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Showing posts from May, 2017

Monuments: Our Secret Lives

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Insight Man is neither kind nor respectful, say I, whenever he erects  monuments to memorialize humanity's heroes. Give man a chance I ask, and see if he wouldn't haul his God from out of the heavens and bring him down here on the Earth, and then make of him a public spectacle, thinking little of the need for such a venerable One. Thinking still less whether that's what the saints and the prophets of ancient time had ever wanted, fame it's called,- when they walked the Earth. Profane, profane I shout!….All that man cares about, is this fleeting experience. He then blinds himself into thinking that he can still make the life of those great ones still greater, and so he goes and built a whole monument of some poor saint, some tired soul, some loving heart who had died trying to change the world. I pray you please tell me, what more do such a pure soul, one who had seen it all, heard it all, and therefore understands it all, can ever again want from fame. An...

Distant Reading Project1

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I chose "The Memoir of Fanny Hill." Prediction This database is absolutely phenomenal! I was very impressed with the rapidity with which it worked to handle a rather huge task.  I entered my words in their thousands, inside the box,  and relaxed watching the magic happens right before my own eyes. Anyway, I think my predictions weren't way off track. I talked about love, which I think is basically the same as pleasure, and this particular word seems to standout in this words-graph.  I talked about sex, and prostitution-- it turned out, the baseline of the book is actually about sex for money. And, Fanny did appeared insecured.

Rinkeby: Swedish Immigration Crisis

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By Samuel Collins           David Ramos, Getty Image                Rinkeby, as it is called, is a small suburban immigrant enclave, located somewhere near the Mediterranean Sea, just 13 km northwest of Stockholm, and about 18 minutes of subway ride to center city. Here, more than 80% of Rinkeby’s residents are immigrants from places like Iraq, Syria, Somalia, South America and Eastern Europe. The once lovely immigrant community has become notorious for crimes, riots, police brutalities.  According to Mr. Hoge, just a mere mention of the name Rinkeby, would get people to shrink back.           A Pew Research Center study conducted in "2016 found that over 46 percent of Swedes believed that refugees are responsible for most of the crimes than other groups," even though an earlier study carried out by a popular local newspaper, the Dagens Nyheter, analyzed crime statistics in ...