Digital Commons Network^™

What Freedom? Freedom-A Disease Without Cure. Slavoj Žižek. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2023. Pp. 328., Edward Sankowski, Betty J. Harris

International Dialogue

Slavoj Žižek's outpouring of books continues, including the volume, Freedom-A Disease Without Cure (2023). The title is somber, but the contents do not signal an unrelievedly depressed attitude on the part of the author. Rather, the book manifests expanding curiosity and far-reaching originality. That is, however, supplemented by some self-criticism, e.g., when the author broods about the apathy in himself and others that he claims is a result of the hyperactivity enjoined by and observed in contemporary capitalism. We hope to go beyond critical interpretation and evaluation of Žižek, to express our own new insights beyond those formulated or hinted …

Sac Newsletter 2024, South Asia Center

Newsletters from the South Asia Center

No abstract provided.

The Approaches And Implications Of English Medium Of Instruction In Nepal’S Private Schools, Vivian Ko

Nepal: Development, Gender, and Social Change in the Himalaya

In this report, I discuss how English Medium of Instruction (EMI) is approached by private schools in Nepal and its implications on larger society. Nepal’s increasing demand for EMI, and thus private schools, has contributed to a variety of social issues including inaccessibility and a dying culture. By situating EMI in Nepal’s education system, I explore how the privatization of schools and the wide implementation of EMI is both a result of neoliberalism and a contributing factor to such ideologies. Observations of EMI classes and non-academic spaces on school grounds, in addition to interviews and focus groups with students and …

The Joining Of Wisdom And Compassion: Tibetan Buddhist Nuns' Intellectual Agency And Sectarian Identity At Dolma Ling Nunnery, Isabella Infante

Nepal: Tibetan and Himalayan Peoples

Historically, Tibetan nuns have had limited access to debate-based philosophical study or any formal monastic education, primarily being trained in ritual practices. While debate has been practiced by other sects, it is largely understood as a major component of the Gelukpa study program. This essay attempts to explore the introduction of debate at Dolma Ling, a non-sectarian nunnery, and how the practice of non-sectarianism is reflected in the curriculum, especially in a context where women have historically been excluded from the design of their own curriculum. While Dolma Ling's non-sectarian approach offers a platform for intra-sectarian dialogue, the Gelugpa-centric curriculum …

What Is The Fallacy Of Approximation?, Matthew Hammerton, Sovan Patra

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Many philosophers appeal to the “fallacy of approximation”, or “problem of second best”. However, despite the pervasiveness of such appeals, there has been only a single attempt to provide a systematic account of what the fallacy is. We identify the shortcomings of this account and propose a better one in its place. Our account not only captures all the contexts in which approximation-based reasoning occurs but also systematically explains the several different ways in which it can be in error.

Innovations In Engaging The Next Generation Towards Discipleship And Mission, Billy Mcmahan

Great Commission Research Journal

This research addresses the central question: How can the church adapt to reach and disciple Generation Z in a way that speaks to their distinctive experiences and needs? To answer this question, the paper will first explore Gen Z’s defining characteristics and then examine how various organizations, particularly for-profit organizations, engage this emerging generation. Finally, the study will highlight innovative ministries gaining significant traction with Gen Z, offering insights and models for broader church applications.

Précis Of: "Birds, Bats And Minds: Tales Of A Revolutionary Scientist, Donald R. Griffin", Carolyn A. Ristau

Animal Sentience

Donald Griffin co-discovered bat sonar and founded the field of echolocation. He studied bird migration and founded Cognitive Ethology, the study of animal awareness and mental experiences. In all these endeavors, he faced hostile opposition. The biography (Ristau 2024) examines Griffin's life and the scientific explorations by him and others in these fields. This Précis emphasizes his arguments and supporting evidence for animal consciousness as well as his later research. Griffin considered the inhibiting assumptions made by scientists, including Cartesian views, the misunderstanding of innate behaviors, prejudice against lower animals, concern with violations of parsimony, and the assertions of the …

The Phenomenology Of Experiencing Critical Thinking In Vocational Higher Education, Sean Castleberry

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Theses & Dissertations

This study investigated the role of critical thinking in vocational education within the Virginia Community College System by examining the lived experience of administrators, faculty, and students who are associated with vocational education. To complete this task, the researcher employed a phenomenological methodology primarily based on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and other phenomenological philosophers including Edmund Husserl, Mark D. Vagle, and Karin Dahlberg. The goal of the research was to serve as a beginning and help close the gap in knowledge concerning how critical thinking is defined in vocational education, why it is seen as an important part of …

10.01.2024 Orsp Connect, Liz Williamson

ORED Newsletter

NIH Podcast on simplified review framework

LINC lunch External Review

NIDA Diversity Supplements Webinar

Using Catholic Social Thought And The Normativity Of The Future In Responding To The Super Wicked Problem Of Climate Change, Stephanie Ann Yu Puen

Theology Department Faculty Publications

The climate crisis has been dubbed a “super wicked problem”—one where there is a sense of urgency, complicity in the problem by those who wish to solve it, and difficulty in sacrificing the short term for the long term. To respond to the difficulty of long-term thinking in addressing super wicked problems as part of SDG 13 (Climate Action), there is a need to pay attention to the narratives, norms, and values at work, and how we employ these categories in climate action. This paper discusses how Catholic social thought and the concept of the normativity of the future can …

Pathos, Fall 2024, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Adriana Stanzione

Transformer-Based Joint Learning Approach For Text Normalization In Vietnamese Automatic Speech Recognition Systems, The Viet Bui, Tho Chi Luong, Oanh Thi Tran

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this article, we investigate the task of normalizing transcribed texts in Vietnamese Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in order to improve user readability and the performance of downstream tasks. This task usually consists of two main sub-tasks: predicting and inserting punctuation (i.e., period, comma); and detecting and standardizing named entities (i.e., numbers, person names) from spoken forms to their appropriate written forms. To achieve these goals, we introduce a complete corpus including of 87,700 sentences and investigate conditional joint learning approaches which globally optimize two sub-tasks simultaneously. The experimental results are quite promising. Overall, the proposed architecture outperformed the …

Inducing And Interpreting Physical Transformation In Electroacoustic Chamber Music Via Experimental Applications Of Modular Synthesizers, Joseph Samuel Lyons

Theses and Dissertations

One of the most rapidly evolving musical genres of the 21st century is interactive electroacoustic chamber music. This is primarily due to the ongoing developments in creative technology that have increased both the idiom's technical accessibility and its potential for artistic expression. In particular, modern modular synthesizers enable electroacoustic musicians to transform the physical characteristics of sound with an extremely fine level of control. This research project has three major goals. The first goal is to explore the relationship between the many disciplines involved in this genre of music through a review of the scholarship of Aleister Crowley, Edgard Varèse, …

Practicing Strategy And Performance Preparation Of György Ligeti’S Musica Ricercata., Xiyao Wang

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923–2006) is renowned as one of the most significant composers of the twentieth century. Musicians around the world have admired his innovative musical language. “Through the 1950s and 1960s, he went from composing in the style of his countryman Béla Bartók to working at the cutting edge of the Western European avant-garde.” His folk elements and avant-garde compositional techniques expanded through various genres, including orchestral, chamber, and keyboard compositions. This study's primary purpose is to explore Ligeti's piano work Musica Ricercata and ultimately provide a resource to other musicians that will assist in preparing and …

Human-Chatbot Interaction Patterns: A Topic Modeling Analysis Of 3,275 Conversations With Chatgpt, Hannah Sussman

IPHS 200: Programming Humanity

This research presents a topic modeling analysis of the WILDCHAT-FULL dataset, examining user interactions with ChatGPT across over one million conversations. The study focused specifically on extended conversations (five or more exchanges) between U.S.-based users and ChatGPT in English. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), I identified 50 distinct conversational topics with coherence scores ranging from -1.5 to -14.92 (mean: -4.47). The analysis revealed diverse interaction patterns spanning creative writing, jailbreaking (attempting to get ChatGPT to do something against its guidelines), technical discussions, business applications, and educational queries. A particularly striking finding was that creative writing and role-play scenarios dominated the …

Leveraging Ai To Manage Your Money Better: How Financial Advisors Can Use Ai To Provide Better Service, Lewis Cropper, Katherine Elkins

IPHS 200: Programming Humanity

A financial advisor is someone who works with clients to build a comprehensive plan for what they should do with their money. The best financial advisors are the ones that clients can trust when they’re going through major life changes, because money is very personal and emotional. With this being said, the wealth management industry is currently going through a major disruption with the rise in generative artificial intelligence. More and more financial institutions are integrating artificial intelligence into their business, whether it be through new planning software, enhanced fraud detection, marketing automation, or even robo advisors. The focus of …

“Indescribable But Never To Be Forgotten”: Challenging The Gender Roles Of Victorian Era Women And Expanding Cultural Horizons Through Travels Abroad, Camryn Counsil

Student Publications

Between the years of 1862-8, the Webb-Black family traveled the world on a Grand Tour to countries such as Italy, Austria, and France. In letters home to their aunts, half-sisters Augusta, Menah, and Julia detailed their journeys within the physical and cultural spheres of the places they visited. Later copied into a bound volume, these epistles gave voice to women’s thoughts, emotions, and conflicts when exploring the realm of the unknown. From a young age, Victorian girls were taught to suppress their opinions and merely expect a life of motherhood. However, the women of these letters pushed beyond what was …

Female's Digital Self-Making On Tiktok: Identity Construction Through A Framework Of Postfeminist Media And Neoliberalism (2016-2024), Lindsey A. Pritchard

Senior Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between TikTok's algorithmic design, women's identity construction, and the feminist historical context that shapes these constructions. In Chapter 1, "TikTok, Algorithmic Design, and Self-Making," I analyze how TikTok's algorithm functions and how these factors influence the curation and presentation of identity. This chapter establishes the foundational understanding of TikTok as a platform where identity performance is deeply intertwined with algorithmic design.

Chapter 2, "TikTok Feminism and Identity Commodification" examines the commodification of women's identities on the platform. It investigates the historical context of feminism and its evolution into postfeminism, analyzing how these narratives have been …

The Importance Of Humanities In A Career-Focused Educational Environment, Geoff Zylstra, Jill Belli, Candido Cabo, Sean Macdonald, Robin Michals, Ann Marie Sowder, Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

The humanities have the potential to enhance STEM curriculum in career-oriented professional degree programs. As part of a larger college-wide initiative to develop interdisciplinary curricula, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded a grant to New York City College of Technology to explore the relationship between the humanities and career-focused degree programs in STEM departments. This article describes the design and implementation of coursework that bridges the curricular divides between humanities disciplines and technical or career-focused disciplines by bringing the humanities to bear on science and technology-oriented courses. Specifically, the humanities served to improve technical skills for students in …

Gender Portrayal In A Nursing Textbook In Oman: Striving For Equality, Adnan Mohammed Bataineh, Ebrahim Douzandeh, Kashif Ali Sabiri

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper aims to analyze gender representation in English for Nursing 1: Vocational English Course Book (Ros et al., 2012) used to teach English for Specific Purposes courses to nursing students at the University of Buraimi in Oman. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses were used to investigate the following categories: images, occupational roles, names, pronouns, and gender firstness. Study findings show that women, in general, are more visible than men in the following categories: images, gender firstness, terms of address, and names. Pronouns are the only category in which men outnumbered women. Although traditional gender norms in the workplace are …

Emotional Display Rules Of Deaf Culture, Nicholas M. Gala, Lawrence Pick

JADARA

Emotional display rules refer to the expression of culturally prescribed and socially acceptable emotions across different people and situations (Wu & Schulz, 2020). The display rules among hearing adults across several cultures are well defined and depend on the type of emotion, the individuals involved in the exchange, and the situation. Regarding Deaf culture in the United States, this minoritized group may follow unique display rules (Hosie et al., 2000), but there has been almost no research conducted with this population and the existing studies have focused on youth. The present study explores perceived emotional expressions among a sample of …

Vol. 27, No. 3 - Whole No. 117, David Bratman

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Title: Questioning Attebery’S ‘Bullseye’: Interviews With Young Readers Of Fantasy May De-Center The Lord Of The Rings, Luke Shelton

Journal of Tolkien Research

In 2018 and 2019, I interviewed young readers about their opinions of The Lord of the Rings (LotR) as a part of my PhD thesis. Their ideas concerning the genre of the text destabilize Attebery's use of it as a central point for the genre. Since these readers do not demonstrate a consensus that LotR is a work of fantasy, one is left to wonder if the idea of the fuzzy set proposed by Attebery is accurate when considering the lived experiences of readers. This leads to several questions about why these young readers have categorized the story …

Chacahoula 2024, Vol 91, Alayna Pellegrin

Chacahoula

MERGING REALITIES:

The 2023 issue of Chacahoula includes December 2023 and May 2024 graduating classes, as well as stunning photography of Week of Welcome, Homecoming, Mardi Gras, and Spring Fever. With features covering notable students, faculty, and staff, this year's time capsule beautifully preserves an academic year in the life of the University of Louisiana at Monroe.

Underrepresentation Of Women In Stem, Ella Asare Afortor

JWU Dissertations & Theses

Despite a plethora of initiatives undertaken by the U.S. government, corporate entities, nongovernmental organizations, and the society at large, the representation of women across various Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields remains dismally low (Martinez & Christnacht, 2021; Srivastava, 2019; Swafford & Anderson, 2020; Wright, 2018). This situation is compounded by a high attrition rate with about 50% of women leaving STEM careers by the age of 35 (Maynard, 2021). Numerous studies have highlighted the underrepresentation of women in various STEM disciplines, raising concerns about the missed opportunities for societal progress and the need for comprehensive strategies to address …

The Semiotics Of Psychological States In International Players' Face Expressions During Qatar World Cup 2022, Mohammed Sami A-Assadi, Iman Mingher Obied

Uruk Journal of Human Sciences

This study aims at applying the social semiotic theory of universal micro-expressions in international players' facial expressions during Qatar World Cup 2022. The research analyzes four basic different facial expressions (sadness, happiness, anger and surprise) at the level of similarity and some other emotions at the level of difference. Relying on Ekman's model of semiotic micro-expressions of emotion, the findings of the data analysis show that the social semiotic approach is highly effective in showing how emotions in sports contexts can be revealed and indicated through facial expressions of players and how there are similarities and differences among them reflecting …

Analysis Of The Content Of Social Studies Books For The Fifth Grade Of Primary School According To Convergent Thinking, Nibras Musafir Shakir

Uruk Journal of Human Sciences

To achieve the goal of the research the researcher chose the descriptive approach in this research and the method of analysis of the content because it is appropriate to achieve the goal of research, and the research community included the content of social books for the elementary stage of the fifth grade primary has been excluded the researcher (introduction, index and questions that exist at the end of chapters) and thus became the pages subject to analysis (98) the researcher prepared the analysis tool for the analysis of the content of social books in the fifth grade of primary according …

Vol. 22, No. 5 - Whole No. 60, David Bratman

Mythprint

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups.

Scientific Programs In The Arab Media - Reality And Gap, Najm Abed Khalaf Aleessawi

Middle East Journal of Communication Studies

The article aimed to reveal the level of Arab media coverage of specialized scientific topics and to know the actual need for such programs, especially with the tremendous developments in various fields of life. The descriptive analytical approach was adopted, and a questionnaire tool was used, which was distributed to (205) Arab academics and researchers who were selected by a simple random sampling method. The study found that coverage of scientific programs in the Arab media at the local level is not at the required level. Social media platforms are the most widely used media means for accessing scientific programs …

Collaborative Co-Design: Transforming Traditional Professional Development, Cristo Leon, James Lipuma

STEM for Success Resources

Objective: The primary aim of this project was to develop the "Online Professional Learning Exchange" (OPLE), a platform designed to support blended learning and facilitate a shift towards a Community of Practice (CoP) model. By integrating face-to-face, blended, and fully online learning situations, this move was intended to enhance the accessibility and effectiveness of professional development. Theoretical Framework: The project was grounded in theories of adult learning and community of practice. It utilized these frameworks to foster an environment where educators could collaboratively design and engage with learning materials. This approach aimed to promote sustained professional growth and mastery of …