Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Faith vs Reason free essay sample

Faith VS. Reason I believe that by definition faith and reason contradict each other, causing them to be incompatible. A person who relies on reason to interpret reality is using logic, probability, and induction to arrive at conclusions about the world. The use of faith, by definition, is to go against these principles. It is to believe in or arrive at a conclusion that is not the most reasonable option, thus why it is an act of faith. Faith is not simply an alternative way of coming to sound conclusions, equal to eason but applicable in different situations. Faith is only plausible as a basis for beliefs if the use of reason is not a viable option. When a position is based upon reason, then the validity and adoption of that position is determined by the strength of the logic, evidence, and arguments that it consists of. When the reasons are strong, then belief should be strong; conversely, when the reasons are weak, then belief should be weak as well. We will write a custom essay sample on Faith vs Reason or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The same, however, cannot be said for the use of faith. When a position is based upon faith, it is by definition arbitrary. To say your belief or onclusion is based on faith is to admit it is not the most reasonable or logically sound choice. The majority of religions are a good example of faith, since many actually preach faith as an important virtue. If you say you cant understand why God would let innocent people die, or animals get abused, or anything else, they state youre not supposed to understand why. Youre supposed to Just believe, to simply take it on faith. Believe without reason, without evidence, and without understanding. Richard Dawkins, an avid supporter of the use of reason over faith went as far as to say: Faith s the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. This is in direct contrast with reason; reason requires evidence to form a conclusion. It doesnt ignore or evade known facts. It is a process by which you try to formulate a conclusion based on an analysis of all the facts. It absolutely never accepts anything without causation or sound reason. Another issue when discussing the compatibility of faith and reason is if you accept an idea on faith, it can conflict with the ideas youve accepted with reason. To comprehend and integrate the different ideas, you have to reconcile those beliefs. That means either discarding the ideas based on faith and staying true to reason, or more likely throwing out reason and sticking with the ideas formed by faith. Imagine you are analyzing a thought or theory with reason and the outcome of your analysis conflicts with your faith. If you ignore the contradiction and accept it anyway, youll be undermining your reasoning process. Reason requires a logical exploration of the data, weeding out any contradictions it finds. If you allow the contradiction anyway, oull have to suspend your reasoning ability. And that means youll be accepting the and reason recedes. If, on the other hand you dont ignore the contradiction, but accept it as valid, youll use your reasoning method on incorrect facts. An example of this can be taken from critics of creationism. If you accept that the universe was created a few thousand years ago, as the bible says, then you have to start interpreting actual facts in this light. When you see the dinosaur bones, youll have to imagine that god put them in the earth to trick everyone or another explanation that acks sound reasoning. If you evaluate everything by use of reason, and remove faith from your thought processes, you will find your self closer to the truth on most issues. I believe it is important to discern between religion and faith, and their uses. While I feel blind faith over sound reasoning has no place in todays society, I do believe that religion does play a useful role. While I do not advocate subscribing to the faith aspect of religions, many do have very positive and uplifting messages that have helped many people. Perhaps this is why many are willing to suspend reason for faith. DNS

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Recording of Music on CDs Essays

Recording of Music on CDs Essays Recording of Music on CDs Essay Recording of Music on CDs Essay In the early 1980s when CDs were first introduced, there were required to hold data (e.g. computer software, music etc) in a digital format! What do we all want in a CD? Well for the example we would use a music CD. The main aim would be to create a recording with very high fidelity which means the similarity between the original signal and the reproduced signal. The reproduction of sound which no matter how many times a track is played would still be the same quality as you first played it! In this report, it will show you how analogue and digital technology work with CDs. Analogue Just out of general interest, the word Analogue comes from two Greek words meaning word for word. An example of how another analogue device works is a clock. The hands of the clock make a complete circuit in a minute or in an hour or in half a day, depending on which hand it is. The hands would continually go around just as the Earth turns completely around on its axis in a day. Analogue recordings draw an impression of sound waves in the scribble channel in vinyl records or as variations of magnetic energy in cassette tape. The vinyl records and tape store these pictures of the sound patterns and allow them to be played back over and over again. Figure 1.1 shows a typical analogue cassette tape. There are some problems with this system that I will just highlight: * The information gets mixed up with the errors of the medium. A clock hand that does not keep up with the other hands gives inaccurate information. * Dust in a record groove causes sounds not meant to be there. * Tape imperfections cause hiss that was not part of the original sound. * Fidelity If you have music and play it over and over again on an analogue format then the sound would not be that of the original. In other words the quality of the sound would gradually deteriorate. The graph (Figure 1.0) shows what an analogue signal would look like scratching onto the tin cylinder can! The machine which records it is called Edisons phonograph. Instead of noting it down on a cylinder can, we can do it electronically! You can see an example of this on Figure 1.2 below. The graph is showing the position of the microphone diaphragm (Y axis) over time (X axis). The diaphragm is vibrating on the order of 1,000 oscillations per second. You can see that the vibrations that are noting down the sound are working very quickly! Even saying a hard like hello has a particular tone! The graph is showing it going up and down which resulted 500-hertz (500 oscillations per second) wave. Digital Data The word digital in Latin means digitus or finger, because everyone from an early age learns to count on his/her fingers. We have ten fingers, so with us humans, the common numbering system is to the base 10 (0 to 9). For computers, they use 0 and 1 because they dont have fingers! Usually 0 is off and 1 is on. This is what we call the binary system. With digital recordings, the computer uses the binary coding system to decode and encode. An example: How does it work? We can take a painting for example, if oil was spilled on the painting it is complex to restore what was there before because the oil has become part of the painting. However if someone recorded the painting with a paint-by-number scheme in great detail, the oil wouldnt matter there no numbers assigned to the oil! The artist could redraw the painting by following the number codes exactly. Only this time the oil spillage wouldnt be there! Identical copies can be made from here. Digital data works exactly like this which is why it can reproduce what it had originally just by using numbers. Digital recordings can that avoids the disadvantages that analogue get. It does not try to draw the information that is being saved. As an alternative, it converts the information into a mathematical code that ignores the flaws of whatever medium (The carrier between a source of information and its intended audience!) is storing the data. Figure 1.3 shows what a CD looks like: Converting Data To make output of sound better quality and efficient, we would have to convert an analogue sound into digital before it is outputted! How is this done might you ask? Well digital recording converts the analogue wave into a stream of numbers and records the numbers instead of the wave which we saw on the graph diagrams figures 1.1 and 1.2. The conversion is done by a device called an analogue to-digital converter (ADC). To play back the music, the stream of numbers is converted back to an analogue waves by a digital-to-analogue converter (DAC). The analogue wave produced by the DAC is put through an amplifier which produces the sound out through speakers. The sound of a CD would be of the same every time you play it unless for example the numbers that are being converted is corrupted. The analogue wave produced by the DAC will be the same or near enough original analogue waves if the ADC produces accurate numbers and it is sampled at a high rate. Compact Disk (CD) When CDs sampling rate and precision is working, it produces a lot of data. On a CD, the digital numbers produced by the ADC are stored as bytes! Just for fact, it takes just two bytes to represent 65,536 gradations. A CD can store up to 74 minutes of music. Therefore the total amount of digital data that must be stored on a CD is! How is this worked out is what you are thinking? Well the equation for this is by: 44,100 samples/ (channel*second) * 2 bytes/sample * 2 channels * 74 minutes * 60 seconds/minute = 783,216,000 bytes The CD player The CD player has the job of finding and reading the data stored as bumps on the CD. Considering how small the bumps are, the CD player is very precise when scanning the bumps! A laser and a lens system focus in on and read the bumps. A tracking mechanism moves the laser assembly so that the lasers beam can follow the spiral track which can move up and down the CD. Below on Figure 1.4 shows what is inside of a CD player. Some of the components are labelled so it is easier to distinguish what is what! Regeneration of analogue signals in the CD player Inside the CD player there is a DAC. Inside of the DAC, there is a clock that regenerates the digital data stream of the CD-player. Regeneration is done by something called Phase Locked Loop (PLL) which is located in the input receiver. However in this DAC design an additional PLL is applied between the input receiver and the DA converters. A disadvantage is the PLL has a very slow tracking of frequency changes but it is acceptable because the data stream is generated with very stable X-tal oscillator inside the CD-player. The PLL exists of a Voltage Controlled X-tal Oscillator (VCXO) which is compared with the regenerated clock from the input receiver. This error signal, filtered with a low pass filter with a very low bandwidth (far below the audio range), controls the VCXO. However, the unfiltered error signal is available as an output. We called this output PLL sound. With an ideal CD-player and ideal PLL this signal should be a constant voltage. However after measurement and listening we would know better. At the output a very small signal is present with noise and signal that is some how parallel with the analogue music signal. By connecting an amplifier with high gain to this output, differences between different players could be detected. It is even possible to determine differences between the original CD and several CD-ROM copies (the brand as well as writing speed). There is a link between the sound quality of the CD-player (used as data source only for the DAC) and the signal at the PLL sound output. This feature makes it possible for the DAC owner to listen to the quality of the CD-player and possibly to improve it. The PLL sound output is something like a subjective clock spectrum analyser. Conclusion Over the years, technology has moved very rapidly especially with the recording of music as a digital signal on a CD and the way analogue signal is regenerated on a CD player. Today most would listen to a digital form of music but the processes still involve analogue signals along the way! Here we have showed that although just playing a CD could be as easy as pressing the Play button, the logic and processes are somewhat unknown to many! At the end of the day these advances would only make listening to music more enjoyable for people.

Thursday, November 21, 2019

The difference between Islamic and conventional Banks Research Paper

The difference between Islamic and conventional Banks - Research Paper Example Financial scholars have surpassed lasting ambiguous loan contracts practiced by drawing attention of the financial world to the benefits presented by bank products that meet the requirements of Sharia. Most of these products conform to religious backgrounds of the local people; and hence turn out to be attractive to wide fragments of the population in need of financial services they can identify with their cultural beliefs and way of life. Despite these existing trends, little academic evidence and research on the functioning of Islamic banks is recorded. Since its establishment in 1970, Islamic banking has witnessed a significant growth. With the establishment of its operational foundations a few decades ago, the banking model acted as a major vehicle that offer products similar to convenient banks. Numerous academic research and literature have gone further to establish the viability of these types of banks in dealing with finances. It is also evident that the last few decades the banking model has been characterized by an increase in its financial institutions that are spread in all continents. Most importantly financial institutions, in Europe and Asia, operate on Islamic windows and thus provide a convenient banking framework to their clients. Therefore, this paper describes some of the common differences between Islamic and conventional banks (Ali, 2005). Despite the fact that there is growing interest on Islamic banking and Islamic finance literature, a few academic papers about the subjects exist. A policy research working paper by Beck, Demirgà ¼Ãƒ §-Kunt & Merrouche (2010), confirms that there is a deficiency of academic work highlighting Islam finance trends. This trend contrasts with the increased importance played by Islamic banking in a majority of Muslim countries across Asia and Africa. Based on the details presented, this paper will, hopefully, contribute to the rising literature