Bryn Mawr College
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\u3ci\u3eLatin Poetry\u3c/i\u3e. Ludovico Ariosto. Ed. and trans. Dennis Looney and D. Mark Possanza. The I Tatti Renaissance Library 84. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
You speaks to me: Effects of generic-you in creating resonance between people and ideas
Creating resonance between people and ideas is a central goal of communication. Historically, attempts to understand the factors that promote resonance have focused on altering the content of a message. Here we identify an additional route to evoking resonance that is embedded in the structure of language: the generic use of the word “you” (e.g., “You can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes”). Using crowd-sourced data from the Amazon Kindle application, we demonstrate that passages that people highlighted—collectively, over a quarter of a million times—were substantially more likely to contain generic-you compared to yoked passages that they did not highlight. We also demonstrate in four experiments (n = 1,900) that ideas expressed with generic-you increased resonance. These findings illustrate how a subtle shift in language establishes a powerful sense of connection between people and ideas
‘The Oracular Tale’ and the Oracles of the Greeks: Storytelling, Conjecture, and Oracular Ambiguity in Herodotus’ Histories and its Historical and Cultural Context
In this dissertation, I investigate the belief in the power of prophecy in ancient Greece. More specifically, I study how the ancient Greeks used oracles, like those of the famous oracle at Delphi, to make their past, present, and future knowable. I analyze the stories about oracles from Herodotus’ Histories as well as Thucydides and the corpus of Greek inscriptions using a theory of storytelling called narratology. With this theory, I show that all stories about oracles are expressions of the same basic plot whether a narrator employs all of its typical episodes or leaves some of them implied. Further, I argue that the basic plot, which I call the ‘oracular tale,’ informs not just how narrators tell their stories and how an audience renders abbreviated stories understandable, but also how the Greeks interpreted oracles, understood their fulfillment, and ultimately believed in their prophetic power in the past. In this way, I argue that the narrative pattern of the ‘oracular tale’ is a general cultural concept at the center both of Greek thought and of their practice relating to oracles. My conclusions create a more consistent picture that explains the apparent disparities between literary and inscribed texts, which modern scholarship has typically understood to indicate a clear schism between how the Greeks told stories about oracles and how they actually practiced oracular divination. In this way, Herodotus’ Histories may be used as a reliable source for the societal expectation that oracles were regularly in verse and required conjectural interpretation in order to be understood properly. The pattern of the ‘oracular tale’ also accounts for how the Greeks made use of oracles. Modern scholarship has been troubled by the real utility of oracular ambiguity as seen in the Histories, but Herodotus’ stories actually explain the utility the Greeks found in enigmatic oracular pronouncements. Consultants carefully connected oracular language with particular circumstances in narratives that made both oracles and event meaningful. Thus, this ‘divinatory thinking’ is storytelling, and this way of thinking allowed consultants to use oracles as flexible frames of reference by which to understand their past and to develop a plan toward a beneficial future
Flex Learning: A Meaningful Option for Post-Traditional Learners
This presentation describes implementation of a Flex learning delivery model to provide increased access to real-time learning to students with outside employment or family responsibilities. Building on Flex learning models developed previously, this Flex model combines live instruction either in the classroom or by video conferencing (at the learner’s choice) with asynchronous online instruction. The model provides choice and agency to the learner, is not burdensome for instructors, and can be implemented at a reasonable cost by institutions. Stakeholder feedback will be shared with participants to help them decide if a Flex model might benefit their learning community
A survey on Recognizing Textual Entailment as an NLP Evaluation
Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) was proposed as a unified evaluation framework to compare semantic understanding of different NLP systems. In this survey paper, we provide an overview of different approaches for evaluating and understanding the reasoning capabilities of NLP systems. We then focus our discussion on RTE by highlighting prominent RTE datasets as well as advances in RTE dataset that focus on specific linguistic phenomena that can be used to evaluate NLP systems on a fine-grained level. We conclude by arguing that when evaluating NLP systems, the community should utilize newly introduced RTE datasets that focus on specific linguistic phenomena
Support Systems and Transgressive Hierarchies: Insights We Gained through the Transition Online While Planning for Pedagogical Partnership
Magnetic Skyrmions in Multilayers with Interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interactions
Magnetic skyrmions, topologically stable spin textures that can be driven by electric currents efficiently, have both rich physics and potential applications in future technology such as spintronic devices for data storage. Magnetic skyrmions in multilayers with interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) were investigated in three aspects: stabilization, current-driven motion and antiferromagnetically coupled skyrmion pairs. The formation and stabilization of magnetic skyrmions without external magnetic fields are determined by the competition of the Heisenberg exchange interaction, dipolar interaction, magnetic anisotropy, and interfacial DMI. In the [Pt/Co/HM]n (HM = W, Mn, Ir, Au, n = 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12) multilayers, DMI and the dipolar interaction can be tuned by changing the heavy metal (HM) and the repetition number n, respectively. The size of the stabilized skyrmions decreases as the DMI or the dipolar interaction increases. Current-driven skyrmion motion was investigated in a Ta/CoFeB/TaOx multilayer and the skyrmion Hall effect was observed. The transverse motion of the skyrmions, driven by an electric current in a perpendicular magnetic field, can be quantized by the skyrmion Hall angle, the angle between the current direction and the skyrmion motion direction. A significant current/velocity dependence of the skyrmion Hall angle was observed. Combining the experimental results and the theoretic derivation based on the Thiele equation, we attribute the skyrmion Hall effect to the topological Magnus force and random pinning potentials in the materials.
To avoid the undesired skyrmions motion towards the device edge, antiferromagnetically coupled skyrmion pairs were realized and investigated in [Co/Gd/Pt]10 multilayers. These skyrmion pairs are stable over a broad temperature range from about 300 K to 55 K. Below 50 K, the magnetization of the core area of the skyrmion pairs starts to rotate from the original direction of out-of-plane to in-plane. However, the domain wall regions are preserved during this spin reorientation transition (SRT). After the temperature is increased back to above 50 K, skyrmions recover to their initial state before the SRT. The recovery of the skyrmions can be attributed to the persisted chiral domain walls due to the strong topological protection by DMI, confirmed by micromagnetic simulations