Modern Day Depiction of the Mongols in Marco Polo: One Hundred Eyes and W. Rubruck's Account:

Marco Polo: One Hundred Eyes is a short special on Netflix loosely based off of the real Mongol General Bayan of the Baarin. In comparing Rubruck's primary account to this modern day portrayal of the Mongols in China under Kubilai Khan there are a few similarities and differences. Differences mainly arise from the time and geographic spaces; the special took place in 1262 in Kubilai Khan's China whereas Rubruck's was between 1253-1255 in the Mongol capital of Karakorum. Rubruck noted the nomadic lifestyle where the Mongols resided in non-fixed dwellings, but in the special this is not shown; the Khan is shown not in a tent, but in a permanent building. Both sources (and our textbook) depict the Mongols as fierce warriors, who used curved bows, horses, and fear (of being massacred) as a means of conquering people. In the special, the Khan states he takes conquered craftsmen, employing them to further his conquests. Our text repeatedly emphasized this unique aspect of the Mongols of using those they captured to create siege engines or help run their armies as the real Bayan of the Baarin did. Though Rubruck's account is a primary source unlike this Netflix special- which was most likely based off of a plethora of primary sources- they both provide different view of how Mongols functioned and lived in various areas within the same mammoth empire.

Here, Stewart is arguing that in many past respected societies (Greek, Roman, Jewish), women were well-respected in a religious sense. As a reference to her earlier claim, that she was visited by the Holy Spirit and therefore had the temerity and the right to speak publicly on religious grounds. I do find it interesting that she said: "For God makes use of feeble means sometimes, to bring about his most exalted purposes." Her use of the word "feeble" is interesting, because it seems like she is ascribing to the expected gender roles/personalities, in that women are the "softer sex," and not perceived as strong or powerful.

I'm not picking up the meaning of this sentence. Thinking back to my younger years and different child studies, I assumed children learned by seeing, not comparison. If they are comparing, what are they comparing?

How one develops his/her taste, in addition to practice. Comparison is the next step to achieving superior "taste."

It's interesting that rhetoric started as this practical system for ancient Greek society, but then comes Bloom and other people Lanham talks about whose interpretation of humanism, rhetoric and the university is super apolitical, with the humanities in the university separate from society.

President Obama is using parallelism to display the differences and compare America and Cuba. He is doing this to develop a relationship and promote trust between the two countries.

p. 75

Why my badges may be a bad idea:

"These results suggest that teachers may discourage avoidance behaviour among their students when they encourage students to focus on mastering the material, improvement, and understanding the relevance of classroom work in their lives. Although it makes sense that students should be less concerned with protecting their image in classrooms that emphasize understanding the material and personal, individual standards of achievement, our results suggest that de-emphasizing performance goals may be more important than increasing the emphasis on mastery goals.... Even in classrooms that contain some of the curricular elements of a mastery goal structure, such as the constructivist principle of assigning open-ended, inquiry-based projects and tasks, students may avoid novelty and challenge if they believe that, ultimately, what matters is how their performance compares to their peers."

p. 71

Gheen and Midgely 1999 examined "how teachers' reports of social comparison practices related to avoiding novelty and chellenge. They found that teachers' reports of informative social comparison practices related to slightly higher levels of avoidance. However, these practices weakened the association between self-efficacy and avoiding novelty and challenge. In classrooms where teachers were high in their use of interstudent discussion about how to improve one's own work, low- and high-efficacy students were on a more equal footing when it came to avoiding novelty challenge. However, in classrooms where teachers reported using high levels of relative ability social comparison practices, low self-efficacy students' avoidance was higher than that of high self-efficacy students'"

This is cool, I may have somehow missed the fact that annotations on an entire page could be made public like that. This was really useful for showing me the power of Hypothesis in a way that made sense (the comparison to Medium is dead on and resonates given the similarities in the workflow).

"Burroughs’ output predicted the affective temporalities that social networks would make ubiquitous half a century after Naked Lunch appeared: a continuous stream of emissions less concerned with the definitiveness of any individual utterance than with the continued elaboration of a familiar presence."

I get the click of recognition with this particular quote. The world isn't so much flat as that Pharisee Friedman asserts as it has been leveled like the top of a mountain, all the energy goodies ripped out and the overburden midden gravity fed below, holler fill.

Comparison of Automated Essay Scoring to Calibrated Peer Review