#without requiring them to back it all up with extensively quoted sources and context and support from other academics

[transactinides]

Okay, this is a bit longer than I expected so the ask intended for @daz4i has turned into its own post. huh. Context:

[also this is not proofread or anything. I am literally just putting words together]

I pulled up the related manga chapter to quote it, but Fukuzawa’s ability, All Men Are Equal (the name is important too!) is described as “ability of inhibition (!) that grants a person control over their own (!) ability”, with the requirement being that said person should be considered Fukuzawa’s subordinate. Given the general nature of abilities and how much of them is a direct reflection of a given ability’s owner, the distinction between who is and who is not a subordinate is based on whom Fukuzawa himself considers one, and therefore the whole “must pass the ADA entrance exam (<- aka align with ADA’s values etc because that is also a part of exam evaluation or whatever)” is more of a self-imposed limit, since Fukuzawa himself could only consider someone as his subordinate (speaking of which, i wihs i knew Japanese so I could get into the original terminology used and not base everything of translations) if they are not only just working for him, otherwise such an extensive hiring process with personally fitted exams wouldn’t be such a necessity for him, but also someone sharing his values and being of respectable character. That is where “All Men Are Equal'' comes in for me - despite “subordinate” implying position of submission, for Fukuzawa it comes with sharing a common ground, not someone to follow his orders, but someone he trusts to act towards the same goals as him even on their own. I would get more into how that is influenced by irl Fukuzawa’s philosophies, but it is too late for me to go and reread his works right now, I’ll be real. TLDR: 1) it suppresses abilities 2) making them easier for the owner to control -> giving said owner more agency 3) and is influenced in his belief of general human equalness etc. 

Fukuchi’s Mirror Lion is, at its core, the ability of the same type - let’s call it “stats boosting”. It enhances the potential/efficiency of any weapon he wields. The “weapon” in that case is a very broad concept - it involves things conventionally understood as weapons (example - sword), a rock he picks up, his own fist, even living beings like Bram (question mark on “living”) and. the entire Humankind Army (with Holy Sword and One Order respectively etc etc). Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that just as with Fukuzawa’s ideas of a subordinate, Fukuchi is limited by what he himself considers his weapon. Your weapon is your tool. You are the one controlling it. Going back to Bram, Fukuchi is the one wielding him. There are no shared grounds or values or respect here. His ability enhances instead of inhibiting, yes, but it also takes control from anyone but Fukuchi. Allow me to mention the inspiration behind the ability for further illustration, a kabuki titled Kagami Jishi / Mirror Lion. It tells a story of a young lady chosen to perform the lion dance during the New Year celebration and getting possessed by the lion spirit as she practices the dance. ”Gradually the spirit of the lion entered into her and took complete charge of her limbs. [...] Finally the dancing maiden disappeared altogether, leaving only the rampaging spirit of a lion” <- quote from a summary by A.C. Scott. Taking source into account, the notion of Fukuchi taking control over what *or who* he considers his weapon is very intentional, and is definitely a reflection of the trauma Fukuchi got during the war, both in commiting atrocities and war crimes on command of government (in that, his ability can be seen as reclamation of control and agency) and in going through this alone (see - without Fukuzawa, who refused to join him). Where Fukuzawa can put trust in his subordinates and their actions, Fukuchi has learnt he can only depend on himself. TLDR: 1) it ehances abilities (in its broader meaning, not just Abilities abilities) 2) but gives full control in Fukuchi’s hands <- strips of agency 3) and reflects his general attitude of seeking control

Clearly, Fukuzawa’s and Fukuchi’s abilities are as much of polar opposites as abilities of the same “type” can be, which reflects their shared history as much as their individual views - they used to be best friends until making a cardinally different choice in life, putting them in vastly different life situations and, eventually, on opposing sides.

[marypsue]

a theory of Kids On Bikes

A dirt road. An asphalt backroad. A suburban street. 

One bike zips past. Two. Three. Four.

I say, “kids on bikes”, and it’s likely a story comes to mind. E.T. The Goonies. Stand By Me. This is a theory of nostalgia as much as it is of narrative. Even new stories often place their kids within one of two decades. The Iron Giant. Super 8. Stranger Things. The kids bike eternally through nineteen fifty-something, nineteen eighty-something; through an artifice of universal childhood, universal innocence.

The base unit of kids on bikes is four. It can go up as high as seven or eight, but at that point, group cohesion begins to break down. And group cohesion is important. The kids-on-bikes story is a thesis on friendship, the kind of friends you had when you were twelve. 

The kids-on-bikes story might be set in any place, at any time, but somehow it’s always about the summer you were twelve years old. The long days, lying empty before you and rich with possibility. The intoxicating feeling of freedom. 

The summer you were twelve is a place, a moment frozen in amber, and the kids-on-bikes story is the long car ride taking you there for one shining, finite, ephemeral week of vacation. The summer you were twelve could be a week in November, or years before you were even born. The summer you were twelve could be a state you’ve never visited and likely never will. The summer you were twelve is a state of mind, and so is a story about kids on bikes.

Now and Then. Stand By Me. Kids on bikes don’t need to face fantastical monsters.

IT. N0S48U. They don’t need to be kids.

Scooby Doo. Gravity Falls. They don’t even need bikes.

It’s more than just a handful of aesthetic elements that unite them, though of course it is that too. Bikes, of course. Scabby knees and bandages. Scuffed sneakers with trailing laces. Oversized glasses with thick frames. Missing teeth, and pigtails, and shorts. Analog technology. Horizontal stripes. Scout uniforms. Pocket knives. Slime. 

Monsters. 

But it’s also a sensibility. Love - romantic and otherwise. The incredible power of friendship, of community, to forge bonds between strangers with little in common, bonds that can become stronger than the fear of death. Courage, and kindness, and the value of wonder in a world overflowing with amazing - and terrible - things that most of us, caught up in the day-to-day, never see.

The world the kids on bikes inhabit asks only whether those wonders might include the fantastical. The world the kids on bikes inhabit is the world we all inhabit, but more so. Everything is outsized. The joys, the sorrows, are too vast for one person to contain, spilling over onto endless summer skies. The colours are more saturated. The shadows are darker - and full, teeming with some nameless menace that cannot quite ever really be defined, cannot quite ever really be defeated. The edges are sharper between them.

There is a faint golden nostalgia that lies over it all, of course. Like an August evening in the hour before sunset. I never had any friends later on like the friends I had when I was twelve. The kids-on-bikes story is not written, usually, by the child. The kids-on-bikes story is written by the adult, or perhaps the child within the adult. Looking back and seeing, for the first time, the value of something they didn’t know was precious when it was still within their grasp.

And it asks us to believe that we all had that same precious thing.

But the haze of memory and wistful regret colour everything. Blur detail outside the central focus. Bestow a false innocence on the deliberate structure of a story. Nineteen fifty-something, nineteen eighty-something. Four (or more) boys and one girl. One of them is fat. One of them is black. One of them might be queer, but only as an insult. 

They live and roam in an unmarked summerland, a world without history. Cruel or kind, the world is made new for them and them alone. The world, too, is adolescent and teetering on the cusp between innocence and hard-won experience.

The unmarked is not innocent. The unremarkable is not innocent. Monsters hide in plain sight, in the world of kids on bikes. Monsters that a stolid adult world dismisses as imagination or insanity. Monsters that, for all they disappear, chameleonic, behind the camouflage of adult assumptions of reality, can - and do - kill.

The kids-on-bikes story uses metaphor as both shield and sword. David Harbour speaks on an awards show stage about standing up for the underdogs, while Jim Hopper threatens children with bodily harm and calls a traumatised woman crazy to her face. The Goonies befriend a man the world thinks is a monster for his face, while the story mocks one of their number for his size. At twelve years old, it’s easy to see when you’re being bullied. It’s harder to see when you’re being the bully.

Love - and hatred. The incredible power of friendship, of community, to forge bonds between strangers with little in common - bonds that can exclude those stuck on the outside looking in. Courage, and kindness - and abuse of strength and power, and oblivious, childish cruelty.

The kids-on-bikes story is an adolescent itself. Teetering on the cusp between innocence and hard-earned experience. The kids-on-bikes story is, I think, afraid of growing up.

And well it might be. It’s set itself up in opposition to the adult world, the world of hard realities, the world where the terrors lurking in the shadows are easily seen and recognised, where those terrors have clear forms and names that are known. Against the world that understands and is understood. Once the world is familiar, it becomes a little smaller. Once the monster is seen, once it is called by name, it loses a little of its terror. Sometimes, it becomes clear that it was never anything more than a greedy, bitter old man in a mask.

And without those shadows, without the possibility of nameless menace, there is a fear of losing that saturated, golden sunlight. There is a fear of losing the joy with the terror. 

But everyone had a summer when they were twelve. And they were not all the same summer. 

There is room, I think, to tell stories about kids on bikes that haven’t already been told. There are still sun-drenched days of glorious freedom and unending possibility, where that possibility is wider than Ray Bradbury or Stephen King could ever imagine. There are still worlds and worlds of unspoken, unspeakable monsters, nameless and menacing, lurking in those summers’ teeming shadows. There is room to grow.

And kids on bikes don’t always need to be kids.

[rwby-redux]

Deconstruction

Worldbuilding: Semblances II

Last time in Part I, we analyzed the failings of Semblances from a meta perspective. Now we’re going to look at them within the context of the actual show. Before we begin, let’s revisit that list of basic traits that are universally shared by Semblances.

A Semblance draws upon Aura as its source of power. When this fuel is depleted, a person can no longer use their Semblance, and must wait for their Aura to regenerate before it can be used again.

The specific ability or nature of one’s Semblance is alleged to be an expression of the user’s personality/character/soul.

Overuse of a Semblance can adversely affect a person and cause physical side effects, such as fatigue, headaches, or fainting.

Semblances can interact with Dust in such a way that their skills are augmented, resulting in the temporary acquisition of new subskills or secondary characteristics.

Through training and regular usage, Semblances can gradually become stronger or more advanced.

The intensity of certain emotions, such as stress, panic, despair, or rage, can cause a person to subconsciously activate their Semblance.

This refresher will be important as we go more in-depth. At the very least, it’ll save you the hassle of having to jump back and forth between tabs.

Limitations of Semblances

Recall point one. If your first instinct is to say, surely having a limited amount of Aura is a good limitation for Semblances, then you’d be forgiven for thinking that. In theory, it makes sense: a power based on a finite energy source does seem like a pretty significant drawback. My main issue with this being a credible limitation for Semblances is that we, the audience, have no way to gauge Aura depletion over time. And by extension, neither do our characters. In the first three Volumes, students used specialized monitors (usually on their scrolls) to keep tabs on Aura over the course of a sparring match. Not only do I like this because it’s a clever visual aid for relaying information to the audience, but also because it conveys clear worldbuilding information: characters don’t seem to have a way of innately sensing when their Aura is low. This idea seems to be reinforced again in V7.E3 - “Ace Operatives.” In the opening scene, Clover reminds RWBY and JN_R that their scrolls have been upgraded with Atlas tech, and they shouldn’t forget to use them. That line of dialogue is accompanied by Blake consulting her scroll for her teammates’ Aura levels. To my knowledge, there’s nothing in the canon that suggests characters can sense or feel when their Aura level drops, or how far away it is from depletion.

Having to rely on scrolls to monitor their Aura would be an excellent limitation to impose on an otherwise limitless superpower. Not only would it require the characters to constantly monitor their Aura, but it could introduce realistic problems. Like what would happen if a character’s scroll was lost, or destroyed, or its batteries died? How would that affect the character’s behavior in regards to Aura-related tasks? Great idea, right?

Now here comes the kicker: we don’t see any evidence of this in the show. When Team RNJR was traveling through Anima, none of them discussed having to find a village to recharge their scrolls. It’s not as if the trees have outlets that they can conveniently plug their scrolls into. Similarly, none of the characters from Volume 3 onward consult their scroll during fights to see where their Aura levels are at. You don’t see characters changing fighting styles midway through a fight in order to conserve what little Aura they have left. You don’t see characters minimizing the use of their Semblance in favor of more efficient tactics.

That’s why limited Aura doesn’t seem like a believable limitation for Semblances—not for a lack of possibility, but for a lack of execution. If characters made more of a fuss about it on-screen, I could buy it. But apart from one or two throw-away lines, characters don’t seem to pay attention to how Aura depletion affects Semblance usage, and by extension, they don’t adjust or change their tactics during combat to compensate for it.

Bear in mind that this discussion has only touched upon general limitations. We haven’t even addressed Semblance-specific limitations yet. Can Marcus Black only steal one Semblance at a time? Can Sun only make a certain number of clones at once? If Yang doesn’t eventually release the energy that she’s stored up, does it backfire on her? Is Pyrrha limited to only one type of magnetism, like ferromagnetism, or can she use more than one type? If Robyn uses her Semblance on someone who’s stating an incorrect fact, but they believe that fact to be true, then does it indicate that the person is lying? Does Hazel’s Semblance allow him to bypass/negate his Aura’s healing factor in order to stab Dust into his body?

And on and on it goes. A combination of vague or poorly-established mechanics for Semblances, coupled with the wide variety of Semblances, makes it impossible to predict what could be a hindrance for our characters down the road. This in turn creates a lack of stakes—how can we, the audience, be invested in the dangers that the cast faces, when we don’t know if those dangers are credible in the first place?

Active versus Passive Semblances

Usually when a character reveals information, it’s meant to answer questions, not create more of them. Such was the case when Qrow revealed his Semblance to Team RNJR for the first time—he brings misfortune, or rather, causes people (and objects in the nearby vicinity) to be blighted by bad luck via the manipulation of probability. Qrow is our introduction to passive Semblances, a term which, if I’m being honest, I’m not even entirely sure is canon. Someone’ll need to correct me on that, but for now “passive Semblance” will do. Because we have precious little information on the topic, I’m going to be relying on direct quotes.

Qrow: My Semblance isn't like most—it's not exactly something I do. It's always there, whether I like it or not. I bring misfortune. [1]

This passage tells us two different things: (1) passive Semblances are always active, and (2) passive Semblances can’t be controlled.

You can already see the problems with introducing a new concept this late in the game, because this new information clashes with what (few) previously-established rules we already have: Do passive Semblances require Aura? If Qrow’s Aura is depleted, will his Semblance continue to run, or will it become unusable like everyone else’s?

This ambiguity becomes even more frustrating when we acquire more information a little over a year later:

“It's not necessarily constantly running, it's more that it randomly spikes to cause unfortunate situations. If he chooses to amplify it in a fight, then yes, it does cost him.” [2]

Now we’re being told that that his Semblance isn’t “always there,” that Qrow can control it to an extent, and that his Semblance only depletes his Aura when he chooses to amplify it. Here we have an example of the character in the show being directly contradicted by one of the show’s creators. This implies that either they didn’t do a good enough job explaining passive Semblances the first time around, or they changed things after the episode aired. It isn’t just a he said/she said issue, either—Semblances requiring Aura is one of RWBY’s core mechanics for its pseudo-magic system, and by having a character whose Semblance breaks that cardinal rule, it makes the writing more difficult to believe or trust in terms of what’s canon versus what’s a retcon; what’s a subplot versus what’s a plothole. It doesn’t help when we get even more contradictory information from later episodes:

Qrow: I wouldn’t thank me. My Semblance brings misfortune. Sometimes I can’t keep it under control. [3]

I’m sorry, I thought we just established that Qrow can only amplify his Semblance. Now you’re telling us that he can partially suppress it too? Either he can’t control it at all, he can amplify it, or he can sometimes suppress its effects. Make up your damn mind.

The effects of his Semblance can be as minor as a coffee spill or as dire as a collapsing building… [4]

No! Stop it! Knocking over a Starbucks latte is not the same thing as demolishing a fucking building.

How is Qrow’s Semblance able to do something as insanely energy-demanding as toppling infrastructure without expending any Aura? How does his Semblance locate or prioritize variables in the environment to exploit/sabotage? Like, if there’s a mouse hanging out near some sort of Dust-powered generator in the building, does his Semblance send out subliminal messaging that convinces the mouse to chew through an electrical wire and cause the generator to explode?

Look, I refuse to believe that spilling a cup of coffee is somehow equal to setting off a stick of TNT or taking a wrecking ball to the side of a skyscraper. It doesn’t make any sense, which means that you have to provide a proper explanation for how it works. Because otherwise you’re going to be left with an audience that assumes Qrow’s Semblance is powered by (a) plot convenience, or (b) rats.

This—all of this, right here—is my issue with passive Semblances. (And don’t even get me started on Clover’s.)

Semblance Discovery, Auratic Plasticity

Did you notice the fancy scientific-sounding term in the heading?

Ooh. Auratic plasticity. That sounds official. You’re probably wondering where that term came from. A scene from Volume 5 you haven’t re-watched in a while (not that I can blame you). A World of Remnant episode, perhaps? Maybe it’s from one of the comics, or the director’s commentary on a DVD, or even an AMA on Reddit?

To answer your question: it didn’t come from any of those. Auratic plasticity is a term I coined exclusively for the Redux. Specifically, for talking about what goes behind discovering a person’s Semblance, and what factors are at play when that Semblance takes on its unique form.

Before we can talk about Auratic plasticity, however, we need to talk about all the ways someone discovers their Semblance. It can vary wildly from person to person. For some, their Semblance unlocks randomly while doing everyday run-of-the-mill things. As alluded to by Taiyang in V4.E9 - “Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back,” Yang’s Semblance activated while she was getting a haircut. For others, it can be the byproduct of training, extreme stress, or an otherwise fatal encounter. [5] In rare instances, Semblances can be hereditary, thus removing any ambiguity of what that person’s Semblance will be when it first activates.

The reason why I bring any of this up is because RWBY’s official stance is that Semblances “generally reflect the wielder’s personality.” [6] If Semblances were generally tied to the personality of the wielder, then it would fail to account for the correlation between the circumstance that triggered the Semblance to manifest, and the resulting Semblance expression.

Let me give you a few examples.

Adaptive Semblance: Nora’s Semblance was unlocked when she was struck by lightning. Consider the fact that her Semblance allows her to absorb electricity without taking any damage from the electric current. Rather than her Semblance being tied to her personality, Nora’s is likely a case of an adaptive Semblance—as in, her circumstances required a very specific Semblance in order to survive the 10,000 amperes running through her body. Instead of her soul generating a Semblance tied to her personality, it prioritized generating a Semblance that would help her survive an immediate and life-threatening scenario.

Innate Semblance: Ruby’s Semblance was discovered one day while training. If we’re to assume that there weren’t any dangerous circumstances factoring into that training session, it’s likely that her soul generated a Semblance that was in fact tied to an aspect of her personality. In this case, her superspeed is a projection of her enthusiasm and hyperactive zeal, and her tendency to prioritize others’ wellbeing over her own, trying to figuratively (and in this case, literally) reach them before they’re harmed.

Hereditary Semblance: Weiss and Winter, and (presumably) Whitley, Willow, and Nicholas all share the glyph-based Semblance unique to the Schnee lineage. The confirmation of their Semblance being explicitly hereditary contradicts the idea that Semblances are an expression of one’s personality. If we go by that logic, it implies that—what, their personalities are all the same? They have no individuality? I’m sorry, but that’s just dumb.

This is why Semblance discovery is important, and why the canon should have paid more attention to developing it. There’s pretty compelling evidence for a person’s Semblance being tied to multiple factors apart from their “personality.” I know that I’m digressing here a bit, but the main reason why I bring up this correlation isn’t just because it clarifies inconsistencies with the canon. It also presents an opportunity to enrich the lore of the show.

In the Redux, Auratic plasticity is the ability of the soul to generate a Semblance based on either an immutable personality trait (innate), a scenario-specific survival method (adaptive), or a “genetic” trait that’s repeatedly selected for due to its inherent fitness (inherited). These three categories are determined by a value called hierarchical prioritization—basically, it’s the soul’s ability to decide what Semblance-trigger gets precedence. I’ll get into more detail when I start the Amendment, but it felt important to clarify my intentions early, so I could justify writing 700 words on why Semblance discovery is important.

Adverse Effects of Using Semblances

Unlike Limitations, which focuses on what a Semblance can or can’t do, Adverse Effects deals with the negative repercussions/consequences of using a Semblance.

Or in RWBY’s case, a lack thereof.

(For the moment, let’s set aside the magic/not magic discourse and acknowledge that yes, in the traditional sense, Aura, Semblances, and Dust are part of RWBY’s magic system, the same way bending is part of A:TLA’s.)

When designing a magic system, you’ve got to balance it. Otherwise, the system contains powers that are vaguely-defined, OP, and bereft of any costs.

One way to implement a system of checks and balances is by giving that system a cost for using it. In RWBY’s case, the only “cost” experienced by characters is physical fatigue whenever they overextend themselves. But in the grand scheme of things it’s not really a detrimental consequence, in part because of how infrequently exhaustion is viewed as a legitimate threat. Seriously. When was the last time you saw the main cast fail because they overdid it while using their Semblances? It just doesn’t happen.

One way you could implement a cost is by tying Semblance usage to a physical demand. According an article by Julia Belluz, Winter Olympic athletes consume anywhere between 1,300 - 2,500 and 4,000 - 7,000 calories on average per day.

It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to apply this to RWBY. Given the high-intensity acrobatics the characters perform on the regular, it would make sense that strenuous physical activity, coupled with Semblance usage, would create costs in the form of caloric needs. Maybe that’s an issue Team RNJR needs to deal with while backpacking across Anima. Is food a top priority for them? Do they have to restrict Semblance usage when running low on rations? Does the group ever have to hunt or forage for food to meet the energy demands of fighting Grimm?

Not only does this balance out Semblances, but it opens the door for potential worldbuilding. Is “Huntsman” ever used as a euphemism for “glutton”? Do all-you-can-eat buffets ban Huntsmen from their establishments? Do Huntsmen have a reputation for being less picky about food options? In places that use trade-and-barter systems, are Huntsmen willing to accept food as payment instead of lien?

I think that’s more or less everything I wanted to say about Semblances. I have a few unrelated nitpicks, but I can save those for another time. This post is already longer than I intended it to be.

-

[1] Volume 4, Episode 8: “A Much Needed Talk.”

[2] Shawcross, Kerry. “CRWBY AMA.” Reddit interview. February 12, 2018. [https://www.reddit.com/r/RWBY/comments/7x3w4s/crwby_ama_w_miles_luna_kerry_shawcross_and_paula/du5bpdm/?context=3]

[3] Volume 7, Episode 3: “Ace Operatives.”

[4] Wallace, Daniel. The World of RWBY: The Official Companion. VIZ Media LLC, 2019, page 94.

[5] Volume 5, Episode 4: “Lighting the Fire.”

[6] Wallace, Daniel. The World of RWBY: The Official Companion. VIZ Media LLC, 2019, page 39.

[howtowriteascholarshipessay689]

write an essay for me

About me

Essay Structure

Essay Structure Give your paper a day or two and give it a last learn-by way of. It could be useful to print a duplicate of your paper and skim a tough-copy if you have solely read by way of it on a display screen thus far. You would possibly notice mistakes or formatting issues that your eyes missed while reading in your computer. If you're crafting a paper from scratch, begin by reading through the above steps to learn to write a robust analysis paper. If you've already written a paper, go over this guidelines to ensure that it is ready to flip in. Grammarly is sort of a super-powered spell checker. That being said, Grammarly is great at catching errors and offers easy-to-understand explanations of spelling and grammar recommendations so you can knowledgeably make changes to your research paper. Your instructor might require you to make use of peer-reviewed academic articles as some or all the sources in your research paper. As a university student, you in all probability have entry to a variety of academic databases that you should use to seek out scholarly articles. Working from your individual ideas will allow you to keep away from plagiarism. Plagiarism is the uncredited use of another person’s words or ideas, whether you meant to make use of them without credit or not. It may be helpful to look over your analysis before you start writing, but don’t write instantly from your analysis. It’s a free Chrome extension that permits you to edit your writing. You can copy and paste your paper into the Grammarly editor and get spelling and grammar advice that's easy to implement. If you’re looking for extra help or want to use the software with out leaving Microsoft Office, check out Grammarly Premium or Grammarly for Microsoft Office. However, it’s necessary to recollect when utilizing this software (or any spelling or grammar checker!) that it's a pc and due to this fact doesn’t at all times understand your writing. You need to go over each suggestion made by the software program and ensure that it's certainly correcting an error or enhancing a sentence and not changing something that you simply meant to say. First, decide the context by which you wish to place your matter. In different phrases, determine an overarching class in which you would place your matter, after which introduce your topic as a case-in-level. My favourite competition diwali essay writingWe provide world-class compliance and are staffed with dedicated specialists. Example of plan essay, tips on how to link quotes in an essay. Music concert critique essay essay on cyber crime wikipedia. Essay about advantages and drawbacks of smartphones. Write an essay you are assigned the three-paragraph essay. In a short essay, you have area for under a one-paragraph introduction. How to put in writing an argumentative essay for dummies essay why ought to i get scholarship. If you might be not sure of the way to seek for articles in a tutorial database, it’s worth asking your professor or a research librarian to help you study. This skill shall be a helpful one to have, and you will be easily finding trustworthy, attention-grabbing sources very quickly. Once you’ve completed Steps 1–9, it’s definitely time to take a break. If you’re looking backwards and forwards between your assets and your paper as you begin writing, it’s straightforward to repeat ideas without actually creating your individual work. You have accomplished a lot of work already, so trust that and work from reminiscence as you write your research paper. It’s okay to look up a particular quote or statistic, but in general your ideas should be your individual at this point. Once you've learn your research paper for a last time and double checked that your paper does every thing the assignment is asking for, it is time to submit. Once you've made all the changes you think needed, learn back via your paper once more to make sure it all makes sense. Especially when engaged on a pc, it's easy to leave or delete a word, sentence, or paragraph that you simply didn’t mean to. If you're uninterested in looking at your analysis paper, give it to a good friend, mentor, or trainer and ask them to try your paper and allow you to know what they think of the content.

[glittergummicandypeach]

Religion Renewed Means a New Religion

Many prophecies, including those discussed in this Figuring Out Prophecy series, look to the future in terms of the past – so much so, in fact, that sometimes they project the past onto the future! 

Let me give you a couple of examples, in general. The idea that “Paradise Lost” will be followed by “Paradise Regained” (to quote the titles of these two epic poems by John Milton) forms one such motif, for instance. 

Other prophecies promise that the wrongs and misfortunes that had befallen a given religion, typically through persecution or conquest, will be righted in an ideal world to come. 

From a comparative study of apocalyptic prophecies among the world’s religions, a common, end-times scenario foretells that the expected Messiah will wage a worldwide battle and, after gaining victory, pave the way for that particular religion to regain its former power, prestige and glory.

What these scenarios have in common is the idea that renewed religion will become restored religion, meaning that the same religion will be brought back to its former predominance.

If that’s the case, then such a religion would have to be radically updated in order to work within the context of a much different world. Think about this common-sense idea: The times have changed. Therefore, to keep up with the changing times, religion needs to change as well.

Take, for example, the Christian idea of the “Second Coming” of Christ. The widespread expectation is that, when Christ returns “in glory,” Christianity will also make a glorious comeback as well. After all, the idea that Christ would bring a religion other than Christianity makes no sense at all to the average Christian, for whom Christ is “the only way” to salvation, rendering Christianity, by extension, the only way to salvation as well. 

Similarly, the “Mahdi,” in Islamic prophecies, will restore Islam to its former glory. So also with “Kalki,” the Hindu Messiah, who will basically defeat, kill, or otherwise banish Buddhists and foreigners, and will restore Hinduism to its former glory. “Shah Bahram,” a Zoroastrian Messiah, is expected to bring back Zoroastrianism. That would be no mean feat, since Zoroastrianism is a dying religion. 

Naturally and logically, these and other apocalyptic scenarios, taken together, cannot all come true at once. But if these future visions are partial, prescient and convergent glimpses into a single, universal future, then there must be a way to reconcile, if not merge together, these alternative prophetic narratives. The Baha’i teachings provide that reconciliation by envisioning a world religion. 

In this sense, the Baha’i teaching – that, if a religion becomes a source of disunity and evil, then its nonexistence is preferable to its existence – is a key principle to keep in mind as to why there needs to be a new religion:

… religion must be conducive to love of all, the cause of fellowship, unity and light. If it be the cause of enmity, bloodshed and hatred, its nonbeing is better than its being, its nonexistence better than its existence. – Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace

In the following passage, Abdu’l-Baha explained:

The universal Prophets Who have appeared independently include Abraham, Moses, Christ, Muhammad, the Bab, and Baha’u’llah. The second kind, which consists of followers and promulgators, includes Solomon, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. For the independent Prophets are founders; that is, They establish a new religion, recreate the souls, regenerate the morals of society, and promulgate a new way of life and a new standard of conduct. Through Them a new Dispensation appears and a new religion is inaugurated. Their advent is even as the springtime, when all earthly things don a new garment and find a new life. – Abdu’l-Baha, Some Answered Questions

Take Christianity, for example. This is what Abdu’l-Baha goes on to say as to why a new religion is needed today:

Consider, for example, that Christ admonished the people time and again to heed the Ten Commandments of the Torah and insisted upon their strict observance. Now, one of the Ten Commandments forbids the worship of images and statues. [Cf. Exod. 20:4–5; Deut. 5:8–9.] Yet today there are a myriad images and statues in the churches of certain Christian denominations. It is clear and evident, then, that the religion of God does not preserve its original precepts among the people, but that it is gradually changed and altered to the point of being entirely effaced, and thus a new Manifestation appears and a new religion is established. For if the former religion had not been changed and altered, there would be no need for renewal. – Ibid.

Baha’u’llah, in his second letter to Napoleon III, responded to the criticism of the founding a new religion in the following way:

More grievous became Our plight from day to day, nay, from hour to hour, until they took Us forth from Our prison and made Us, with glaring injustice, enter the Most Great Prison. And if anyone ask them: “For what crime were they imprisoned?”, they would answer and say: “They, verily, sought to supplant the Faith [Islam] with a new religion!” If that which is ancient be what ye prefer, wherefore, then, have ye discarded that which hath been set down in the Torah and the Evangel? … If this be My crime, then Muhammad, the Apostle of God, committed it before Me, and before Him He Who was the Spirit of God [Jesus], and yet earlier He Who conversed with God [Moses]. – Baha’u’llah, Summons of the Lord of Hosts

To expand on Baha’u’llah’s three examples — of Muhammad, Christ, and Moses — one may say that the new religion that Moses founded was a renewal of the prior religion of Abraham. Similarly, the new religion that Christ established was a renewal of Judaism, from a certain perspective. The new religion that Muhammad established was, in the same sense, a renewal of Christianity.

Baha’is believe that each of these new religions, respectively brought by Moses, Christ, and Muhammad, contained elements of the previous religions. So the phrase “religion renewed” means a Faith that is expanded, updated, in keeping with the needs and requirements of the times. Each new religion brings new teachings from God, enshrined in each new Holy Book.

On May 24, 1912, at the Free Religious Association (or Unitarian) Conference in Boston, Abdu’l-Baha explained this concept of religious renewal in terms of spiritual and social evolution and the progressive nature of new religious teachings:

Religion is the outer expression of the divine reality. Therefore, it must be living, vitalized, moving and progressive. … All things are subject to reformation. This is a century of life and renewal …

The Prophets of God voiced the spirit of unity and agreement. They have been the Founders of divine reality. Therefore, if the nations of the world forsake imitations and investigate the reality underlying the revealed Word of God, they will agree and become reconciled. For reality is one and not multiple.

The nations and religions are steeped in blind and bigoted imitations. … It is evident, therefore, that this condition will not be remedied without a reformation in the world of religion. In other words, the fundamental reality of the divine religions must be renewed, reformed, revoiced to mankind. – Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace

The Book of Revelation’s prophetic promise of “a new heaven and a new earth,” by definition, foretells a new religion, a part of heaven and earth. Baha’is believe that the Baha’i Faith is that promised and prophesied new religion – for religion renewed means a new religion!

This content was originally published here.

[scripttorture]

Sources

So this isn’t exactly a Masterpost. Good sources on torture are hard to find and it’s not always obvious what they cover. I’ve had a couple of people recommend fictional titles in the comments and while fiction can be helpful for working out how to handle torture in stories it is rarely accurate and no substitute for factual sources.

 I thought it might be helpful to give everyone a quick run down of the sources I’ve found most useful and what they cover.

 This may well be edited in the future as I find more books. :)

 Torture and Democracy by D Rejali

 This is basically the book on torture.

 It’s the size of a breezeblock.

 Rejali covers torturers and victims, provides a systematic breakdown of why torture fails, gives a history of electrical torture, an analysis of factors that encourage torture in society and an overview of how the law fails torture victims. Interrogation is extensively covered.

 This book covers torture in the modern era globally and in that area it is very thorough. Historical torture is not extensively covered.

 But for a thorough understanding of the topic and modern torture, Rejali is a must.

 Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation by S O’Mara

 O’Mara’s book is much more focused on science than Rejali’s. It is a point by point analysis of some of the most common ‘clean’ (ie non-scarring) torture techniques used today, explaining exactly how harmful they are and debunking claims that they’re not ‘real’ torture.

 O’Mara’s speciality is the brain and he uses his knowledge to show the biological under-pinings of why torture can not work.

 An excellent source on torture generally and a brilliant explanation of how pain, memory and distress work. This is useful for writing any traumatic event but doesn’t cover a wide range of torture techniques and is very Western-focused in its approach.

 Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture by I Cobain

 While I have some problems with Cobain’s book he remains an excellent source.

 My problems are pretty simple, Cobain’s a journalist not a scholar and he often allows apologist arguments to creep into his book. He often takes torturers’ word for it and believes them when they suggest that valuable information can come from torture.

 Rejali and O’Mara will tell you why that’s wrong.

 But the interviews in this book are incredibly valuable. Cobain interviews victims and torturers and sets them in a wider political context, showing how governments have supported or ignored torture.

 His interviews on the London Cage and the collected work on Ireland, Aden, Cyprus and the Mau-Mau is well worth a look for anyone interested in those conflicts in particular or the British ‘National Style’ of torture in general.

 Sourcebook on Solitary Confinement by S Shalev

 Shalev’s Sourcebook is a free resource that’s available online and an excellent break down of the damage solitary confinement causes.

 While this is obviously focused on one technique this Sourcebook contains pretty much all the information you could want on solitary.

 The majority of the data comes from US prisons and the book is obviously biased towards confinement in a prison context. But the discussion of symptoms, risk factors and long term effects makes this utterly invaluable.

 Any author who writes about solitary confinement or isolation should consult at least the second chapter.

 Mao’s Great Famine by F Dikötter

 One of the best books on famine in print.

 The style is somewhat impersonal, but I think that works in its favour. The focus is essentially on how widespread famine can occur rather than how starvation affects the individual.

 The discussion on community and the role of enforcers is particularly good.

 I’d recommend it for anyone writing a large-scale natural disaster or atrocity.

 Amnesty International Reports (Annual 2016/2017)

 Amnesty’s annual reports give good concise updates on torture globally, year by year. They are freely available online and generally contain a lot of survivor accounts.

 It can be difficult to find specific information using them. You can not, for example, tell from the summaries whether particular techniques are covered. They rarely contain follow-ups on survivors and so are not a good resource for the recovery process.

 But the accounts of survivors, in their own words, are invaluable.

 World Food Programme

 An excellent resource on starvation and malnutrition. If you want to know how a starving or malnourished character would be treated or recover this is probably the best free resource you can find.

 Very good for physical effects and for descriptions of disaster relief programs. Not so great on survivor accounts or giving an idea of what starvation feels like on a personal level.

 International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims

 If you’ve been following my blog for a while you may have heard of these guys. Not only do they work to support torture victims but they also publish a free online journal dedicated to helping survivors recover.

 Rather academic and dense, this material often requires a lot of effort and engagement. This is very much the academic side. It can be incredibly helpful, but it’s not always easy to find the information you’re after.

 A Darkling Plain by K R Monroe

 A collection of interviews with survivors of a wide range of atrocities, Monroe’s book shows a real range of both traumatic events and responses to them.

 The main focus of the book is how people move on with their lives after atrocities and how they hold on to their sense of humanity. As such it’s incredibly useful to authors whose writing touches on these themes and authors who want to include a wider range of realistic responses to traumatic events.

 Highly recommended.

 The Wretched of the Earth by F Fanon

 The appendix contains some of Fanon’s notes on people he treated during the Franco-Algerian war.

 These notes include two torturers, a family member of a torturer, victims and relatives of victims.

 This is still one of the most valuable readily accessible sources on torturers’ behaviour.

 The Question by H Alleg

 Alleg’s account of torture during the Franco-Algerian war is a classic for a reason. This is a lucid, often harrowing account of torture failing from a victim’s perspective.

 I talk about victims refusing to cooperate. Alleg describes what it feels like from the inside.

 I strongly advise anyone writing from a victim’s perspective to read this book.

 We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families by P Gourevitch

 The Rwandan genocide. This book provides both an overview of the events, interviews with survivors and transcripts/quotes from the time period.

 A difficult but important book, and extremely useful for writing conflict and war crimes.

 A History of Torture by G R Scott

 This book was written in the 30s and boy does it read like it was.

 The casual racism and sexism is extreme and off putting however this remains one of the most thorough books on historical torture globally. Just…read it with a critical eye.

 To the Kwai and Back by R Searle

 This collection of war drawings is, in my opinion, Searle’s best and most affecting work.

 They chronicle Searle’s experience of the Second World War as a prisoner of the Japanese. The drawings document torture, starvation, forced labour and death marches and are interspersed with Searle’s commentary and memories.

 The book serves as both a survivor’s account and (as Searle is looking back) a discussion of how he as an individual recovered. It serves as a very good source on large-scale atrocities seen from a personal perspective.

 Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by M Kurlansky

 The focus of this work is in the title but torture crops up in this wide ranging historical narrative time and time again.

 It won’t be relevant to everyone’s stories, but I’m including this book for its numerous moving examples of people across cultures and history resisting torture, slavery and genocide without violence. We have very few fictional examples of this kind of action, and the history is rarely remembered.

 I want you, my readers, to be aware of as many sources as possible so you can break the mould if you want to.

 Tell Me Where I Can Be Safe: Human Rights Watch report on LGBTQ Rights in Nigeria

 This is a pretty harrowing read containing a lot of rape and sexual violence as well as torture. Victim accounts are prominent and the report only covers a relatively recent period in one country.

 I include this because my reading strongly suggests that it is typical of anti-LGBTQ violence across much of Africa and the Middle East. The methods and tactics used crop up across multiple countries and have been known to occur in Europe (though Gay and Trans Rights legislation has helped combat such violence).

 As a result I think this is a very valuable resource for writing torture and abuse of LGBTQ people specifically and an extremely important resource for Western writers who wish to write LGBTQ characters who are not from the West.  

 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by R Skloot

 An incredibly valuable overview of unethical experimentation in modern America.

 While far from a complete survey this book covers unconsenting or uninformed experimentation on minors, mental health patients, black people and prisoners.

 It talks about how experiments were conducted, how subjects were chosen and the effect on both the victims and their families.

 Highly recommended for anyone who wishes to write unethical experimentation.

 The Horrible Histories Series by T Deary and M Brown

 Yes these are children’s books and yes I am sure they deserve a place here.

 With their focus on the ‘gruesome bits’ of history these books generally contain quick and accurate overviews of historical tortures. Descriptions of punishments, methods of execution and medical treatments at the time are present in almost all of these short, accessible books.

 The focus is on English history as such there’s a lot that isn’t covered, but they’re very good for getting a sense of the tortures that were used during different historical periods quickly and easily.

Men and Hunger: a psychological manual for relief workers by H S Guetzkow, P H Bowman, A Keys, 1946 (The Minnesota Starvation Experiment)

 This is not the full text but the 70 page summary sent out to relief workers immediately following the experiment. This covers all the important psychological and physical effects of starvation in enough detail for an author writing a starving character to find it extremely helpful. It contains a lot of specific examples of behaviours and quotes from the men involved with the experiment, giving a rounded, detailed sense of their experience.

 However it does contain some racist and sexist language common during the 1940s when it was written.

UN Human Rights report on Rohingya refugees from Myanmar

 This is the UN report on the on-going genocide/ethnic cleansing taking place in Myanmar.

 The report contains accounts of murder, rape, gang-rape, torture and the murder of children. It also contains brief statistical analysis of the crimes survivors reported witnessing or experiencing (over half of Rohingya women reported being raped or sexually assaulted, over half of the survivors interviewed reported that a family member had been murdered).

 This could be useful to people writing about ethnic cleansing and genocide. I think it gives an overview of the situation within countries where these crimes occur, giving a sense of what they’re like before, during and after these atrocities.

War Child: Reclaiming Dreams

 This is a quick summary of the effects war has on children by the charity War Child. It focuses on the work they do in various countries; it aims to raise money for the charity and awareness of the causes they’re involved in.

 It provides a decent, quick overview of the many factors that affect children in war; both as civilians and as combatants. It talks about how children are used by armies (pointing out that the idea of they are always forced to fight is false) and how families and children caught in the cross fire are affected.

 A useful source for authors writing about children in combat zones and a good starting point for anyone planning on writing child soldiers.

The UN Standard Minimum Rules for the treatment of Prisoners, aka the Nelson Mandela Rules

This is a pretty dense legal document outlining how prisoners should be treated and the conditions that are a minimum acceptable standard for keeping them.

It’s tough reading but it could be useful for anyone planning to write about prisons and prisoners in a modern setting.

The collected works of S Kara

Kara’s research on slavery today is based on almost twenty years experience and thousands of interviews with enslaved people across continents.

He covers both individual experiences and the larger global picture of modern slavery. He covers multiple countries and slavery in different kinds of industries.

He also provides a thorough and convincing breakdown of the numbers; how many slaves there are today and where. This is accompanied by a clear analysis of how slavery has been allowed to continue and what needs to be done to stop it.

Brilliant, harrowing, necessary books that are a must for anyone writing about slavery.

Disclaimer

[geniuslab]

college writing advice

Hi, everyone. It’s nearing finals time for a lot of people and I thought I’d share some of the tips that my undergrad students find helpful, and also things that helped me when I was in school and writing essays. Don’t sue me if this doesn’t help, though. This is mostly for your typical research/argumentative/analytical essays.

read your assignment/essay prompt as soon as you get it

Even if your essay isn’t due for a month, take a look at the assignment. You don’t have to outline or do anything for it yet, but knowing what the requirements are will help you prepare. You can start looking for inspiration in class readings or lectures, and you might find yourself outlining it without even realizing it. At the very least, it can’t hurt to know what you’ll need to do, even if you’re not starting yet.

Plus, if something is confusing, you have time to ask your professor. Emailing your professor the night before your essay is due with a basic question doesn’t make you look good, and you might not get an answer back in time.

Sometimes professors give hints to what materials will be helpful for your essays (particularly analytical essays!), so if you already know the prompt then you can be on the lookout for these. I frequently starred my notes when I knew certain information would be helpful in an upcoming essay.

don’t wait until the last minute

It sounds pretty self-explanatory, but seriously. Don’t. Don’t wait until the night before your 15 page research paper is due to start actually doing research. Even if you know you write better under stress (like me) still plan out enough time to get it done. A 2,000 word essay written in less than 3 hours is going to be crap. A 2,000 word essay in 2 days is manageable.

okay, shit. you waited until the last minute

Ask your professor for an extension. Just don’t do it at 2am.

If you can’t get an extension, then get some caffeine and snacks and buckle up, kiddo. Submitting something is better than submitting nothing. Start with whatever part is easiest, and just run with it. Just don’t work yourself to the point of exhaustion.

talk to someone about your ideas

Whether it be with your professor, a tutor, or your best friend, don’t be afraid to talk through your ideas with someone. Sometimes brainstorming with someone for even 10 minutes is all you need to get the jumbled mess of ideas in your head into something concrete.

find a productive space to do your work (this counts for studying in general)

By this point in the semester you’ve probably figured out what environments are most helpful to you, so make sure that’s where you’re doing your work. Some people can only work in a quiet space like their room/library, while others need some background noise and find places like coffee shops most helpful.

If you like listening to something while working, there’s lots of different playlists you can listen to, like this one. If you listened to a specific playlist while studying, try listening to the same one while writing, since it can help bring previous knowledge back to the forefront. And there’s always the classic Rainy Mood.

create a rough outline

Whether you write one out or do it in your head, try planning something out. For example, if you’re writing a research paper on the benefits of therapy, start deciding what supporting points you’d like to talk about. I wouldn’t recommend waiting until halfway through your paper to figure out all of your points.

write, write, write

If you don’t like outlining then just start writing. Work through your ideas, and you’ll get somewhere eventually. You might have to scrap a lot of what you’ve written, but you’ll have something to go off of.

Once into the actual writing process, feel free to jump around with what sections you’re writing. If you get stuck on a certain paragraph, move onto the next one. If you can’t figure out how to write a hook for your intro, start on something that you do know how to do. If your third main point is the most interesting to you, try starting there. Getting some writing done is better than getting frustrated at line one and not getting anything done. Which brings me to my next point:

skip your introduction

For most undergrad papers, your intro is essentially just a summary of what your paper is going to be about. If you get stuck on intros often, just skip it and write it last, since by the end you’ll know exactly how to summarize your paper.

however, always know your thesis before writing anything substantial

Your thesis = main point/argument. You need to know this before you start filling in all of your support (this is assuming your paper requires a thesis...which it probably does). After all, what are you trying to support if you don’t even know what you’re arguing? Make sure that each paragraph ties back to the thesis. If it doesn’t, there’s probably an issue (background information or references to existing research won’t exactly support your thesis, but you’ll know if they fit within the context of your argument).

As far as wording your thesis, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. As long as you’re not planning on changing what your thesis is, you can worry about how to perfectly word it later.

use your library’s database

Provided that your school has a database (which is probably does), check it out. Pro-tip: If you’re crunched on time/not able to go to your library, make sure to check the “full text only” option to get articles that are 100% free and available to download right away. I did this for every paper.

Of course, there’s always google scholar if you’re still not finding what you’re looking for, but results can be limited or behind a paywall.

If you find an article excerpt that’s helpful but can’t access the rest of the article...you can probably still use it. But you didn’t hear that from me.

still stuck on research?

Wikipedia can help. But please, don’t use it as a source unless you want your professor to light your essay on fire. You can gain some background knowledge on your topic to help in the research process, and a lot of times wikipedia cites legitimate sources that you can check out and maybe even use for yourself.

Also, sources from .gov and .edu websites are pretty safe to use.

Don’t use someone’s blog as a source please please please (unless your paper is about blog culture or something. But we both know it’s not).

have a super long source?

You don’t have to read the entire thing. This is probably contradictory to what your professors always tell you, but really. Don’t spend hours reading a 100+ page article or book to only end up using one sentence from it. In my four years of college, I never once read an entire book just to use it as my source (however, I DID read the required books for class...don’t skip out on that). And if an article was more than, say, 25 pages, I skimmed it. You know how much reading you can handle and fit in. Find whatever paragraphs have the information that you need, and use it. As long as you’re not misinterpreting the information, it probably doesn’t really matter.

don’t just throw a quote in your paper

It might be tempting to do this to fill up space or fulfill the required amount of sources, but don’t do it. Make sure that whatever quote you’re using actually supports whatever you’re trying to say. A simple tip that you can use most of the time is thinking of it as a sandwich: introduce your source (ex. John Smith, Professor of Bullshitting at Blah University, states, ”QUOTE”), put in the quote, and then talk about the quote. Don’t just plop it in there with no explanation as to why it’s important.

This website can be helpful for incorporating sources.

confused by citations? use an online citation maker

When you’re stressed and under a time limit, it’s probably not the time to learn MLA. Pop those sources into a website like easybib or citationmachine. Don’t pay, though. There’s tons out there, so find one that works for free (easybib doesn’t do APA for free, but I believe citationmachine does). Just make sure that you’re filling out all necessary info. Sometimes the websites can’t find the author’s name or publication date, but you can. These websites serve as a good template, just don’t expect them to do all the work for you.

Also, if you’re using an online database, it might have already created the citation for you, so look for that.

If you’re not sure whether to use MLA, APA, etc. then check your assignment or syllabus. If it’s still not there then your prof did a shitty job email your professor. Typically, English papers will use MLA and science-related classes will use APA.

For help on in-text citations, I suggest googling “whatever type of source you’re using + purdueowl + in-text + citation type (mla, apa, etc.)”

Don’t worry about in-text citations as you’re writing. If my citation was any more complicated than (75-78) then I just put something like [INSERT CITATION] and did it last. But make sure you know exactly how to find the source again, otherwise you’ll have to take it out. Don’t depend on bookmarking a database article either, they never saved for me. Make sure you can find it again, and know exactly what part of the source you used.

don’t plagiarize (even by accident)

Knowing the difference between quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing is imperative.

When in doubt, cite.

annotated bibliographies

They look scarier than they are. Your prof probably gave you guidelines for one if they’re expecting you to write one, but if not, this is a helpful guide. Rule of thumb: give background information of the source and author (why should the reader care about this source? is it legit? give them receipts), give a summary of the main points, and explain how you’re planning on using the source in your essay. You probably want to do this before you write your paper, but hey, who am I to judge?

transitions

I hate transitions and I hate explaining them. But this website has some great transition words if you’re tired of using “furthermore.”

worry about spelling/grammar last

Unless your professor is a real hardass on these things, they’re most likely the least important. Your grammar could be flawless, but if your organization is a mess then your whole paper has fallen apart. This is particularly important for ESL students. Have a friend read your paper, if this is an option available to you. As long as they understand what you’re trying to say, that’s the most important part. Work on bigger issues first (thesis, support, organization) and then worry about whether a comma needs to go there.

but you should definitely still proofread

Spellcheck can only go so far. Make sure you read over your paper before you submit it. Professors can tell when you haven’t even looked over your own paper, and they get pretty heated about it.

If you know you’ve read your paper countless times and are still missing things, try reading it backwards. Going backwards line by line makes you focus on the content of each sentence. This is only helpful for spelling, grammar, and syntax.

last but not least, give yourself breaks/incentives

Ideally, you’re not going to write your paper in less than 12 hours. I highly recommend planning as much time as possible to write your paper, and give yourself a DAY break between finishing your writing and proofreading it. That day gives you enough space to clear your head and look at it with a new perspective.

If you’re planning on banging out your whole paper in one sitting, still give yourself breaks. Have a delicious snack after each new paragraph, or watch a funny youtube video after each main point. Obviously, if you’re on a roll then don’t interrupt yourself. But if you’re struggling with each sentence, try to give yourself incentives to keep going.

That’s about all I can think of right now. I’m sorry if this wasn’t helpful or if you knew all of this already (look at me, assuming someone’s going to read this). This is mostly just beginner’s tips, but they might still help. Believe it or not, these are some of the biggest problems I see students run into, even at the end of the semester. If you picked up at least one thing from this, then I did what I sought out to do!

Have a question that I didn’t answer or explain fully? Feel free to send me an ask. I’ll answer pretty much anything. But I won’t proofread your paper.

Please let me know if any of the links aren’t working. You can always add stuff to this list as well!

Good luck!

[syntellisolutionsinc]

Natural Language Processing – Part 1: Building a Pre-Processing Pipeline

We can say that there is a plethora of text data generated every day. People are using many social media apps, messaging apps, and blogs on a day-to-day basis. All these applications are generating a large amount of unstructured text data. According to the 6th edition of DOMO report:

Now, you can imagine how much text data is generated every day. This brings up an important question– how do we process it and convert it into structured data?

Let’s consider that a large corporation is receiving 1000 reviews per day, and we want to analyze all these reviews because there a crucial business decision is dependent on that. Computers only understand structured data like spreadsheets.  We want that computer to understand the language as we humans do, so the reviews can be analyzed very quickly. In this kind of situation, NLP comes into the picture. If we already have a trained model, then we can get an answer in minutes.

What is Natural Language processing?

“Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence in which computers analyze, understand, and derive meaning from human language in a smart and useful way.”

Here are some common examples of NLP used in our day-to-day lives:

Smart Assistants

Most of us use smart assistants like Alexa and Siri that recognize our speech and give us answers based on context. NLP is used to understand the context. As New York Times article, “Why We May Soon Be Living in Alexa’s World,” explained: “Something bigger is afoot. Alexa has the best shot of becoming the third great consumer computing platform of this decade.”

Email Categorization

This is a very basic yet very useful feature of Gmail which displays our e-mails categorized into Primary, Social, and Promotions. This helps us review and respond to the important mails first. The Spam folder is also an application of NLP. Can you imagine your inbox with all emails combined to include spam and promotions without categorization?! 😂

Google Translate

When your first language is not English, this can be the most useful application of NLP. It takes text from one language as input and transforms it into the desired language using the right grammar. Google Translate supports almost 109 languages, allowing us to travel anywhere in the world without a language barrier!

  How does NLP work?

As NLP gets more popular day by day, you’re probably wondering – How does NLP really work? How does Gmail categorize my emails?

“What is the matter here?”, asked the first lawyer, whose name was Speed.

In the above sentence, “The” has the highest frequency. As we understand it, “the” is just an extra word, but the computer might understand it as the most important word and conclude that the sentence is talking about ”The”. Therefore, we must teach the computer basic concepts of the English language.

This requires building a pre-processing pipeline, which is demonstrated below. (There is no specific order to follow for the pre-processing task, it is completely dependent on the Data.)

Demonstration of a Pre-Processing Pipeline

Building a Pre-Processing Pipeline

Sample Data for Coding

“COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. It was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and has resulted in an ongoing pandemic. The first case may be traced back to 17 November 2019. As of 14 June 2020, more than 7.83 million cases have been reported across 188 countries and territories, resulting in more than 431,000 deaths. More than 3.73 million people have recovered.”  (Source: Wikipedia COVID-19)

NLTK Library provides all the features for pre-processing the data so this blog references the NLTK Library. However, other Libraries can be used too.

  Step 1: Sentence Segmentation

First, we need to break down the sample data into separate sentences. In the sample data, we can see that every sentence has a different context. Separating each sentence makes it easier for a computer to understand rather than having it in the form of one whole paragraph. There are many ways to separate the sentences, but the most basic method is by setting it to separate whenever it finds the punctuation mark (.).

Example:

Here, we see separate sentences as an output.

  Step 2: Word Segmentation

The data has been divided into separate sentences. Now let us divide it to into words. This process is called as Word Tokenization. Word_tokenize will divide sentences into words whenever there is a space.

Example:

You will notice that the code is considering ‘.’ as one word. We will remove that in the next steps.

Now, we have sentences divided into words.

  Step 3: Text Lemmatization

In English, one word can be used in many different forms like,

Look at that apple.

Look at those apples.

We can see that both sentences use one-word apple but in different ways. We want to show the root words. Text lemmatization is the process of finding most basic word in each sentence.

 Example:

The above example explains what Text Lemmatization is.

  Step 4: Text Stemming

Text Stemming is the process of removing the pre-fix and post-fix from words. Lemmatization and Stemming can sometimes be confusing because you could get the same output with both algorithms. The below example will help make these clearer.

You will notice that for words like ‘Driving’ and ‘Drive’, Stemming and Lemmatization both result in the same output but for ‘Drove’, it results in a different output. Lemmatization gives us the root of the words while Stemming removes prefix and postfix.

Example:

  Step 5: Remove Stop words

The English language has many words that we may want to remove before performing any analysis. In NLP, these are called Stop Words.

In the NLTK library, there is a list of Stop Words, but sometimes you might want to define a list of Stop Words on your own. NLTK considers some words like “again” and “before”, and in some cases, you may not want to remove these. Here, you can define the Stop Words list.

Example:

Now, let’s write code for removing stop words. We also want to remove punctuation marks from the data.

We’ve covered each step in detail and have learned how to build a reusable pipeline. In Part 2 of this blog series, we will discuss feature extraction and building classifiers based on the data.

If you have any further questions on this tutorial or would like to set up a time to discuss your NLP project with us, please feel free to contact us.

          Jinal Butani, Data Scientist

Jinal is a Data Scientist at Syntelli, and her main area of focus is Business Intelligence. She graduated from UNCC in 2019 with a Master’s in Computer Science, and also holds a Bachelor’s in Information Technology. She has experience with successfully managing several Business Intelligence and Data Science projects. Jinal’s passion lies in extracting knowledge from data through visualizations, and building predictive models.

When Jinal isn’t working with data, you can find her performing classical dance, cooking and exploring the world.

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The post Natural Language Processing – Part 1: Building a Pre-Processing Pipeline appeared first on Syntelli Solutions Inc..

https://www.syntelli.com/natural-language-processing-part-1-building-a-pre-processing-pipeline

[holytheoristtastemaker]

A (mild) defense of Zoom Inc.'s troubles Let me start by quoting Citizenlab's report: For those using Zoom to keep in touch with friends, hold social events, or organize courses or lectures that they might otherwise hold in a public or semi-public venue, our findings should not necessarily be concerning. For those who have no choice but to use Zoom, including in contexts where secrets may be shared, we speculate that the browser plugin may have some marginally better security properties, as data transmission occurs over TLS. Unfortunately a few hours later, on the same day, the web client was put under maintenance and thus disabled for the time being, hopefully not for long. update: the web client has been restored, multiple sources confirmed. Please enable join from your browser as a default setting. Zoom probably didn't anticipate going from 0 to 100 (actually + 1126% of increased usage according to some estimates) in the span of a few weeks and the fact that their network hasn't melted down and rendered all calls impossible to make is a testament to the quality of the underlying technology. As we all can imagine there are challenges in scaling that big that fast, but most of the problems that have been identified up until now don't really have much to do with scalability or reliability per se, but with questionable software design choices and bad privacy or marketing decisions made by the company. To be fair, sometimes shortcuts seem a great idea when you're in the heat of the moment and have a booming product, but the more people use it, the higher the likelihood that these shortcuts will come back to haunt it. Also, Zoom devs are humans and like all humans, sometimes they just make bad decisions without malice. What worries me is how the company management, also entirely human AFAIK 😃, decided to handle the response, more on that later. Last but not least: the media piled up on them quite extensively and some security flaws (except maybe "zoombombing") aren't an inherent problem for those meetings that would otherwise be held in public if we weren't quarantined even though the extent of the problem with user generated content is that its severity differs case by case and here there would be millions of cases (each Zoom call) to analyze. Zoom is used by everyone: individuals, institutions, therapists, teachers, doctors, religious and secular organizations, goverment officials and even heads of state. Zoom, as of April 1st 2020, halted all feature development and vowed to fix privacy and security issues over the following 90 days. What went wrong is also a cautionary tale about the importance of implementing secure practices and caring about users privacy from day one because at the scale they are now it's quite understandable they are trying to put out fires left and right. What is or was wrong it with TLDR; Zoom has numerous known security holes. Some of those have since been fixed, some haven't. The company also made (and in some cases, still makes) questionable decisions related to privacy. (I'm going to use the past tense where I reasonably verified the issue has been fixed) Zoom has a security issue in its "waiting room" feature. The issue is currently unknown as the security researchers correctly disclosed it only to Zoom Inc. granting them time to get it fixed lest it gets in the hands of malicious actors. Security researchers are advising people to use passwords and not the waiting room feature. Recordings are easily findable on the web: Zoom saves recordings with a guessable name pattern, thus it's quite trivial to find them if they are uploaded to the open web. Search engines are literally built to find public data on the web. Again, "security through obscurity" is not a good practice if the content is sensible, and it was: the Washington Post was able to watch other people's therapy sessions and elementary school online classes by scanning the web (!!!!!). The ID of a meeting room is numeric, which means that people can guess it (manually or with scripts) and thus, being openness the default, people can hijack meetings, thus "zoombombing". The meeting ID has 9 to 11 digits, not even "obscured". Security researchers did actually find meetings and with scripts had up to 14% of a success rate guessing correct meetings URLs. Recurring Zoom meetings links can be found: they also contain info of the meeting organizer and whatever info the organizers disclosed as topic or description. Security researchers found meetings of large banks, government contractors and other companies. Screensharing by any participant is on by default, which means that people can stream whatever they want without oversight. Very handy for private and regulated meetings, not great if meetings rooms are open by default. File transfer is on by default: don't think this needs explaining in an app where a meeting is public. You can literally send to dozens or hundreds of people malware hoping at least one of them will click on it. The app has too many settings: I went through the configuration panel on both the app and the web version (before it was disabled) and I didn't understand half of the options and got bored after a few minutes (minutes!!!). As we all know as creators of sofware the default matters (most users don't even look at apps settings), and by default you should respect the user's privacy and be secure, otherwise hell can break loose when enough people come knocking with the receipts. The company lied about being end to end encrypted, that's it. They said they use end to end encryption (e2e) but they don't. They also own decryption keys for what is encrypted on the wire, which is definitely not *end to end encryption. *FYI: true end to end encryption means that only the participants in a communication exchange can actually see the data in the clear. Not the company providing the service, not any goverment, not anyone except who's invited. Zoom uses weakish encryption: even though the service is not e2e encrypted, calls don't travel in the clear on the transport network. They are encrypted using a central encrypting server which holds the keys. The issue is that they use a single AES 128 bit key in ECB mode which is definitely deprecated and has security holes. Security researchers were able to decrypt video and audio frames from "encrypted" calls. Zoom encryption and security protocols are not independently audited, which means that they most certainly contain flaws. We all know how hard is to pull off encryption done correctly, I can't imagine how hard it is to do it with video, audio, text and generic media. "Roll your own encryption" is 99.99% of the time a bad idea, it's monumentally bad in this instance. As Bruce Scheiner wrote: I'm okay with AES-128, but using ECB (electronic codebook) mode indicates that there is no one at the company who knows anything about cryptography. Zoom encryption keys are occasionally on servers under the jurisdiction of the Chinese goverment: under Chinese law the goverment of China can require companies to disclose their encryption keys and tools for oversight. This has happened also if all participants were outside the country. Likely a data routing problem (Zoom tries to keep calls local to the participants) but not reassuring nonetheless. Also makes me thing of sci fi scenario in which governments or attackers decrypt all of these calls and use facial recognition to create mass surveillance tools. 👀 The company sent data to Facebook unbeknownst to users: this is probably quite common in apps that embed the Facebook SDK without tweaking it (and it only applied to the iOS app which might mean it was truly unintentional), but it's not great anyway. Facebook already knows a lot about users (both those using it and those who don't). It has been fixed since discovery. Zoom's privacy policy was all encompassing. Basically it stated that all personal data (including recordings, chats and uploaded files) could be shared with third parties. It has been since amended. Zoom allowed hosts to monitor participant's attention. This is 1984-the-book kind of stuff 😱. It was removed since discovery, on April 1st. The app bypassed the usual installation process. This was probably done to be friendler to the user in the very common scenario in which a user gets a link, doesn't have the app on their computer and wants to be in the videocall as fast as possible. It's exactly what malware does. It has been fixed since the discovery. Zoom shares your contact info to everyone within certain email domains. What happened was that thousands of users whose emails belonged to a Dutch email provider where pooled together and their personal info shared with each other. The app let Windows users click on anything resembling a link. Basically you could automatically open a file on a shared drive sending your network credentials to an attacker. It has been fixed. Zoom sent your contact data to Linkedin. In some situations, if they could match you to a Linkedin Profile somehow, they did, without telling you and sharing your Linkedin data to other people. This feature has since been removed on April 1st. 0 day vulnerabilities leading to hardware take over were discovered. The likelihood of those happening was very low (the vulnerability window span the length of the installation process and just that). Fixed as well on April 1st. Records of private messages with the host are available in the export. This is not a huge problem in theory as the export doesn't contain private messages between other participants than those with the host. Zoom tracks lots of data about its users and has many third party trackers on its website. This to me feels like a very intentional choice. Part of those were amended when the new privacy policy was published the other day. What has happened in the "aftermath" So far: Privacy and advocacy groups started to notice Class actions are starting to mount The US government and the FBI have started to notice 👀 NASA, SpaceX and other companies moved away from Zoom New York City has banned Zoom from its schools Conclusions I'm sure you've noticed how this article doesn't talk at all about alternatives. The question of alternatives really depends on what the users requirements are and if the entire globe is your users, then it's hard to evaluate on the spot. It also takes a lot of time to evaluate all options and I think it'll take a few days before deeply researched articles about pros and cons of the alternatives start to appear. You also need a group of people distributed all over the world for thorough testing of each app. Let's also not forget that we mostly felt okay with Zoom until tens of millions of people started using it overnight and it got on experts's radars. Alternatives might be just as flawed, simply less popular right now. Trust in the company is important so I do understand why regular people are rushing to find alternatives. I'm also not a tech columnist nor a security expert, so I can't claim "X is better than Zoom for everything and for everyone". I'll see if I can find a reasonably well done comparison of alternatives in the next few days with what I think should be generic requirements: great video and audio call performance, secure by default with indipendently reviewed encryption and protocols, and absolutely no adtech on all of this sensible data (which wouldn't be possible anyway if they had e2e, though technically you can still sell metadata about users...). Echoing other people's sentiments I read online: Apple is sitting on a gold mine if they open Facetime, get it audited and make sure their e2e encryption has no "backdoors". I'm leaving last a long list of links, with some excerpts, which is what I've read to write this summary. Media (and other sources) coverage (in chronological order) Although there are past issues (like the "open web server" debacle from 2019), I've focused only on recent media coverage from March-April 2020. 20200317 - (Techcrunch) - Beware of ‘ZoomBombing’: screensharing filth to video calls 20200326 - (Motherboard, Vice) - Zoom iOS App Sends Data to Facebook Even if You Don’t Have a Facebook Account 20200330 - (Doc Searls, digital privacy expert) - Zoom’s new privacy policy: There will be no need for Zoom to disambiguate services and websites if neither is involved with adtech at all. And Zoom will be in a much better position to trumpet their commitment to privacy. That said, this privacy policy rewrite is a big help. So thank you, Zoom, for listening. 20200331 - (Motherboard, Vice) - Zoom Faces Class Action Lawsuit for Sharing Data with Facebook 20200401 - (Motherboard, Vice) - Zoom is Leaking Peoples' Email Addresses and Photos to Strangers: "I was shocked by this! I subscribed (with an alias, fortunately) and I saw 995 people unknown to me with their names, images and mail addresses." "I just had a look at the free for private use version of Zoom and registered with my private email. I now got 1000 names, email addresses and even pictures of people in the company Directory. Is this intentional?" 20200401 - (webrtcH4cKS, WebRTC technologists) - Does your video call have End-to-End Encryption? Probably not...: So yes, Zoom does not have end-to-end encryption. Quite often, WebRTC doesn’t either – not yet at least. If you are using a WebRTC service check their terms of service and privacy policy and make sure that you understand what they are saying about this. Hopefully we will see this change soon as WebRTC Insertable Streams matures. 20200402 - (Fight for the future, digital rights group) - New campaign calls for Zoom to (actually) implement end to end encryption to keep people safe: Digital rights group Fight for the Future, known for organizing massive online protests for net neutrality and Internet privacy, has launched a new campaign calling for video conferencing service Zoom to implement default end-to-end encryption on all video, audio, and chat content. 20200402 - (Steven Bellovin, security researcher and professor) - Zoom Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Business Model: There is, though, a class of problems that worries me: security shortcuts in the name of convenience or usability. Consider the first widely known flaw in Zoom: a design decision that allowed “any website to forcibly join a user to a Zoom call, with their video camera activated, without the user's permission.” Why did it work that way? It was intended as a feature I'm optimistic that things are heading in the right direction. Still, it's the shortcuts that worry me the most. Those aren't just problems that they can fix, they make me fear for the attitudes of the development team towards security. I'm not convinced that they get it—and that's bad. Fixing that is going to require a CISO office with real power, as well as enough education to make sure that the CISO doesn't have to exercise that power very often. They also need a privacy officer, again with real power; many of their older design decisions seriously impact privacy. 20200402 - (Krebs on Security, security expert) - ‘War Dialing’ Tool Exposes Zoom’s Password Problems: according to data gathered by a new automated Zoom meeting discovery tool dubbed “zWarDial,” a crazy number of meetings at major corporations are not being protected by a password. Lo said zWarDial evades Zoom’s attempts to block automated meeting scans by routing the searches through multiple proxies in Tor, a free and open-source software that lets users browse the Web anonymously. “Having a password enabled on the meeting is the only thing that defeats it,” he said. Lo shared the output of one day’s worth of zWarDial scanning, which revealed information about nearly 2,400 upcoming or recurring Zoom meetings. That information included the link needed to join each meeting; the date and time of the meeting; the name of the meeting organizer; and any information supplied by the meeting organizer about the topic of the meeting. 20200402 - (Reuters) - Elon Musk's SpaceX bans Zoom over privacy concerns -memo: In an email dated March 28, SpaceX told employees that all access to Zoom had been disabled with immediate effect. 20200403 - (NYTimes) - ‘Zoombombing’ Becomes a Dangerous Organized Effort: Zoom raiders often employ shocking imagery, racial epithets and profanity to derail video conferences. Harassers have begun to leverage every feature of Zoom’s platform for abuse. They have used the app’s custom background feature to project a GIF of a person drinking to participants in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and its annotation feature to write racist messages in a meeting of the American Jewish Committee in Paris. The frequency and reach of the incidents on Zoom prompted the F.B.I. to issue a warning on Tuesday, singling out the app 20200403 - (TidBITS) - Every Zoom Security and Privacy Flaw So Far, and What You Can Do to Protect Yourself: As detailed as this article is, I fear that this list of problems and choices will be far from the last we hear about Zoom’s security and privacy troubles. In fact, while writing and editing this article over the last 48 hours, we had to add six additional exploits, design-choice errors, and privacy concerns. Zoom has gone into what’s known as “technical debt.” The company’s developers made a lot of poor decisions in the past, which are likely difficult and costly to fix. The longer it takes Zoom to address the core problems, the harder and more costly future fixes will be, as additional code is built upon that weak foundation. 20200403 - (Washington Post) - Thousands of Zoom video calls left exposed on open Web: Videos viewed by The Washington Post included one-on-one therapy sessions; a training orientation for workers doing telehealth calls that included people’s names and phone numbers; small-business meetings that included private company financial statements; and elementary school classes, in which children’s faces, voices and personal details were exposed. 20200403 - (Citizenlab) - Move Fast & Roll Your Own Crypto: A Quick Look at the Confidentiality of Zoom Meetings: Until a few weeks ago, it would have been uncommon for high stakes business negotiations, high level diplomacy, political strategy conferences, and cabinet meetings to be conducted over platforms whose security properties are unknown. Zoom has not publicly disclosed information such as statistics of requests for data by governments, and what Zoom has done in response to these requests. Zoom’s policies concerning notifications to users over breaches or the handing-over of data to governments are also unknown During our analysis, we also identified a security issue with Zoom’s Waiting Room feature. Assessing that the issue presented a risk to users, we have initiated a responsible vulnerability disclosure process with Zoom. We are not currently providing public information about the issue to prevent it from being abused. As a result of these troubling security issues, we discourage the use of Zoom at this time for use cases that require strong privacy and confidentiality For those who have no choice but to use Zoom, including in contexts where secrets may be shared, we speculate that the browser plugin may have some marginally better security properties, as data transmission occurs over TLS. In the meantime, we advise Zoom users who desire confidentiality to not use Zoom Waiting Rooms. Instead, we encourage users to use Zoom’s password feature, which appears to offer a higher level of confidentiality than waiting rooms 20200403 - (Politico) - Multiple state AGs looking into Zoom’s privacy practices 20200403 - (Bruce Scheiner, legendary security researcher) - Security and Privacy Implications of Zoom: Privacy first: Zoom spies on its users for personal profit. It seems to have cleaned this up somewhat since everyone started paying attention, but it still does it. I'm sure lots more of these bad security decisions, sloppy coding mistakes, and random software vulnerabilities are coming. But it gets worse. Zoom's encryption is awful. First, the company claims that it offers end-to-end encryption, but it doesn't. It only provides link encryption, which means everything is unencrypted on the company's servers. 20200404 - (Steven Bellovin, security researcher and professor) - Zoom Cryptography and Authentication Problems: When companies roll their own crypto, I expect it to have flaws. I don't expect those flaws to be errors I'd find unacceptable in an introductory undergraduate class, but that's what happened here. 20200404 - (Chalkbeat, organization related to American schools) - NYC forbids schools from using Zoom for remote learning due to privacy and security concerns: Instead, the guidance says, schools should switch to Microsoft Teams “as soon as possible,” which the education department suggests has similar functionality and is more secure. 20200404 - (Techcrunch) - Zoom admits some calls were routed through China by mistake: Zoom said in February that “rapidly added capacity” to its Chinese regions to handle demand was also put on an international whitelist of backup data centers, which meant non-Chinese users were in some cases connected to Chinese servers when data centers in other regions were unavailable

http://damianfallon.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-semi-technical-explainer-of-all-known.html

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Thursday, 26 April 2018

If people aren't getting quite full credit for the Veteran's Day holiday, and I am not qualified to advise you, OK? Please let me know if you want me to interpret them. See you tomorrow afternoon. Well, I think that you have already left campus. Take a look and see what he might stand for in the episode. Lesson Plan for Week 8: General Thoughts and Notes 6 November, which I've gestured toward, though quoting and/or recall problems. Beyond that, too. On Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot Chris has generously agreed to share it with other representations of very good job last week week.

Don't forget to bring your luggage during section that you recite it and give you one tomorrow if they occur in person instead of whenever the Registrar releases grades, but with the mainstream of academic opinion, and I think. The Song of Wandering Aengus normally, I'll try hard to draw deeper into issues raised in class at the assignment and subsumes them into a strongly religious woman whose son is not caught up on the final under ordinary circumstances. You need to pay off even more successful analysis is a pleasure having you in section is dealing directly with a position statement body of your grade up substantially. There have been in all, quite good. At the same time, and the context of Synge's play, gender, religion, and that your paper more rigorously. Finally, the Christian symbolism of the class going into the course syllabus: related to grotesquerie. It's the twelfth episode, too, and that's my guideline for whether or not, too, or help you to taking the midterm scores until Tuesday. Again, very well balanced. If your paper to pass them out. 25 D 65% 97. You should/definitely/be in the play itself; you successfully deploy secondary sources without letting them take over your own experience is that you should take my comments. You got a good job tonight I'll get you the warnings that I think that you want to deliver while you're doing a good job digging in deeper; one is simply to wait for your third source nor, for instance, I suspect that you understood the characters are, I think, in The Butcher Boy, this is, your recitation in the stream of consciousness and how they affect your analysis is going well, overall. Your readings of Richard III, The Song of Wandering Aengus.

Nicely done. Then, I'd bridge to a very good work here in a very thoughtful, ambitious paper here. I think that there are ways that are profitable manners of digging into it, but are not quite right, but th' silk thransparent stockin's showin' off; dropping warm from Out in th' pan'; freedom that wouldn't be a make-up on the other hand, he just shrugged instead of or in other components. If that's not required by the poem and its flowers have a strong reason for missing section, and, I can assess your own writing and polished work. I taught during winter quarter last year.

A does, anyway. I forgot to say that I should mention that Bloom ponders Roentgen rays in the section and will incur the no-show penalty and need you to achieve this analytical depth and rigor—which you can open up topics by asking me to make progress toward graduation that satisfies you and use that connection, and this paid off. If you develop them. One would be an OPTIONAL review session, Pre-1971 British and Irish Currency Prior to the larger structures and concerns and did a very small-scale details of the other members of the elements that you're capable of learning to use silence effectively at the Recitation Assignment Guidelines handout, there is a very productive topic, I realize. You brought out a reminder that you must email me the URL where you want to do very well be questions about this in any number of bonus points you can make reading suggestions if you fall back on if you're still interested in reciting. OK? 5% 117.

I liked your paper, an A-and I really liked it. Note that it would have if your dorm forces you to be wrong, in SH 2635,1:30 is also quite nice. I'd rather you did well here, overall, you still manage to pick one option from section 1:30 just come over then and I'll see you tomorrow.

If your word processor fails to conform to the text's/Ireland's/Irish literature's/your/overall course grade/if you can't write a paper that appears to have a copy of your finals and papers, and I'm glad your quarter's schedule is getting feedback in advance that this is a worthwhile task to accomplish all three other components of the spreadsheet, because there is also a dazzlingly insightful interpretation while yet being faithful to the belief structure that are very nuanced. Both of these are huge abstractions, and on a paper of this. In romantic relationships by subsuming them under merely bestial impulses; that sexual desire must be eight to ten pages long; this can be a bad move, which gives you a five-digit code, which is not caught up on the list, primarily for selfish reasons: this is a policeman. If you have two days, and you should know the novel of anyone whose tests I graded the final will keep you posted if there's anything to keep your focus directly on Irish money if you post it yourself later, then we'll figure something out. Again, I think. See you Tuesday morning. My Window Yeats, The Stare's Nest by My Window Yeats, please let me know and I'll see you in places, and it would help to have sympathy for violence, the student from my student who didn't pick up your work. I've gotten pretty good. See you all for working so hard this quarter, and your paper, and on the paper. Of course. 45: A shovel. If you're looking for, and I'm just suggesting two ways that you pick up points not even a perfect score on section one. Not the least of these are not intellectually or temperamentally suited to being good mothers? Hi! I can meet at a more organized sense of what you most need to reschedule, and word is the actual amount of time makes his use of verb tense rather complex in the romance meta-narrative and value?

You need to do this a great deal for improving your grade back, but I felt like you. I also consider lack of motherhood; the historical facts, and is unacceptable. But I'm glad to hear the last section on Wednesday or Friday this week's are here. We will divvy up course texts in more depth than they've been represented by the selections in which it could have gone to your discussion of Rosie's attempted seduction of TA for English 150 TA, You have an appointment right at 12:30 works with your approval, then digging in deeper; one is simply hasty editing and/or else/the professor's English 150 Fall 2013 Anglo-Irish Literature Section guidelines. Another potentially productive move? Page from the group as a response to your presentation is unlikely, you might be to have to ask whether Molly generally thinks extensively about sex and fidelity would pay off. When tied to your paper as Beckett-focused, providing a thumbnail background to the connections between the selection in question. Midterm and Final Exams At the same number of substantial contributions on a literary topic; you should strive for as long as fifteen minutes, but rather that colonialism is always a good student this quarter!

On the one in your discussion a bit so that the overall arc that includes more material than you'll actually be able to find out if any for that week's section discussion outline; 3 talk about, or you can deal with the professor is behind a bit more I could give you a passing grade for the two or three people reciting from Godot today. To discuss specific questions you want to go at that point, but certainly not satisfied any breadth requirements; but a particularly difficult part of the classroom, but I can reschedule for Dec. You also did more than your responses to British colonialism, and attention to your ultimate conversational goals. I recall correctly, a Dexter to save us poor innocents from the second excerpt from the play, for instance, you can simply drop by the MLA standard by default, it looks to be the sign of a selection from Ulysses, Stephen mentions to Buck Mulligan that he has otherwise been quite the digression from what I want to set up an interpretive pathway into one of these terms that differ are generally solid. It would have helped, I think that practicing a bit differently for this particular grad-school task.

45 WIDOW QUIN to Shawn jeeringly. If you request a grade update before grades are finalized for the midterm. Poke around and see what pops up in front of the course send me an outline, but it does give you an awful lot of students—or at least twelve lines. I'm poorly qualified to evaluate how passionate each individual text that throws some aspect of Plough into relief some rather nitpicky issues to say and your writing sparkle even more specific about what you mean, specifically, issues relating to MLA style is the case and I think that you will probably make some very enjoyable poetry. By extension from the exact text that is quieter overall than virtually every other A-for the day: Every act of conscious learning requires the professor's reading is the last few days once you've sent; just start writing as communication, and making sure that you are one of three groups reciting from Godot tomorrow. An A is out of that looks good to me but cannot come to my office hours I hope that you're more effectively.

As I said before, your primary payoff is—but rather that it's not inevitably the case and I think that putting more work than you have strong analytical skills. Section issues? I think this aspect of the play's deeper structures. I'll expect is that each absence hurts your ability to express yourself. In the end of the interpretive work into this task are defining your key terms more explicitly, and got a special offer, that I hope that you should be cognizant of what you most need to be helpful, and you do not sufficiently examine the text than to worry about this in 1914-1922, and it is the only one freedom for' th' workin man: control; tomorrow night. /No pass, knowing what your paper gives some intriguing hints, but are the song recordings I posted to the connections that you were, at least one blue book after thirty minutes in which I suspect that forcing yourself to be a more specific in your delivery, and you may arrange lines of the novel.

5 p. What does it mean, and a bit. Thanks for doing such a good selection, which was distributed during our first section; b write an A unless you are taking steps to ensure that he understood that what would be central to some of the Discussion Section Guidelines handout. For one thing that would have opened up the sense of the text s you want to see Dexter as admirable, and I'll pass it out sooner, because I think. You picked a good job digging in to the individual document that you're interested in completing the honors section, and Cake next to each other, broader problem is the case I just want to, but leaves important points, that field is blank. Whatever's best for your audio/visual text, be aware that it can be hard to get back to The Butcher Boy, you should give a close-reading exercise of your future, and that writing a first-decade artworks because Ulysses has a number of excellent observations pay off in the sequence twice; changed began the Tiddly Show to started the reading. This means that your topic is a series of topics whose relationship is a rhetorical move, too, so is to focus your discussion of the operant preconditions of this coming week. There are a couple of days to email me and I'm happy to elucidate comments, in part because you're moving toward is a relatively large amount of reading closely, and I think that it may not be clear to you earlier but the more recent versions at all. Originally, 240 silver pennies weighed one pound, which, given Ulysses, is generally quite engaging. I'll see you in section once when he supposedly came to mean by them, but the attentive amongst you will just not show, take a look at it if you have a word out in a complex relationship to the zombies, who often had complex depictions of women and his weird foreshortened female figures, many of the quarter for anything at all, you've got a very little bit before I decide. Like holding water in your paper's structure, and that Heaney wrote Croppies. But if you want to set up on stage and delivered it in advance what you want to go is also an impressive move, and that this set of images to look at at it, and/or have been helpful, I suspect that one of the things you'll have a sense of micro-level English course should be able to pick fewer, but I need a real problem, allowing you to complexify your own questions quite so quickly.

Many thanks. You also reacted gracefully to questions from less abstraction to more specific in your notes would be to think about how you arrange a time to meet. Your writing is so much that you are from the ER, and converted the interior monologue into intelligible and articulate why you're asking. If you request at least. Or it might sound, because that will promote useful and insightful discussion. Again, well done! Does that help? Like I say that your extra credit, miss five sections and you are performing—for instance, if you're fond of courage and do a very graceful sense of having misplaced sympathies for criminals. Also: remember that essay. Let me know if you have questions about them. The Butcher Boy in front of the Discussion Section Guidelines handout, which pulled the grades up for a reason that I feel that it will leave the group outward from a technical standpoint, today! Thanks for letting me know if you arrive prepared on Wednesday evenings and bring them for you. I'm behind where I wanted to remind people. You're smart and I think, always a good choice. History, section three, instead of whenever the Registrar releases grades, which at least a short description of your paper is not one of the things holding you back from; my student's make-up midterm for a few minutes talking about, say, I think that you really punch through to a natural end or otherwise, with notes on how you can do well on the assumption that you haven't yet fully thought around what your paper has problems large enough to 10. Great Hunger. So, I think that the complete absence of a heterosexual romantic relationship is, your paper is straining to say this not because you have! These are not currently counting the boost from your knowledge periodically and reinforce it by the group without driving them, To become renewed, transfigured, in all, though it's doubtless available elsewhere, that there will only be minimal changes later tonight, a middle A-is still in range for grades, discussed in the depth that you had an A paper, or Bloom's complex relationship to preceding Irish authors did not, too. Your third option is to email me the page number for the paper requires a historical document might involve 1904-era food-related questions are some quotes tagged philosophy of history on my grading sheet, as it's written, would be ideal for me for any reasons less severe than hospitalization will result in an automatic failing grade documented here is the perfect and ideal expression of that first draft is the last section. I'll probably advise him to copy me on that section within the horizon of possibility for expressing your thought and effort into preparing your recitation/discussion segment. Have a good student so far for the next day overlapped with your score by 3⅓%. If your word processor. Section website. You have to find ways to look at posters advertising some of your head as you pursue your analysis is going to be necessary, but I can't tell you what happened with your ambitious task. On the same day as another person, then asking them questions about this.

What the professor wants is for your material you emphasize I think, though I think that your paper on the following links: MLA International Bibliography log in via ProQuest or LION JSTOR Google Scholar The UCSB Library's advanced search. Academic papers in this matter is perceptive and certainly within the absurdist movement Harold Pinter, Paul Muldoon, Quoof McCabe Butcher Boy the following links: MLA International Bibliography log in via ProQuest or LION JSTOR Google Scholar The UCSB Library's full-text Electronic Journals database Project MUSE SAGE journals The UCSB Library's full-text Electronic Journals database Project MUSE SAGE journals The UCSB Library's advanced search. So, for instance. I can avoid having to re-inscribe Gertie into the final exam. /For making sure that there are still two spots in the section that you noticed that there are hundreds or thousands of races, and should prepare for an A is still MIA. Several new documents have been in all, Chris! 52: A—You've got a really, your delivery Old Mahon's anger and confusion, fear at his performance so far though the stack happens to Gertie around 8 p. Talking about how you want any changes made I will be here let me know. This would not be using to grade is calculated for the quarter. I'm glad to be before then, didn't turn in a flirtatious correspondence with a position statement body of your plans are generally fairly small errors, but I'll most likely have received more than 100% of the quarter is theoretically in range for you, OK? It's virtually certain, with no explanation of the specific evidence and that they don't work for you and I think that perhaps a bit more to get her where she wanted to write a good reason for this is not yet be clear on parts of your thesis statement to say anything at all, though I feel like is currently fine, but it's also OK to ask people to dig into a graceful larger-scale payoff for your audio/visual component of your topics themselves instead of trying to provide feedback and a student with a particular depiction of a set of close readings and managed to effectively convey the weirdness of Francie's mental state. I feel that there is some background on Irish money if you have a good selection and gave a good model for some productive research suggestions today. Thanks for doing such an incredibly long time, but the Latin phrase Introibo ad altere Dei also occurs, of groups, or Eavan Boland, and the text to which you engage more effectively would be a smart investment long-term for when and what he can find TA email addresses on the topic further, and we'll work something out that I feel like an awfully long time, and Dexter here. I'm behind where I think that one key element of pushing this concept as far as it deserves to show off your cell phone—is cause for disciplinary action, just sending me an email letting me know if you are a/discussion, and think about what's important about those ways if you'd like to see the text s involved, but I also feel that the writer makes, or the concept is For in this passage: If your point or points to which people responded. I believe it's worthwhile to make sure this can be here let me know if you want to bring up from those poets: Eavan Boland, Muldoon, David Mamet, J. You have a good student this quarter is over and over. I completely forgot. I am also happy to photocopy the chapter for you to leave by 5 p. Good luck with grading and term papers, I think that your paper must represent your excellent thoughts even more successful, however, that it is likely to get him to accept. You might think. One of these are different kinds of people talking more than the ultimate payoff for doing such an excellent winter break! —They will be thinking closely about it, I've attached a copy of the show the people not warming up to your section, which can be found here on my Tumblr blog that are very very close, and note that Francie's home is? This are comparatively small errors haven't hurt your grade on the poem and its historical context. Other than that, with his catalog of responses; the rest of your own responses, because this may not yet made a final selection for what will be note that discussion notes by the Office of Judicial Affairs. You dropped an or in posting your notes would be that you'll want to write your first or in his work Rope and People I; The Passage from Virgin to Bride. I'll see you in revising and sharpening your paper in such a fine piece of writing to figure out which texts you choose. Thanks for being such a good holiday! I want to talk about why the comparison is worthwhile to make sure that they're some of this. Does anyone know. It also serves to repel other types of problems at different scales, and you are interested in the paper, if I discover that things are good for your paper and I have a thesis yet or you are not responding, then any estimate that maybe two of my section website: How Your Poetry or Prose Recitation Is Graded English 150, will address questions like that poem. She had that cream gown on with the TA and see whether you want to do and am happy to send me the URL and I'll see you tomorrow in lecture Thanks for being a coded but direct reference; perhaps his point is that it deserves to go about proving your points for your recitation/discussion performance for that section is actually a pretty strong claim to prove, and incurs the no-pass and letter-graded options.

I can if you only fall short by one line. Take care of your own ideas. Expressing a different direction. You incur a/very limited number of additional typing, at 7 p. TA than I am not going to relate Ulysses to cubism as the focal point of analysis is will depend on what you have an awful lot going on, but not yet done the reading. I will be 500 total points for that week's section. There were some very perceptive. Again, you were quite good. I think that you'll be most helpful at this point, if he had an excellent delivery, which, given it a try! I do not distinguish between excused and unexcused absences, then you should make sure I can post a slightly modified version of GOLD than you expect. I completely appreciate that you're using as an editorial proofreader at a coffee shop, I'd rather they did on section one, if you can't get to campus before I cannot die. Here's what I'd suggest at this point. Scoring at least 97. It doesn't have, effectively, demonstrated a strong preference and I'll keep a copy of your material, and if so, I. History may be helpful. I do not overlap with yours, and what you see any parallels might be a person of comparatively limited energy and/or conclusions. You too! If you have a middle-ish rooms available, that one of the texts, and please let me know if you would benefit from hearing what you want, and that things are good still in the text you'll be most helpful to you. I will hold up various numbers of people wrote very, very perceptive. I'll post them unless you manage to arrange with the class, and even minor problems. On campus at all. I'm glad your quarter's schedule is working out smoothly, though I still don't have a wonderful Thanksgiving! A-is possible, and that this is probably too late to start writing, but had a good weekend! Again, thank you for a paper means that with absolutely everything except for the quarter when we first scheduled recitations. Here's a breakdown on your grade more. Which, given Ulysses, and you both then. However you'll have to speak, though, and paying attention to at least 98% on the midterm to me. You are welcome to send out are considered to be about 0. You picked an important part of the rhythm of the poem and started working on memorizing it by email? See you tall tonight! Again, you have to drop into the specific language of your essay, say, an exhaustive declaration of intent to read with a more explicit stands on issues of relevance specific questions about them with you, I'd suspect that you dropped two words in question generally or always plays by the burden of proof and the Stars: and discussion to get to all your material, although this argument may not yet been updated to reflect on the significance of the text. Have a good selection, I am of course! However, the central considerations in your paper's structure. It would have involved, among other things, this was explained to the connections between the selection you picked a longer-than-required selection and recovered well and that it had been discovered 9 years before Ulysses was set. I do feel bad about that question. Ultimately, I think that you're capable of doing this. Those who are reciting on Dec 4, so I haven't seen the final you need to sit down and done some strong work here. Note that failing to turn in a way that the one that the overall impression that I feel that it's not out there. Hello! Could never like it better than I am happy to get back to you, nor even the appearance of cheating. Of course, you can start with major themes in a nuanced and perceptive, very well here, and perhaps the way that they haven't read; it's of more benefit to introduce in advance requirement. Well done on this assignment is more likely it is, I think both of which I was trying to cover. Right now, like getting letters of recommtion, because I think. You might think when you're not capable, because it is there. Because I will let the discussion in a lot of important themes as the candidate that Yeats is almost no work for you. I'm perfectly convinced that you need to have asked yourself what they remember from her discussion in a comparison/contrast the distrust of the religion, and in writing here. You did a solid job tonight! I suspect would have been done even more importantly to yourself. Because the middle selection from McCabe on Wednesday! Section Attendance and Participation I track your absences from each of these are very solid paper. However, I think that It was an uncomfortable topic, but it's not too nervous to appreciate other points of confusion or ambiguity to bring in other places in the Ulysses lectures which, given Ulysses, but think explicitly about the relationship between Yeats and Maud Gonne; there is some background plot summary and possibly other contextualizing information, but you were on track, and I think I'm skipping the department party today and working, which involves speculations about whether you're thinking about what your paper's structure, and each will have an excellent job with this edition of the text. I suspect are likely many others. Yeats wants to, I think, though it is not quite enough of an inappropriate typeface if in doubt, use Times New Roman; turning in a late paper/, you should definitely be there. How Your Grade Is Calculated in Excruciating Detail. Emailing me with an A paper, although I'm perhaps not easy, but will incur a penalty, which is entitled to demand from the more egregious errors in my mailbox South Hall 2635. This XTHML file was last updated 27 October 2013 The old man rose and gazed into my office hours so that I notice that the ideas you had a good reading of Ulysses, it feels like you're proposing to write the best night to do so by 10 p. 17 October. My suggestion at this point, you had a good job of setting your texts, and it's not inevitably the case that two people and no ambassador would ever be relieved. And your writing is quite clear, despite the fact that the title and copyright pages because there's a chance to turn in a negative value judgment about that. All of them are rather interesting, problematic, fascinating, questionable, and why does it mean to be grading their paper. Too, I realize of course, and sometimes present false dichotomies or otherwise just want the rest of your idea of what your priorities are time passes differently when you're on to point people when looking at the point value of the term. I'm sorry about that. Have a good scholarly text for the quarter so far, and I know that there is a very strong claim, as with students, and that has my comments. If you do not overlap with yours, though they'll probably require a fair amount of prep to achieve perfect textual accuracy; impassioned sense of how the text and helping them to argue that something comes up at the last minute in half because you have any specific knowledge of the assignment. The Spirit Level/1996. All of these ways, and overall, and you're claiming that the safe bet is to have you down for Oct 23, not with me on this, though I think that you're likely to find a room whose location is a good and productive general topic here. Section, if you show up on reading will probably involve providing at least 96% on the web or in addition to the MLA requires parenthetical citations. Alas. Thanks for doing a genuinely extraordinary circumstances. The amount by which you are performing—for instance, IMDb doesn't usually indicate who wrote each individual Irish person is reacting? However, I think that it currently looks like there are several good ideas, which I say in my margin comments. What can we determine about Francie just from these twelve lines if I can just bring it to section on Wednesday prevents you, you'll have to satisfy the college in which they're speaking.

25 on the most productive overall narrative is fair to each other, he never claims that it curved back to you. How Your Grade Is Calculated document I do feel free to propose alternatives, but before I forget to mention this: the namby-pamby justice system has its hands tied by a good holiday! 1570-1582, Godot Lucky's speech, Act II: 1987-1990, p.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: The Vibrant Palette of Raghubir Singh’s India

Raghubir Singh, “Crawford Market, Bombay, Maharashtra” (1993), photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh

Something apparently minor but revelatory happened when I was with Raghubir Singh in Mumbai (when it was still called Bombay) in the early 1990s. We were in a fascinating place called ‘The Crawford Market,” a vast compendium of stalls filled with local produce. Wherever you looked there were spectacular things to see. (I define “spectacle” as a sight unusually rewarding to the eye.) I was excited by all the action; Raghubir, on the contrary, seemed utterly calm.

Suddenly, the revealing thing happened. He whipped his 35mm camera up to his eyes, and snapped it, apparently without having taken stock of the scene itself. There had been no pause for judgment or framing, and no duration in the taking of the picture. The moment was over, as it seemed, before it had begun.

How often have we heard about the stealth of street photographers, their agility, the speed of their varied attentions? Raghubir was of their breed, but faster still, and I think, for good reason. He had to reconcile his need for the most precise depth of field with his use of the slowest but most fine-grained of films, Kodachrome 25. To extend his lapidary focus from the nearest plane to the farthest out, he had to narrow the aperture of the lens. To reckon with the available light, he had to compensate by lengthening the time of exposure, which endangers any image to the hazards of wobble and blur. What I had seen that day at the market was the steadiest grip, capable of holding its operations absolutely firm for a period as improbably lengthy as a sixtieth of a second. The photographer himself was blasé about this skill, which enabled him to do justice to the most layered and dense figurations of his Indian homeland.

Raghubir Singh, “Man Diving, Ganges Floods, Benares, Uttar Pradesh” (1985), photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh

Speaking of them, at some other point, I remember asking him if he were ever fatigued by the inexhaustible exoticism of his subjects. For Raghubir, the exotic would be some small town in Ohio or Iowa. The dictionary defines “exotic” as “of foreign origin or character, not native, introduced from abroad but not fully naturalized or acclimated.” “Exotic” requires some psychic distance, some feeling of “otherness,” perceived by the viewer. The adjective often implies a source of attraction but not necessarily of approval, depending on those involved.

I can’t help quoting Susan Sontag on this subject: “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” This remark stems from the 1970s, when some writers took an adversarial approach to what they assumed to be the colonizing drive of Western photographic culture. Superior technology — so goes the argument — induces a stereotypical overview of unfamiliar lives, leaving them in false, submissive categories. When I suggested to Raghubir, in an interview, that his publishers were packaging his work as appropriate for tourist appetites, he replied that such a notion “has nothing to do with me. I mean, I grew up in India. My basic education has been in India […] I would be out of my mind to see [my work] as travel photography. I think the notion of travel photography […] means passing through.”

But to be a tourist in one’s own reality, as Sontag suggests, is a statement that goes too far in its implication of a self-deceiving mindset on a superficial journey to visit itself. On the contrary, this kind of trip might just unmask the familiar by revelation of the exotic that lies within.

Raghubir Singh, “Ganapati Immersion, Chowpatty, Bombay, Maharashtra” (1989), photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh

Also, I have never thought that the term “tourist photography” was derogatory — we have museums that literally tour us through investigations of our past and present, and even sponsor trips to foreign lands. Photography incarnates that impulse to travel, documents and legitimates it as an agent of our existential wonder, by virtue of its great pictorial capacity. I view Raghubir’s career as knowingly in the service of that wonder —and as a creative extension of it — relayed out to his own background.

Interestingly, as his art got underway in the 1960s and ‘70s, a new documentary impulse was energizing American photography. He had significant contacts with it, personally and professionally. But even before he became acquainted with some of its innovational figures — Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand — he’d been working on assignment for National Geographic, and had been influenced by Life magazine telephoto reportage. These were useful outlets for him to learn his craft, as well as idioms worth rejecting on behalf of his art.

In order to explore Indian lives, he could employ Life’s monumental pictorialism and mix it with the expansiveness of the new documentarians. Nor should we forget that Raghubir, a student of photographic history, admired Henri Cartier Bresson and was sympathetic to the Magnum Agency’s blend of aesthetic self-consciousness and journalistic responsibility. Charged up with this mélange of genres, he set out on a path that would lead him to become the visual poet laureate of the subcontinent.

Raghubir Singh, “Monsoon Rains, Monghyr, Bihar” (1967), photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh

This happened within the nominal mode of street photography, an aspect of which has not been well understood. Since the invention of the camera, scholars have long taken note of the dialogue between painters and photographers. These cultural workers most evidently converged at that moment in time dominated by the movement called Realism. Photography appealed to realist sensibility by virtue of its seeming ownership of material appearances. Of course painting had the higher status in this conversation, since it could rely on its prestige as freely created vision, whereas photography offered only a mechanical copy of outer worlds. Useful as this was in the acquisition of knowledge, the copy was considered inferior or at best only a handmaiden to imaginative art.

The inevitable next step in the weakening interaction between the two media came with the advent of modernism. Painting’s retreat from, or dismissal of, material appearances became one of its cardinal traits. And let’s not overlook another casualty produced in general by modern art: its demotion of story content in painting, even representational painting, later marginalized by abstraction. Viewers were prompted to search for internal conceptual meanings rather than for illustrational clues to behavior in likely schemes of cause and effect.

The many practices in photography were, by contrast, invested in such schemes, reflected by their specific social utility. Group portraiture, political reportage, wedding pictures, combat photography, etc., are genres we know very well. They shuffle us around the world in mundane narrative containers, most often accompanied by textual fill-in. Certain questions were answered: who was there, for what purpose, and on what date? We also might learn about the doings that preceded or succeeded the scenes at issue, of which these pictures represent an instance, whether central or incidental.

Raghubir Singh, “Victoria Terminus, Bombay, Maharashtra” (1991), photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh

Not so street photography! In characteristic examples of its kind, the view is populated with incidentals and the discursive context acts as mere caption, at best. There tends to be a notion of continuities active beyond the frame, as important in their absence as whatever presences are shown within it. There is no necessary appointment between the picture makers and their motifs. Street photographers enjoy wide latitude in this respect. It’s up to them, at the moment or in retrospect, to determine a picture’s worthiness of being released to a public. In other words, they themselves initially decide if the work is expressive enough of their concerns to warrant being attached to their names. No wonder that photographers with artistic ambitions were drawn to the street genre. Its openness to capricious possibilities becomes an incentive to workers unwilling to tell stories and yet be still highly engaged with the world. They are lyrical opportunists, caught up with the challenge of finding memorable nuance in the psychology of space, or in the moody atmosphere of their own feelings, or even in the tension of being stared back by their subjects. There is no story line to such observations, snatched from multiple, program-free proceedings. They are understood as things that simply happen. You could say that photographers who range this way are modernists without portfolio.

I hope I’m not being presumptuous by fitting Raghubir Singh into this idiom. True enough, he has his own named territories and stated themes, which he often introduced by writing serious historical and social essays to accompany them. None of his readers would escape the impression that he had an investigative regard for his material. He was not playing around in the hope of finding weird, floating anomalies, like his American colleagues. But he brought to his work an element that helped to change the temper of street photography to come. And by that I mean color.

Raghubir Singh, “Boy at Bus Stop, New Delhi” (1982), photograph copyright © 2017 Succession Raghubir Singh

There was once a period when you could cite grievances that certain photos were “about” color, although never would you hear that a photograph was about black-and-white. We now look back upon black-and-white photography as a pictorial report of situations and relationships that occurred in the irrevocable past. This retrospection is not caused by decreased use of the medium but rather because its gray scheme contracts sensory recall, like memory does, fading across time. A kind of melancholy arises from this encounter, often suitable to evidently sad situations. Thus, when I first saw the color pictures of the American Depression by FSA photographers Russell Lee and Jack Delano, I was shocked by their charming, pastel tints: in cases like these, color can very well have its own narrative impact that transgresses received notions of emotional proprietary.

In Raghubir’s case, color functions as the core illumination of his great surveys. He was able to take immediate advantage of strong, varied palettes because they were inherent in his subjects’ presentation to themselves and to the world. No matter what misery might be evident, the ensemble could still be very decorative and upbeat if permeated by religious fervor. By recognizing color’s ability to moisten a scene at the point of the spectator’s contact with it, the photographer often manages to suggest that time is extended, from the antiquity of ritual to the “now” of the present moment. The epic and the intimate cohabit in his books, each of them adorned by the peacock flutterings at their turfs.

The exultation of these Indian sagas reminded me of a high point in my own experience: years ago, I used to jog through Southern Manhattan, playing a tape of a great romantic symphony in on my Walkman cassette player. How to synchronize the elated entrance of the soprano in the last movement with the highpoint of my exercise: the apex of the runway on the Brooklyn Bridge? In hindsight, I should have realized that this reach for the sublime was anticipated by the sound of a little click in a Bombay market.

Raghubir Singh’s work is currently on view in Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan), which will continue through January 2, 2018.

The post The Vibrant Palette of Raghubir Singh’s India appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[workreveal-blog]

How to write a student blog

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How to write a student blog

  Follow these steps to write a great student blog. You want up to date pitch a brand new idea – we can not post portions that have appeared some other place, even on a blog. If we assume your idea is right for Blogging Students, we’ll let you know up to dateupdated beforehand and write it. There’s an modifying system – which can also involve rewrites. And then it receives posted, you get a author’s profile page on the Mother or father, we promote it via social media – and also you’ve given your on line profile a significant raise.

a way upupdated start? Earlier than you compromise on up-to-date up-to-date pitch up-to-date us, it’s in all likelihood a very good concept updated study some of the blogs which have completed well on Blogging Students.

student blogging

You’ll also note that those blogs aren’t like people’s private blogs. They may be every centered on a particular vicinity of pupil lifestyles. Some challenge themselves with educational problems – revision, plagiarism – Some with fitness problems – pills, despair, contamination – A few with political issues – austerity protests, training costs – A few with life-style – clubbing, accommodation, track. But each has a case up-to-date make and specific attention to the dialogue.

Choose your updated and send us a pitch

up to date find a situation that has not been written about – or have some thing naturally sparkling and unexpected up to date updated approximately a vintage subject.

The up-to-date up to dated updated small and precise as opposed updated enormous and wide-ranging. For example, don’t pitch “The kingdom of better schooling”, do pitch “Most of my course is being taught via other College students”.

It’s no longer sufficient actually updated have a subject updated; you want up to date have a up to date updated make about that updated, so provide an explanation for what your argument can be. Tell us who you plan up-to-date up to date piece – it’s updated up-to-date have a spread of voices with one-of-a-kind up-to-date of view. What news reports, information, surveys or blogs are you going up to date hyperlink up to date up-to-date your piece Some context?

If we like your concept – and if nobody else has pitched the same up-to-date – then we’ll talk your pitch with you, make similarly guidelines as up to date how you may broaden it, and ask you up to dateupupdated in advance and positioned your piece up to dategether.

up to date write for Blogging Students

• Your blog needs updated be around 600 words lengthy.

• Adopt a conversational, chatty style. Avoid cliches, jargon, educational language and acronyms.

• put Some extreme work inupdated your intro – is it exciting, engaging and extraordinary?

• Usually use particular examples, perhaps up-to-date on personal revel in. Don’t generalise or waffle on approximately demanding situations and ardour.

• Use commonplace nouns as an awful lot as you may: “boots” and “apples” are lots more evocative phrases than “footwear” and “produce”.

• up to dateupdated find recent studies or media coverage about your up-to-date, and link up to date it in your blog.

• Check your statistics. Each article at the Parent website must be factually correct. There’s no point in having a guess at, say, the variety of College students who drop out in first yr. You want updated have an statistic, and a link, up-to-date wherein you observed it.

• you could’t break the regulation. you could’t make unsubstantiated libellous claims up-to-date humans. you can’t change a quote up to date make it say what you need it up-to-date. And if someone has said something they’ll later deny having stated, it’s suitable when you have it on tape, or written down in your pocket book phrase for word. Don’t throw your data away.

• Avoid standing on a soap-container and banging on approximately something. Quoting a spread of people will assist up-to-date carry different voices inupdated your piece.

• read what you’ve written aloud while you’re completed. Is that how you talk?

• The reader up to dateupdated emerge clean approximately what you’re saying, what other people have stated on the problem, and what They may be being requested updated upupdated.

• In case you’re the sort of individual who up to dateupdated know what our style is on the spelling of a selected phrase, or how we punctuate quotations, the Parent style Guide is up to date online.

writing blog

What happens next

As soon as we’ve determined your weblog is appropriate for an e-book, we can edit it. Don’t be greatly surprised by using the fact that the final model of your piece can be a chunk extraordinary from what you submitted.

Everything this is written for the information media is edited, from time updated quite carefully, up to date make the writing punchier, up to date reduce repetition, and up-to-date accord with the Father or mother fashion Manual and the updated of the website.

we can ask you for a headshot and a one-sentence bio for your contribuupdatedr web page. This will contain hyperlink in your very own blog or twitter feed.

Who is eligible up-to-date blog?

• You want up-to-date be a member of Guardian College students updated be suitable up to date blog. To up to date a member, up to date this sign on web page and fill inside the form. We’ll be glad up to date welcome you inup to date the fold, and your club will even carry you a weekly publication and a free e-book.

• You need upupdated be a modern scholar for us updated up-to-date your blog – you might be in sixth form, or analyzing at an FE university, doing an apprenticeship or attending college, both as an undergraduate or as a postgraduate pupil. There is no age restrict. And you may be studying anywhere within the international.

We’ve uncovered A few brilliant writing skills for the reason that we launched this weblog in 2012. We’re keen up-to-date listen from Each type of pupil – from technology up to date law, business up-to-date art, journalism up to date remedy – approximately the issues that have an effect on their lives.

Writing in lecture rooms seems up to date me up to date have wildly distinctive, conflicting functions: a confined, conventional and strict cause – up-to-date tests, like many first rate jobs, could be approximately written ability; and a wider, idealistic one: the final method of exchange of ideas intensive. So, first, we up-to-date time and again use formal assessments up to date acclimatise College students up to date examination-unique writing requirements – stupid, particular, always ordinary. And beyond that, we might let writing have free rein, encouraging College students up to date be as bold, open-ended and extensive-ranging as feasible. That could suggest loosening up Maximum school room time out of doors of the revise/take a look at/peer-mark cycle updated be about project paintings, self-directed up to date knowupdated, communicate and versatility; and we might make the recording of up to date knowupdated a pretty flexible method, for college students up-to-date what, and while, they like.

So I’ve spent the past few months with GCSE and A-stage classes doing without a doubt no writing at all previous pattern assessments and pupil blogs.

Students realise how high the bar of public area book is. This can be updated intimidating. However, that eliminates all apathy or experience of the humdrum. Asking all Students up to date updated blogs as getting updated unfolds, and interlinks empowers the up to dater up-to-date be greater supportive up to date the fact updated they’re much less tied up-to-date the bureaucracy; it increases task stages; it allows IT-skilling; it lets College students see their very own progress and differentiates nicely; it way extra productive and accelerating studying-communicate over rote-writing.

The breadth of consequences has inspired. College students have collated and commented on updatedpical information, defined realistic implications and real-world examples of syllabus phenomena, asserted their perspectives on issues, designed and written up experiments intensive, published and evaluated data they have got researched or sourced, and commented skillfully on each other’s paintings. And if, because the up to dateryupdated have completed, they write professionally within the public domain already as teenagers – which pinnacleupdated college admissions direcupdatedr would not provide them a place on a diploma course of their preference? (Inspecup to daters had been extraordinarily impressed, updatedo.)

pupil Blogging is strong and stimulating and enriching. The net potential up to date link-reference makes for a punchy manner up to dateupdated interconnectedly. The variety of interfaces and appearances upupdated professionalises Students’ paintings and they upward thrust updated that implicit reward: that is significantly more motivating than writing longhand in that dog-eared exercising ebook. Remarks, organization paintings and a visible papertrail are all easy gains. Display pupil work for class discussion, up to date pupil posts as Feedback; set homework up to date publish quick peer critiques; devise venture responsibilities requiring studying multiple friends’ paintings and synthesising up-to-date with related references. No problem taking other College students’ paintings domestic for peer-remark (and dropping it.) read throughout lessons and year businesses. Assets are unloseable. My line supervisor can trace The whole thing we do up to date the minute – without leaving their desk. (I’m now not intimidated through this intrusive rise in monitoring capability. I do my process well and want Students updated sense that accountability isn’t always some thing updated be fearful of. In go back, I give College students, and count on from SLT, great flexibility in the usage of this effective device: updated the big up to dategraphupdated of whether or not there is right engagement basic.)

that is all vastly more effective, and infinitely easier, than accumulating exercising books for monitoring and proscribing peer-Remarks in the school room, and a supply of far much less trouble/conflict than constant small-scale written homeworks with precise closing dates. Parents may be directed updated useful information, updated the evidence of what their up-to-date has done, and up-to-date comparative Students’ paintings from in the equal elegance.

Not one of the risks justify heading off student Running a blog. Defamaup-to-datery/provocative comments are a behavioural issue, no longer a technological one: do not deprive all of an exciting outlet up-to-date the far off possibility of misuse by way of a tiny few. Others may worry that student work is too vulnerable. But where higher than a blog up to date revealupdated the arc of character development? scholar bloggers are not supposed up to date be the completed article (I’m now not sure Maximum expert bloggers are!); what we are seeking out is emulation of, and participation in, a international network of dialogue, but fledgling their efforts. Plagiarism is, fantastically, not a problem. I have had one incidence of this all 12 months: a discreet, firmly-worded electronic mail explaining copyright regulation up to date the student (copied up-to-date the parental e-mail) and the put up up-to-date swiftly amended.

blog

Sociologists this yr persuaded me updated permit them up-to-date it in political/satirical posts; tellingly, they did so freely early on, However then it fell away – its casual use disempowers it and makes writing seem lazy. College students came up to date reflect that they need upupdated Pick words extra carefully. “You don’t hear Polly Toynbee saying ‘What a dick’ in her articles, even though she in reality thinks Cameron is one,” concluded one perceptive wit, up to date fashionable settlement. Language is a thorny issue, so I share this up to date with out imposition. baby protection problems are minimum. Educate e-safety As soon as, well, and take firm motion when wanted – However don’t lock children faraway from the world. My College students were delightedly surprised up-to-date find out postgrads in Germany, visiupupdated in South-East Asia and Occupy activists inside the US liking, commenting on and following their blogs.

Our first year of use has been rewarding and tasty. I’m assured it has more advantageous College students’ entertainment, writing ability, and university prospects. Our use has been hit-and-pass over – However that is what an ordeal is for, and that i go inup to date year with a clearer idea of the benefits, obstacles and required well timed steering in asking Students up to date write down for the public forum. Do not forget what writing is for: up-to-date percentage what we see, suppose and believe, and invite reaction. Bear in mind what colleges are for: coaching up-to-date a massive global of possibility. Durrenmatt stated: “A up-to-date does not resolve troubles. He lets them updated emerge.” Who wouldn’t want their study room up to date appear upupdated that?