Doublespeak: The Empowerment of the Self and the Dis-Empowerment of the Other

Regarding the ability doublespeak offers to its users to distort and mislead, the question about how power is (re)produce, distributed, and enacted becomes of great concern. Within this context, the present paper seeks to study how the use of doublespeak serves for the empowerment of the self and the dis-empowerment of the other. The study of this topic consists in the analysis of some examples that are taken from political speeches delivered by the US presidents; Bush, Obama, and Trump. To analyze these examples, a combination of three theories—theories of discourse analysis, theories of power, and theories of politics—is used. The application of this theoretical combination is based on the use of a simple method of research. This method follows three successive steps. First, the traces of doublespeak are detected and classified. Second, interest is given to the study of how each of the traced uses of doublespeak serves for empowerment. Third, interest shifts to the interpretation of the obtained results to highlight the political ends standing behind any struggle for power. The paper ended by offering a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of empowerment in the political uses of doublespeak as well as a simple method of research. Also, it proved that the use of doublespeak represents a strategy of empowerment that the speakers resorted to while seeking to get more power to dominate and to achieve personal goals. The paper might show as well some limitations like the uses of examples from other political contexts. However, this did not affect the quality of the research nor the results that are sought to be reached, instead, it represents a good start for future researches to look into other contexts

Structuring Racist Ideologies in Stephen Crane’s “A Dark Brown Dog”: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This paper deals with the study of how racist ideologies are constructed and re-constructed in Crane’s “A Dark Brown Dog” using the CDA framework. Benefitting from the approaching between literature and linguistics (Maingueneau, 2010), it focuses on the linguistic analysis of the (re)construction of whiteness and blackness based on the assumption that racism is: a social, a discursive, and an ideological construct. This tri-dimensional construct is treated within a theoretical triangulation ranging from cognition, society, and discourse (Van Dijk, 1992, 1995, and 2006). Based on the view of discourse as a process of coding and decoding of meaning, the text of this story is explored at various levels of language use. These levels are tackled under three sections: a) the contextual analysis focuses on the study of how the setting and the participants are depicted; b) the textual analysis deals with the way narration contributes to the (re)production of racism (Van Dijk, 1993b); and c) the analysis of the evolution of racial identity is devoted to the study of how racist ideologies evolve across generations. The results showed that: first, the representation of the characters highlights the binary structure of the southern American society marked by the inferiority of the blacks and the superiority of the whites. These societal features are detected through the depiction of the context. Second, the way actions and events are narrated reflects the unequal distribution of power between blacks and whites. The existing asymmetry of power is traced in the duality of punishment and obedience. This social status quo is maintained by a binary system of ideologies (white superiority vs. black inferiority). Third, it is proved that racist ideologies and race relations evolve across generations depending on: the amalgamations happening at the family level, the evolution of society, and the evolution of its legislations. Keywords: Literary discourse, racism, ideologies, whiteness, blackness, and slavery

Out-Side-Text Knowledge: A Critical Discussion of Its Importance in the Analysis and Comprehension of Political Discourse

The relation between knowledge and discourse is a problematic one. While speaking, we may activate one part of our knowledge and leave anther one silent to serve the coherence of what we seek to convey. Having this in mind, this paper seeks to discuss the importance of out-side-text knowledge in the analysis and comprehension of political discourse. To study this issue, concern is devoted to two axes of discussion. First, focus is given to the analysis and discussion of some key concepts to form a workable frame for the study. It also seeks to high-light the boundaries between interpretation and over-interpretation. Second, focus shifts to the analysis of some examples to put into practice the tools of the established approach. Also, the extent to which the knowledge we activated served to produce worthwhile interpretations is questioned. The selected examples are taken from presidential speeches delivered by Bush, Obama, and Trump. The method we used consists of two phases: one simple and the other complex. In phase one, the meaning the speaker sought to convey is decoded based on the types of knowledge he activated. In phase two, we activated the knowledge we have about the context of each speech to communicate the un-said. While doing this, we used the logic of critique to avoid over-interpreting the examples. The results showed that our activation of the required knowledge served to demystify what the speakers hide and to work out deception by highlighting the gap between discursive reality and social reality. It is also proved that the issue of boundaries between interpretation and over-interpretation remains a matter of critique. Though bringing valuable contributions to the critical study of language in use, the paper left the doors open for further research on how to use out-side-text knowledge to communicate the un-said

Detecting the cause of death in infants and children: Whole body post-mortem computed tomography compared to autopsy.

Abstract Post-mortem investigation is a sensitive issue that needs to be studied in order to address the many issues that surround this topic. This thesis is divided into 7 chapters. Chapter One is a review of the literature, providing information about identifying the causes of death in children, autopsy protocols and the acceptability of post-mortem investigations among the public. Chapter Two determined the reaction towards post-mortem procedures among Muslims and non-Muslims in Libya and in the UK. Muslims were found to have a significant preference for post-mortem imaging compared to autopsy except in homicidal cases. Chapter Three is a systematic review of the literature which identified 3 papers totalling 262 patients and showed overall agreement between post-mortem CT and conventional autopsy of 51%. Chapter Four is an evaluation of the performance of PMCT compared to conventional autopsy in identifying the cause of death in 54 infants and children. Conventional autopsy detected significantly more abnormalities than PMCT and proved to be superior to PMCT for identifying organ’ soft tissue abnormalities. PMCT however was superior at identifying skeletal pathology. Chapter Five investigated whether longitudinal changes in organ Hounsfield units (HU) and total body air volume (TBAV) can provide an estimate of post-mortem interval (PMI) in eight euthanised lambs. TBAV increased by 14 cm3 (p< 0.001) for each additional post-mortem day with an intercept of 116 cm3 (p< 0.001). There was clear and progressive decrease in tissue densities and increase in TBAV in individual cases over time. Chapter Six is a pilot study to determine whether PMCT can be used to estimate PMI in 51 infants and children by measuring HU of selected organs. Results suggest that further investigation of the reliability of using HU of the kidney and spleen to estimate PMI is warranted. Chapter Seven provides an overview, discussion and concludes this thesis

Pangenomic Genotyping with the Marker Array

We present a new method and software tool called rowbowt that applies a pangenome index to the problem of inferring genotypes from short-read sequencing data. The method uses a novel indexing structure called the marker array. Using the marker array, we can genotype variants with respect from large panels like the 1000 Genomes Project while avoiding the reference bias that results when aligning to a single linear reference. rowbowt can infer accurate genotypes in less time and memory compared to existing graph-based methods