College students who wrote a paper (ANY paper) this term: just for fun

Open your paper, and scroll to page three. Post the title of your paper, along with the first, FULL paragraph on page three in its entirety. If your paper is less than three pages, post from page two instead. I'm very interested to see what we were all writing about!

Here's mine:

A National Disaster: Rebuilding a Welfare System Broken by Reform

          The stated justifications for welfare reform were myriad, and cloaked in political jargon that was tailored to appeal to the white middle-class base. Proponents of reform had spent over a decade carefully crafting a public image of the typical welfare recipient as a lazy, unmotivated, irresponsible, typically Black mother who popped out babies on a regular basis for the sole purpose of increasing her welfare check, and used hard-earned taxpayer dollars to buy luxuries rather than necessities. President Ronald Reagan once famously railed against the “welfare queens” who drove Cadillac cars bought and paid for with America’s tax dollars (Krugman). This helped the myth of the “welfare queen” to become even more pervasive throughout the American culture of the 80s and early 90s, and served to foster a simmering, deliberately-provoked resentment within the middle class. The opponents of welfare took great advantage of this resentment in order to convince America that welfare reform was one of the most urgent priorities for the nation, which in turn led directly to the electoral grandstanding on "welfare reform" during the Presidential campaign of 1992.

Unfortunately, Darius’ courtiers disagreed with the plan, and accused Charidemos of “wanting to get the command so that he could betray the Persian empire to the Macedonians.” Charidemos supposedly then lost his temper and cursed out the Persian high command – including Darius. The shocked and enraged king supposedly ordered the Athenian executed on the spot for this offense. This part of the account is extremely suspicious, as it seems unlikely that Charidemos could have so thoroughly abandoned common sense. More probably, some of the courtiers may have had the Athenian assassinated, or convinced Darius to order the execution after Charidemos had stormed out of the council. However, it is possible that the Athenian, used to greater freedom of speech, could have failed to realize the danger of open criticism. Either way, the entire speech ascribed to Charidemos by Diodorus and Curtius, where he shouts that Darius would “pay the penalty for rejecting (his) advice” at Alexander’s hands can be dismissed – it is far too pat, as though our authors are ascribing the tragic flaw of hubris to the Persian king. Nevertheless, Darius’ own hot temper had just cost him the only other general (besides himself) capable of seriously challenging Alexander. He was now forced to take the field in person.

THANK you for sharing that!

That paper's actually late because I'm such a fucking perfectionist (it's run rather substantially over what my professor expected), but eh, I majored in the subject for love of it, and I think my profs for this semester respect that.

I'm actually thinking of writing an article to try and correct the negative portrait of Darius III. (He wasn't anywhere near perfect, as that little anecdote shows, but the poor son of a bitch has been painted as a much worse person than he actually was for the past 2350 years.) All the major sources for that period were Greek or Macedonian writers (who, at best, questioned some of the Persian officers who defected to Alexander), and worse, we're getting their accounts second or third-hand from (comparatively) later authors. (Mostly 50 B.C. -- 50 A.D., and one from the mid-100s.) Some of the Hellenic accounts are blatantly propaganda, and everyone's just kind of accepted them without considering the potential questions that raises in their portrayal of Darius.

There are two, maybe three other papers on all of fucking JSTOR addressing this possibility, and one of them is...eh, let's just say it's not very well done and leave it at that, shall we?

Have you tried EBSCOHost? That's the best source of info that I've ever found.

but hey, it's easier to stand out in a less crowded field.

I was SHOCKED there wasn't a ton of research on what I spent most of this semester writing about. Turns out there was barely anything, and most that was either dated or focused on obscure details.

that's an interesting topic, and one I've sparred with others about. :P :D

Here's my term paper (one of them) from Scandinavian Mythology:

"The Commoner God and the Noble God: Thor and Odin"

With regards to personalities, Thor is possessed of the very human trait of a temper, something anyone can relate to. In ‘Loki’s Quarrel’ Thor is the one who, in the end, is reckoned greatest among the gods (if temporarily) simply because he loses his temper. He could stop Loki in his tirades against the gods, for while Loki insulted even Odin, he eventually stopped when Thor threatened him; “be silent, you evil creature, my mighty hammer Miollnir shall deprive you of speech,” (Poetic Edda 95). The other Aesid had made threats, but only Thor was likely to make good on his words, and Loki knew it. Thor is also simple and evidently perceived as common by his own father. He is, after all, technically a bastard, as Frigg is not his mother. Odin calls Thor a peasant outright in ‘Harbard’s Sayings,’ crying, “who is that peasant who calls over the gulf?” (Poetic Edda 69). It would make sense, seeing as Thor had been traipsing about trying to cross a river like anyone would, by ferry. He is also called “the glorious son of Earth” in ‘The Seeress’ Prophecy’, and thus seems much closer to his mortal admirers than any reference to heaven would make him. Thor is continually linked to the lower-born of society, not only by his actions, but also through the words of his father and a prophetess.

and I really don't want to make it easy for people to connect me with my name and school.

Plus posting a section online might count as prior publication, and I don't want to risk my chances of getting it in a journal.

Since it's only a paragraph excerpt, it wouldn't be considered a "publication."

Still, I can completely understand wanting to maintain your privacy. Can you at least tell us a paraphrased version of what it's about, roughly?

:hi:

I'd actually love to send you the whole thing if you're interested in reading it. It's political so I think you'd enjoy it.

;)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x8338633

:hide:

Stranger With A Camera: Ethics in Photojournalism

When Ison pulled the trigger, he seems to kill all those who had come before and warns all those who would come after. He doesn’t know O’Connor, nor does he care to know him. He is attempting to take back, for himself and his community, his cultural image. Ironically, he exacerbates that image by turning his gun on an innocent outsider, perpetuating and expanding that image. Barret goes a long way towards bridging the divide between the insider and the outsider, as she plays both at once. But, in the end, she acknowledges that we are all outsiders, and she raises more questions than she answers about the moral rights of a subject and the responsibilities of a storyteller.



I had more interesting subjects, but not many in paper form.

REPAIRING THE FAMILY AND ITS COURTS: THE CASE FOR
RESTORATIVE FAMILY PROCESS

Fixing “the system” will require not just tweaks to the existing court paradigm, but wholesale realignment of attitudes, processes, and infrastructure. While not every family will benefit from a restorative approach to family law (hereinafter termed Restorative Family Process or RFP), such an option needs to be available for those who choose it and for those for whom it is appropriate.

I'm still writing another one, due Monday. Bah.

Political Cynicism in Action: Watching the 2008 Presidential Debates
with Internet News Users

Much research into cynicism centers on media effects on cognition and behavior based on specific stimuli. McGraw, Lodge, and Jones uncover that people are more suspicious of politicians’ statements than statements from “ordinary” people. However, much of this suspicion derives not from a person’s general feeling of malaise about the world or about other people, but from specific political reasons. John Fraser writes, “Political cynicism apparently does have political causes.” Additionally, a person will more cognitively evaluate what they believe to be a politician’s negative behavior, while more readily accepting what they believe to be positive behavior with little questioning. A person’s prior opinion about a public official, or a policy disagreement with a public official, also can raise suspicion in a voter.

It's a 26 page paper, so it gets a bit more interesting... but here you go.

One thing that I must point out is that the compilation and machine
execution environment is very fragile and finicky. I discovered
that, sometimes, the environment is left in a strange state after
encountering bugs, such that, after fixing the bug bad behaviors
continue to occur, even though the bug has been fixed. I spent a
lot of time tracking down a subtle bug, then finally exiting scheme
and re-entering, only to find that the bug was no longer there.

More insidious and dangerous is the opposite behavior. A corrupt
environment can lead to correct behavior, even when bugs still
exist in the code. An example of this was when I discovered that
set-car! was left out of the list of primitive functions. I
modified eceval-support.scm to add it, reloaded machine-shell.scm,
ran it, and it worked! Then, I exited scheme, entered it again,
re-ran the same machine-shell, and got a new complaint that
set-cdr! was missing!!! How did it work before, after fixing only
set-car!? I have no idea.

I am suspecting that a lot of the testing I performed yesterday was
against a corrupt environment, because I was able to run s450.scm
successfully, even when some primitives were missing, and when
let->appl was not working properly. I know that I tested the
(define a 1) yesterday and saw it succeed, but this morning after
reading professor XXXX, retested and saw that it was
definitely broken. It is also possible that an error dropped me out
of the s450 environment and on to regular scheme where, naturally,
everything worked just fine... Who knows...

and n-Butyl Acetate System at Subatmospheric Pressure

A material balance requires that the change in moles of one component must equal the change in moles of the component in any phase <2> if any reactions taking place have a stoichiometric ratio of 1:1, i.e.,

Σdn_i,α = 0 (4)

If the general criterion for equilibrium is used, that is, dG_total = 0, this simplifies equation (3), assuming only two phases are present, to:

Σ ( μ_i,α - μ_i,β ) = 0 (5)

In order for equation (5) to be true, μ_i,α must be equal to μ_i,β. Since, in this case, the partial molar Gibbs free energy is defined as the chemical potential μ, the following holds true <2>:

dμ_i = RTd(ln f_i) (6)

Indefinite integration yields:

μ_i = RT ln f_i + Θ_i (7)

Since Θ_i is a constant only dependent on temperature, and, at equilibrium, all phases are at the same temperature and pressure, substituting equation (7) into the result for equation (5), it is seen that the fugacity of each component is equal across all phases.

Written four years ago for a master's thesis.