Including your choice of text caption (see list below)
Available quotes for back of card:
- Antonio Gramsci, in a letter from prison, Jan. 14, 1929
- Roone Arledge, on News
- Wendy Lehnert on coding plot affect states
- David Korten on unrelieved domination
Turi, January 14, 1929
Dearest Giulia,
I'm still waiting for your answer to my last letter. When we start to correspond regularly again (even if at long intervals), I'll tell you all about my life, impressions, etc., etc. In the meantime, you must tell me how Delio uses his construction set. This interests me greatly because I have never been able to decide whether construction sets, which give no scope to the child's inventive spirit, are a really desirable modern game. What do both you and your father think about this. In general, I think that modern American-style civilization, of which construction seets are a typical product, makes people rather desiccated, mechanical, and bureaucratic and creates an abstract mentality. By this I do not mean "abstract" in the nineteenth-century sense. That was abstractness determined by a metaphysical intoxication, whereas now there is an abstractness determined by a mathematical intoxication. How interesting it must be to observe these educational methods affecting the mind of a small child, a child who is your own and to whom you are bound by feelings far stronger than mere "scientific interest." Dearest, write me a long letter. A big, big hug.
Antonio (p. 139-140)
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"Clearly, we feel that we have all this material and all this
capability and the more we can disseminate it, the better it is,"
said ABC News Chairman Roone Arledge. Found: http://www.apme.com/apind/indnews_04_07.html
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Coding affective states and their linkages from
narrative text is a skilled procedure. Several
comments are appropriate about this important step
in our analysis. First, it should be stressed that
plot units have been defined with an emphasis on
affective and purposive behavior, such as individual
success and failure, interpersional cooperation and
competition. Secondly, research has shown that ordinary
reader/listeners bring to any new text a set of higher-order
or "top-level" knowledge structures used in interpreting
that text. Therefore, skilled coders must be familiar with,
and are expected to look for, a number of complex plot units.
When done carefully, this increases the chance that subsequent
search for higher order (or deeper) plot units will be
successful. Thirdly, an important grammatical constraint
in the production of an affect state graph is the requirement
that at most one link of each allowable kind may go into or
out of a particular affect state. Novice coders make many
mistakes along these lines, which are likely to require
repeated recoding efforts; sophisticated coders must still
choose among the several possible connections symbolicaly
suggested by certain texts. At the moment reasonably
explicit and reliable heuristic and grammatical coding
rules exist for this process, but no completely programmed
and validated coding algorithms are avaliable.
Wendy C. Lehnert & friends "The Heroic Jesus: The Affective Plot Structure of Toynbee's Christus Patiens"
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Governments seem wholly incapable of responding, and public frustration is turning to rage. It is more than a failure of gov
ernment bureaucracies, however. It is a crisis of governance born of a convergence of ideological, political, and technologi
cal forces behind a process of economic globaliztion that is shifting power away from governments responsible for the public
good and toward a handful of corporations and financial institutions driven by a single imperative--the quest for short-term
financial gain. This has concentrated massive economic and political power in the hands of an elite few whose absolute share
of the products of a declining pool of natural wealth continues to increase at a substantial rate-- thus reassuring them tha
t the sytsem is working perfectly well. Those who bear the costs of the system's dysfunctions have been stripped of decision
-making power and are held in a state of confusion regarding the cause of their distress by corporate-dominated media that in
cessantly bombard them with interpretations of the resulting crisis based on the perceptions of the power holders. An active
propaganda machinery controlled by the world's largest corporations constantly reasssures us that consumerism is the path to
happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause of our distress, and economic globalization is both a histor
ical inevitability and a boon to the human species. In fact, these are all myths propagated to justify profligate greed and
mask the extent to which the global transformation of human institutions is a consequence of the sophisticated, well funded,
and intentional interventions of a small elite whose money enables them to live in a world of illusion apart from the rest of
humanity.
David Korten, from When Corporations Rule the World, co-published by Kumarian Press, Inc. 630 Okwood Ave, Suite 1
19, West Hartford, Connecticut 06110 and Berret Koehler Publishers, Inc. 155 Montgomery St. San Francisco, CA 94104
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