Statistics and the Conversion of the Roman Aristocracy

1995 ◽  
Vol 85 ◽  
pp. 135-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. D. Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Religious Change ◽  
Major Advance ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
Imperial Rome ◽  
The Public ◽  
Famous Paper ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
English Speaking World

In a justly famous paper published in 1961, Peter Brown set out a model for understanding the historical process whereby the formerly pagan aristocracy of imperial Rome became overwhelmingly Christian during the course of the fourth and fifth centuries. Brown's paper has deeply influenced all who have subsequently studied this historical phenomenon, at least in the English-speaking world. Since this article argues that the Roman aristocracy became Christian significantly earlier than Brown and most recent writers have assumed, it must begin by drawing an important distinction. Brown's paper marked a major advance in modern understanding because it redirected the focus of scholarly research away from conflict and confrontation, away from the political manifestations of paganism culminating in the ‘last great pagan revival in the West’ between 392 and 394, away from episodes which pitted pagan aristocrats of Rome against Christian emperors, away from ‘the public crises in relations between Roman paganism and a Christian court’, towards the less sensational but more fundamental processes of cultural and religious change which gradually transformed the landowning aristocracy of Italy after the conversion of Constantine. This change of emphasis was extremely salutary in 1961, it has permanently changed our perception of the period, and it entails a method of approaching the subject which remains completely valid. Unfortunately, however, Brown also adopted prevailing assumptions about the chronology of these changes which are mistaken, on the basis of which he asserted that the ‘drift into a respectable Christianity’ began no earlier than the reign of Constantius. The evidence and arguments set out here indicate that the process began much earlier and proceeded more rapidly than Brown assumed, but they in no way challenge the validity of his approach to understanding the nature of the process.

scholarly journals Hooked on Sol-Fa: the do-re-mi heuristic for Yorùbá speech tones

Africa ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Carter-Ényì
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Pitch Height ◽  
Zoltan Kodaly ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
The Public ◽  
Field Recordings ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Positive Side ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

AbstractSarah Ann Glover (1785–1867) believed that singing was for the public good and Samuel Àjàyí Crowther (1809–91) thought that speech tones should be preserved in writing. Their stories illustrate that diversity in thought may encounter obstacles, but can ultimately shape human consciousness. While this shows a positive side of missionary work, bringing people and ideas together, the transmission of Glover's and Crowther's ideas was mediated by the overlapping political, social and cultural hegemonies of the colonial era. Crowther was celebrated in the English-speaking world as evidence that the civilizing agenda – and colonialism – was good for all involved, but his orthographic approach was credited to the missionary linguist Johann Gottlieb Christaller. Glover's innovations in music education have been misattributed to John Curwen and Zoltán Kodály. Drawing evidence from ethnographic work, field recordings, language surveys and literature from a variety of disciplines, this article asks the question: why is do-re-mi the preferred heuristic for Yorùbá speech tone? Glover's and Crowther's physical paths never crossed, but their ideas did, converging in a remarkable inter-continental and trans-disciplinary synthesis. The do-re-mi heuristic resists the pitch-height paradigm used in formal linguistics (low-mid-high). In a culture where drums can speak, it is unsurprising that a musical model filled a void in the (European) concept of what a language could be.

Herman Melville and “Billy Budd”

Tempo ◽  
1951 ◽  
pp. 6-8
Author(s):  
Ronald Mason
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
The Public ◽  
Billy Budd ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Adventure Stories

Melville's Billy Budd is the culmination of a lifetime's spiritual agony, and it is impossible to value this curious allegory at its true worth without studying it carefully in the light of its author's private despairs. It may be that the publicity that Britten's opera is sure to attract will focus the reluctant interest of the public at last upon a writer who for nearly a century (though he has been only sixty years dead) has been the dimmest of shadows for all but the occasional addict. In England his name is still the barest rumour. Moby Dick has had its boosts, Typee the popular reprintings owed to an entertaining travelogue; yet none of these temporary quirks of fortune has aroused more than the most cursory interest in the mind that created them. Projected into posterity as a crude adventurer who had lived among cannibals and hunted whales before turning these experiences into pleasurable adventure-stories, the richest and profoundest imagination in American literature still remains virtually unrecognised over half the English-speaking world. America is beginning to acknowledge him at last; but in this country indifference is still his lot. Some of his works, I am glad to say, are being reprinted and enjoyed again; but until he is accepted and appreciated as a coherent whole, the understanding given to isolated parts of his work will be at best partial and inadequate.

Administrative Law and the Constitution

1929 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-46
Author(s):  
Marvin B. Rosenberry
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Great Work ◽  
The People ◽  
Explicit Statement ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Government ◽  
English Speaking World

In the constitution of Massachusetts is found the following: “In the government of this commonwealth the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers or either of them; the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers or either of them; the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers or either of them; to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.” This is probably the most explicit statement of the doctrine of separation of powers to be found in the constitution of any of the states of this Union. While the doctrine has been set forth in other constitutions in other language, the constitutions of all the states as construed and interpreted have come to have substantially the same meaning. For more than a century, lawyers, courts, political scientists, publicists, and the people generally regarded the separation of the government into coördinate departments as one of the corner-stones of our liberties.Montesquieu, who had no doubt derived his ideas upon the subject from the writings of Locke and a study of English law, in 1748 published his great work, The Spirit of Laws. In this treatise he gave a new exposition of the doctrine of separation of powers and the reasons for it, in a form which gave it wide currency in the English-speaking world; but this exposition was intended by Montesquieu to be a statement of political theory, and was so accepted by political writers of the time.

Feral and "Wild" Children

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Newton
Keyword(s):  
Common Denominator ◽  
Human Society ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Feral Children ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Political Realm

The term feral children has been taken as applying to those who have endured three very different kinds of childhood experience. In one case, the term covers “children of nature,” that is, those who have lived in a solitary state in the countryside. Closely related to such individuals are those children who have been reared for a while by animals, most notably wolves or bears, though there are also tales of children suckled by gazelle, pigs, sheep, cows, and so on. Yet, the phrase has also been applied to children who have been confined to long periods of isolation within human society, locked up in rooms or dungeons. The common denominator in these tales is the experience of an absolute solitude, the absence of caring human parents, and, very often, the deprivation of language that results from that solitude. As such, for centuries these children have been an object of fascination to philosophers interested in human development, the inception of the political realm, and the origin of language. In more recent times, they have been the subject of study by linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists. Whether “wild children” have truly existed is a matter of some interest; more important here is what they stand for, the ideas and philosophies they evoke, and the fantasies that their supposed existence nurtures. Outside the English-speaking world, the idea of feral children is especially important in French- and German-language texts. However, this bibliography limits itself to sources in English, including translations of Arabic, Latin, French, and German works. Feral children have been central to a number of literary works, from William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610–1611) to Thomas Day’s The History of Little Jack (1788), and from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1895–1896) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914). Authors have in several instances turned true stories of feral children into fiction, as with Jakob Wassermann’s Caspar Hauser (1908), Catherine Mary Tennant’s Peter the Wild Boy (1939), and Jill Dawson’s novel based on the Wild Boy of Aveyron, Wild Boy (2003). Similarly, several excellent films have been produced on the subject, such as François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (1970), Werner Herzog’s Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1974), and a number of other successful works, such as Michael Apted’s Nell (1994) or even the Disney-animated classic, The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman 1967). It is beyond the scope of this bibliography to make full mention of these works; however, it is clear that they demonstrate that a fascination with feral children goes beyond the limits of academic discourse.

The Bayesian Controversy in Statistical Inference

1967 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. A. Barnard
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Inference ◽  
Occupational Group ◽  
Major Advance ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Bayes’S Theorem ◽  
Famous Paper ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Bayes's Theorem ◽  
Insight Into

When I was invited to read this paper I felt not only honoured but particularly pleased to be given the opportunity to set forth for your criticism the views I have come to hold concerning the complex of problems centred round the use of Bayes's theorem. For what body of people has for longer been engaged in the application of the mathematical doctrine of probabilities to the affairs of life? And so, what body could be better fitted to judge the merits and the faults of any attempt to clarify the principles of the subject? It is no accident that the original publication of Bayes's famous paper was brought about by the author of the Northampton Life Table; and in the modern period, in dealing with the criticisms of Bayes's postulate stemming from Boole, the credit for a major advance is shared between Sir Harold Jeffreys and Mr Wilfred Perks, independent originators of the theory of invariant prior distributions. And, to anticipate a point I shall develop in more detail later on, it appears to me that the experience of actuaries in the formation of categories as, for instance, by occupational group, as abstainers or non-abstainers, and so on, can be highly relevant to the effective use of Bayes's theorem in many wider contexts; and an examination of the principles underlying the formation of categories should improve our insight into problems of statistical inference in general.

Prescott's History Of The Conquest And Calderon de la Barca's Life In Mexico: Mexican Reaction, 1843-1844

1991 ◽  
Vol 47 (03) ◽  
pp. 337-348
Author(s):  
Michael P. Costeloe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico

In 1843, two friends, one Scottish and one American, published books about Mexico which were to become essential reading for students of Mexican history. Much the better known of the two is William Hickling Prescott whose History of the Conquest of Mexico became an instant best-seller and remains to this day one of the classics of Mexican historiography. Less well-known but equally valuable to historians of nineteenth-century Mexico is Frances Calderón de la Barca's vivid account of Life in Mexico based on her experiences during the two years from 1840-1841 when she lived in the country as the wife of the first Spanish ambassador. By coincidence, Prescott and Sra. Calderón were close personal friends and regular correspondents and they gave each other much assistance in preparing their respective books for publication. Both their works were greeted with critical and public acclaim in the English-speaking world of Europe and North America but reactions in Mexico were markedly different. While Prescott's book was received with qualified enthusiasm, Life in Mexico was the subject of hostile reviews and its author much vitriolic, personal abuse.

All Talked Out

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.D. Trout
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Positive View ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Philosophical Doctrine

Few topics animate, even polarize, philosophers, more than Naturalism, a doctrine which states that philosophy is continuous with, and perhaps even replaceable by, sciences worthy of the name. On one side, fans of technical progress believe that the sciences can indeed replace philosophy with something that allows us to reason and explain better. On the other, advocates of the humanities herald the insights and methods of disciplines seemingly beyond the reach of science. But these disputes are often more about turf than truth. All Talked Out exemplifies the power of science in a philosopher’s hands and takes a welcome look at the resulting fate of philosophy. Based on Trout’s Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Lectures, each chapter presents a novel and positive view of intellectual advances while addressing traditional topics in philosophy, and each chapter explains why these achievements occurred despite the archaic and often retrograde influence of philosophical doctrine and method. While foundational reflection remains as necessary as ever, philosophy, as it is conceived of in the halls of academia, no longer adds anything distinctively useful. At its best, philosophy is a place to grow new ideas. But many other disciplines can and do provide that incubation. In the end, we don’t have to kill philosophy; but we do have to figure out what it’s good for. Following a spirited Introduction, the first lecture takes stock of the growing field of evidence-based approaches to reasoning and, in light of these scientific developments, criticizes important failures in epistemology as it is currently practiced in the English-speaking world. The second lecture examines the psychological impulse to explain, the resulting sense of understanding, and the natural limits on cognitively appreciating the subject we have explained. The final lecture, on social policy, presents the proper reaction to the idea that scientific evidence matters to responsible governance.

Machine translation: potential for progress

English Today ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 38-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Smith
Keyword(s):  
Research And Development ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Status Report ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Technological Research ◽  
Free Translation ◽  
On Line ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
English Speaking World

A status report on a controversial and much-maligned area of technological research and development.Machine Translation does not often make the headlines, though it can happen. In the non-English-speaking world, at least, the last time the spotlight briefly fell on this normally unexciting activity was in September 1998, at the height of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The report on the case by the Independent Council, Kenneth Starr, containing an account of the President's intimate dealings with Miss Lewinsky, was placed on the Internet and to satisfy the morbid curiosity of surfers everywhere was immediately translated into the world's major languages using the free translation software available on a number of WWW sites. The results, not surprisingly, were laughable. A capable human being would have had a hard enough time translating such a potent combination of technical and colloquial English: the MT applications were quite out of their depth. The silliest gaffes appeared in newspapers and everyone agreed that the on-line MT programs were useless; the subject was soon forgotten.

scholarly journals What happened to our community of practice? The early development of Adult Basic Education in NSW through the lens of professional practice theory.

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Osmond
Keyword(s):  
Professional Practice ◽  
Basic Education ◽  
Adult Basic Education ◽  
Social Programs ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
The Public ◽  
South Wales ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Practice Knowledge ◽  
English Speaking World

The field of adult basic education had its genesis as a named field of education in the English speaking world in the mid-1970s, based firmly on an underpinning philosophy of humanistic education and a socio-cultural view of literacy. Subsequent decades of its development have involved recurrent and destabilising periods of change with a major and overriding theme being the move away from the humanist philosophy, towards an economically driven, human capital view of literacy, which mirrors the story of a number of other social programs in their trajectory towards the ‘new capitalism’. This paper considers the first fifteen years, or genesis, of the field of adult basic education in the state of New South Wales in Australia through official documents and archival material and through the stories from practice told by the teachers. Analysis of these stories using a theory of professional practice knowledge demonstrates the ways in which the early field of professional practice emerged as a product of its particular socio-political climate, and demonstrates also the strong convergence between the public discourses and the professional discourses surrounding the field in this period; a convergence which was progressively weakened in subsequent decades.

scholarly journals COVID19 Research for the English-Speaking World: Health Communication During a Pandemic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zehra Taskin ◽  
Guleda Dogan ◽  
Emanuel Kulczycki ◽  
Alesia Ann Zuccala
Keyword(s):  
Health Information ◽  
Science Communication ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
World Health ◽  
The Public ◽  
Language Of Science ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

Since COVID-19 first appeared, enormous numbers of scientific articles have been published on this subject every day, and these articles have been brought to the attention of millions of people. People make great efforts to obtain information about COVID-19, however, the public cannot access health information under equal conditions. On the other hand, one of the important missions of science is informing the public, and language is one of the essential channels of this mission. The main aim of this commentary is to analyse the languages of the published articles on COVID-19 to reveal the language trends. To achieve this aim, we evaluated 10,728 publications listed in WHO’s Global COVID-19 database. As a result, although 125 different countries publish articles on COVID-19, our findings show that English, as the universal language of science, is dominant. Scientists prefer the English language for their articles; in fact, this preference is the expected choice because of the international effect of the virus and reaching the whole world. However, all these English-language papers serve the inbound mission of science communication. It is important to convey the results of the research to the public, and in this study, the general features of the non-English journals are determined, and various suggestions are presented in order to make science communication more effective.

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