an abugida, as each consonant has an inherent vowel (/a/), which can be changed with the different vowel signs. Thus, for example, the basic form of the letter k is à  Ã‚ ¶Ã… ¡ ka. For ki, a small arch is placed over the à  Ã‚ ¶Ã… ¡: à  Ã‚ ¶Ã… ¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬â„¢. This replaces the inherent /a/ by /i/. It is also possible to have no vowel following a consonant. In order to produce such a pure consonant, a special marker, the hal kirÄ «ma has to be added: à  Ã‚ ¶Ã… ¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…   . This marker suppresses the inherent vowel. Figure 2.6: Character associative Symbols in Sinhala Historical Symbols. Neither U+0DF4 sinhala punctuation kunddaliya nor the Sinhala numerals are in general use today, having been replaced by Western-style punctuation and Western digits. The kunddaliya was formerly used as a full stop or period. It is included for scholarly use. The Sinhala numerals are not presently encoded. Sinhala and Unicode In 1997, Sri Lanka submitted a proposal for the Sinhala character code at the Unicode working group meeting in Crete, Greece. This proposal competed with proposals from UK, Ireland and the USA. The Sri Lankan draft was finally accepted with slight modifications. This was ratified at the 1998 meeting of the working group held at Seattle, USA and the Sinhala Code Chart was included in Unicode Version 3.0 [2]. It has been suggested by the Unicode consortium that ZWJ and ZWNJ should be introduced in Orthographic languages like Sinhala to achieve the following: 1. ZWJ joins two or more consonants to form a single unit (conjunct consonants). 2. ZWJ can also alter shape of preceding consonants (cursiveness of the consonant). 3. ZWNJ can be used to disjoin a single ligature into two or more units. Encoding auto Detection Browser and auto-detection In designing auto detection algorithms to auto detect encodings in web pages it needs to depend on the following assumptions on input data [24]. Input text is composed of words/sentences readable to readers of a particular language. Input text is from typical web pages on the Internet which is not an ancient dead language. The input text may contain extraneous noises which have no relation to its encoding, e.g. HTML tags, non-native words (e.g. English words in Chinese documents), space and other format/control characters. Methods of auto detection The paper[24] discusses about 3 different methods for detecting the encoding of text data. Coding Scheme Method In any of the multi-byte encoding coding schemes, not all possible code points are used. If an illegal byte or byte sequence (i.e. unused code point) is encountered when verifying a certain encoding, it is possible to immediately conclude that this is not the right guess. Efficient algorithm to detecting character set using coding scheme through a parallel state machine is discussed in the paper [24]. For each coding scheme, a state machine is implemented to verify a byte sequence for this particular encoding. For each byte the detector receives, it will feed that byte to every active state machine available, one byte at a time. The state machine changes its state based on its previous state and the byte it receives. In a typical example, one state machine will eventually provide a positive answer and all others will provide a negative answer. Character Distribution Method In any given language, some characters are used more often than other characters. This fact can be used to devise a data model for each language script. This is particularly useful for languages with a large number of characters such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The tests were carried out with the data for simplified Chinese encoded in GB2312, traditional Chinese encoded in Big, Japanese and Korean. It was observed that a rather small set of coding points covers a significant percentage of characters used. Parameter called Distribution Ration was defined and used for the purpose separating the two encodings. Distribution Ratio = the Number of occurrences of the 512 most frequently used characters divided by the Number of occurrences of the rest of the characters. . Two-Char Sequence Distribution Method In languages that only use a small number of characters, we need to go further than counting the occurrences of each single character. Combination of characters reveals more language-characteristic information. 2-Char Sequence as 2 characters appearing immediately one after another in input text, and the order is significant in this case. Just as not all characters are used equally frequently in a language, 2-Char Sequence distribution also turns out to be extremely language/encoding dependent. Current Approaches to Solve Encoding Problems Siyabas Script The SiyabasScript is as an attempt to develop a browser plugin, which solves the problem using legacy font in Sinhala news sites [6]. It is an extension to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers. This solution was specifically designed for a limited number of target web sites, which were having the specific fonts. The solution had the limitation of having to reengineer the plug-in, if a new version of the browser is released. The solution was not global since that id did not have the ability to support a new site which is using a Sinhala legacy font. In order to overcome that, the proposed solution will identify the font and encodings based on the content but not on site. There is a chance that the solution might not work if the site decided to adapt another legacy font, as it cannot detect the encoding scheme changes. There is a significant delay in the conversion process. The user would notice the display of the content with characters which are in legacy font before they g et converted to the Unicode. This performance delay can be also identified as an area to improve in the solution. The conversion process does not provide the exact conversion specially when the characters need to be combined in Unicode. à  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ´Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã‚ = à  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â€š ¬Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬ ºÃƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ¯Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…  Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ º à  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â€ž ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…  .à  Ã‚ ¶Ã¢â‚¬â„¢.à  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ´Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬Å". à  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â€š ¬Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬â„¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â€ž ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…  Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã… ¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ¸Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ » à  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ¸Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ­Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã‚ , à  Ã‚ ¶Ã…“à  Ã‚ ·Ã‹Å"à  Ã‚ ·Ã‹Å"à  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ´Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…   à  Ã‚ ¶Ã… ¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ´Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬â„¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ­Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ±Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…   à  Ã‚ ¶Ã¢â‚¬ ¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ±Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…  Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ©Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã‹Å"à  Ã‚ ·Ã‹Å" à  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â€š ¬Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬â„¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â€ž ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…  Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã†â€™Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ »Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬â„¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ º, à  Ã‚ ¶Ã… ¡ à  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬â„¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…  Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ »Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã… ¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…   , à  Ã‚ ¶Ã¢â‚¬ ¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã†â€™Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…  Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã… ¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…  Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ »Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ½Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬â„¢Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ºÃƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ±Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬  , à  Ã‚ ¶Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ±Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã‚ +à  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ »Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ºÃƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ±Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…   à  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â€š ¬Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ± à  Ã‚ ·Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬Å"à  Ã‚ ·Ã…  Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ » ,à  Ã‚ ¶Ã… ¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬Å"à  Ã‚ ·Ã…  Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ »Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ©Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã‚ Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã…“à  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ «Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ºÃƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã… ¡Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ¯Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬Å" ,à  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ¯`à  Ã‚ ¶Ã…“ à  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ´Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ±Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…  Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ¯Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â‚¬  à  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ºÃƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã¢â€š ¬Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ±Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…  Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ±Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¶Ã‚ ±Ãƒ  Ã‚ ·Ã…   can be mentioned as the examples of words of such conversion issues. The plug-in supports the Sinhala Unicode conversion for the sites www.lankadeepa.lk, www.lankaenews.com and www.lankascreen.com. But the other websites mentioned in the paper does not get properly converted to Sinhala with Firefox version 3.5.17. Aksharamukha Asian Script Converter Aksharamukha is a South: South-East-Asian script convertor tool. It supports transliteration between Brahmi derived Asian scripts. It also has the functionality to transliterate web pages from Indic Scripts to other scripts. The Convertor scrapes the HTML page, then transliterates the Indic Scripts and displays the HTML. There are certain issues in the tool when it comes to alignment with the original web page. Misalignments and missing images, unconverted hyperlinks are some of them. Figure 2.7: Aksharamukha Asian Script Converter Corpus-based Sinhala Lexicon The Lexicon of a language is its vocabulary including higher order constructs such as words and expressions. In order to detect the encoding of a given text this can be used as a supporting tool. Corpus based Sinhala lexicon has nearly 35000 entries based on a corpus consisting of 10 million words from diverse genres such as technical writing, creative writing and news reportage [7], [9]. The text distribution across genres is given in table 1. Table 2.1: Distribution of Words across Genres [7] Genre Number of words Percentage of words Creative Writing 2340999 23% Technical Writing 4357680 43% News Reportage 3433772 34% N-gram-based language, script, and encoding scheme-detection N-Gram refers to N character sequences and is used as a well-established technique used in classifying language of text documents. The method detects language, script, and encoding schemes using a target text document encoded by computer by checking how many byte sequences of the target match the byte sequences that can appear in the texts belonging to a language, script, and encoding scheme. N-grams are extracted from a string, or a document, by a sliding window that shifts one character at a time. Sinhala Enabled Mobile Browser for J2ME Phones Mobile phone usage is rapidly increasing throughout the world as well as in Sri Lanka. It has become the most ubiquitous communication device. Accessing internet through the mobile phone has become a common activity of people especially for messaging and news items. In J2ME enabled phones Sinhala Unicode support yet to be developed. They do not allow installation of fonts outside. Hence those devices will not be able to display Unicode contents, especially on the web, until Unicode is supported by the platform. Integrating the Unicode viewing support will provide a good opportunity to carry the technology to remote areas if it can be presented in the native language. If this is facilitated, in addition to the urban crowd, people from rural areas will be able to subscribe to a daily newspaper with their mobile. One major advantage of such an application is that it will provide a phone model independent solution which supports any Java enabled phone. Cillion is a Mini browser software which shows Unicode contents in J2ME phones. This software is an application developed with the fonts integrated wh

Challenges of Ecotourism in Antarctica Essay

Antarctica is one of the largest and most fragile environments on earth. It is rare and unique, and few people get the opportunity to visit such an extraordinary place. Antarctica’s unique environment and climate sets it apart from other tourist destinations. However, the hostile wilderness creates many challenges for ecotourism. There is a concern regarding the high concentration of tourists and their environmental impact at the few landing sites available. The real debate is whether tourism can benefit, or threaten the conservation of Antarctica. Ecotourism, in its early historical origins has been closely linked to nature – oriented tourism. For example, Laarman and Durst, in reference to ecotourism, defined it as a nature tourism where a traveler is interested and drawn to a destination because of its features and natural history. The visit combines education, recreation, and often adventure’ (Laarman and Durst 1987:5). Defining ecotourism is not easily done, difficulties defining it are mainly due to the multidimensional nature of the definitions, and the fact that each dimension involved represents a continuum of possibilities (Blamey 1997). The Ecotourism Society defines ecotourism as ‘responsible travel to natural areas, which conserves the environment and improves the welfare of local people’ (Western 1993:8). Ceballos-Lascurain (1987: 14) defines ecotourism as ‘traveling to relatively undisturbed or uncontaminated natural areas with the specific objective of studying, admiring, and enjoying the scenery and its wild plants and animals, as well as any existing cultural manifestations (both past and present) found in these areas’. The tourism industry of Antarctica is often overlooked as a factor of environmental degradation. It is important that more attention is drawn to assessing the current state of this large continent. Beck (1994) states that, tourists, scientists, and other visitors to Antarctica have tremendous environmental impacts. Tourist shipping can pose an environmental risk, and there is good reason for concern. There have been several marine accidents in recent years. There was the case of an Argentinean supply vessel Bahia Paraiso, which ran a ground on January 28, 1989, spilling 600 metric tones of fuel into Antarctica’s pristine waters (Culver 1991). Other environmental impacts include engine emissions that contribute to air pollution. The noise generated from outboard motors on inflatable zodiacs, turbulence created from tourist ships and the â€Å"grey water† sewage they emit also creates harmful effects. More responsibility is being demanded out of eco tourists visiting Antarctica. For example Salen Lindblad’s 164-passenger ship the Frontier Spirit has been reinforced, and also contains a sewage treatment plant, refrigerated waste storage area, and a special storage area for non-biodegradable waste (Cebellos-Lascurain 1996). Another main concern is in the peninsula region of Antarctica where there are several highly concentrated, high profile sites. The concentration of tourism activities leads to the potential for over visitation in these areas. A present study of Magellanic penguins demonstrates that human impact puts a great amount of stress on the species. Simple human presence can be physiologically stressful for breeding at nest sites (Fowler 1999). The Antarctic environment is very fragile and not used to human activities. However the study also found that birds exposed to high levels of tourists are not effected over time and concludes that as a result tourism should be concentrated to certain areas while others are kept off limits to human presence. People have been going to Antarctica for over 100 years. Prior to 1950, nearly all trips to Antarctica were either exploratory or scientific expeditions (Cessford 1997). As a result of human activity in the area there has been a connection with industrial, national and scientific programs. Human activity has also caused the development of alien microbes, fungi, plants, and animals. These â€Å"alien† species that are mostly European in origin exist on most of the sub – Antarctic islands and some even occur on the continent itself. These species in turn can have both a direct and indirect impact on the Antarctic ecosystem (Fenot 2004). It has only been recently that biologists have conducted any research into diseases of Antarctic wildlife to note the effects of human activity. These studies look at marine mammals and penguins for bacteria flora and pathogens (disease causing organisms). Blood tests for antibodies of a variety of species have also been taken to check for viral, bacterial, fungal and parasitic disease. A study conducted in the summer season of 2000/2001, Dr. Todhunter and Dr. Terris took swab collections of specimens from passengers’ boots aboard the Kapitan Khlebnikov, which led to tentative findings of a wide range of potential pathogens. In another study 233 fecal samples from 8 bird species were taken from 6 different penguin colonies, which are regularly visited by tourists. The samples were investigated for pathogens of potential human origin. No human related bacteria were found, which suggests that the tourism industry in the Antarctic region has achieved its goal of not introducing any pathogens so far. While the tourist season only ranges from October to April, currently tourism in Antarctica involves over 30 agencies, and 40,000 tourists per annum (Lambert 2005). Antarctica is the ultimate destination for anyone interested in natural history, but it also challenges the same people that visit to think about our responsibilities to all life on earth† (Lambert 2005). Tourists to Antarctica are most likely to fall in to the category of eco tourist, as there are no restaurants, theaters or art galleries, and the experience is about learning about and viewing one of the earth’s last untouched continent s. Boo (1990) states that for conservation management to succeed, tourism must be a tool to educate thus creating real benefits for a geological location. Although tourism and human contact on Antarctica is showing some negative impacts, it has also encouraged conservation efforts in the region. Another step towards the recognition of potential environmental impact is the creation of the IATTO (International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators). In 1991 seven tour operators active in Antarctica formed IATTO. It was created to act as a single organization. The goal of IATTO is to promote and practice safe environmentally responsible private-sector travel to the Antarctic. Currently there are 80 member organizations representing 14 countries. IATTO 2008) This environmental protocol designates Antarctica as a natural reserve devoted to peace and science and seeks to ensure human activities, such as tourism, have no adverse effects on the Antarctic environment, or on its scientific and aesthetic values. With a recent increase in the number of members in the IAATO it shows that companies are becoming more aware of the environmentally se nsitive concerns related to Antarctica and the importance of such an organization. The increase in membership does not necessarily mean that there has been a drastic increase in the number of tourists visiting Antarctica. All current Antarctica tour operators file yearly environmental impact assessments to their national authorities. There are few places on earth that have never been to war, where the environment is fully protected and scientific research has priority over anything else. (IAATO 2008) The Antarctic treaty can be accredited with the successful protection of Antarctica. Formed on June 23, 1961 the treaty covers the area south of 60 degrees latitude and consists of 46 countries. Its objectives are simple and unique, demilitarize Antarctica and make it a zone free of nuclear tests, and disposal of radioactive waste. As well as be used for peaceful purposes only (IAATO 2008). To promote international cooperation in the Antarctic and set aside disputes over territorial sovereignty. The treaty parties meet each year and have adopted over 300 recommendations and negotiated separate international agreements, of which 3 are still in use. These include: 1. The convention for the conservation of Antarctic seals which was established in 1972. 2. The convention for conservation of Antarctica marine living resources established in 1980. 3. The protocol on Environmental protection to the Atlantic Treaty established in 1991. These agreements and the original treaty provide the rules to govern all activities in relation to Antarctica. Collectively known as the Antarctica Treaty System (ATS). In conclusion it is apparent that Antarctica is a very fragile environment, and any kind of human involvement can pose great risks if the correct precautions are not taken. It is clear to me that eco tourism can benefit the great continent of Antarctica, those visiting become ambassadors as they learn about the importance of preservation. Boo (1990) explains that tourists become emotionally attached to an area and will contribute funds to preserve it. It is important for organizations like the IAATO to continue their promotion of safe and environmentally responsible travel to the Antarctic. Continued research is necessary to make sure that tourists as well as scientists leave as little of a human footprint as possible. Antarctica is a beautiful place on earth, and I believe that when people are educated about their impact on such a vulnerable area and regulations are put in place to protect the area that everyone should be able to experience the Antarctic continent in all of its magnificence.