Lyda Newman Invents Vented Hair Brush

African-American inventor Lyda D. Newman patented a new and improved hairbrush in 1898  while living in New York. A hairdresser by trade, Newman designed a brush that was easy to keep clean, durable, easy to make and provided ventilation during brushing by having recessed air chambers. In addition to her novel invention, she was a womens rights activist.   Hairbrush Improvement Patent Newman received patent #614,335 on Nov. 15, 1898. Her hairbrush design included several features for efficiency and hygiene. It had evenly spaced rows of bristles, with open slots to guide debris away from the hair into a recessed compartment and a back that could be opened at the touch of a button for cleaning out the compartment. Women's Rights Activist In 1915, Newman was mentioned in local newspapers for her suffrage work. She was one of the organizers of an African-American branch of the Woman Suffrage Party, which was fighting to give women the legal right to vote. Working on behalf of her fellow African-American women in New York, Newman canvassed her neighborhood to raise awareness of the cause and organized suffrage meetings in her voting district. Prominent white suffragists of the Woman Suffrage Party worked with Newmans group, hoping to bring voting rights to all of New Yorks female residents. Her Life Newman was born in Ohio around 1885. Government censuses of 1920 and 1925 confirm that Newman, then in her 30s, was living in an apartment building on Manhattans West Side and was working as a familys hairdresser. Newman lived much of her adult life in New York City. Not much else is known about her private life. Hairbrush History Newman did not invent the hairbrush, but she did revolutionize its design to resemble the brushes in use more today. The history of the first hairbrush begins with the comb. Found by archaeologists at Paleolithic dig sites around the world, combs date back to the origins of human-made tools. Carved from bone, wood, and shells, they were initially used to groom hair and keep it free of pests, such as lice. As the comb developed, however, it became a decorative hair ornament used to display wealth and power in countries including China and Egypt.   From ancient Egypt to Bourbon France, elaborate hairstyles were in vogue, which required brushes to style them. The hairstyles included ornate headdresses and wigs that were used as displays of wealth and social status. Because of their primary use as a styling tool, hairbrushes were an indulgence reserved exclusively for the wealthy. As late as the 1880s, each brush was unique and carefully handcrafted—a task that included carving or forging a handle from wood or metal as well as hand-stitching each individual bristle. Because of this detailed work, brushes were usually bought and gifted only on special occasions, such as weddings or christenings, and cherished for life. As brushes became more popular, brush makers developed a streamlined manufacturing process to keep up with demand.

The Impact Of Technology On Our Understanding Of The...

Discuss ways in which modern (post 1950) neuroscientific research has had an impact on our understanding of the developing brain. Early stages of embryonic progression show how the human brain and nervous system start to occur at three weeks from contraception, with the closing of the neural tube and By four weeks, major sections of the brain can be distinguished in a simple form, including the forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain divisions and optic vesicle, where the eye matures from. (Brainfacts.org, 2012) From the premature stages advances the essential processes such as the sensory systems after birth. This essay will address how studies within post 1950 neuroscientific research utilise; brain imaging techniques, case studies of child†¦show more content†¦The results primarily displayed that grey matter develops from inside out, and from the back of the brain to front and myelination follows a similar ordered approach. There was also a decrease in brain water content during development and the grey and white matter intensities during the first 6 months are inverted from the adult pattern such that grey matter appears lighter than white matter (Barkovich, Kjos, Jackson Norman, 1988). From ages 6 to 12 month’s grey and white matter was not well distinguished and either was the myelination of neuron bodies. In addition to this study, Hà ¼ppi et al. (1996) demonstrated that brain surface changes from smooth surface and from few enfolds to a significantly enfolded surface with an increase of myelin in cortical white matter. His study included new born babies from 31 weeks gestation to 40 weeks post conception age, and this was carried out for the first 2-3 years of the child’s life. This study was undertaken over a longer period of time which displayed a more significant result in the change in grey matter, which are the neuronal cell bodies, and the process of myelination of axons which is white matter. In addition to this it backs up the previous study as it has a similar trend. These studies highlight the importance of more grey matter linked to development as it inc ludes sections of the brain used in muscle control, and sensory perception, as well as others and they added to our understanding

Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Language Study Free Essays

It has its origins in the sass as a conscious reaction to Chomsky linguistics, tit its emphasis on formalistic syntactic analysis and its underlying assumption that language is independent from other forms of cognition. Increasingly, evidence was beginning to show that language is learned and processed much in the same way as other types of Information about the world, and that the same cognitive processes are Involved In language as are Involved In other forms of thinking. For example, In our everyday lives, we look at things from deferent angles, we get up close to them or further away and see them from different vantage points and with efferent levels of granularity; we assess the relative features of our environment and decide which are important and need to be attended to and which are less important and need to be backgrounder; we lump information together, perceive and create patterns in our environment, and look for these patterns in new environments when we encounter them. We will write a custom essay sample on Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Language Study or any similar topic only for you Order Now As we will see in this volume, all of these processes are at work in language too. The two key figures who are associated with the inception of Cognitive Linguistics are George Alaska and Ronald Linebacker. Both, t should be remembered, started their careers as members of a group of young scholars associated with the radical new approach spearheaded by NOAA Chomsky. By the sass, however, both Alaska and Linebacker were becoming increasingly disaffected with the formalistic approach to syntax associated with the Chomsky school. Both scholars turned their attention, Instead, to semantic Issues, which had been relatively neglected within the Chomsky framework. Alaska raised fundamental questions with regard to ‘objectivism’ SE antics that is, theories which maintained that entente meaning maps onto objectively verifiable states of affairs in the world. He argued, instead, that semantic content is mediated by how speakers construe and conceptualize the world. An important aspect of construal is how we categorize the things in our environment. Taking up the notion of prototype category developed by cognitive psychologist Eleanor Roach, Alaska argued that words do not name classically defined categories, that Is, categories constituted by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Rather, entitles can be good, or less good, members of a category. In a crucial and highly influential move, Alaska then proposed that the a syntactic construction, might also be analyses in terms of a central, prototypical member, and a number of extended, or more peripheral senses. A noteworthy milestone here is the dissertation by one of Alaska s students, Claudia Bergman, on the polymers of the preposition (Bergman, 1981). Bergman argued that t he ‘central’, ‘prototypical’ sense combines the meanings of ‘above’ and ‘across’, as in The bird flew over the yard . Extended senses, related in virtue of some common shared features, include the ‘above’ sense , as in the electric is hovering over the hill, the ‘across’ sense, as in Sam drove over the bridge , the ‘covering’ sense She spread the tablecloth over the table, the dispersal sense, as in The guards were posted all over the hill , and several more. Bargeman’s thesis (presented in Alaska 1987: Case Study 2) not only inspired a plethora of -studies, it also provided a template for polymers studies more generally. La Coffs second main contribution was to id entity a number of ‘conceptual metaphors’ that underlie our abstract concepts and the way we think about the world and ourselves (Alaska and Johnson 1980, 1999). For example, one of the most important conceptual metaphors is the idea that ‘good’ or ‘active’ things are ‘up’ whereas ‘bad’ or ‘static’ things are ‘down’, which allows us to say that we’re feeling IoW or having ‘down time’, that things are or that that they are ‘up and going’ . This metaphor was taken to reflect our basic experience with the world that we have as children; when we fall over we feel bad; when we lie down we are stationary, when we get up we are active, and when we are feeling good, we literally ‘stand tall’. As discussed in a later chapter, conceptual metaphor theory has come in for a good agree of criticism in recent years and the theory has been refined to take account of empirical psycholinguistic findings as well as more socio-cultural approaches to language, but the basic tenets remain the same: language tends to reflect our physical interactions with the world and abstract concepts are linked to physical experiences through metaphor. Linebacker’s contribution is perhaps more fundamental than Lassoes . His Cognitive Grammar (Linebacker 1987, 1991, 2008) offers a radical re-think of basic issues concerning the nature of linguistic meaning and its relation to the surface form of utterances. He proposed a ‘minimalist’ approach, whereby the only elements in linguistic description are (a) phonological representations, concerning the overt form of an expression (whether spoken, written, or signed), (b) semantic representations, roughly, meanings, broadly understood to include pragmatic, situational, and encyclopedic aspects, and (c) symbolic relations between elements of (a) and elements of (b). On this basis, a language comes to be characterized, quite simply, as an inventory of phonological, semantic, and symbolic units, and language acquisition is a matter of a speaker’s increasing command of these units. Importantly, the units differ along a number of dimensions. Thus some units are internally complex, while others are schematic to some degree or other. For example, the expression can-opener is internally complex, while the component unit can is an instance of the more schematic unit Noun, the whole expression being an instance of the complex schematic unit [N V- ere] and its associated semantics (roughly: ‘ a device that can be used for V- ins Ins’). The schematic unit can sanction an open-ended set of instantiations; in this way, Cognitive Grammar is bled to handle syntactic and morphological generalizations. It should also be noted that the unit has other semantic values (think of examples such as dog-lover , which denotes a person, not a thing, and , where the initial noun designates the place where a person dwells); in other words, the unit is polygamous, Just like the words of a language. The mechanics of Cognitive Grammar are discussed in more detail elsewhere in this volume. Three aspects, however, may be singled out for special mention here: The first concerns the way in which ‘grammaticality (or ‘acceptability- cognitive insists see little reason to distinguish the two concepts) is to be understood. Grammaticality, namely, has to do with the extent to which an expression is sanctioned, or legitimated, by an already existing schematic unit, or possibly by several such units, in the language; the fit, needless to say, need not be perfect, neither will different speakers of the language always assess the matter in the same way. * The second observation concerns the idea that syntactic organization is inherently symbolic and therefore meaningful, and that syntactic structures – Just like individual words ND morphemes associate a form and meaning. An early indicative study concerned the passive construction in English (Linebacker, 1982). Rather than being seen as the result of syntactic transformations, the construction and its various components, such as the verb be the verbal participle, and the by phrase, were argued to have semantic content, which contribute cumulatively to the semantic and pragmatic value of the passive construction. Thirdly, the Cognitive Grammar approach is sympathetic to the notion that linguistic knowledge, rather than residing in a small number of very road, high-level abstractions, may actually be rather low-level and ‘surface oriented’, consisting in multiple memories of already encountered usage and relatively shallow generalizations over these remembered instances. In practical terms, this means that linguistic knowledge will tend to be centered on individual lexical items and their idiosyncratic properties, concerning the syntactic environments in which they occur and their stylistic or pragmatic values. Similarly, the representation of syntactic and word-formation constructions will incorporate knowledge of the lexical items which typically occur in hem, in addition, once again, to information about the kinds of situations in which they are likely to be used. Although it represents a radical departure in some ways from many established ideas in linguistics (such as the formerly widely held view that syntax, semantics and pragmatics were largely independent of one another), the principles underlying Cognitive Linguistics resonated with many traditional concerns one thinks of classics such as Gustavo Steer’s Meaning and Change of Meaning (1931), C. S. Lewdest Studies in Words (1960), and various works by Stephan Almsman (e. G. , Almsman, 1964) How to cite Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Language Study, Essays

Evolution of the X-Box Supply Chain free essay sample

Xbox and Sony’s Playstation. Nintendo turns high profit margins with its console, the Nintendo Wii, however it competes virtually in its own market, pursuing the casual gamer. Microsoft and Sony lose money on sales of their consoles, and make up the profit on the games. Microsoft was not extremely successful with its development of the original Xbox, and made some essential changes in their gaming strategy to make the introduction of the Xbox 360 more profitable. The two important changes Microsoft made were repositioning the release date and changing the product offering. One of the biggest problems with the original Xbox was its release date. This problem was fixed with their second generation console. With video game consoles the release date is highly correlated to market share. First of all, when the Xbox was released, the Playstation 2 already had a predecessor with market share. â€Å"In Q4 1999, when the PS2 was launched, Sony sold 1. 1 million PS1 consoles, and 1. 4 million PS2 consoles. † (Evolution of the Xbox Supply Chain. ) This brand presence was further established when the Playstation 2 was released 12 months before the Xbox. Customers who wanted to move onto the next generation of gaming bought the PS2, choosing not to wait a full year for the Xbox. â€Å"Microsoft did not have the established base of games and gamers that Sony enjoyed, and Sony continued to dominate the market (Evolution of the Xbox Supply Chain. ). † One of the failure’s of the original Xbox has become a success for Microsoft with the Xbox360. Xbox did not have to worry about being a newcomer into the market anymore, the problem with their first console. Not only that but now they were doing exactly what Sony did. They chose to release their console over a year earlier than the PS3 taking advantage of the early adopters. In fact Xbox planned to sell 2. 75-3 million consoles within 90 days of their launch. Microsoft switched the tables on Sony, a very prudent part of their improved gaming strategy. Microsoft’s most important change in their gaming strategy with the Xbox 360 was how they adjusted their product offering. The original Xbox was differentiated from the PS2 on the basis of technology and features. The Xbox â€Å"processed 116 million polygons per second, compared to 66 million for the PS2 (Evolution of the Xbox Supply Chain). † The Xbox also had a better DVD player and overall better technology. This was a strategic move for Microsoft, and forced them to prolong the introduction. â€Å"A 2000 launch would force the company to use technology that did not offer a substantial improvement on Sony’s PS2, (Evolution of the Xbox Supply Chain†). † Once again the tables were switched with the Xbox 360. The graphics processor and microprocessor would both be more powerful than that offered by the Xbox 360. The PS2 had a Blu-Ray player while Microsoft installed a HD-DVD player. Clearly the PS3 has better technology but was that the right move? Xbox UK boss Neil Thompson said, â€Å"Sony is now making people pay an extra few hundred pounds for a Blu-Ray DVD drive which we dont know is going to be the standard in the next-generation DVD formats (Microsoft execs slam Sony Blu-Ray strategy). † This is important point because Sony is investing all of their money in Blu-ray technology. It will probably be the right move, but Xbox may be able to find a way to still compete, and still save precious manufacturing costs. Another product offering adjustment made by Microsoft is that they are trying to attract the casual gamer like Nintendo did. â€Å"Roping in the casual game fan will be a number of game show releases that promise to expand the consoles limits beyond its rather traditional hardware (Dimmel). † A partnership with NetFlix will also help pursue the casual, residential consumer. 2. With the original Xbox many of the supply chain initiatives were to reduce costs. This is an essential piece of making console sales profitable. Microsoft was not very successful reducing costs on their processing and graphic chips, as well as overall manufacturing costs with product design. Microsoft improved this with the release of the Xbox 360. For the original Xbox, Microsoft purchased the graphics chip from Nvidia and the microprocessor from Intel. For the second generation Microsoft changed its method. â€Å"Microsoft contracted with chip companies so that it owned the designs of the critical Xbox 360 chips (Evolution of the Xbox Supply Chain. ) . † This was a strategic move aimed at reducing costs, and giving Microsoft more leverage with suppliers. This had a great impact on the manufacturing and purchasing aspects of the supply chain. The second supply chain improvement was in the Xbox360’s actual product design. For the first generation the Xbox was big and bulky and required specific parts such as the controller to be ordered against the Microsoft contract. The second time around, â€Å"Microsoft brought its existing Xbox manufacturers into the design process so that design production could be optimized (Evolution of the Xbox Supply Chain). † It is always a brilliant supply chain move to work with your suppliers on product design. Optimized manufacturing always minimizes overall supply chain cost. Conclusively, Microsoft made significant supply chain changes with their chip design and product design. These process improvements minimized supply chain costs, and overall supply chain costs. 3. Microsoft’s new change to their supply chain is a strategic move to cover up one of their worst manufacturing decisions. The structural differences between the Xbox360 and Playstation 3 are that the Playstation has a built in Blu-ray technology, and the Xbox runs inferior technology, HD DVD. HD-DVD lost the battle to bluray for the next generation of DVDs, creating a huge manufacturing problem for Microsoft and their supply chain. Should Microsoft redesign their console, with blu-ray technology? According to Brandon Dimmel a writer for Geosign, â€Å"Microsoft has announced a partnership with Netflix, the online-based DVD rental company†¦The downloads are an alternative to switching HD support from HD-DVD to Blu-ray (Dimmel). † This partnership is a way for Xbox to strategically change its technology without changing their manufacturing costs or overall process, a great move. It seems that some of Microsoft’s best manufacturing moves are choosing to not change anything at all. While some of the other consoles may have to change their design to keep up with the improving techno-science market, Xbox360 will not. They are taking advantage of their extremely successful online access and partnering with other social networking sites. According to a 2009 New York Times article, â€Å"Microsoft announced new relationships with the social networking giants Facebook and Twitter as well as Sky, the big British satellite television provider (Scheisel). While this doesn’t seem to be a change in Microsoft’s supply chain it essentially is. Applications for the IPhone, are a part of their product offering and downloading them is a distribution channel for their supply chain. The Xbox 360 has superior internet access to PS3’s because of the willingness for their customers to pay. Microsoft knows this so they are using the downloading ability to expand the product offerings and provide effective distribution channels. This will expand the overall profitability of these machines, because as we already know, you lose money on the consoles and make money on the games and other products. This also helps Xbox360 challenge its other competitor, the Nintendo Wii. The Wii is for the casual gamers, not the hardcore gamer as the Xbox is. The NY Times reports, â€Å"Reaching out beyond hardcore video game players to everyday consumers†¦ Microsoft outlined an entertainment strategy on Monday for making the company’s Xbox 360 game console a gateway for movies, television and social networking,† (Scheisel). This is another winning strategy for Microsoft. Microsoft always seems to significantly improve their products by the third generation as they did with Windows, and it seems that they are at it again. Microsoft should stay on this course and continue to expand their products by utilizing their top of the line internet access. It seems that they are already doing this and will continue with their new social networking initiatives.