1,172 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2020
    1. these words bring up all kinds of questions

      some thoughts when skimming through stream-of-consciousness journals like these

      if I want to absorb the information and "learn" faster, then reading faster or summarising the text is not the solution, because a text is already a compressed lossy encoded form of the initial thought. to decode it further and transfer it into my head would risk too much missing bits of information.

    1. Annotations—even inline marginalia which include your own writing—have very little informational value. They’re atomized; they don’t relate to each other; they don’t add up to anything; they’re ultra-compressed; they’re largely unedited. That’s fine: think of them as just a reminder. They say “hey, look at this passage,” with a few words of context to jog your memory about what the passage was about.Since you’re going to write lasting notes anyway, annotations need carry just enough information to recreate your mental context in that moment of reading. You wouldn’t want to rely on that long-term, since then you’d just have a huge pile of hooks you’d have to “follow” anytime you wanted to think about your experience with that book.

      Classical marginalia in books, according to Andy Matuschok, have little informational value. They are not interlinked, they're very compressed and usually unedited. But that's okay.

      Their purpose is to help you get back to the mental context you were in when you thought the passage was worth returning to.

  2. Apr 2020
    1. Regarding a Hunter S. Thompson book. The reviews on Amazon. One review said to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas first before this one inquiry mentions. So noted.

    1. 你說,這樣不是會忽略掉書中其他有價值的內容嗎?也許是,但是誰在乎?我是為了成長而學習,不是為了看完一本書而閱讀。在大學的時候,也沒有任何一堂課會上完了整本書,不是嗎?

      放棄完美主義

    1. 讀書e誌這個粉專的特色是,版主會分享許多的英文原文書,有許多是台灣根本還沒翻譯版的,這種新鮮感總是令我愛不釋手。書評的行文風格很親切易讀,篇幅不會太長,文章也同步會發表在 讀書e誌部落格 上。你可以選擇自己喜歡的平台來追蹤。

      不錯的資源

    1. There are good preprints and bad preprints, just like there are with journal articles. Overall, do not be afraid to be scooped or plagiarized! Preprints also actually protect against scooping [21,22]. Preprints establish the priority of discovery as a formally published item. Therefore, a preprint acts as proof of provenance for research ideas, data, code, models, and results—all outputs and discoveries.
      • Salah satu alasan untuk tidak mengunggah preprint adalah takut idenya dicuri,

      • Ini adalah faktor budaya yang lain. Ketakutan yang tidak beralasan. Justru dengan mengunggah preprint, peneliti dapat mengklaim ide lebih awal.

      • Preprint ada yang bagus dan ada yang buruk, peninjauan akan ada di tangan pembaca. Ini adalah hambatan budaya berikutnya, ketika mayoritas pembaca ingin melimpahkan tanggungjawab untuk memverifikasi, memeriksa, dan menjamin kualitas suatu makalah kepada para peninjau.

      • Pengalihan tanggungjawab ini sulit dilakukan ketika dokumen PR sendiri tertutup, dan tidak lepas dari bias.

      • Selain itu, dosen akan menyalahi prinsip yang disebarluaskan kepada para mahasiswa, untuk membaca secara kritis.

    1. Our phones and computers deliver unto each of us a personalized—or rather, algorithm-realized—distillation of headlines, anecdotes, jokes, and photographs. Even the ads we scroll past are not the same as our neighbor’s: a pair of boots has followed me from site to site for weeks. We call this endless, immaterial material a feed, though there’s little sustenance to be found.

      As reading materials—not just books, but newspapers, magazines, and ephemera—proliferated, more recent centuries saw the rise of reading “extensively”: we read these materials once, often quickly, and move on. Birkerts coins his own terms: the deep, devotional practice of “vertical” reading has been supplanted by “horizontal” reading, skimming along the surface. This shift has only accelerated dizzyingly in the time since Engelsing wrote in 1974, since Birkerts wrote in 1994, and since I wrote, yesterday, the paragraph above.

      Horizontal reading rules the day. What I do when I look at Twitter is less akin to reading a book than to the encounter I have with a recipe’s instructions or the fine print of a receipt: I’m taking in information, not enlightenment. It’s a way to pass the time, not to live in it. Reading—real reading, the kind Birkerts makes his impassioned case for—draws on our vertical sensibility, however latent, and “where it does not assume depth, it creates it.”

      We know perfectly well—we remember, even if dimly, the inward state that satisfies more than our itching, clicking fingers—and we know it isn’t here. Here, on the internet, is a nowhere space, a shallow time. It is a flat and impenetrable surface. But with a book, we dive in; we are sucked in; we are immersed, body and soul. “We hold in our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times,” Birkerts assures. “We can resist the skimming tendency and delve; we can restore, if only for a time, the vanishing assumption of coherence. The beauty of the vertical engagement is that it does not have to argue for itself. It is self-contained, a fulfillment.”

    1. New media makes good literature (defined in relation to portrayal of character/human spirit) harder and as important as ever to find.

      Modern readers know more and more about psychology, and to them a writer’s explanations often seem unnecessary, false, or old-fashioned. They reads plenty, and no theme is shocking enough to surprise them. They get the facts from newspapers, magazines, radio, television, or movies. They’re connected to all the corners of the world — and nothing invented by the mind can compare with what takes place in reality. There’s still a chance that, in our day — or yours — humankind will reach the moon, or one of the planets. All the fantasies of so-called “science fiction” will pale in comparison with footage shot on the moon or on the other planets.

      The new era, in a sense, brought a radical change. Readers get endless information from the radio, from film, from the press, from television. They hear lectures on psychology and psychoanalysis. They watch travel shows, often enough travel themselves, and have knowledge of the world. If literary fiction and theater were to continue playing their old role, they would need an audience with a strong interest in human character and individuality, independent of all these other byproducts and external concerns. But the number of such connoisseurs is small. Real and pure connoisseurs of art are nearly as rare as real and pure artists.

      Precisely because people today are surrounded by a sea of information related to all kinds of fields, genuine modern artists have to deliver more and more artistic purity, more substance, a greater focus on the portrayal of character and individuality. But for this one has to have exceptional gifts. It is, simply put, harder than ever to be original and creative in new ways.

    1. Trying too hard to understand the minutiae initially can make it easy to miss a fairly apparently general theme. It’s productive to learn the parts that are accessible before putting in effort to fully understand everything. Don’t miss the forest for the trees.
    1. an evaluation of social reading platforms; an analysis of social reading applications;

      This book includes a few sections about defunct Readmill.

  3. Mar 2020
  4. Feb 2020
    1. The Four-Component Instructional Model (4C/ID) immediately grabbed my attention when looking at the various models we had available. The process involves (a) learning tasks, (b) part-task practice, (c) support information, and (d) procedural information. It seems simple enough but design guidelines laid out in the tables within Merriênboer (2019) provide very thorough suggestions and a constructivist approach. The end product for a curricula or course designed in this approach is one with fidelity to professional activity.

    2. Table 4:

      encourages metacognition and challenges conceptual and structural models.

    3. Table 3

      Encourages individualization, personalized learning tasks and self-directed learning. Shifts the responsibility over task selection from the teacher to the student (important!)

    4. Table 2:

      It's asking for thorough standards of acceptable performance to be set down, or made concrete by the instructor and ID, as a way to measure things effectively.

    5. Table 1: Design Principles for Learning Tasks

      one of the things I like about this model is that it is asking you from the get go to think of profession-related activities that can be designed or simulated for students to understand and relate the material.

    6. Instructional methods for part-task prac-tice aim at the strengthening of cognitive rules by extensive repetitive practice. Strengthening is a basic learning process that ultimately leads to fully automated cognitive schemas (Anderson, 1993

      Find the activities in a college class that require routines and rote learning, or cognitive schemas that require practice and "strengthen them"

    7. Procedural information (in Figure 1, the yellow beam with arrows pointing upwards to the learning tasks) helps students with performing the routine aspects of learning tasks, that is, aspects that are always per-formed in the same fashion.

      so break down a lecture theory session from a step by step session. Or a document that has theory information should have a clear divide when you get into the step by step process?

    8. sup-portive information in Figure 1 is not con-nected to individual learning tasks but to levels of complexity; it can be presented be-fore learners start to work on the learning tasks (under the motto ‘first the theory and only then start to practice’) and/or it can be consulted by learners who are already working on the learning tasks (under the motto ‘only consult the theory when needed’)

      The idea of providing this supplemental information as a way to check against their current cognitive models by referring to theory or let theory guide their attempt at a learning task. It doesn't dictate a rigid structure.

    9. This feedback stimulates learners to critically compare their own mental models and cognitive strategies with those of others, including experts, teachers and peer learners

      I like that this model includes the idea of feedback and how to trigger thinking and reflection on their own behavior, cognitive models, etc.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. * Information-Processing Analysis : about the mental operations used by a person who has learned a complex skills

      this sounds a lot more involved unless you are working off a basic set of assumptions for mental operations and complex skills. Further understanding of psychological research and learning theories would be needed.

    2. Dick and Carey Model

      what the heck is this website, lmao.

    1. (a) learning tasks, (b) supportive information, (c) procedural information, and (d) part-task practice

      4 components

      Learning Tasks:

      • aim at integration of (non-recurrent and recurrent) skills.
      • provide authentic, whole-task experiences based on real-life tasks
      • Are organized in simple-to-complex task classes and have diminishing support in each task class (scaffolding).
      • Show high variability of practice.
    2. Learning tasks provide the backbone of the educational program; they provide learning from varied experiences and explicitly aim at the transfer of learning.

      the backbone of this model

    3. four-component instructional design (4C/ID)

      4C/ID tag might be one of the models I want to look into as I might use it for the Art Modules Class

    1. Feedback is a constant loop and not something that should come right at the end of the e-learning course or training module. So, it is important for courses to have feedback inserted at the right places during instruction.

      feedback is a constant loop

    2. Feedback needs to be specific in nature, as well as confirmatory and corrective. This way the learners know what they did right and wrong.

      how to give feedback

    3. Giving learners an indication of the desired outcomes help them calibrate their approach appropriately. This can be done via examples, case studies, and modelling various learning strategies like concept mapping, visualizing, role playing.

      learner guidance

    4. because it establishes some important relationships and concepts

      another link to article. this dude needs to elaborate more even if it makes the article longer, wtf!

    5. Michael Hanley, discusses this very subject in his article

      link to article

    6. Dale H. Schunk, in his book Learning Theories

      another book rec

    7. Successive Approximation Model (SAM)

      first time i've heard of this one

    8. Understanding Instructional Design

      reading check 3 material

  5. Jan 2020
    1. Suppose the algorithm chooses a tree that splits on education but not on age. Conditional on this tree, the estimated coefficients are consistent. But that does not imply that treatment effects do not also vary by age, as education may well covary with age; on other draws of the data, in fact, the same procedure could have chosen a tree that split on age instead

      a caveat

    2. hese heterogenous treatment effects can be used to assign treatments; Misra and Dubé (2016) illustrate this on the problem of price targeting, applying Bayesian regularized methods to a large-scale experiment where prices were randomly assigned

      todo -- look into the implication for treatment assignment with heterogeneity

    3. Chernozhukov, Chetverikov, Demirer, Duflo, Hansen, and Newey (2016) take care of high-dimensional controls in treatment effect estimation by solving two simultaneous prediction problems, one in the outcome and one in the treatment equation.

      this seems similar to my idea of regularizing on only a subset of the variables

    4. These same techniques applied here result in split-sample instrumental variables (Angrist and Krueger 1995) and “jackknife” instrumental variables

      some classical solutions to IV bias are akin to ML solutions

    5. Understood this way, the finite-sample biases in instrumental variables are a consequence of overfitting.

      traditional 'finite sample bias of IV' is really overfitting

    6. Even when we are interested in a parameter β ˆ, the tool we use to recover that parameter may contain (often implicitly) a prediction component. Take the case of linear instrumental variables understood as a two-stage procedure: first regress x = γ′z + δ on the instrument z, then regress y = β′x + ε on the fitted values x ˆ. The first stage is typically handled as an estimation step. But this is effectively a prediction task: only the predictions x ˆ enter the second stage; the coefficients in the first stage are merely a means to these fitted values.

      first stage of IV -- handled as an estimation problem, but really it's a prediction problem!

    7. Prediction in the Service of Estimation

      This is especially relevant to economists across the board, even the ML skeptics

    8. New Data

      The first application: constructing variables and meaning from high-dimensional data, especially outcome variables

      • satellite images (of energy use, lights etc) --> economic activity
      • cell phone data, Google street view to measure wealth
      • extract similarity of firms from 10k reports
      • even traditional data .. matching individuals in historical censuses
    9. Zhao and Yu (2006) who establish asymptotic model-selection consistency for the LASSO. Besides assuming that the true model is “sparse”—only a few variables are relevant—they also require the “irrepresentable condition” between observables: loosely put, none of the irrelevant covariates can be even moderately related to the set of relevant ones.

      Basically unrealistic for microeconomic applications imho

    10. First, it encourages the choice of less complex, but wrong models. Even if the best model uses interactions of number of bathrooms with number of rooms, regularization may lead to a choice of a simpler (but worse) model that uses only number of fireplaces. Second, it can bring with it a cousin of omitted variable bias, where we are typically concerned with correlations between observed variables and unobserved ones. Here, when regular-ization excludes some variables, even a correlation between observed variables and other observed (but excluded) ones can create bias in the estimated coefficients.

      Is this equally a problem for procedures that do not assum sparsity, such as the Ridge model?

    11. 97the variables are correlated with each other (say the number of rooms of a house and its square-footage), then such variables are substitutes in predicting house prices. Similar predictions can be produced using very different variables. Which variables are actually chosen depends on the specific finite sample.

      Lasso-chosen variables are unstable because of what we usually call 'multicollinearity.'<br> This presents a problem for making inferences from estimated coefficients.

    12. Through its regularizer, LASSO produces a sparse prediction function, so that many coefficients are zero and are “not used”—in this example, we find that more than half the variables are unused in each run

      This is true but they fail to mention that LASSO also shrinks the coefficients on variables that it keeps towards zero (relative to OLS). I think this is commonly misunderstood (from people I've spoken with).

    13. One obvious problem that arises in making such inferences is the lack of stan-dard errors on the coefficients. Even when machine-learning predictors produce familiar output like linear functions, forming these standard errors can be more complicated than seems at first glance as they would have to account for the model selection itself. In fact, Leeb and Pötscher (2006, 2008) develop conditions under which it is impossible to obtain (uniformly) consistent estimates of the distribution of model parameters after data-driven selection.

      This is a very serious limitation for Economics academic work.

    14. First, econometrics can guide design choices, such as the number of folds or the function class.

      How would Econometrics guide us in this?

    15. These choices about how to represent the features will interact with the regularizer and function class: A linear model can reproduce the log base area per room from log base area and log room number easily, while a regression tree would require many splits to do so.

      The choice of 'how to represent the features' is consequential ... it's not just 'throw it all in' (kitchen sink approach)

    16. Ta b l e 2Some Machine Learning Algorithms

      This is a very helpful table!

    17. Picking the prediction func-tion then involves two steps: The first step is, conditional on a level of complexity, to pick the best in-sample loss-minimizing function.8 The second step is to estimate the optimal level of complexity using empirical tuning (as we saw in cross-validating the depth of the tree).

      ML explained while standing on one leg.

    18. egularization combines with the observability of predic-tion quality to allow us to fit flexible functional forms and still find generalizable structure.

      But we can't really make statistical inferences about the structure, can we?

    19. This procedure works because prediction quality is observable: both predic-tions y ˆ and outcomes y are observed. Contrast this with parameter estimation, where typically we must rely on assumptions about the data-generating process to ensure consistency.

      I'm not clear what the implication they are making here is. Does it in some sense 'not work' with respect to parameter estimation?

    20. In empirical tuning, we create an out-of-sample experiment inside the original sample.

      remember that tuning is done within the training sample

    21. Performance of Different Algorithms in Predicting House Values

      Any reason they didn't try a Ridge or an Elastic net model here? My instinct is that these will beat LASSO for most Economic applications.

    22. We consider 10,000 randomly selected owner-occupied units from the 2011 metropolitan sample of the American Housing Survey. In addition to the values of each unit, we also include 150 variables that contain information about the unit and its location, such as the number of rooms, the base area, and the census region within the United States. To compare different prediction tech-niques, we evaluate how well each approach predicts (log) unit value on a separate hold-out set of 41,808 units from the same sample. All details on the sample and our empirical exercise can be found in an online appendix available with this paper athttp://e-jep.org

      Seems a useful example for trying/testing/benchmarking. But the link didn't work for me. Can anyone find it? Is it interactive? (This is why I think papers should be html and not pdfs...)

    23. Making sense of complex data such as images and text often involves a prediction pre-processing step.

      In using 'new kinds of data' in Economics we often need to do a 'classification step' first

    24. The fundamental insight behind these breakthroughs is as much statis-tical as computational. Machine intelligence became possible once researchers stopped approaching intelligence tasks procedurally and began tackling them empirically.

      I hadn't thought about how this unites the 'statistics to learn stuff' part of ML and the 'build a tool to do a task' part. Well-phrased.

    25. In another category of applications, the key object of interest is actually a parameter β, but the inference procedures (often implicitly) contain a prediction task. For example, the first stage of a linear instrumental variables regres-sion is effectively prediction. The same is true when estimating heterogeneous treatment effects, testing for effects on multiple outcomes in experiments, and flexibly controlling for observed confounders.

      This is most relevant tool for me. Before I learned about ML I often thought about using 'stepwise selection' for such tasks... to find the best set of 'control variables' etc. But without regularisation this seemed problematic.

    26. Machine Learning: An Applied Econometric Approach

      Shall we use Hypothesis to have a discussion ?

  6. Dec 2019
  7. Nov 2019
    1. Cabinet: one author or several; posts curated into particular collections or series’, often with thematic groupings, perhaps a “start here” page for new readers, or other pointers to specific reading sequences

      Colin Walker has suggested something like this in the past and implemented a "required reading" page on his website.

    1. For those not familiar with GPT-2, it is, according to its creators OpenAI (a socially conscious artificial intelligence lab overseen by a nonprofit entity), “a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text.” Think of it as a computer that has consumed so much text that it’s very good at figuring out which words are likely to follow other words, and when strung together, these words create fairly coherent sentences and paragraphs that are plausible continuations of any initial (or “seed”) text.

      This isn't a very difficult problem and the underpinnings of it are well laid out by John R. Pierce in An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. In it he has a lot of interesting tidbits about language and structure from an engineering perspective including the reason why crossword puzzles work.

      close reading, distant reading, corpus linguistics

    1. From this page:

      AUPresses thinks more readers should be aware of the work they’re doing. That’s why during the organization’s annual University Press Week, it launched a reading list it’s calling READ. THINK. ACT., a list of 75 peer-reviewed books designed to help non-academic readers understand the world and work to make it a better place.

    1. Sustained reading of long form texts and books is perhaps the most “active” of all basic media consumption. Philip Roth, in 2009, prognosticating the death of the novel, smartly points out: To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities. I love this: “If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really.” Meaning: To truly read (and, I might add, write) is to commit and maintain focus long enough to live fully within the world of the book (as opposed to ten second dips in and out, as we mostly do with much online media).

      Craig Mod on really reading. This has me thinking about Philip Glass' discussion at the end of Words with Music where he talks about different worlds.

  8. Oct 2019
    1. when reading we can double back and re-read a word several times until it sticks (which according to some arguments may actually impair comprehension rather than increase it),
  9. Sep 2019
    1. Goodreads is nearly useless for finding recommendations

      I believe that the point of Goodreads—since Amazon bought the site—is lost here.

      The point of Goodreads is to make people buy books from Amazon. They're capitalists. They don't care about the common good, or about making people find books that they can truly benefit from.

  10. Aug 2019
    1. Both artists, through annotation, have produced new forms of public dialogue in response to other people (like Harvey Weinstein), texts (The New York Times), and ideas (sexual assault and racial bias) that are of broad social and political consequence.

      What about examples of future sorts of annotations/redactions like these with emerging technologies? Stories about deepfakes (like Obama calling Trump a "dipshit" or the Youtube Channel Bad Lip Reading redubbing the words of Senator Ted Cruz) are becoming more prevalent and these are versions of this sort of redaction taken to greater lengths. At present, these examples are obviously fake and facetious, but in short order they will be indistinguishable and more commonplace.

  11. Jul 2019
    1. In Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf talks about how technology has led to more skimming rather than reading slowly and carefully. She talks about the benefits of “cognitive patience.” And she reminds us that reading quickly isn’t what makes someone a good reader.
  12. Jun 2019
    1. tl;dr: understanding reading styles for better reading

      Approach: An outline, high-level overview approach is taken since the article is so clearly structured. Specific ideas are highlighted and annotated.

      Outline

      Reading optimally means applying the suitable reading method for the suitable reading material you've selected, to fit the object you're trying to accomplish.

      Objectives:

      • Information vs Understanding
      • All the true value & growth is in understanding
      • Heuristic for information: anything easily digested is information.

      Reading Styles:

      1. Inspectional Reading: systemic skimming and superficial reading
      2. Analytical Reading:

      Rules:

      • Classify the book according to kind and subject matter
      • tl;dr
      • outline
      • defining problems/issues
      1. Syntopical Reading:

      Steps:

      • find relevant passages
      • understand in your own context
      • getting the questions clear
      • defining the issue
      • analyzing the issue
    1. Why I'm reading this: because I'm going to Refactor Camp & I figured I should be up on Ribbonfarm stuff.

  13. May 2019
  14. Apr 2019
    1. vocabulary notes

      interpreting plot

      • title
      • subtitle
      • climax
      • denouement
      • exposition
      • frame narrative
      • in media res

      summary

      • introduction
      • main body
      • denouement
      • conclusion

      literaty terms

      • first person narrative
      • second person narrative
      • third person narrative
      • irony
      • satire
      • epithet
      • personification
  15. Mar 2019
    1. Two-fold arguments are also put forward concerning the just and the unjust

      Examples here are more oriented toward personal freedom / libertarian values; points out that the same action applied to the same person, can be either potentially just or unjust depending on the circumstances, and also that there will be local conflicts and differences in opinion (e.g. in preventing a friend from committing suicide, they may be angry and disagree that your actions are just, though others may support your decision and think it is indeed just).

      There is no universal sanctity of property rights or freedom from bodily restraint by others; violence is in some cases justified, and in others not.

    2. Since if anyone should ask those who say that the same thing is both disgraceful and seemly whether they have ever done anything seemly, they would admit that they have also done something disgraceful, if disgraceful and seemly are really the same thing.

      In removing the context, the actions become effectively neutral, in that they are simultaneously good and bad; the actions themselves exist without judgment, and the judgment is only the product of the culture in which they take place (or are regarded)

    3. but the right occasion

      The right occasion = the opportune moment; context-specific.

    4. against the law

      As examples rise in degree of 'extremity', they brush up against norms and laws, an act that may be celebrated in one culture is punishable by death or ostracism in another, simply based on the geography or time in which it takes place. By keeping location and temporality intact, the author is able to refrain from making absolute claims about any of the actual behaviors and just cite them as things that are, irrespective of judgment. The degree to which the reader judges them may be dependent upon the reader's interpreting the behaviors not as context-specific acts, but as archetypes(?) or fixed representations of those acts which stand outside of time and place.

    5. the most beautiful grave imaginable

      Shifts to more 'extreme' examples, but points out that this perverse (to the greeks) act is BEAUTIFUL and an act of love to others; perhaps their reverence is inversely proportional to the Greeks' horror.<br> Also, in using such 'extreme' examples, the author shows that in fact nothing is truly extreme, because it is all a matter of context, and concepts of extremity introduce limits or constrain these things to a spectrum which is not necessarily accurate; it all depends on the context, and something cannot "depend" strongly or weakly based on the actual act, but only on the context.

    6. I go on to the things which cities and peoples regard as disgraceful

      Switches to point out arbitrary differences in culture; be born in one area and you believe x, be born in another and you believe y, but largely it is a matter of the random happenstance of one's birth. These beliefs are human creations, and vary depending on where the humans live.

    7. (although for men to do so in the palaistra aid gymnasium is seemly.)

      The "good" and the "bad" can be seemingly arbitrarily different between identity groups. Why is it seemly for person of type x and unseemly for person of type y?

    8. And I am not saying what the good is, but I am trying to explain that the bad and the good are not the same but that each is distinct from the other

      Not trying to identify a moral absolute, just point out that it is relative and therefore that there is no absolute.

    9. I think it would not be clear what was good and what was bad if they were just the same and one did not differ from the other; in fact such a situation would be extraordinary

      Is this sarcasm? Is he saying that such a duality would be extraordinary in that it would violate the philosophers' attempts to categorize and assign general rules? Not sure...

    10. But there is another argument which says that the good is one thing and the bad another, and that as the name differs, so does the thing named.

      This serves as a sort of refrain in the verse/chorus structure of the text. It is constructed like a song in some respects.

    11. And death is bad for those who die but good for the undertakers and gravediggers.

      Use of the progressive method of providing examples; in this case, linear from health to death. Further on in the text from mundane to extreme.<br> Examples here shift from the personal (the sick individual) to a class (professions); there is a hierarchy and blending here of sorts in that any member of any of the professions listed could find themselves as the individual afflicted by the example condition/problem, and as such we find that the same person could potentially hold these conflicting opinions at different stages in their life, and that neither is necessarily wrong nor contradictory.

    12. or at one time good and at another time bad for the same person

      Not fixed

    13. Suppose someone should question the man who says this as follows: Why don't you assign your household slaves their tasks by lot, so that if the teamster drew the office of cook, he would do the cooking and the cook would drive the team, and so with the rest ?

      How do these "fish out of water" statements compare back to previous examples? Seems to imply that, if you took an Athenian and placed them in Sparta, that they would consider the Spartan culture still foreign and would be at a disadvantage trying to operate within the context (which is likely)? They would see things through the lens of an Athenian, which, on the other hand, may provide certain perspective that the Spartans take for granted. Perhaps it is a reminder that opportunity is not democratically distributed, and that the moments and circumstances conducive to certain results cannot be manufactured by moving the pieces around, because they depend so much not only on the context in which they happen, but the experience and history of those who find themselves within the situation?

    1. vocabulary notes

      interpreting plot

      • title
      • subtitle
      • climax
      • denouement
      • exposition
      • frame narrative
      • in media res

      summary

      • introduction
      • main body
      • denouement
      • conclusion

      literaty terms

      • first person narrative
      • second person narrative
      • third person narrative
      • irony
      • satire
      • epithet
      • personification
    2. She felt out of place.

      Ей было не по себе.

    3. for starters orders

      сигналов стартеров

    4. Of course, we've had our ups and downs

      Конечно, у нас бывало то лучше, то хуже

    5. processed kind

      консервированный

    6. Jean put the ruler down on the conveyor belt.

      Джин положила линейку на конвейер. (Прим.: В западных супермаркетах для экономии времени несколько покупателей выгружают продук­ты на конвейер одновременно. Для того, чтобы кассир видела, где граница, покупатели кладут пластиковую линейку яркого цвета между своими и чужими покупками.)

    7. Think of all the oriental foods you can get into

      Как по­думаешь, каких только ни бывает восточных продуктов

    8. her individual yoghurt seemed to say it all

      казалось, что её единственная упаковка йогурта говорит сама за себя.

    9. a gross offish fingers

      оптовая закупка рыбных па­лочек

    10. You can always tell a person by their shopping

      Всегда можно определить, что за человек перед тобой, по его покупкам

    11. when I turned up?

      когда я бы вдруг пришла?

    12. a see-through tray of tomatoes which fell casualty to the rest.

      прозрачный лоток с помидорами, придавленный другими покупками.

    13. the quick till

      касса-экспресс

    14. Jean felt her patience beginning to itch.

      Джин чувствовала, что её терпение заканчивается.

    15. giving an accompaniment of nods and headshaking at the appropriate parts.

      в такт словам то кивала, то качала го­ловой.

    16. why I should have to put up with her at family occasions.

      с какой стати я должна мириться с её присутствием на се­мейных праздниках.

  16. Feb 2019
  17. Jan 2019
    1. Contiguity, however, is not the same as complicity,and qualitative differences can an

      This quote makes me think of a poem by Robinson Jeffers: Shine, Perishing Republic

      While I'm sure Jeffers wasn't after furthering the cause of posthumanism, it seems like an especially interesting piece to give a posthuman reading to.

      Now, someone please do that because I do not understand how the hell to do it.

    1. excessive reading has a scattering effect: “In reading of many books is distraction.”

      I feel personally attacked. ;)

    1. The Shortest Answer is Doing the ThingIf reading at megaspeeds is not feasible, does that mean reading can’t be improved? Not at all.The serious way to improve reading—how well we comprehend a text and, yes, speed and efficiency—is this (apologies, Michael Pollan):Read. Reading skill depends on knowledge acquired from reading. Skilled readers know more about language, including many words and structures that occur in print but not in speech. They also have greater “background knowledge,” familiarity with the structure and content of what is being read. We acquire this information in the act of reading itself—not by training our eyes to rotate in opposite directions, playing brain exercise games, or breathing diaphragmatically. Just reading.As much as possible. Every time we read we update our knowledge of language. At a conscious level we read a text for its content: because it is a story or a textbook or a joke. At a subconscious level our brains automatically register information about the structure of language; the next chapter is all about this. Developing this elaborate linguistic network requires exposure to a large sample of texts.Mostly new stuff. Knowledge of language expands through exposure to structures we do not already know. That may mean encountering unfamiliar words or familiar words used in novel ways. It may mean reading P. D. James, E. L. James, and Henry James because their use of language is so varied. A large sample of texts in varied styles and genres will work, including some time spent just outside one’s textual comfort zone.Reading expands one’s knowledge of language and the world in ways that increase reading skill, making it easier and more enjoyable to read. Increases in reading skill make it easier to consume the texts that feed this learning machinery. It is not the eyes but what we know about language, print, and the world— knowledge that is easy to increase by reading—that determines reading skill. Where this expertise leads, the eyes will follow.
  18. Dec 2018
    1. Start with the index, the table of contents, and the preface. This will give you a good sense of the book. Be OK with deciding that now is not the time to read the book. Read one book at a time. Put it down if you lose interest. Mark up the book while reading it. Questions. Thoughts. And, more important, connections to other ideas. At the end of each chapter, without looking back, write some notes on the main points/arguments/take-aways. Then look back through the chapter and write down anything you missed. Specifically note anything that was in the chapter that you can apply somewhere else. When you’re done with the book, take out a blank sheet of paper and explain the core ideas or arguments of the book to yourself. Where you have problems, go back and review your notes. This is the Feynman technique. Put the book down for a week. Pick the book back up, reread all of your notes/highlights/marginalia/etc. Time is a good filter — what’s still important? Note this on the inside of the cover with a reference to the page number. Put any notes that you want to keep in your commonplace book.

      tips for making notes while reading a book

    1. Step One. The first thing I do when I pick up a book is read the preface, the table of contents, and the inside jacket. Often, I’ll glance over the index too. This doesn’t take long and often saves me time, as a lot of books do not make it past this filter. Maybe it doesn’t contain the information I’m trying to gain. If it seems crappy, I’ll flip to a few random pages to verify. This filter is a form of systematic skimming. This isn’t my term, Mortimer Adler, a guy who literally wrote the book on reading, came up with it. Adler says there are four levels of reading. I tend to blend inspectional reading and analytical reading together for most books. This way, when I start reading a book, I have an idea what it’s about, the main argument, and some of the terminology involved. I know where the author is going to take me and the broad strokes of how they will bring me along. That’s very useful information. While reading, I take notes. I circle words I need to look up. I star points that I think are critical to the argument. I underline anything that strikes me as interesting. I comment like a madman in the margins. I try to tease out assumptions, etc. Essentially, I’m trying to engage in a conversation with the author. Maybe my questions will be answered on the next page or in the next chapter. Maybe I’ll need to find another book to answer them. Who knows. But I write them down. At the end of each chapter, I write a few bullet points that summarize what I’ve just read. When I’m done, I write a brief summary of the entire book and then I do something few other people do. I let the book age. I put the book on my desk and I won’t touch it for anywhere from a few days to a week. This is very important.
      1. Read the preface, TOC. Take notes while reading.
    2. Step two. When I pick the book up again, I re-read every scribble, underline, and comment I’ve made (assuming I can still read my writing). Sometimes I can’t. I’m not the same person I was the first time I read the book, two things have changed: (1) I’ve read the entire book and (2) I’ve had a chance to sleep on what may have seemed earth-shattering at the time but now just seems meh. If something still strikes my interest, I write a note in the first few pages of the book, in my own words, on the topic. Often this is a summary but increasingly it’s ways to apply the knowledge. I index this to the page number in the book. Sometimes, and this depends on the book, I’ll create a sort of mental summary of the book’s main arguments and gaps. Sometimes I’ll cross-link points with other books.
      1. Re-read upon waiting for a while. Write out the main notes in the first pages of the book.
    3. Step 3 (optional but highly effective). Wait a few days. Then go through the book and copy out excerpts by hand and put them into your repository or commonplace book. I use these notes to connect and synthesize ideas as I read. To aid recall, connect the ideas to something you already have in your mind. Is it a continuation of the idea? Does it replace an idea? Is it the same idea in a different discipline? I add these connections to my notes and percolate them in my mind. Often I turn out to be mistaken but that’s the process. Most of the time, you get to see the ideas on Farnam Street. You can see how I connect and contextualize ideas, linking them across disciplines. I find writing about the ideas really helps me develop my understanding. Even if you don’t share your thoughts with millions of people you can do the same thing with Evernote, which is searchable, easy to use, and free. Personally, I do not use technology as a substitute for the non-technological approach mentioned above but rather as a compliment. I rarely listen to books but if you are listening to a book, create a new note for that book and type in notes as you are listening. I know a few people that do not take notes as they are listening because they listen in the car on the way to work. They find that sitting down right away when they get to work and typing up notes is an effective way to improve recall although the notes are less accurate.
      1. Put the excerpts in a separate medium.
    1. It may seem as if kids are learning to read when they’re exposed to books, and some kids do pick up sound-letter correspondences quickly and easily. But the science shows clearly that to become a good reader, you must learn to decode words.
    1. Girls, even when their abilities in science equaled or excelled that of boys, often were likely to be better overall in reading comprehension

      What does this say about different skill sets? Is this biological or genetic, or is it just conditioned?

  19. Nov 2018
    1. Fourth, if you are still young, let’s say in the first third of your active reading life, you should indiscriminately devour as many books as possible – novels, short stories, poetry, nonfiction of all sorts without any regard for quality.
    2. Anyway, after forty life is too short for reading poor books.
    3. I have limited myself to 100 spaces for the next 10 years. That’s an average of 10 books per year
    4. thrillers are excepted from the reading ticket
    5. I consider it time wasted if a book leaves no traces in the brain, either because it is a poor book or because one has read it poorly
    6. A book gets no more than ten minutes of my time before a verdict is reached – to read or not to read.
    7. I read as much as before, to be sure, but fewer and better books, and each twice.
    1. These ideas are rooted in beliefs about reading that were once commonly called “whole language” and that gained a lot of traction in the 1980s. Whole-language proponents dismissed the need for phonics. Reading is “the most natural activity in the world,” Frank Smith, one of the intellectual leaders of the whole-language movement, wrote. It “is only through reading that children learn to read. Trying to teach children to read by teaching them the sounds of letters is literally a meaningless activity.”
    2. while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up.
    3. It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level.
  20. Oct 2018
    1. The Migration of the aura through its facsimiles

      Also See....Sally M. Foster & Neil G.W. Curtis (2016) The Thing about Replicas—Why Historic Replicas Matter, European Journal of Archaeology, 19:1, 122-148

    2. Switching Codes

      Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts Front Cover Thomas Bartscherer, Roderick Coover University of Chicago Press, 15 Apr 2011

    1. The role of touch in the multi-sensory experience of reading turns out to be as important as we intuit it to be when we hold a volume or turn a page — or better yet, when we mark it up.

      I've found that the way I read and my reading retention have changed since I started to regularly use digital annotation. The act of selecting what sentence to highlight, how to tag passages and articles, and what to make public has changed how I feel about reading online. I still prefer paper for pleasure reading, but for news, research, and collaborative reading, digital now works just fine for me.

  21. Sep 2018
    1. teacher-directed whole-class phonics lessons with small-group activities to meet the needs of children at different points in the process of learning to read.
    2. Another big takeaway from decades of scientific research is that, while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound. What a child must do to become a reader is to figure out how the words she hears and knows how to say connect to letters on the page. Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds. Kids have to crack that code to become readers.
    3. We are born wired to talk. Kids learn to talk by being talked to, by being surrounded with spoken language. That's all it takes. No one has to teach them to talk.But, as numerous studies have shown, reading is different. Our brains don't know how to do it. That's because human beings didn't invent written language until relatively recently in human history, just a few thousand years ago. To be able to read, structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.
    1. students are not downloading texts in ePub format but, rather, as PDFs.

      Interesting. Because they're easier (more familiar?) to work with?

    1. reading may be linked to empathy. In a study published earlier this year psychologist Raymond A. Mar of York University in Toronto and others demonstrated that the number of stories preschoolers read predicts their ability to understand the emotions of others. Mar has also shown that adults who read less fiction report themselves to be less empathic.
  22. Aug 2018
    1. F or Z

      This study is very well done. I find myself using the F pattern often--and I wonder how it compare to print readers (#eyetracking). I also wonder how this might change with optimized font size, spacing, column width, etc. For example, writing this annotation, Hypothes.is is squishing the window and giving me a shorter column (still wider than would appear in a standard magazine that's been formatted to make reading easier).

    2. Here we are, going beyond skimming. In the margins. Terry took this piece over into Diigo for his annotation. Read his thoughts: https://www.diigo.com/annotated/30d001f7e33fbb45a08b27cbdc58e9a4 Others are here, off to the side. Please join in.

    3. The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a text.

      I don't know if this article is where I first read this idea, but maybe haptics are part of the equation?

      "Being able to flip back and forth between pages, to hold a physical item that changes appearance as one moves through it (e.g., early in a book or magazine there are more pages on the right, and as the reader nears the end his or her progress is marked by a stack of pages on the left), and to refer to the printed item’s topography to find information in it are all print features that onscreen media lack."

    4. the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts, whether in literature and science in college

      In a recent conversation with my voracious literature-consuming son, I expressed impatience with (adult) reviewers on Goodreads who complain about books when they jump backwards and forwards in time and/or between different characters' points of view. My son pointed out that to follow these jumps is a learned skill, and it takes a lot of practice. Something I hadn't even considered, since these are adult reviewers.

      In a similar vein, I find the teens I teach to want immediate action and a linear path, regardless of the storytelling format (e.g. film vs. book). This saddens me, as there is so much richness in taking time to build characters, plot, suspense, etc.

    5. empathy

      I find it fascinating that there is a link between reading literary fiction and developing empathy.

    6. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

    7. We need to cultivate a new kind of brain: a “bi-literate” reading brain capable of the deepest forms of thought in either digital or traditional mediums. 

      Huh

    8. use it or lose it

    9. fourth and fifth grade

      This age -- eight to ten years old -- seems critical in so many areas, not just screen reading and comprehension. It's also the same age here in the US where standardized testing kicks in, and where so many kids lose their love of learning as a result. That's my opinion, anyway.

    10. technology of recurrence
    11. skimming

    12. Results indicated that students who read on print were superior in their comprehension to screen-reading peers, particularly in their ability to sequence detail and reconstruct the plot in chronological order.

      Be helpful to know why ... what was different for the students?

    13. the reading circuit

    14. “cognitive impatience,”

      I agree with Ciara on Twitter about this term -- I like it.

      Cognitive Patience

    15. In this hinge moment between print and digital cultures, society needs to confront what is diminishing in the expert reading circuit, what our children and older students are not developing, and what we can do about it.

      As a teacher of children, this is a key point -- one I grapple with every time I use technology with my young writers and readers. Am I providing a richer and more engaging content with digital text? Or am I teaching more surface reading of text with media intrusions? (prob neither and both)

    16. This is not a simple, binary issue of print vs digital reading and technological innovation.

      Thank you -- we want to make it clear that this is not an either/or situation here. Appreciate this statement early in the text

    17. My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight.

      interesting .... the act of reading is always deeper, and forges deeper connections, than we think it might be ...

    18. read stories
    19. the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing - a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.

      This has long been a concern, and I know there is all sorts of research happening in this field. I don't doubt this at all... what I don't know yet is whether this change in the way we read text is good or bad or neither. This article suggests a negative shift, and that may be true. Always hoping for some balance.

    1. I believe, and I try to emphasize to the students, that annotation is a deeply personal activity, my annotations may look different from yours because we think differently.

      We often think differently even on different readings. Sometimes upon re-reading pieces, I'll find and annotate completely different things than I would have on the first pass. Sometimes (often with more experience and new eyes) I'll even disagree with what I'd written on prior passes.

      This process reminds me a bit of the Barbell Method of Reading

  23. Jul 2018
    1. Welcome to the Newsela Instructional Content Platform. We solve the problem of reading engagement holistically for students, teachers, and principals. See our results See our results Fresh, adaptive reads for every subject. ELA Science Elementary Math SocialStudies Our Content Partners World-class students (yours)deserve world-class instructional content. History Bio National Geographic The Washington Post The Guardian ProCon.org Encyclopædia Britannica Scientific American Associated Press The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History PBS Newshour Smithsonian Perfect for elementary, too. With content and activities created specifically for students in grades 2-6, Newsela fits seamlessly into your elementary literacy routine. Learn more Assessments FTW. Every great love affair with reading begins with engagement, and Assessments are the ultimate in engagement. Know if students did the reading, if they’ve understood it, and much more. (All from the comfort of your mobile device.) Quizzes. Annotations. Writing Prompts. Teach vocabulary in context with Power Words. Forget word lists and memorization—the best way to learn new words is for students to encounter them in context while they read. Available on hundreds of articles. 5 Power Words with student-friendly definitions are embedded in hundreds of articles. Students can practice Power Words by completing 10 practice activities after reading. Words and points are collected on each student’s Word Wall. 123 Is your district missing something? Not anymore. We designed the Newsela Instructional Content Platform to fit perfectly into how your district already works. Integrate with Google Classroom, Canvas, Clever and more. Learn about PRO Learn about PRO It’s time to solvereading engagement. Join our community of 1,300,000 educators and counting. Join Learn about PRO Close Teachers Administrators Newsela About Newsela Pro Company Careers Content Partners Help Learning & Support Follow Us Press Blog Twitter Facebook Youtube Instagram © 2018 Newsela | info@newsela.com | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

      Newsela- Articles customizable to any reading level:) Keep as a future resource

    1. Interestingly, the word Internet is never used in the CCSS reading stan-dards (Leu et al., 2011), despite the fact that the writing standards specify the use of “digital sources,” “technology,” and the “Internet” repeatedly (CCSS, 2010, p.41). Because of this, many will ignore instruction in online reading, thinking that the CCSS only references traditional, offline read-ing comprehension. Many may also fail to integrate reading and writing instruction, an important part of any literacy program.

      There is a lot wrong with the Common Core standards, so I'm glad this article pointed this out. That is a perspective in the standards I had never thought of before and this gave me a new lens to look at it with

    1. like a picture in the newspaper

      I have noticed a lot of similes in this text. I think it would be interesting to create a function to help of find them and then do an analysis on what each simile refers to. Then we could derive a pattern from the out put. We could do this be creating an Ngram function to parse them out and then close read them for analysis. Or maybe a coordinates for the words "like a"?

    1. In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.
    2. So even if you don’t agree that reading fiction makes us treat others better, it is a way of treating ourselves better. Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,” the author Jeanette Winterson has written. “What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”
    1. dismissing pleasure in reading (whether as illicit, or unserious, or whathaveyou) opens space for anxiety to become one’s dominant reading affect, and particularly “anxiety about whether we’re reading the right stuff, or reading for the right reasons, or reading in the right way.”
    1. the only filter worth having is the one that distinguishes between what is relevant and what is not; what matters and what doesn’t.When you filter by right or wrong, not only are you trying to paint a whole with the smaller component of its parts, but you’re also limiting what you understand. Who is to say that there isn’t a lesson in what is wrong? Or more importantly, who is to say that what you assume to be right or wrong is just a current bias that, one day, you will come to readjust?Any time I reread a book that has been important to me in the past, I always come back with new lessons. Most books contain more than one idea, and they say different things in different places.

      According to Zat Rana, reading is not about being right or wrong, but rather about being open new ideas and lessons.

    2. Every word, every sentence, and every paragraph of a good piece of writing has the potential to teach you something. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be selective about what you read or that you can’t give up on something that isn’t speaking to you. What it means is that for something to move you, you have to be ready to be moved.

      The challenge is to be open to the opportunity to be moved.

    1. Can't annotate stupid JSTOR page images. But: "When we read for typos, letters constitute the field of attention; content becomes virtually inaccessible. When we read for content, semantic structures constitute the field of attention; letters - for the most part - recede from our consciousness."

    1. On the other hand, computers cannot read.

      This is entirely too complex an assertion to be made without support. It seems easy to understand, and yet it is not.

  24. Jun 2018
    1. The first part introduces what Marjorie Perloff calls “differential reading,” which positions close and distant reading practices as both subjective and objective methodologies.

      Is New Historicism close or distant reading? The latter, right? But nonetheless deeply human, perhaps more so than "close reading" criticized as privileging text over lived reality.

  25. Apr 2018
  26. Mar 2018
    1. An Open Approach to Scholarly Reading and Knowledge Management

      Key writing on opening knowledge practices (OKP), what we are calling the effort to enable people, when they are engaged in acquiring, generating and sharing knowledge as students, teachers, researchers, scholars, and librarians, to develop and demonstrate (agency) themselves (identities), their understanding (literacies), their skills, and their connections to other people (communities) throughout their lives for their own benefit, for the common good, and to participate in a just and thriving economy.

    1. To facilitate and promote the writing, publishing, and reading of literature in electronic media.

      I think that ELO's definition pretty much sums up what E-Lit, or Electronic Literature is. And I think that this concept is only going to grow bigger, and become the new norm for future generations.

    1. Reading might convey an actual bit of knowledge to the officious man. How much easier to open a book and talk as opposed to read and actually learn something

  27. Feb 2018
    1. Máire Ní Mhongáin

      As Ciarán Ó Con Cheanainn writes in Leabhar Mór na nAmhrán, the oldest written version of this song dates to 1814, and is found in MS Egerton 117 in the British Library. Oral lore in Conneamara has it that Máire Ní Mhongáin’s three sons joined the British Army, and that Peadar deserted soon after joining, and emigrated to America. It seems probable that their involvement was in the French Revolutionary Wars or the Napoleonic Wars, the major conflicts fought by the British Army in the final decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth respectively.

      Máire Ní Mhongáin seems to have resonated among Irish emigrant communities in the United States. My evidence for this is that Micheál Ó Gallchobhair of Erris, County Mayo, collected songs from Erris emigrants living in Chicago in the 1930s, over a century after the occasion of ‘Amhrán Mháire Ní Mhongáin’s’ composition. It features in his collection, which you access via the following link: http://www.jstor.org.ucc.idm.oclc.org/stable/20642542?seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents

      The virulent cursing of departed sons by the mother, named Máre, produces the effect of striking g contrasts with John Millington Synge’s bereaves mother, Old Maurya, in Riders to the Sea.

      My Irish Studies blog features an in-depth account of typical features of the caoineadh genre to which Amhrán Mháire Ní Mhongáin belongs. You can access it via the following link: johnwoodssirishstudies.wordpress.com/2018/01/03/carraig-aonair-an-eighteenth-century-west-cork-poem/

    1. Bean an tSeanduine - Sean Nós 2

      ‘Bean an tSeanduine’ features all of the conventions of the malmariée genre we have previously encountered in ‘An Seanduine Cam’. Also, it is a good example of the speaker blaming her parents for her plight, which is another regular feature of this song type.

      As well as being one of the finest examples of the genre, it is perhaps the most well-known and commonly sung, owing in large part to the simplicity and catchiness of its monosyllable end-rhymes.

      As well as Ó Tuama, Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail has written about the common features of the chanson de la malmariée. Her article ‘The Representation of the Feminine: Some evidence from Irish language sources’ in Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an Dá Chultúr is a rich source of information on the topic. In ‘Bean an tSeanduine’, we have a fine example of what Ní Úrdail calls the description of ‘the plight of a beautiful young woman, trapped in an unhappy marriage to an impotent elderly spouse who is ignorant of her mental and physical frustration’. However, when we consider the particular humour of this song, we can identify how it serves to empower the female speaker.

      ‘Bean an tSeanduine’ differs from ‘An Seanduine Cam’ in that there is no third-person narrator. Like ‘An Seanduine Cam’, the humour of the song relies on a ridiculing of the old man, although here the young woman herself is his detractor. Each of his brags meet a witty riposte. When he claims wealth, she calls him a miser, and when he wonders what would become of his if he died during the night, she jokes that death is an immanent danger. When mockery of this kind is voiced by the female speaker, it serves to empower her, and inspire in the listener a sense of sympathy and respect.

    1. An Seanduine Cam - Corn Uí Riada 2016

      The song’s first two verses are spoken by a third-person narrator. In its humorous exaggeration, the first verse caricatures recognized conventions of arranged marriage. This narrative consciously situates itself in a genre whose familiarity to the listener is a necessary part of the humour. It addresses the economic incentives which were the major precipitating factors of marriage arrangements in rural Ireland during the eighteenth century. It also invokes the misery which such marriages often visited upon young women.

      In his essay ‘Love in Irish Folksong’, Seán Ó Tuama identifies among typical features of the malmariée genre that ‘a young woman speaks (in the first person) of her anguish,’ that ‘the description of the husband can be unbelievably grotesque and ribald: he is humped, crippled; he coughs, grunts, whines at night; most of all, he is cold as lead, important, and completely fails to satisfy her desires’, and that ‘she discloses that she is going to leave him for a young man’ (149). ‘An Seanduine Cam’ provides clear examples of all of these traits.

      Moreover, because these tendencies find expression in a debate form, and are redoubled in response to the unfeeling man, the resistant character of the put-upon young woman is strongly emphasized.

    1. chúige

      ‘what you yourself and the late John O’Daly, following in the footsteps of Edward Walsh, to some extent accomplished for Munster, more than thirty years ago’ (iv)

      John O’Daly (1800-1878) was an editor and publisher. He published Edward Walsh’s Reliques of Irish Jacobite Poetry (1844), as well as two series of Poets and Poetry of Munster, the first by James Clarence Mangan (1849), and the second by George Sigerson (1860). In another of his works, Mise agus an Conradh (1937), Hyde wrote ‘Ní raibh éinne, lena linn, a rinne níos mó ar a shlí féin chun Gaeilge a leathnú agus a shaothrú’ (There was noone, during O’Daly’s time, who did as much as he did to popularize Gaelic’, my trans.) The most comprehensive biography of John O’Daly is that in Beathaninéis, vol. 2, by Diarmuid Breathnach and Mairéad Ní Mhurchú. It is available online at https://www.ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=1193

      The most comprehensive biography I have found in English is the entry in The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, edited by Robert Welch.

    2. grádh

      ‘My Dear Dr. Sigerson’ (iv)

      The Dr. Sigerson in question is George Sigerson (1836-1925), a physician and an eminent translator of Gaelic poetry. When the Gaelic League was founded in 1893, Hyde was elected as its present, and so absented his role as president of the National Literary Society. Sigerson succeeded him, and was the society’s incumbent present when Love Songs of Connacht was published.

      A direct address to the National Literary Society was famously performed by Hyde in 1892. The central idea of his speech titled ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ was that there was an indissoluble link between a nation’s language and its culture, and that it was a sign of cultural weakness to mimic English ways and habits of thought.

      The beginning of Love Songs of Connacht reminds us of the ideological backdrop from which the book emerges. For in-depth accounts of the development of the idea that language and nationhood are inextricably linked, see Diarmuid Ó Giolláin’s Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity (2000), and Joep Leerssen’s National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (2006). You can read the text of Hyde’s 1892 speech to the National Literary Society at http://historymuse.net/readings/HYDENecessityforDeAnglicizingIreland1892.html

  28. Nov 2017
    1. Should the students bedisciplined for their disrespectfor authority and their flouting ofschool rules? Should the studentsbe praised for their ingenuity andtheir ability to figure out howsophisticated security systems reallywork?

      To answer this question, it may depend on what the outcome was. Did the students use this for personal gain? Did the students report the security flaw? How many times did this occur? This moral dilemma is not only taking place in school, but in the real world.

  29. Oct 2017
    1. Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

      James Joyce is known for is his use of epiphanies: "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself" (Stone 371).

      The last line of "Araby" can be seen as the boy's epiphany. Leading up to this moment, Mangan's sister has consumed his mind, and he thought buying something for her from Araby would solve everything. Now that he finally made it to the bazaar, he is utterly disappointed.

      There are many interpretations about what the boy's epiphany actually is. Some scholars posit that the he relates to the men flirting with the sales woman: "The boy looks steadily at this vulgar avatar of his longings; and then his other vision—his vision of a comely waiting presence, of a heavenly dolorous lady—dissolves and finally evaporates. The boy, at last, glimpses reality unadorned; he no longer deceives himself with his usual romanticizing" (Stone 371). He is ultimately just like those two men, and Mangan's sister is just another girl.

      Another possible interpretation is that the boy's realization is a greater metaphor for the deterioration of Ireland's identity. He sees the French "Café Chantant". Moreover, while eavesdropping on the lady and the two men, the boy "remarked their English accents". Perhaps Ireland is not so Irish anymore.

      Yet another meaning could be that the boy is no longer a boy; he has transitioned out of the magical and imaginative world of being a child. The story begins with the boy telling us how he and his friends, "played till our bodies glowed". He then stops playing with his friends because he is infatuated with Mangan's sister: "From the front window I saw my companions playing below in the street". After he hears about Araby the boy has "hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play". His whole outlook on life has rapidly changed. In an essay titled "Closing Time: 'ten minutes to ten' and the End of Childhood in Joyce's Araby'", Steven Doloff notes that the boy arrives at the bazaar at "ten minutes to ten": "While clock hands regularly meet twenty-four times during the course of a day, their particular occurrence at 9:50 P.M. at the end of 'Araby' may have a special contextual significance. Their juncture immediately precedes the boy's anguished self-revelation and what appears to be the near-simultaneous closing of the bazaar at ten o'clock. If we choose to see the longer minute hand of the clock as representing adulthood and the shorter one childhood, then 'ten minutes to ten' would symbolically portend the moment that adulthood overtakes the boy's childhood, eclipses it, and begins to leave it behind—a simple visual icon for a widely acknowledged theme in the story".

      These are just a few of many interpretations of the ending. Ezra Pound wrote that Joyce's "most engaging merit, is that he carefully avoids telling you a lot that you don't want to know".

      sources: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.jpllnet.sfsu.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=cb6a19bc-74ce-46ea-a40d-117795dd7dfb%40sessionmgr104

      https://muse-jhu-edu.jpllnet.sfsu.edu/article/605563

      http://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1305652712296879.pdf

    1. COMPETENCY-BASED LEARNING

      Close reading is basically standardized in Common Core--it's referenced in the first ELA anchor standard for reading. Hypothesis is a means to assess competency in that standard by recording, measuring, and allowing feedback on

    2. Listening

      A big part of social reading: listening to the text and to other readers.

    3. more engaging

      Because social and interactive, collaborative annotation can make reading more engaging.

    4. peer-to-peer conversations about big issues that defy yes/no answers and ask students to think more analytically

      Pretty good definition of social reading in fact!