Beyond writing: The development of literacy in the Ancient Near East

Previous discussions of the origins of writing in the Ancient Near East have not incorporated the neuroscience of literacy, which suggests that when southern Mesopotamians wrote marks on clay in the late-fourth millennium, they inadvertently reorganized their neural activity, a factor in manipulating the writing system to reflect language, yielding literacy through a combination of neurofunctional change and increased script fidelity to language. Such a development appears to take place only with a sufficient demand for writing and reading, such as that posed by a state-level bureaucracy; the use of a material with suitable characteristics; and the production of marks that are conventionalized, handwritten, simple, and non-numerical. From the perspective of Material Engagement Theory, writing and reading represent the interactivity of bodies, materiality, and brains: movements of hands, arms, and eyes; clay and the implements used to mark it and form characters; and vision, motor planning, object recognition, and language. Literacy is a cognitive change that emerges from and depends upon the nexus of interactivity of the components

Academic Segregation and the Achievement Gap: How Black Students Are Collateral Damage in a Flawed American Education System

Overview: Segregation is a battle this nation has been fighting for centuries, and the fight still carries on to this day. The effects of segregation are vast; however, its presence is particularly apparent in the United States’ education systems. From the start of our nation’s history, black individuals have faced segregation and discrimination in the academic world. In the past, it was illegal for black individuals to even read or write. Today, even though a great deal of progress has been made to improve the academic standards and opportunities of black individuals, academic segregation still exists and has given rise to an academic achievement gap between white and black students. Issues within school settings, the archaic nature of the education system, and the crossovers between racial socioeconomics and education are the major catalysts of academic segregation and the achievement gap, which have downstream effects on higher education and the labor market. Author\u27s Reflection: My name is Kara Woglom and I am a sophomore service scholar at St. John Fisher College. I plan to graduate in 2021 with a bachelor\u27s degree in Nursing and a minor in Spanish for the Health Care Professions. I am one of five children; I have three older sisters and a twin brother. As my first official extensive research paper in college, I viewed the 199 final research paper as an onerous task. I was intimidated by the amount of work I had to do and the intellectual level to which I hoped my paper would reach. The jump from a blank page to writing is always scary. However, I found that utilizing the preparatory assignments from class, such as the cubing activity and synthesis paper, eased the stress of starting my paper. With these assignments and a logically organized and detailed outline, when I sat down to write my paper, to my surprise my thoughts flowed naturally. As a result of this class, I am more confident in myself as a writer. I have a better idea of how to analyze and compile research. Most importantly, I have realized how complex and multifaceted controversial issues are. I now know the importance of being educated about an issue before forming a solid opinion. Professor Regan\u27s Reflection: Our primary class readings focused on works of fiction and nonfiction that depicted social and cultural issues regarding race in the U.S. These provided an environment for students to generate papers across diverse areas of inquiry based on their individual interests. Kara’s choice of examining how race impacts learning in public schools stemmed from a personal connection to the topic. Her mother’s vocation as a teacher in a socio-economically challenged school system in Binghamton motivated Kara’s passionate inquiry, and she delved into a variety of sources to discover and illuminate her argument. In her research, Kara effectively used the scaffolded assignments to develop a substantial, coherent argument. Ultimately, she shed light on an important American issue, highlighting some lingering effects of historical segregation in schools and exposing evidence of persistent segregational practices. Importantly, she also looked ahead and explored the collateral professional impact for graduates of color entering the workforce

Constructing a concept of number

Numbers are concepts whose content, structure, and organization are influenced by the material forms used to represent and manipulate them. Indeed, as argued here, it is the inclusion of multiple forms (distributed objects, fingers, single- and two-dimensional forms like pebbles and abaci, and written notations) that is the mechanism of numerical elaboration. Further, variety in employed forms explains at least part of the synchronic and diachronic variability that exists between and within cultural number systems. Material forms also impart characteristics like linearity that may persist in the form of knowledge and behaviors, ultimately yielding numerical concepts that are irreducible to and functionally independent of any particular form. Material devices used to represent and manipulate numbers also interact with language in ways that reinforce or contrast different aspects of numerical cognition. Not only does this interaction potentially explain some of the unique aspects of numerical language, it suggests that the two are complementary but ultimately distinct means of accessing numerical intuitions and insights. The potential inclusion of materiality in contemporary research in numerical cognition is advocated, both for its explanatory power, as well as its influence on psychological, behavioral, and linguistic aspects of numerical cognition

TRANSDUCER FOR AUTO-CONVERT OF ARCHAIC TO PRESENT DAY ENGLISH FOR MACHINE READABLE TEXT: A SUPPORT FOR COMPUTER ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING

There exist some English literary works where some archaic words are still used; they are relatively distinct from Present Day English (PDE). We might observe some archaic words that have undergone regular changing patterns: for instances, archaic modal verbs like mightst, darest, wouldst. The –st ending historically disappears, resulting on might, dare and would. (wouldst > would). However, some archaic words undergo distinct processes, resulting on unpredictable pattern; The occurrence frequency for archaic english pronouns like thee ‘you’, thy ‘your’, thyself ‘yourself’ are quite high. Students that are Non-Native speakers of English might come across many difficulties when they encounter English texts which include these kinds of archaic words. How might computer be a help for the student? This paper aims on providing some supports from the perspective of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). It proposes some designs of lexicon transducers by using Local Grammar Graphs (LGG) for auto-convert of the archaic words to PDE in a literature machine readable text. The transducer is applied to a machine readable text that is taken from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The archaic words in the corpus can be converted automatically to PDE. The transducer also allows the presentation of the two forms (Arhaic and PDE), the PDE lexicons-only, or the original (Archaic Lexicons) form-only. This will help students in understanding English literature works better. All the linguistic resources here are machine readable, ready to use, maintainable and open for further development. The method might be adopted for lexicon tranducer for another language too

Accounting And Forms Of Accountability In Ancient Civilizations: Mesopotamia And Ancient Egypt

The aim of this paper is to identify the relevance and implications of ancient accounting practices to the contemporary theorizing of accounting. The paper provides a synthesis of the literature on ancient accounting particularly in relation to issues of human accountability, identifies its major achievements and outlines some of the key challenges facing researchers. We argue that far from being an idiosyncratic research field of marginal interest, research in ancient accounting is a rich and promising undertaking. The paper concludes by considering a number of implications of ancient accounting practices for the theorizing of accounting and identifies news avenues for future research.

Siteless Survey and Intensive Data Collection in an Artifact-rich Environment: Case Studies from the Eastern Corinthia, Greece

Archaeological survey in the eastern Mediterranean has become increasingly intensive over the last 20 years, producing greater and more diverse data for smaller units of space. While complex, siteless data sets have allowed more sophisticated reconstructions of natural and cultural regional histories, the employment of more intensive methods has refocused the scope of Mediterranean surveys from region to ‘micro-region’. Such increasingly myopic approaches have been criticized for their failure to address research questions framed by a large-scale, regional perspective and the analytical categories of ‘settle- ment’ and ‘site’. This paper uses results from a survey in southern Greece to show how artifact-based approaches make valuable contributions to ‘big-picture’ historical and archaeological issues in a Mediter- ranean context

The material origin of numbers: Insights from the archaeology of the Ancient Near East

What are numbers, and where do they come from? A novel answer to these timeless questions is proposed by cognitive archaeologist Karenleigh A. Overmann, based on her groundbreaking study of material devices used for counting in the Ancient Near East—fingers, tallies, tokens, and numerical notations—as interpreted through the latest neuropsychological insights into human numeracy and literacy. The result, a unique synthesis of interdisciplinary data, outlines how number concepts would have been realized in a pristine original condition to develop into one of the ancient world’s greatest mathematical traditions, a foundation for mathematical thinking today. In this view, numbers are abstract from their inception and materially bound at their most elaborated. The research updates historical work on Neolithic tokens and interpretations of Mesopotamian numbers, challenging several longstanding assumptions about numbers in the process. The insights generated are also applied to the role of materiality in human cognition more generally, including how concepts become distributed across and independent of the material forms used for their representation and manipulation; how societies comprised of average individuals use material structures to create elaborated systems of numeracy and literacy; and the differences between thinking through and thinking about materiality

Seshat: The Global History Databank

The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great differentials in wealth and power, and elaborate governance structures of today? Why do modern states sometimes fail to meet the basic needs of their populations? Why do economies decline, or fail to grow? In this article, we describe the structure and uses of a massive databank of historical and archaeological information, Seshat: The Global History Databank. The data that we are currently entering in Seshat will allow us and others to test theories explaining how modern societies evolved from ancestral ones, and why modern societies vary so much in their capacity to satisfy their members’ basic human needsPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Final proposal for encoding the Phoenician script in the UCS

This is a proposal to encode the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform script in the international character encoding standard Unicode. This script was published in Unicode Standard version 5.0 in July 2006. Cuneiform was used to write Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite, and Hurrian. This proposal covers set of signs used from the Ur III period onwards. Signs specific to Early Dynastic period are separately encoded in a different block of Unicode. Since some changes have been made in Unicode since this proposal was approved, users should check the latest code charts, accessible at: