Scientific and Social Definitions of Race

Its a common belief that race can be broken down into three categories: Negroid, Mongoloid and Caucasoid. But according to science, thats not so. While the American concept of race took off in the late 1600s and persists even today, researchers now argue that there’s no scientific basis for race. So, what exactly is race, and what are its origins? The Difficulty of Grouping People Into Races According to John H. Relethford, author of The Fundamentals of Biological Anthropology, race â€Å"is a group of populations that share some biological characteristics†¦.These populations differ from other groups of populations according to these characteristics.† Scientists can divide some organisms into racial categories easier than others, such as those which remain isolated from one another in different environments. In contrast, the race concept doesn’t work so well with humans. That’s because not only do humans live in a wide range of environments, they also travel back and forth between them. As a result, there’s a high degree of gene flow among people groups that make it hard to organize them into discrete categories. Skin color remains a primary trait Westerners use to place people into racial groups. However, someone of African descent may be the same skin shade as someone of Asian descent. Someone of Asian descent may be the same shade as someone of European descent. Where does one race end and another begin? In addition to skin color, features such as hair texture and face shape have been used to classify people into races. But many people groups cannot be categorized as Caucasoid, Negroid or Mongoloid, the defunct terms used for the so-called three races. Take Native Australians, for instance. Although typically dark-skinned, they tend to have curly hair which is often light colored. â€Å"On the basis of skin color, we might be tempted to label these people as African, but on the basis of hair and facial shape they might be classified as European,† Relethford writes. â€Å"One approach has been to create a fourth category, the ‘Australoid.’† Why else is grouping people by race difficult? The concept of race posits that more genetic variation exists interracially than intra-racially  when the opposite is true. Only about 10 percent of variation in humans exists between the so-called races. So, how did the concept of race take off in the West, particularly in the United States? The Origins of Race in America The America of the early 17th century was in many ways more progressive in its treatment of blacks than the country would be for decades to come. In the early 1600s, African Americans could trade, take part in court cases and acquire land. Slavery based on race did not yet exist. â€Å"There was really no such thing as race then,† explained anthropologist Audrey Smedley, author of Race in North America: Origins of a Worldview, in a 2003 PBS interview. â€Å"Although ‘race’ was used as a categorizing term in the English language, like ‘type’ or ‘sort’ or ‘kind, it did not refer to human beings as groups.† While race-based slavery wasn’t a practice, indentured servitude was. Such servants tended to be overwhelmingly European. Altogether, more Irish people lived in servitude in America than Africans. Plus, when African and European servants lived together, their difference in skin color did not surface as a barrier. â€Å"They played together, they drank together, they slept together†¦The first mulatto child was born in 1620 (one year after the arrival of the first Africans),† Smedley noted. On many occasions, members of the servant class—European, African and mixed-race—rebelled against the ruling landowners. Fearful that a united servant population would usurp their power, the landowners distinguished Africans from other servants, passing laws that stripped those of African or Native American  descent of rights. During this period, the number of servants from Europe declined, and the number of servants from Africa rose. Africans were skilled in trades such as farming, building, and metalwork that made them desired servants. Before long, Africans were viewed exclusively as slaves and, as a result, sub-human. As for Native Americans, they were regarded with great curiosity by the Europeans, who surmised that they descended from the lost tribes of Israel, explained historian Theda Perdue, author of Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South, in a PBS interview. This belief meant that Native Americans were essentially the same as Europeans. They’d simply adopted a different way of life because they’d been separated from Europeans, Perdue posits. â€Å"People in the 17th century†¦were more likely to distinguish between Christians and heathens than they were between people of color and people who were white†¦,† Perdue said. Christian conversion could make American Indians fully human, they thought. But as Europeans strove to convert and assimilate Natives, all the while seizing their land, efforts were underway to provide a scientific rationale for Africans’ alleged inferiority to Europeans. In the 1800s, Dr. Samuel Morton argued that physical differences between races could be measured, most notably by brain size. Morton’s successor in this field, Louis Agassiz, began â€Å"arguing that blacks are not only inferior but they’re a separate species altogether,† Smedley said. Wrapping Up Thanks to scientific advances, we can now say definitively that individuals such as Morton and Aggasiz are wrong. Race is fluid and thus difficult to pinpoint scientifically. â€Å"Race is a concept of human minds, not of nature,† Relethford writes. Unfortunately, this view hasn’t completely caught on outside of scientific circles. Still, there are signs times have changed. In 2000, the U.S. Census allowed Americans to identify as multiracial for the first time. With this shift, the nation allowed its citizens to blur the lines between the so-called races, paving the way for a future when such classifications no longer exist.​

Gender inequality Male underachievement - 1304 Words

Critical Reading and Writing in Social Sciences: FOUN1013 Documented Essay Worldwide, women are achieving higher representation and success. At the post-secondary level women are earning most of the degrees awarded. Where did our males disappear to? Gender inequality is an extensive, complex and often vague concept. Simply it is defined as the ranking of a particular gender, whether male or female, over the other and how they are treated based on their gender. Gender inequality and the result of male underperformance in schools have become major issues in the Caribbean, and affect the individuals involved and the society on a whole. Boys’ underachievement therefore should not be ignored and an analysis of†¦show more content†¦Delinquent behaviours may also develop, such as crime when males find other ways of surviving in providing for themselves and their families. Society, on the other hand, is economically affected by the reduction in the workforce. Less people working in an economy, results in a decline in levels of production. Unemployed persons may also put a strain on the countries’ resources. This is the current state of Jamaica’s economy. As society progresses and changes, the roles of males and females continue to change. Historically, Caribbean men were known to take part in manual work or attend schools, as academic excellence was seen as a male domain, while females did domestic work. Men were also given better paying jobs, while females had to work twice as hard to be qualified for those same jobs. In contemporary Caribbean society, the roles have interchanged and it appears that men are lagging in education as well as in job placements. Due to the history of the socialisation of males, it is evident in today’s society that they are more likely to survive after not attending school than females, whose only other option is domestic labour. This is so because males are hardened to find other ways of making a living. (Chevannes, 1999) Figueroa (2004) identifies other minor factors which i nfluence male underperformance such as: the absence of motivational factors, aShow MoreRelatedCharacteristics of Gifted Underachievers2021 Words   |  8 Pagesachievement. The gap or discrepancy is not explained by a severe learning disability. The expected learning is measured by standard tests and other methods of assessment while actual achievement is measured by grades and teacher evaluations. Underachievement has been a nagging program in the education community because it involves poorly performing brightest students. Recent statistics revealed that 15-40% of gifted students have been performing below par. Data from the US Office of Education sorelyRead MoreInequality Between Gender And Education2181 Words   |  9 PagesThis essay will provide evidence of how inequalities are found in both gender and education, and will show how these inequalities intersect. 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Zimbardo Prison Experiment free essay sample

The Stanford Prison Experiment harbored interest concerning the psychological effects that would be exhibited from normal people when put into simulation prison. Stanford Prison experiment had elements of social structure of a real-life prison. Zimbardo himself held â€Å"ultimate† master status as the warden. Participants were selected by Zimbardo for the experiment. Participants held achieved master status of prison guards and another group of male students were portraying inmates in the study. The social interaction in the experiment had extreme psychological effects on the participants in the experiment. Both guards and inmates conformed to the expectation of their social role. Originally the Stanford Prison Experiment was planned for two-week research study. The experiment ended prematurely after six days because the students became so absorbed into their roles. The roles the subjects played believed they actually were those roles. The guards adopted sadistic abusive attitudes. Authority and power over another person went to extreme measures in some subjects. We will write a custom essay sample on Zimbardo Prison Experiment or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The group selected to portray inmates became discouraged and rebellious. These subjects felt guilty, people staring at them, being in police car, being in a police station. Riding in a police car, and the process of arrest created guilt in their minds. Even though they knew no crime was committed going through the arrest process created distress. The subjects playing inmates believed they could not leave the experiment. These boys were having trouble with their identity in this experiment. Inmate subjects were really not able to adapt in this social structure. They did not possess the life skills a real criminal has in his personality.

The Rise of Technology in India Essay free essay sample

INTRODUCTION The rise of technology in India has brought into force many types of equipment that aim at more customer satisfaction. ATM is one such machine which made money transactions easy for customers to bank. The other side of this improvement is the enhancement of the culprit’s probability to get his ‘unauthentic’ share. Traditionally, security is handled by requiring the combination of a physical access card and a PIN or other password in order to access a customer’s account. This model invites fraudulent attempts through stolen cards, badly-chosen or automatically assigned PINs, cards with little or no encryption schemes, employees with access to non-encrypted customer account information and other points of failure. Our paper proposes an automatic teller machine security model that would combine a physical access card, a PIN, and electronic facial recognition. By forcing the ATM to match a live image of a customer’s face with an image stored in a bank database that is associated with the account number, the damage to be caused by stolen cards and PINs is effectively neutralized. We will write a custom essay sample on The Rise of Technology in India Essay or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Only when the PIN matches the account and the live image and stored image match would a user be considered fully verified. The main issues faced in developing such a model are keeping the time elapsed in the verification process to a negligible amount, allowing for an appropriate level of variation in a customer’s face when compared to the database image, and that credit cards which can be used at ATMs to withdraw funds are generally issued by institutions that do not have in-person contact with the customer, and hence no opportunity to acquire a photo. Because the system would only attempt to match two (and later, a few) discrete images, searching through a large database of possible matching candidates would be unnecessary. The process would effectively become an exercise in pattern matching, which would not require a great deal of time. With appropriate lighting and robust learning software, slight variations could be accounted for in most cases. Further, a positive visual match would cause the live image to be stored in the database so that future transactions would have a broader base from which to compare if the original ccount image fails to provide a match – thereby decreasing false negatives. When a match is made with the PIN but not the images, the bank could limit transactions in a manner agreed upon by the customer when the account was opened, and could store the image of the user for later examination by bank officials. In regards to bank employees gaining access to customer PINs for use in fraudulent transaction s, this system would likewise reduce that threat to exposure to the low limit imposed by the bank and agreed to by the customer on visually unverifiable transactions. In the case of credit card use at ATMs, such a verification system would not currently be feasible without creating an overhaul for the entire credit card issuing industry, but it is possible that positive results (read: significant fraud reduction) achieved by this system might motivate such an overhaul. The last consideration is that consumers may be wary of the privacy concerns raised by maintaining images of customers in a bank database, encrypted or otherwise, due to possible hacking attempts or employee misuse. However, one could argue that having the image compromised by a third party would have far less dire consequences than the account information itself. Furthermore, since nearly all ATMs videotape customers engaging in transactions, it is no broad leap to realize that banks already build an archive of their customer images, even if they are not necessarily grouped with account information. LITERATURE REVIEW For most of the past ten years, the majority of ATMs used worldwide ran under IBM’s now-defunct OS/2. However, IBM hasn’t issued a major update to the operating system in over six years. Movement in the banking world is now going in two directions: Windows and Linux. NCR, a leading world-wide ATM manufacturer, recently announced an agreement to use Windows XP Embedded in its next generation of personalized ATMs (crmdaily. com. ) Windows XP Embedded allows OEMs to pick and choose from the thousands of components that make up Windows XP Professional, including integrated multimedia, networking and database management functionality. This makes the use of off-the-shelf facial recognition code more desirable because it could easily be compiled for the Windows XP environment and the networking and database tools will already be in place. For less powerful ATMs, KAL, a software development company based in Scotland, provides Kalignite CE, which is a modification of the Windows CE platform. This allows developers that target older machines to more easily develop complex user-interaction systems . Many financial institutions are relying on a third choice, Windows NT, because of its stability and maturity as a platform. On an alternative front, the largest bank in the south of Brazil, Banrisul, has installed a custom version of Linux in its set of two thousand ATMs, replacing legacy MS-DOS systems. The ATMs send database requests to bank servers which do the bulk of transaction processing (linux. org. ) This model would also work well for the proposed system if the ATMs processors were not powerful enough to quickly perform the facial recognition algorithms. In terms of the improvement of security standards, MasterCard is spearheading an effort to heighten the encryption used at ATMs. For the past few decades, many machines have used the Data Encryption Standard developed by IBM in the mid 1970s that uses a 56-bit key. DES has been shown to be rather easily cracked, however, given proper computing hardware. In recent years, a â€Å"Triple DES† scheme has been put forth that uses three such keys, for an effective 168-bit key length. MasterCard now requires new or relocated ATMs to use the Triple DES scheme, and by April, 2005, both Visa and MasterCard will require that any ATM that supports their cards must use Triple DES. ATM manufacturers are now developing newer models that support Triple DES natively; such redesigns may make them more amenable to also including snapshot cameras and facial recognition software, more so than they would be in regards to retrofitting pre-existing machines . There are hundreds of proposed and actual implementations of facial recognition technology from all manner of vendors for all manner of uses. However, for the model proposed in this paper, we are interested only in the process of facial verification – matching a live image to a predefined image to verify a claim of identity – not in the process of facial evaluation – matching a live image to any image in a database. Further, the environmental conditions under which the verification takes place – the lighting, the imaging system, the image profile, and the processing environment – would all be controlled within certain narrow limits, making hugely robust software unnecessary . One leading facial recognition algorithm class is called image template based. This method attempts to capture global features of facial images into facial templates. Neural networks, among other methods, are often used to construct these templates for later matching use. An alternative method, called geometry-based, is to explicitly examine the individual features of a face and the geometrical relationship between those features (Gross. ) What must be taken into account, though, are certain key factors that may change across live images: illumination, expression, and pose (profile. A study was recently conducted of leading recognition algorithms, notably one developed by two researchers at MIT, Baback Moghaddam and Alex Pentland, and one a commercial product from Identix called FaceIt. The MIT program is based on Principal Feature Analysis, an adaptation of template based recognition. FaceIt’s approach uses geometry-based local feature analysis. Both algorithms have to be ini tialized by providing the locations of the eyes in the database image, from which they can create an internal representation of the normalized face. It is this representation to which future live images will be compared . In the study, it was found that both programs handled changes in illumination well. This is important because ATM use occurs day and night, with or without artificial illumination. Likewise, the programs allowed general expression changes while maintaining matching success. However, extreme expressions, such as a scream profile, or squinted eyes, dropped the recognition rates significantly. Lastly, matching profile changes worked reasonably well when the initial training image(s) were frontal, which allowed 70-80% success rates for up to 45 degrees of profile change†¦ however, 70-80% success isn’t amenable to keeping ATM users content with the system. The natural conclusion to draw, then, is to take a frontal image for the bank database, and to provide a prompt to the user, verbal or otherwise, to face the camera directly when the ATM verification process is to begin, so as to avoid the need to account for profile changes. With this and other accommodations, recognition rates for verification can rise above 90%. Also worth noting is that FaceIt’s local feature analysis method handled variations in the test cases slightly better than the PGA system used by the MIT researchers . Another paper shows more advantages in using local feature analysis systems. For internal representations of faces, LFA stores them topographically; that is, it maintains feature relationships explicitly. Template based systems, such as PGA, do not. The advantages of LFA are that analysis can be done on varying levels of object grouping, and that analysis methods can be independent of the topography. In other words, a system can examine just the eyes, or the eyes nose and mouth, or ears, nose, mouth and eyebrows, and so on, and that as better analysis algorithms are developed, they can fit within the data framework provided by LFA The conclusion to be drawn for this project, then, is that facial verification software is currently up to the task of providing high match rates for use in ATM transactions. What remains is to find an appropriate open-source local feature analysis facial verification program that can be used on a variety of platforms, including embedded processors, and to determine behavior protocols for the match / non-match cases. OUR METHODOLOGY The first and most important step of this project will be to locate a powerful open-source facial recognition program that uses local feature analysis and that is targeted at facial verification. This program should be compilable on multiple systems, including Linux and Windows variants, and should be customizable to the extent of allowing for variations in processing power of the machines onto which it would be deployed. We will then need to familiarize ourselves with the internal workings of the program so that we can learn its strengths and limitations. Simple testing of this program will also need to occur so that we could evaluate its effectiveness. Several sample images will be taken of several individuals to be used as test cases – one each for â€Å"account† images, and several each for â€Å"live† images, each of which would vary pose, lighting conditions, and expressions. Once a final program is chosen, we will develop a simple ATM black box program. This program will server as the theoretical ATM with which the facial recognition software will interact. It will take in a name and password, and then look in a folder for an image that is associated with that name. It will then take in an image from a separate folder of â€Å"live† images and use the facial recognition program to generate a match level between the two. Finally it will use the match level to decide whether or not to allow â€Å"access†, at which point it will terminate. All of this will be necessary, of course, because we will not have access to an actual ATM or its software. Both pieces of software will be compiled and run on a Windows XP and a Linux system. Once they are both functioning properly, they will be tweaked as much as possible to increase performance (decreasing the time spent matching) and to decrease memory footprint. Following that, the black boxes will be broken into two components – a server and a client – to be used in a two-machine network. The client code will act as a user interface, passing all input data to the server code, which will handle the calls to the facial recognition software, further reducing the memory footprint and processor load required on the client end. In this sense, the thin client architecture of many ATMs will be emulated. We will then investigate the process of using the black box program to control a USB camera attached to the computer to avoid the use of the folder of â€Å"live† images. Lastly, it may be possible to add some sort of DES encryption to the client end to encrypt the input data and decrypt the output data from the server – knowing that this will increase the processor load, but better allowing us to gauge the time it takes to process. CONCLUSION We thus develop an ATM model that is more reliable in providing security by using facial recognition software. By keeping the time elapsed in the verification process to a negligible amount we even try to maintain the efficiency of this ATM system to a greater degree.