Book Review: A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet

For those familiar with Eavan Boland\u27s book, Object Lessons, her latest defense of the woman poet begins in well-traveled territory. A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet) reiterates her struggles to find an authentic voice in a poetic and political history that has largely excluded the voices of women. She again notes her sense of dislocation-Irish but not raised in Ireland-and recognizes the effect of such dislocation on her participation in the project called Irish poetry. She repeats her observation that poetry has traditionally been confined to the recondite, defined as war, death, and God, a definition excluding the domestic sphere in all its humanity and intensity. All of this is discernibly conventional when: Boland is concerned. The key difference between Object Lessons and A Journey, however, appears to be in her conclusions: where Object Lessons reconstructs her struggle to become a woman poet, A Journey with Two Maps seems to signal her arrival

Transparency in Complex Computational Systems

Scientists depend on complex computational systems that are often ineliminably opaque, to the detriment of our ability to give scientific explanations and detect artifacts. Some philosophers have s..

Caroline Emelia Stephen

Excerpt: Caroline Emelia Stephen, born on December 8, 1834, was notable for a number of reasons. Her connections were impressive: she was the unmarried daughter of Sir James Stephen (the noted Under-Secretary for the Colonies in 1836-1847), the sister of Leslie Stephen (author of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), sister-in-law to Minny Thackeray Stephen and Anny Thackeray Ritchie (daughters of William Makepeace Thackeray), and aunt to Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Her grandfather, also Sir James Stephen, wrote the legislation that ended slavery in England. Known as a Quaker mystic, she is credited with bringing about the revival of the Society of Friends in the latter part of the nineteenth century through writings about her conversion

Feeding a Population: Agricultural Education Priorities in Haitian History

The nation of Haiti has experienced a long history of poverty and of tests to its economic development. Among its priorities has been the establishment of an effective educational system. While educational standards remain high, the area of agricultural education—necessary for Haiti’s economy as well as nutritional subsistence—has met with unique challenges. This paper examines analyses and programming policies of the past in order to illuminate contemporary circumstances

The Minimum Wage, Decent Wages, and Time Sovereignty in the European Union

The minimum wage is a legally mandated relationship between money and time. Traditionally, studies of the minimum wage have focused on the money side of this relationship (e.g. how much do minimum wage workers earn) while ignoring its temporal aspects (e.g. how long someone has to work to receive a particular income). This is a significant oversight because it overlooks the temporal investments that minimum wage workers must make in order to achieve a specific sum of money (e.g. there is a significant temporal difference if a minimum wage worker can achieve an income above a poverty threshold by working part-time, full-time, or more than full-time). To address this oversight, we calculate the number of hours individuals and families earning the minimum wage would have to work in order to achieve the poverty-level income in the 20 European Union countries with national statutory minimum wages. Our findings show two things. One is that there are significant differences between how long minimum wage workers must work in order to achieve these income thresholds. The other is that while in some countries this amount is relatively stable over time, in others it can vary considerably

Moving Beyond Gender Stereotypes: Reinterpreting Female Celtic Statues from Entremont, France

In the field of archaeology, male bias has been prevalent in both theory and practice. Female Celtic statues from Entremont, France are an example of how this bias can negatively affect the study of past peoples. Male archaeologists who have excavated or studied the site of Entremont have given little attention to the female statues found on the site, despite being a unique find. The few interpretations that they did provide were sexist, and the female statues were treated as secondary to male statues, reflecting the perceived inferiority of women to men in ancient societies. This can lead to not only incomplete but also likely incorrect narratives of the lives of Celtic women from Entremont and the larger Celtic world. The goals of this paper are to address these biases, and work beyond them in order to provide a more holistic perspective on Celtic women and their roles within society

Stephen King

Stephen King, popularly known as “The King of Horror,” is one of the more prolific and successful writers of the twentieth century. Despite a reputation for writing only horror and gore, however, King has written works that do not qualify as either horror or supernatural but rather are thoughtful, intricate slices of human experience that often cause us to reflect on our own childhoods, not always with fond nostalgia. He encourages his readers to get in touch with their own memories of what being a child really means, and innocence has little to do with King\u27s version of childhood. Believing that most adults have lost touch with their imaginations and a sense of the mythic, King constantly challenges his readers to expand their concepts of memory and experience

Observe the Sons of Ulster Talking Themselves To Death (Chapter in The Theatre of Frank McGuinness: Stages of Mutability)

Excerpt: Within Irish drama of the late 20\u27h century, the use of language as a marker for lrishness begins to shift away from a focus on accents and Hiberno-English, towards a use of language that attempts to actually establish new truths: truths about relationships and alliances, truths about history, truths about memory, and especially truths about identity. Language becomes the very means of change and hope, in drama that has become concerned with the use of language not as signifier of nation but as reiteration of the stories that might be able to change through that reiteration. What is \u27true\u27 is no longer shaped by someone else\u27s language, but by the incantatory retelling and recasting of stories in versions particularized by individuals. The words themselves become a means for an imposition of identity. Language is not only the tool, but also the subject for discussion and performance. Whereas some others, including Tom Murphy, Christina Reid, and Enda Walsh, have concluded that language does indeed change at least the perception of truth, Frank McGuinness, in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), concludes that language cannot always succeed in its efforts to create a new reality. A play in which eight men try to come to terms with the events leading up to the Battle of the Somme in France during WWI, The Sons of Uifter shows us that language may be able to change personal identity, but it can never change history, desirable though that may be