Essay Sets Research Articles

An Automated Essay Grading Framework Based on Neural Networks (Dept.E)

This paper presents a proposed framework depending on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) that enhances the process of assessing student's essays in order to save the line and cost of manual scoring of these essays. This framework consists of five phases and the UML model of that framework is defined. Also the activity diagrams of that system are explained. During the learning algorithm phase, the network trained on a set of pre-graded student responses by teachers and then a set of essays not used in the training are introduced to a 10 tie network to judge the essay. The proposed framework was tested on case study and presents good results compared 10 a previously published work using the same case study with another technique.

“The Reason for War is War”: Western and Eastern Interrogations of Violence in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

Abstract Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) is set in civil war-torn Sri Lanka. This contemporary violent moment becomes a rupture through which the writer interrogates the division between Western and Eastern ways of approaching a violent situation. This essay sets out to investigate historical instances of violence and justifications for violence in the Buddhist context. The essay then turns to Buddhist scholars’ contemporary critical examination of violence and war in light of the teachings of ancient Buddhist texts. Then, having established the Buddhist history and contemporary debate around violence and war, the essay explores how Ondaatje comments on this history through the contemporary moment of civil war in Sri Lanka. The essay argues that rather than illustrating the need for a purer Buddhism or the separation between the political and the religious, as some scholars have argued in relation to Anil’s Ghost, according to Ondaatje, the only way to approach the problem of violence with any hope of reaching understanding is through appreciating the different ways of knowing offered by the East and the West.

“People Eat Their Dinner, Just Eat Their Dinner…”: Food Discourse in Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters and Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart

Abstract The essay sets out to explore the functions of food discourse in the plays Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov and Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley. Based on the critically established continuity between the two plays, the essay looks at the ways the dramatists capitalize on food imagery to achieve their artistic goals. It seemed logical to discuss the alimentary practices within the framework of everyday life studies (Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schütz, Fernand Braudel, Bernhard Waldenfels and others), moved to the forefront of literary scholarship by the anthropological turn in the humanities. Enhanced by a semiotic approach, this perspective enables one to understand food products and consumption manners as performing a variety of functions in each play. Most obviously, they are instrumental in creating the illusion of “everydayness” vital for new drama. Then, for Chekhov, food comes to epitomize the spiritless materiality of contemporary life, while in Henley’s play it is predominantly used, in accordance with the play’s feminist agenda, as a grotesque substitute for the lack of human affection. Relying upon the fundamental cultural distinction between everyday and non-everyday makes it possible to compare representations of festive occasions in the two plays seen through the gastronomical lens of “eating together.” Despite substantial differences, the emphases on alimentary practices in the plays serve to realize the inexhaustible dramatic potential inherent in the minutiae of quotidian life.

The things we keep – an ethnographic study of material possessions in New York City

A home could be likened to a glimpse into our heads. The plaster and lath are the skin and bones, our skull of sorts, a container of all things, sitting, waiting to be observed. The things we keep silently, but visually tell a story of us. Is this why we keep them? So as not to erase our identity? This essay sets out to understand consumer culture through people’s most special things in their domestic spaces. With an ethnographic approach, influenced by The Meaning of Things, I conducted in-person interviews, surveys, and workshops with residents discussing their most special things. From these findings, I created Home Moves prompts to re-engage with our things, and a speculative Living Room Lobby to transform personal collections outside of the domestic space.

„Do monkeys compare themselves to others?“

Abstract After briefly reconstructing the history of comparison both as a method of ‘comparing sciences’ in the 18th and 19th centuries and as an every-day phenomenon, the essay sets out to explore the historic and on-going debate on anthropological origins and features of comparing. By referring to different academic cultures – natural sciences, social sciences, humanities – the paper confronts insights and results of scientific experiments that test comparing practices of primates with Franz Kafka’s Report to an Academy. While the anthropological question still remains unresolved, the different cultures of science and literature reveal different aspects by laying bare the foundations of comparing processes.

Rule by the Few in the Federalist Papers: An Examination of the Aristocratic Preference of Publius

Abstract The Federalist Papers are a set of eighty-five essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay during the founding era of the United States, with the purpose of persuading the states to adopt the Constitution as the replacement for the Articles of Confederation. The Papers were some of the most impressive political writings of the time, and are still cited frequently today by the United States Supreme Court. The arguments set forth in the Papers attempted to defend the Constitution's aristocratic characteristics against its opponents, the Anti-Federalists, while also attempting to normalize an anti-democratic, representative form of government in the minds of the American people. The clever advocacy and skillful rhetoric employed by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay led to the eventual ratification of the Constitution, and consequently the creation of the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet. This paper examines the differences between the traditional forms of government, the political philosophies of the Papers’ authors, the anti-democratic, aristocratic nature of the government proposed by the Constitution, and the arguments for and against its adoption, as articulated in the Papers and various other writings.

The second reality for Blanche DuBois

The essay sets out to interpret T. Williams's famous play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) from the viewpoint of the characters' psychology as well as the eternal conflict between America's two fundamental civilizational elements - the vanishing and sophisticated culture of the South and the victorious and pragmatic culture of the North. In her detailed analysis of the plot and the symbolic structure of the play, as well as the psychology of the characters, the author finds that A Streetcar Named Desire incorporates a lot of the playwright's ideas inspired by the philosophy of F. Nietzsche, in particular, the latter's teaching of the Ubermensch. It is in this light that Remizova proposes to interpret the play's protagonist Stanley Kowalski - not only as the embodiment of ‘superhuman' traits, but also a metaphoric actualization of the same ontological ‘will,' which, according to Nietzsche, is life itself. Remizova believes that the conflict between Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois represents the antagonism between personified life and death, respectively, and that the play's ending, with life defeating death, resonates perfectly with the post-war era (1940s).

Reformulación pragmática de la filosofía del Derecho. Características de una teoría realista del Derecho

Hace un siglo, los pragmatistas promovieron una reformulación de la filosofía. La filosofía del momento estaba centrada en el análisis conceptual, las abstracciones, el análisis a priori y la búsqueda de verdades necesarias y universales. Los pragmatistas argüían que, por el contrario, la filosofía debería centrarse en los problemas del momento, lo que requiere que los teóricos presten atención a la complejidad social, la variación, el cambio, el poder, las consecuencias y otros aspectos concretos de la vida social. Los paralelismos entre la filosofía de entonces y la filosofía del Derecho de hoy son sorprendentes y, como sostengo, requieren una teoría del Derecho de inspiración pragmatista en la filosofía del Derecho contemporánea. La teoría realista expuesta en este ensayo se centra en lo que es el Derecho, para qué se utiliza el Derecho, qué piensa la gente sobre el Derecho, cómo actúan en relación con el Derecho y cuáles son las consecuencias sociales del Derecho. Esta retrata al Derecho como un complejo de instituciones que evoluciona a lo largo del tiempo en conexión con los factores sociales, culturales, económicos, políticos, tecnológicos y ecológicos circundantes. Valiéndose del pragmatismo, este ensayo adelanta los aspectos epistemológicos, ontológicos y metodológicos de la teoría realista del Derecho junto a un muestreo de las nuevas percepciones que lo distinguen o que desafían posiciones ampliamente mantenidas en la filosofía del Derecho. Los temas tratados son, en orden, el pragmatismo, la reformulación de filosofía del Derecho, el naturalismo, el historicismo y el holismo, la construcción social del Derecho y el instrumentalismo, el poder y los ideales.

Essays on the Fallacy of Electricity Price Indeterminedness: Electricity Market Stylized Facts and Conjectures of Interest Part Ia

In this work, which represents the first part of a compendium of papers, author investigates and discusses a set of the most prominent electricity market stylized facts of price formation. Subsequently, the lack of theoretical underlying concerning the stylized set of facts is being dealt with a suggestion of a set of conjectures to be examined in the future parts of the set of essays on the fallacy of electricity price indeterminedness. Each of the conjectures is thoroughly discussed and will be dealt in subsequent parts of the following set of essays by examining mathematical and applicative basis of the conjectures itself which, at the same time, implies their viability and sustainability.

Development of a test taker-oriented rubric: Exploring its usefulness for test preparation and writing development

The study reported here is part of a mixed methods validation of a test taker-oriented rating scale or rubric for the writing section of the CanTEST, a high-stakes proficiency test used for university admissions at several Canadian institutions. This rubric is being developed as a support to test preparation efforts, as well as a potential formative tool to support student writing development. The scale was provided to international students in ESL advanced writing classes (n = 48) who were representative of the test taker population. Students reviewed and practiced using it in class, then used it to score a set of blinded essays and provide comments justifying their scores. Students also reflected on their experience using it and the extent to which it supported their own writing development. Cluster analysis revealed considerable variation in scale use and discrepancies with the official scores awarded to the essays. However, qualitative analysis of student comments and reflections revealed considerable potential for the tool to direct students’ writing development efforts.

Muck, Mummies and Medicine: Disgust in Early Modern Science

Abstract This essay shows that early modern practices that used human bodily matter cannot be – as hitherto – explained by the absence of the emotion of disgust nor as being conducted in spite of disgust. Instead, it proposes to read those practices’ changing history as part of the history of the ‘paradox of disgust’. Four case studies (on anatomy, excrement, mummies and skulls) demonstrate that disgust was highly productive: it attracted fascination, allowed physicians to fashion themselves, and was even believed capable of healing. Over time and for complex reasons, however, the productive side of disgust declined. Combining current approaches in the history of emotions and material culture studies, this essay sets out not only to propose a new narrative for the changing role of disgust in early modern science and societies, but also to explore how variations in settings and human intervention changed the way emotions were used and perceived.

Traces of Dissent: The Journal Filmspiegel and Readership Responses to the Ban of Frank Beyer’s DEFA Film Spur der Steine (1965/66)

The 11th Plenum of the Central Committee of the East German SED, held in December 1965 and resulting in the ban of over a dozen feature films, marks the most ferocious act of political censorship in the history of the state-owned production company DEFA. The ideological agenda behind the decision-making process that led to the official branding of Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones, 1965/66) is well documented, the critical acclaim of the forbidden films has steadily grown after their rediscovery in 1989. Still missing is any deeper insight into the reactions of the cinema-going public to this ruthless intervention of politics into GDR film culture. Based on recently discovered unpublished ‘letters to the editor’ of the journal Filmspiegel concerning the ban of Spur der Steine, this essay sets out to restore a crucial dimension to our understanding of the social reverberations of the 11th Plenum.

Shifting the pattern: lateral thinking and machine vision

ABSTRACT Pattern recognition and machine vision are two defining features of a drone’s sensor. The following essay sets out to examine these features by combining machinic and artistic frameworks for understanding patterns. Its goal is to counter the invisibility and inaccessibility of machine vision – especially where it concerns the military use of drones – by forming constellations around the drone that seem unlikely at first. They include modernist instances such as Paul Klee’s Grid Dancer and Siegfried Kracauer’s writings on the mass ornament, which are paired with contemporary artworks by Julién Prévieux and Clemens von Wedemeyer. These pairings are the result of a methodology that harks back to Edward de Bono’s concept of lateral thinking, which calls for a repatterning by moving sideways and deviating from the standard approach. In this case, its goal is to review subject formations in the drone age, as they are scrutinized in the pattern of life analyses that shift the focus from identity to action and from individual bodies to dividual connections. Although these shifts may be most explicit in the case of war, they similarly apply to commerce and entertainment, thus suggesting the drone as a pattern made out of elements that are central to “our” time.

Volume 50 (2020)

Volume 50 (2020)

Confidential Gossip and Organization Studies

This essay sets out the case for regarding confidential gossip as a significant concept in the study of organizations. It develops the more general concept of gossip by combining it with concepts of organizational secrecy in order to propose confidential gossip as a distinctive communicative practice. As a communicative practice, it is to be understood as playing a particular role within the communicative constitution of organizations. That particularity arises from the special nature of any communication regarded as secret, which includes the fact that such communication is liable to be regarded as containing the ‘real truth’ or ‘insider knowledge’. Thus it may be regarded as more than ‘just gossip’ and also as more significant than formal communication. This role is explored, as well as the methodological and ethical challenges of studying confidential gossip empirically.

Legal Authorities and their Legislative Priorities: The Treatment of Leprosy in the Sources of Canon Law

Abstract This essay considers medieval leprosy in ecclesiastical legislation through the lens of legal pluralism, that is the range of normative orders that are independent from the “state” as a monolithic entity. It focuses on the period between the mid-eleventh and the turn of the fourteenth century marked by efforts at church reform, by the proliferation of leprosaria, and by canonical interest in matrimonial law. It argues that the environment in which various legal authorities worked influenced how they engaged with leprosy. The policies they enacted resulted from a negotiation of their circumstances and needs, which were not necessarily the same. The result was a rich and overlapping legal tradition that, over time, coalesced into a comprehensive legislative policy that both protected the rights of the afflicted as well as the safety of the healthy. The first section of this essay sets forth research on leprosy and the arguments to be pursued. The second section argues that the “old law” in canonical collections used leprosy as an allegory for sin and as a metaphor for simony in pursuit of personal reform and renewal. The third section focuses on the proliferation of leprosaria and argues that the challenge of arranging for pastoral care fell on the shoulders of councils and prelates making policy at the regional or local level. The fourth section argues that the papacy and jurists worked parallel to other legislative bodies. Yet it would be the requests to which the papacy responded and the importance of juridical commentary as a source clarifying the legal ambiguities in these responses that would provide the inroad for the papacy, acting similar to the proverbial “state”, to normalize ecclesiastical life and Christian society.

Edward Thomas and Hedges: England’s going out of Stile

Abstract Edward Thomas’s life and writing are marked by his attentiveness to rural England. With an overview of Thomas’ prose writings and then a set of close readings of his poetry, this essay describes how he presented hedges as an especially important part of the English countryside. Examining Thomas’s prose, the essay sets out how he saw hedges bringing natural life together into concentrated versions of landscapes, and how he argued that these concentrations could represent the English national identity. As the essay demonstrates, these ideas came into his poetry. His speakers see English field life as intricately interwoven. Some respond to the ongoing First World War by building on this intricacy. Their sense of being at home in England and belonging there is fuelled by treating hedges as portals to an eternal and a pre-industrial England. By considering the roles that hedges have in his poems, this essay shows how Thomas shaped them into a focal point for portraying speakers who have a connection to the national identity.

Who will check the checkers: false factcheckers and memetic misinformation

This Essay sets out the need for disciplined fact-checking networks and the likely counterattacks of domestic and foreign propagandists. Part I sets out the continuing social media disinformation campaigns infecting elections worldwide, which stoke internal divisions and undermine public discourse. Part II details factchecking efforts and their effectiveness, with specific attention paid to the neutralization of memes designed to inflame racial hatred. Part III examines disturbing trends that threaten the fact-checking mission, including an internally driven tendency towards false equivalence and foreign-directed efforts to create imposter fact-checkers. Part IV offers an overview of potential solutions and areas for future study.

IDEOLOGIA, UTOPIA E CRISI DELLA POLITICA

Political parties inspired by the values of liberalism, democracy and socialism no longer appear to be capable of conceiving long-term projects for their fellow citizens and humanity. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, large and small powers entered into a sordid struggle for world supremacy, sparking both local and global conflicts, and heralding the return of nationalism as a dominant ideology. This essay sets out to demonstrate that the posited “end of ideology” is groundless: traditional ideologies are unable to envisage a future of progress because they passively submit to the ideology of the absolute sovereignty of states and the just war to defend national interests. The future of humanity is threatened by a new arms race – regarding both nuclear and conventional weapons - to which governments are dedicating vast amounts of money; money which should actually be invested in saving the planet from global warming and the sixth extinction of animal species now under way. The path taken by the people of Europe, with the construction of the first supranational Union in history, should be a source of inspiration for formulating the policies necessary to construct a world order based on peaceful cooperation between states and to ensure that all citizens of the world enjoy the same rights of freedom and solidarity that, albeit imperfectly, have been achieved in Europe. Human progress is a utopia that can become a reality.

More efficient processes for creating automated essay scoring frameworks: A demonstration of two algorithms

Automated essay scoring (AES) has emerged as a secondary or as a sole marker for many high-stakes educational assessments, in native and non-native testing, owing to remarkable advances in feature engineering using natural language processing, machine learning, and deep-neural algorithms. The purpose of this study is to compare the effectiveness and the performance of two AES frameworks, each based on machine learning with deep language features, or complex language features, and deep neural algorithms. More specifically, support vector machines (SVMs) in conjunction with Coh-Metrix features were used for a traditional AES model development, and the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) approach was used for more contemporary deep-neural model development. Then, the strengths and weaknesses of the traditional and contemporary models under different circumstances (e.g., types of the rubric, length of the essay, and the essay type) were tested. The results were evaluated using the quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) score and compared with the agreement between the human raters. The results indicated that the CNNs model performs better, meaning that it produced more comparable results to the human raters than the Coh-Metrix + SVMs model. Moreover, the CNNs model also achieved state-of-the-art performance in most of the essay sets with a high average QWK score.