Young Goodman Brown :: Free Essay Writer

Nathaniel Hawthornes unusual story, Young Goodman Brown, is a tale that can be analyzed through many different perspectives. The author uses mystery and bizarre scenarios that create gaps in the plot, leaving the reader asking questions about what the intent of Hawthornes style is. To answer these questions, many readers approach the story with a type of critical analysis, such as authorial intention, historical and biographical criticism, mythological and prototypal criticism, or reader response criticism. All may apply to this particular story, depending on the reader.Authorial intent criticism is based on the idea that whatsoever meaning coming from the passage is none other than what the author intended it to be. This type of approach may be beneficial or may campaign more confusion to some readers. If you were to know what the author intended a certain complicated passage to mean, it would be much easier to grasp the meaning of the constitutional text. There is one problem r elated to this approach, however. If the author is not present or has no notes explaining the intention of a passage, it is impossible to have questions answered. This is the problem that I ran into while reading Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown.The plot to Hawthornes story is filled with mystery, leaving the reader questioning certain scenes and acts. For example, the biggest question that I had for Hawthorne was did he intend for Young Goodman Browns experience in the forest gathering to be a dream or a hallucination, or was it very? Some students question whether or not the dark traveler who was waiting for Brown was the Devil or was an alter ego for Brown himself. Unfortunately, these argon some(prenominal) intent questions that cannot be answered.Almost opposite in character is reader response criticism. This is an approach where the readers interpretation of the text is how it is supposed to be seen. How the reader responds to actions, conflicts, circumstances, and other gaps left within the story is what makes the plot form. With every different reader, and every different reading, a new plot is formed, and none of these readings are any more correct than the other. It is the methodology and transaction between the reader and the text interpretation that counts, and has nothing to do with the intent of the author. With my questions unanswered about Hawthornes intent, I was forced to use reader response and provide my own interpretation.

Technology in Auditing Using Benford?s Law :: essays research papers

Technology in Auditing Using Benfords LawWhat started out as a curious observation by an astronomer in 1881 has the potential to have a significant impact on the audit profession 125 age later. In 1881, the astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed that the front pages of his logarithmic tables frayed faster than the rest of the pages. Newcomb concluded the early image is oftener 1 than any other finger. Newcomb quantified the probability of the occurrence of the different digits as being the first digit and as well as the second digit. For the most part, Newcomb just considered it a curiosity and left it at that. (Caldwell 2004)In the 1920s, a physicist at the GE Research Laboratories, Frank Benford, thought it more than a curiosity and conducted extensive interrogatory of naturally occurring data and computed the expected frequencies of the digits. In Table 1, there is a table of these expected frequencies for the first four positions. Benford also determined that the data could not be constrained to only show a restricted order of numbers such as market values of stock nor could it be a set of assigned numbers such as street addresses or social security numbers. (Nigrini 1999)The underlying theory behind why this happens can be illustrated using investment fundss as an example. If you start with an investment of $100 and assume a 5% annual return, it would be the 15th year before the value of the investment would reach $200 and therefore change the first digit value to 2. It would only take an additional 8 years to change the first digit vale to 3, an additional 6 years to change the first digit to 4, etc. Once the value of the investment grew to $1,000 the time it would take to change the first digit (going from $1,000 to $2,000) would revert back to the same pace as it took to change it from $100 to $200. Unconstrained naturally occurring numbers will follow this pattern with odd predictability. (Ettredge and Srivastava 1998)In 1961, Roger Pinkham tested a nd proved that Benfords law was scale invariant and therefore would apply to any unit of measure and any type currency. In the 1990s, Dr Mark Nigrini discovered a powerful auditing tool using Benfords law. He was able to determine that most people assume that the first digit of numbers would be distributed equally amount the digits and that people that make up numbers tend to use numbers starting with digits in the mid range (5, 6, 7).