These are quotes which stood out to me, possibly for use in a sermon someday. Their presence here does not mean I agree with them, it merely shows that I might want to reference them later. The default view is five random selections. Use the tag list on the right to view all quotes relevant to that theme.
Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, has attributed the fall of the Empire to: 1. The rapid increase of divorce; the undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis of human society. 2. Higher and higher taxes and the spending of public monies for free bread and circuses for the populace. 3. The mad craze for pleasure; sports becoming every year more exciting and more brutal. 4. The building of gigantic armaments when the real enemy was within, the decadence of the people. 5. The decay of religion--faith fading into mere form, losing touch with life and becoming impotent to warn and guide the people. Edward Gibbon.
How do you solve a personal problem? Let's say you have a fondness for gossip or quarreling. How do you stop? Or suppose you have a life-controlling addiction to alcohol or drugs or sex. How do you get free? Sometimes the answer is something that seems totally unrelated. For example, in the middle of winter when your feet are cold, you may try putting on thicker socks or a blanket. Still your feet may be icy. One secret to warm feet is to stop focusing on your feet and look at your head. That's right, go to the other end of your body and put a hat on. Although your neck and head have only 10 percent of your body surface, in the cold that's where you lose a whopping 30 percent of your body heat. Having nothing on your head is like opening a window in your house in the dead of winter. If you keep that heat in your body with a hat, your blood will carry it down to your toes. In the same way, when people have problems, spiritual leaders often recommend that they do something that sounds unrelated-- such as read the Bible, pray, go to church, or focus on serving other people. These seemingly unrelated things bring grace to help overcome problems.
Computer program detects author gender Simple algorithm suggests words and syntax bear sex and genre stamp. 18 July 2003 PHILIP BALL A.S Byatt confuses the computer; will it see through George Elliot? A new computer program can tell whether a book was written by a man or a woman. The simple scan of key words and syntax is around 80% accurate on both fiction and non-fiction1,2. The program's success seems to confirm the stereotypical perception of differences in male and female language use. Crudely put, men talk more about objects, and women more about relationships. Female writers use more pronouns (I, you, she, their, myself), say the program's developers, Moshe Koppel of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and colleagues. Males prefer words that identify or determine nouns (a, the, that) and words that quantify them (one, two, more). So this article would already, through sentences such as this, have probably betrayed its author as male: there is a prevalence of plural pronouns (they, them), indicating the male tendency to categorize rather than personalize. If I were female, the researchers imply, I'd be more likely to write sentences like this, which assume that you and I share common knowledge or engage us in a direct relationship. These differing styles have previously been called 'informational' and 'involved', respectively. Koppel and colleagues trained their algorithm on a few test cases to identify the most prevalent fingerprints of gender and of fiction and non-fiction. They then set it searching for these fingerprints in 566 English-language works in a variety of genres, ranging from A Guide to Prague to A. S. Byatt's novel Possession - which, intriguingly, the programme misclassified by gender, along with Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Strikingly, the distinctions between male and female writers are much the same as those that, even more clearly, differentiate non-fiction and fiction. The programme can tell these two genres apart with 98% accuracy. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that non-fiction is more informational and fiction more involved. Most of the works studied were published after 1975. The Israeli team now intends to probe whether the differences extend further back in time - and so whether George Eliot was wasting her time disguising herself with a male nom de plume - and also whether they occur in other languages. References Koppel, M., Argamon, S. & Shimoni, A. R. Automatically categorizing written texts by author gender. Literary and Linguistic Computing, in the press, (2003). |Homepage| Argamon, S., Koppel, M., Fine, J. & Shimoni, A. R. Gender, genre, and writing style in formal written texts. Text, in the press, (2003).
Deciding What You Want - If you don’t know what you want, it’s probably sleep.