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Pardon the tardy publication today of the Engaging Essentials. Legislature is back in town and there are some disappointing moves being contemplated. Thankfully, I was able to meet with several of our lawmakers to discuss our concerns. They seem to be understanding.
RIP: Del. Larry Border – My friend, and a friend to many, Del. Larry Border passed away last week. I had the privilege of extending my condolences, and those of the entire FPCWV network, to his dear widow Anna last Friday. Larry was a kind man, surpassed in kindness only by his wife, perhaps. Not only did he look after new lawmakers, he was known to look after new lobbyists too. Thanks, Larry. You will be sorely missed.
A Marshall Plan for Marriage – That's "Marshall" like the plan to rebuild Europe after WWII, not the Thundering Herd kind. Still, Chuck is dead on in his analysis of how to strengthen society by strengthening marriage.
The Worst Argument for SSM? – First Things Blog last week highlighted what it labeled as perhaps the worst argument for same-sex marriage: climate change.
The Family's End – For your in-depth reading tonight, this from the Public Discourse on what to expect, if anything, in a post-family culture.
About Jeremy Dys
Jeremy Dys is the FPCWV's President and General Counsel. In addition to his duties of providing strategic vision and leadership to the FPCWV, Dys is the chief lobbyist and spokesman. Dys is regularly featured in local, state, and national print, radio, and television outlets. He lives close to Charleston with his wife and growing family.


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Neck Deep & State Champs Announce New Zealand Tour
Neck Deep and State Champs will be heading to New Zealand to play a couple shows in late August! Click here to buy tickets!
Neck Deep and State Champs will be heading to New Zealand to play a couple shows in late August! Click here to buy tickets!
Neck Deep and State Champs will be heading to the land down under to tour this fall! The dates are in the flyer above, but if you can't read it, click Read More for all of the dates.
Celebrate Pure Noise Records' 5th birthday with a specially curated playlist featuring The Story So Far, State Champs, and more on PureVolume.
Vans Warped Tour have announced four new bands! State Champs, Crown The Empire, The Maine, and Volumes. Click Read More to check out the lineup that's been announced so far.
The Wonder Years have announced dates for The Greatest Generation: World Tour. They will be playing a run of North American dates as well as European dates. The bands supporting them will be Defeater, Real Friends, Citizen and Modern Baseball in North America, and A Loss For Words and State Champs in Europe. Click Read More to check out the tour flyers as well as the dates.
It's kind of hard for me to suggest things to you guys anymore, because nothing catches my attention. While, The Good Fight might not be the most original sounding band I've ever heard, but dammit, they know how to write some catchy songs. Earlier this year, they released their latest EP, This Is My Nightmare, which is available on Bandcamp, iTunes, and Spotify.
RIYL: New Found Glory, Honour Bright, State Champs
Track to listen to: 'A Perfect Storm Of Satisfaction'
Want to win some sweet State Champs gear? All the info is in the above post!
State Champs - The Finer Things
Release Date: October 8th, 2013
Record Label: Pure Noise Records
Reviewer: Jake Hook
State Champs may not be heralded as saviors of the genre like some of their peers in the quasi-subgenre of "Defend Pop Punk," but for what they do, they do it quite well. They're not great innovators, they don't take as many risks as others, but their strong points lie in their refinement of past efforts and a keen sense of awareness of developments in the scene around them. This in contrast to many pop punk bands out there, who are equally content in their style, but whose style is unfocused, derivative, or underdeveloped due to a lack of planning. 'The Finer Things' capitalizes on the success of The Wonder Years' 'The Greatest Generation' by coming in with concise narratives and tight, melodic playing. And singing about how much it sucks to get older rather than how much it sucks when your girlfriend breaks up with you seems to be in vogue in pop punk these days, so State Champs' use of this device comes at a time when capitalizing on it will yield the best results, signaling a move by even the less-recognized among pop-punk bands towards more thoughtful introspection.
The opening track "Elevated" is about as catchy as they come, filled to the brim with hooks and maudlin sloganeering that's easy to swallow but not needlessly saccharine. "Deadly Conversation" follows up with more substantial riffing and some more complex structure, standing out as an album highlight with its anthemic, fist pumping chorus. A number of these tracks fall prey to what a lot of crossover acts do, that is, standing more on the side of pop than punk, with excessive vocal modulation and predictable music, as can be occasionally detected on tracks like "Hard To Please" or "Critical." Make no mistake, as heavy as this music is they probably aren't going to be the next You Me At Six, in fact it's borderline easycore in a lot of places. In a way, it feels like these tracks are simply watered down versions of tracks they worked harder on like "Over The Line," whose strong points include poignant, memorable slogans, in contrast to when frontman Derek Discanio attempts to wax poetic about getting bummed.
But we do have to remember, this is the debut by a band still learning what it is it does best. And for the most part it's headed in the right direction, like on "Mind Bottled." The band never lets up in intensity or in accessibility, and Discanio is at his most charming, with lyrics like "was it all worth it/I built the highest bridge just to burn it." It's not gut-wrenchingly deep, but it is something to mull over when you're singing along with some friends. Again, it's when the songs aren't the kind you can easily pump fists to that it falls apart. A band like Fall Out Boy may have been able to pull of writing lyrics while sitting next to an open thesaurus, but this is not that kind of band. State Champs show very little restraint, which is not in itself a bad thing, but when cramming in as many lyrics as you can into this kind of music, it tends to feel forced and comes off exhaustingly.
State Champs is a band who will see its star rise quite quickly in the pop punk community, no doubt. Likely they won't rise to the top of the pile to rest among Tigers Jaw or the like if they continue in the same vein, but their style is incredibly endearing and I predict them to be live favorites come next summer. Their musical direction from here on out is anyone's guess, but they've got some real potential for artistic triumph.
State Champs are currently streaming their new album, The Finer Things, over at Rocksound. The album will be released on October 8th via Pure Noise Records.
State Champs have released a brand new track off of their debut LP, The Finer Things. Stream 'Nothing's Wrong' by clicking Read More, and pre-order The Finer Things, out October 8th, here!

subset: commoncrawl


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Nebraska and Ohio State fans might be overheard asking each other "Where's the Beef?" before Saturday's game. What they are referring to is where they can find samples of steak they read about on WOWT.COM.
The Nebraska Corn Board has announced samples of corn-fed (of course!) ribeye steak will be offered before the game. To answer the question "Where's the Beef?", look for a big Nebraska Corn Board display trailer with signs that will ask if you'd rather have a buckeye or a ribeye.
Samples will be served beginning at 4pm on Stadium Drive on the west side of Memorial Stadium.
The promotion is part of the Nebraska Corn Board's "Sustaining Innovation" program that includes information about how corn farmers are growing more corn with less fertilizer, less water, and less environmental impact.


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— Adam Gopnik, "The Poet's Hand"
PODCAST: Christopher Warren on Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
SDFB co-PI Christopher Warren recently presented in Oxford University's Cultures of Knowledge seminar series "Negotiating Networks."
The podcast of his presentation, "Bacon and Edges: Reassembling the Early Modern Social Network," can be found here.
BLOG POST: Daniel Shore on "Extensions of the Book"
SDFB co-PI Daniel Shore has written a guest blog post at the Folger Shakespeare Library's blog, "The Collation."
His post, "Extensions of the Book," can be found here.
PODCAST: Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian Ahnert on "Tudor Letter Networks: The Case for Quantitative Network Analysis"
SDFB team members Ruth and Sebastian Ahnert recently spoke in Oxford University's Cultures of Knowledge seminar series "Negotiating Networks."
The podcast of their presentation, "Tudor Letter Networks: The Case for Quantitative Network Analysis," can be found here.
Job Opportunity with Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: Early Modern Data Curation Fellow
Carnegie Mellon University's Department of English and University Libraries jointly seek an Early Modern Data Curation Fellow to lead data curation activities for the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) project, a digital reconstruction of the early modern social network that scholars and students can collaboratively expand, revise, curate, and critique. The fellow will leverage expertise in early modern studies along with technical aptitude in order to contribute meaningfully to a rich data lifecycle, including collecting, processing, textmining, analyzing, and archiving data related to the early modern social network.
Click on the links above for further details.
Request for Input
We're very busy working behind the scenes on an interactive user interface for Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB). Since we want SDFB to be as useful to the scholarly community as possible, we thought we'd open up the process a little.
Have a look at a couple recent screenshots, centered on Thomas Hobbes and Ben Jonson, respectively. Say you could learn more about the line of connection between two people - in technical network parlance, the "edge" connecting Hobbes and Waller or Jonson and Chapman. What kind of information would you want to find there?
Say, moreover, that you could add or edit information about that edge. What kinds of information would you want to add or correct? Likelihood of relationship? Type of relationship? Strength of relationship? Dates and frequency of contact? Bibliographical sources?
Let us know with a tweet to 6Bacon or by clicking "Submit" above.
Elizabethan Hacks
We're delighted to share the reflections of Matthew Harrison, a graduate student at Princeton University. His dissertation, "Tear Him for His Bad Verses: Carping, Cavilling, and the Origins of Criticism," explores the strange and wonderful vocabulary with which Tudor readers insulted, sniffed at, and objected to the shortcomings of particular poems and the art itself.
Many thanks to the 6 Degrees team for letting me play around with their data.
I requested the network data for three Elizabethan writers: Nicholas Breton (1554/5–c.1626), Barnabe Barnes (1571—1609), and Robert Greene (1558-1592). Though rough contemporaries in the burgeoning London literary scene, each imagines and constructs a career as a print author in somewhat different terms, taking very different relations to print and patronage. I wanted to know how much of the different writerly trajectories of these figures would be visible in their social networks.
First, a rough sketch of the three figures:
Greene, famously, is among those now known as "University Wits," humanistically-trained writers who made careers out of writing for publication and the stage. The success of his pamphlets and prose romances made him, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, "England's first celebrity author," and the appeals to patronage of his early work disappear in favor of efforts to capitalize on his reputation.
The third son of the Bishop of Durham, Barnes seems to have lived on his inheritance while trying to fashion himself as a fashionable literary gentleman. (Thomas Nashe mocks him for showing up at court in "a strange pair of Babylonian britches, with a codpiece as big as a Bolognian sausage.")
Finally, Breton, the son of a wealthy merchant, was a prolific writer of devotional and secular poetry and prose. His dedications approach a wide swath of potential patrons—city officials, country dignitaries and luminaries at court—with works that seem targeted to their taste and interests.
Image: Greene, in his winding sheet, imagined as writing from beyond the grave. From the title page of Greene in Conceipt, by John Dickinson
For ease of reading, I've put the top twenty or so results for each writer at the bottom of the page. These lists, while idiosyncratic, are fairly accurate: above the .5 confidence interval, the algorithm tends to be right that two people are connected (though, as we will see, what comprises a connection is an open question). One other encouraging result: the confidence intervals for Greene's relationships are significantly higher than those of the others, while those for Barnes are quite low. With good reason: Greene's DNB entry is five or six times longer, and a full-text search suggests he's mentioned about that much more often in other entries. The algorithm is most confident when it has a larger sample with which to test its conclusions. The more often two names appear together, the more likely a relationship can be inferred. (I'll raise a few problems with that inference in a moment.)
With this general background, I want to raise three challenges for thinking about and using Six Degrees data.
Did Robert Greene Know Philip Sidney?
With a confidence interval of of .83, the network suggests Greene knew Philip Sidney. A connection is possible— the two are contemporary, though they move in very different circles. And, indeed, Greene's entry mentions Sidney six times. Yet each mention denies literary influence, claims such as the following: "Greene independently synthesized the same models as Sidney had…" or " But Greene probably knew Sidney's romance only indirectly…". The DNB entry author takes pains to distinguish Greene's mode of prose romance writing from Sidneian influence.
Should this be considered a connection? In terms of social network and literary influence, respectively, Breton and Barnes are each closer to Sidney. Yet Sidney's prominence and their generic similarities mean that Greene's work has been read in Sidneian terms since the 1590's. Is that sufficient? It depends on the purpose for which we are using the database.
A related problem: Breton is connected to Henry Machyn, a parish clerk, because Machyn's Diary is used to provide a colorful anecdote about his step-father. Indeed, I suspect the network data for Machyn would tell us far more about which entries draw on this source than about Machyn himself. (We can find the same sort of error in relations to Francis Meres, John Bodenham, Thomas Moffet, Robert Dow, Anthony Wood, and other individuals connected to important historical sources.)
Again, these complications tell us less about the shortcomings of the project than about the complexity of human relationships and their irreducibility to a network graph. Hence the Six Degree team's emphasis on introducing multiple data streams and on allowing domain experts to tag and annotate relationships.
John Weld and Isaac Newton: Artifacts and Duplicates
One place where human intervention will greatly improve results comes in recognizing artifacts of the way the algorithm derives names from the DNB data.
Barnabe Barnes, you'll notice, is connected both to "Thomas Nashe" and "Thomas Nash." These aren't two different individuals; it's the same fellow, with his name spelled two different ways. (If I had included a little more data, you'd see Archbishop Matthews' first name spelled both "Tobie" and "Toby.") Making matters worse, in other entries, Barnes's own name is sometimes spelled "Barnaby."
On the other hand, the network suggests that Robert Greene knew Isaac Newton. Perplexing, until one realizes that it doesn't distinguish between Robert Greene (the 16th-century writer) and Robert Greene (the 17th-century natural philosopher).
My favorite example is Breton's proposed connection to one "John Weld." There is no such person in the DNB meeting the five mention threshold for inclusion in this data set, so his appearance seems anomalous. Until a full-text search reveals that five different people named "John Weld" are mentioned once or twice apiece. The network amalgamates a 20th-century critic, a 17th-century sheriff, a cleric, and so on.
City, Country, and Court
The DNB favors people who have been deemed notable, while the 6 Degrees project threshold for inclusion restricts the data set even further. The resulting networks are male-dominated and overly emphasize weak ties to key political and literary figures over the everyday sorts of sociability that might have governed lives in the period. The given networks lack, for example, the city figures to whom Breton dedicated much writing.
Still more drastically, we don't hear of the many servants, innkeepers, shop-owners, and apprentices that far outnumbered the "notables": how different will these networks look, I wonder, when they can be supplemented with data from court cases, the State Papers, and college records?
The inferences the algorithm can already make are impressive. Thus in 1598, Barnabe Barnes tries twice (rather amateurishly) to poison John Browne, first poisoning a lemonade he gives him and then his glass of wine. Barnes is caught, tried by Sir Edward Coke, and ultimately gets off easy, presumably through intervention of some aristocratic connection.
The court records survive, so we can piece together quite a bit of social life in Elizabethan London: we even know the name of the two servants who are made to test the poisoned wine and become grievously ill. The Six Degrees project doesn't have access to this data. Indeed, as I pointed out above, it doesn't have much to work with regarding Barnes at all: about a dozen names in his entry. What it does know, however, are the associates of Barnes's father, the Bishop of Durham. We find a number of Richard Barnes's connections suggested (with low confidence intervals) as possible contacts of Barnabe's. And as I researched the aftermath of the trial, I was surprised to find that some of the same names come up, as people to whom the younger Barnes had recourse. And I wonder whether more historical research might not validate more of these connections.
Its guesses, we might say, happen to have been validated by history. This is part chance, of course, but it also reflects a deep parsimony in human relations. If serendipity and error make it difficult for network analysis to completely capture the complexity of human social relations, nonetheless, often enough we know who you might guess we know. Though far from complete, a network like this one is an excellent place to begin.
Boundaries, brevity and bias: Protestant letter networks
A few days ago we posted an update about the project, including the fact that Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian Ahnert had recently joined the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) team. The following post, by Ruth, examines how her recent work with Sebastian on Protestant letter networks, and the methods they have developed through this process, inform the project.
Sebastian and I were invited to join the SDFB team after Chris Warren and Dan Shore saw me presenting on our research at the MLA conference in January. What piqued their interest, I believe, was the way that our approach contrasted with, yet complemented, their own. While the existing SDFB team have been constructing a global network inferred from secondary literature comprising 6,000 nodes (and growing), ours was a verified local network comprising just 377 nodes, derived from primary literature. The source in question was a collection of 289 letters written in the reign of Mary I by Protestants which were later collected, and many brought to print, by the famous martyrologist John Foxe.The other difference between our work and theirs was that our emphasis was not so much on network visualization as on topographical network analysis. In our work we have employed mathematical tools and algorithms to measure the relative centrality of each of the individuals in the network, and we have begun to develop ways of predicting the roles of different actors according to their network properties.
We are now moving onto a new, much larger collection of documents - Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, and The Calendars of State Papers. Our mining of these sources will create a very large sub-network that will offer two things: 1) additional associations missed by the (necessarily) coarse-grained nature of network inference, and 2) a means of verifying and improving the inference process. It will take quite some time before this verified sub-network is reconstructed, but to suggest the way this might work, we decided to write a couple of blog posts comparing the Protestant letter network to the equivalent portion of the global network. In this post we will provide an overview of what a comparison of these two networks can offer; in a second post we will undertake some more quantitative analysis.
Figure 1 (created by Sebastian) is a visualization derived from 289 letters found in John Foxe's papers and publications and sent between Protestants in England during the reign of Mary I. Figure 2, by comparison is a section of the inferred network derived from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), which was generated by running the network inference process for the those actors in our Protestant network that have their own ODNB entries. Straightaway two key differences between the parameters of these 2 networks can be observed: the network in figure 1 is bounded by time (communications made 1553-1558), and its actors' membership within the Protestant community, whereas network 2 covers the whole lives of those Protestants, and consists of all associations that have been inferred with a confidence that exceeds a given threshold. This is the nature of working with collections of primary documents: they are circumscribed by various collection policies. For this reason, network 1 excludes figures like John Story, who, despite being in written communication with various Protestant leaders in the reign of May I, was an opponent of the Protestant community as one of the key enforcers of the Marian religious reaction. Based on these two additional layers of circumscription acting on network 1, it should look much smaller. Yet it doesn't, even when we take into account some of 'false positives' included in network 2, such as the historian and biographer John Strype (1643–1737), who only wrote about the Protestant martyrs, and William I. Why is this?
There are three main reasons: the brevity of ODNB entries, their bias, and the confidence levels used in the network inference process. Considering first the issues of brevity and bias: ODNB entries are concise introductions to the biographies of figures perceived to be significant in the nation's history. This means that there is only space to mention their 'important' relationships and interactions. However, religious leaders did not only write to other high profile figures in the Protestant movement, and, as a result, there are a significant number of figures that appear in network 1 who do not have their own ODNB entries; some are only mentioned in passing within others' entries, and others still are not mentioned at all. Significantly, many of the figures who fall into this category are women, for while women play a minor role in both historical and modern scholarly accounts of the Reformation, they often occupied vital infrastructural roles within this network, funneling letters, money, food and other goods to the London prisons to support their incarcerated co-religionists. These infrastructural figures are highlighted by two key network measures: "betweenness" (which measures the number of times a shortest path across the network goes through a given node) and "eigenvector centrality" (which is closely related to the algorithm used by Google to assign importance to web pages in the World Wide Web, and to rank its search results by relevance). Network 2 demonstrates how the need for confidence levels when inferring a network exacerbates the structural bias against women in the ODNB: because they are mentioned rarely, they often fall below the radar. However, the combination of primary sources and network analysis has the ability to provide a more gender-balanced view of the early modern social network.
While the relative absence of women from network 2 might have been expected, there are some other more surprising absences, which highlight the problem with using the ODNB alone for network inference. In network 1 John Careless is shown to be an important hub. This is because he sent a lot of correspondence, and so accordingly he is given significant coverage in John Foxe's famous 'Book of Martyrs'. Yet the ODNB does not have an entry on him. Bartholomew (or Bartlet) Green, a prominent martyr in Foxe's book, is another significant absence from network 2. This is because although he does have his own ODNB entry his relationships are given low confidence levels because his name does not appear in anyone else's entries.
The absence of nodes such as the female sustainers, Careless, and Green has a knock-on effect for our understanding of the topography of this network as a whole. It means that important relationships and channels of news transmission are not represented, which also prevents us from seeing how highly connected certain Protestants were. For example, in network 1 John Bradford appears right at the centre as the most connected node, with links to 67 different people through the numerous letters he wrote. By contrast in network 2 he does not appear to be especially connected, and he is nowhere near the middle, which shows the inability of the inference methods to pick up on his notable evangelism, and the important relationships with carriers like Augustine Bernher and William Punt, and sustainers like Margery Cooke and Joyce Hales, that made this possible.
A comparison of these 2 networks, then, provides a number of lessons for the SDFB team about the reliability of the source material and our current inference models. Happily the former issue is being addressed as we turn to a broader range of primary and secondary literature; and as more anomalies are spotted and understood we hope to find ways to improve the way we assign confidence levels. But there are also broader lessons for anyone working on networks. When you construct a network you are always necessarily making decisions about where your boundaries are. This comparison shows clearly that choosing to include more or less information can radically change your findings.
Probability, Validation, and Method in Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) is at an important juncture in the project as we move onto the second phase, which brings on board two new members: Ruth Ahnert (Queen Mary, University of London) and Sebastian Ahnert (University of Cambridge). Their ongoing collaboration - which explores the application of quantitative network analysis to the study of sixteenth-century letter collections - will bring both new data and skills to our reconstruction of the early modern social network.
Up to this point, the team has been mining a single source, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), to produce a preliminary list of 6,000 actors and to infer, with confidence estimates, a map of the associations between them. Links are inferred through data-mining, by chunking articles and measuring the co-occurrence of names. Confidence estimates arise through re-sampling. Out of 100 runs through the documents, how well does the presence of one name predict the presence of another? Using this data, we have already created one large data visualization mapping all these inferred associations ('Global Graph, featured on the blog 14 July 2013), as well as smaller ego networks focused around single figures, such as Margaret Cavendish or James Harrington. However, these inferred networks are coarse grained, biased to one source, and lacking verification. The next phase requires us to broaden the scope of our sources to extend and verify these inferred relationships, and to explore the ways that we can analyse the network we have reconstructed.
In the coming months we will expand the range of primary and secondary texts from which we derive relationships in order to reconstruct the network more fully and accurately. Hathi Trust Reseach Center and Google Books have supported our work by providing non-consumptive access to texts in their archives, and so we will be expanding our inferred network using secondary literature from these two vast repositories. On its own, however, this approach only produces a set of probable links with confidence estimates. Inference algorithms produce some false associations and omit other true ones. This is why, at the same time, Ruth and Sebastian will also be constructing a validated sub-network from the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, and The Calendars of State Papers foreign and domestic, which they have been granted permission by British History Online to access via their site. This will allow us not only to confirm and supplement the inferred network; it also provides a sizeable set of verified associations against which to validate the inferred network so that we can examine the technical process and to tweak the methods applied to derive data.
Comparing the two networks will also alert us to systematic biases in secondary literature – some of which have already become apparent from initial case studies, such as the relative absence of women (see 'An Entry of One's Own, or Why Are There So Few Women In the Early Modern Social Network?' 8 March 2013). Another important bias has been pointed out in Shawn Moore's guest post on Margaret Cavendish's network. He writes:
But with few exceptions, the majority of nodes are people with whom Margaret had little to no direct contact. Samuel Pepys and Dorothy Osborne, with .65 and .80 estimates respectively, are not known to have interacted with Margaret at all, though their impressions of her and her work still dominate traditional representations of the early modern writer.
This is both a problem with the nature of secondary literature, which places emphasis on how Cavendish was received by early modern writers who may well not have known her personally, and on the automated nature of the data-mining, which picks up these names as people likely to have known Cavendish because of the frequency with which they appear in close proximity to her name. Conversely, however, Moore points out that in addition to these false positives, there are some known relationships that have not been picked up through inference. This is due to the need to set thresholds high enough to filter out statistical noise – names that appear together once only are more likely to give raise to a false positive. But as a result we necessarily miss the fine grain.
The primary sub-network that Ruth and Sebastian are working on, then, aims to fill in these gaps. But Shawn's contribution here is also instructive. Our ultimate aim is to have a whole host of experts like Shawn overseeing additions and modifications to the network, which will be editable to invited collaborators through a wiki interface; other scholars will be able to make suggested modifications which will be checked and implemented by these curators. There is still a long way to go before this is a reality, but through collaboration, and a growing team and support network of advisors, these aims are closer to realisation.
Global Graph
Above is a thumbnail from a large network visualization produced for SDFB by the talented folks at KNALIJ. Click here to view the whole image, which is large (~12mb) but can be zoomed and navigated using your web browser. The image includes only the top nodes and edges in our inferred network. For a rather unwieldy visualization of all 6,000 odd nodes and their edges, without labels, click here.
The proximity of the nodes is determined by their connection strength. If multiple nodes are all connected with a high degree of confidence, they will cluster together. So, for example, you can see members of the Elizabethan court clustered in the bottom left hand corner. The graph takes the shape of a circle because it's what's called a force-directed graph, in which links or edges are treated as springs whose stiffness varies based on confidence estimates. It's as though the nodes and their connections had been compressed, then left to settle in place in accordance with Hooke's law for springs and elasticity. Node size is a function of the number of connections, which is why a figure like Charles II is significantly larger than, say, Samuel Palmer. The color of the nodes is an indication of community. Nodes are members of the same community when they share a set number of edges with other members of the community. When a node is part of multiple communities, its color is determined by the community with which it shares the most edges.
What is remarkable about the image, from our perspective, is how much meaningful information it displays given the relatively sparse dataset on which it is based. All that we sent to KNALIJ was a matrix of nodes and edges with confidence intervals. But from this minimal data their clustering and community inference algorithms have inferred a remarkable amount.
For example, though our data includes no dates or other temporal information, the graph has an obvious, though not entirely consistent, chronological organization. Starting with the Elizabethan court in the lower left hand corner, the graph proceeds counter clockwise through the reigns of James, Charles I, and Charles II. Nodes at 12 noon are largely post-Restoration and/or 18th-century. Nodes at 10 o'clock are part of James's Scottish court.
At first we wondered why the center of the graph is basically empty. Then we realized that to occupy the center, a node would need to share edges with communities stretching over 150 years. The empty center is, in effect, a sign of the temporal scope of of our network. Presumably a network stretched over a longer time period would have an even more pronounced doughnut hole.
It's worth at this point acknowledging some of the embarrassing things that this image makes evident about the current state of our inferred network. We still have some named entity recognition problems. The "Society of Antiquaries" should not show up in our network. There's more work to do on date limitations, since figures appear from both much earlier (King John) and later (Lloyd George) than our proposed date range of 1550-1700. As we've discussed in earlier posts, there are still de-duping problems, especially with regards to monarchs. Some of these should be simple to iron out: King James and James I should not have separate nodes.
But in other cases the duplication provides potentially significant information. Even though James VI of Scotland became James I of England, it is fascinating to see different communities and networks surrounding the two names. Nor, to scholars of the period at least, is it self-evident that James VI of Scotland and James I of England should be treated as the same person. As Jenny Wormold asked long ago, James VI and I: Two Kings or One?
King James's northern and southern subjects shared one attitude: both treated this man, who embarked on his dual role three months short of his thirty-seventh birthday, as their king, dividing him as far as possible into two separate individuals.
At stake in the question "Two Kings or One?" is the category of Britain itself.
In some cases the use of colors to indicate communities shows fascinating breakdowns in social coherence. A light blue Elizabeth I is surrounded by a sea of relatively unbroken light blue Protestantism. But the pink Charles I is cut off from his Laudian community and hemmed in by the darker blues of Cromwell, Fairfax, and Henry Vane. Henrietta Maria appears to have her own small and dispersed community, set apart from the rest of the mid-century milieu, that is more closely connected to the courts of Charles II and James II, and doubtless to the court in exile starting in 1644.
As tempting as it is to turn these images into narrative, it would be unwise to draw any strong conclusions at this point. We can't be sure which aspects of the visualization are artifacts of our highly imperfect network data, or of the arbitrary thresholds with which the visualization algorithms organize that data into a coherent image. Revised data, or different thresholds (particularly thresholds manipulable by users), could and doubtless will yield very different pictures.
That said, we see the filtered SDFB graph as a rather large map of problems. Why does Henrietta Maria have a community distinct from her husband and those most proximate to her? Why does Jacob Tonson sit so far out to the upper-right hand corner? Why are certain nodes so evidently out of place? When and why don't communities align with proximity, color with clustering? The problems call out for further explanation, interpretation, and speculation especially by experts with knowledge of the period, of particular figures, or of graph learning and/or visualization.
Networks as Constructs: The Curious Case of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623?-1673)
Guest post by Shawn W. Moore
The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) team is delighted to introduce here the first in an occasional series in which we invite early modernists with expert knowledge about particular groups and figures to reflect on ways SDFB might aid their own research and on how SDFB's iterative process could be improved.
Shawn Moore, a PhD student at Texas A&M University who as curator of The Digital Cavendish Project is developing exciting new methods to study early modern networks, examines our early attempts to reassemble Margaret Cavendish's associations from the 58,000 DNB entries with which we began. We sought Shawn's feedback because of his demonstrated knowledge about both Cavendish in particular and digital methods more broadly.
We told Shawn, "be completely honest and fully critical. If there are wrong links do say so; if there are important missing connections, that's just as important; if there's something useful that we can't yet do but that you think would be crucial, let's hear it. Again, it would be great also to hear how the graph or confidence intervals might be useful to you and your research, but you should by all means go beyond that as warranted…The point is that this is very much a collaborative, iterative process."
Shawn Moore's guest post is below.
Any social network analysis of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne (1623?-1673) must deal with two important characteristics of the famed writer's reputation: her infamous, self-proclaimed shyness, and the exaggerated yet continually perpetuated reports of her eccentric megalomania. Margaret's own textual practices complicate this relationship even further.
In fact, it's a curious case in regard to Cavendish's perceived network that she at once downplays her own relationships with her early modern contemporaries, yet at the same time embeds her texts with complex sociable relationships and consciously distributes her texts to the intellectual hotspots of her time. These apparent contradictions and her infamous reputation still fascinate Cavendish scholars. It makes social network analysis particularly interesting because it requires thinking about networks in a different way. In many ways, her networks are non-traditional in that they often exist outside of and beyond Cavendish herself.
Figure 1.
In the visualization produced by SDFB (Figure 1.), we see an evenly spread layout of nodes showing a rather impressive network including famous contemporaries such as Samuel Pepys, Robert Boyle, and Thomas Hobbes. The confidence interval visualization (Figure 2, after the jump.) indicates the reliability of estimated relationships, how likely it is that Cavendish "knew" that person (see Network Inference post on the problems regarding "knew"), based on the DNB data. In this case, with a confidence of .9 we can reliably estimate that Margaret knew William Cavendish, her husband the Duke of Newcastle. But with few exceptions, the majority of nodes are people with whom Margaret had little to no direct contact. Samuel Pepys and Dorothy Osborne, with .65 and .80 estimates respectively, are not known to have interacted with Margaret at all, though their impressions of her and her work still dominate traditional representations of the early modern writer.
Coming Soon: Shawn Moore on Margaret Cavendish
The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) team is delighted to introduce in the coming days the first in an occasional series in which we invite early modernists with expert knowledge about particular groups and figures to reflect on ways SDFB might aid their own research and on how SDFB's iterative process could be improved.
Shawn Moore, a PhD student at Texas A&M University who as curator of Digital Cavendish is developing exciting new methods to study early modern networks, will examine our early attempts to reassemble Margaret Cavendish's associations from the 58,000 DNB entries with which we began. We sought Shawn's feedback because of his demonstrated knowledge about both Cavendish in particular and digital methods more broadly.
We told Shawn, "be completely honest and fully critical. If there are wrong links do say so; if there are important missing connections, that's just as important; if there's something useful that we can't yet do but that you think would be crucial, let's hear it. Again, it would be great also to hear how the graph or confidence intervals might be useful to you and your research, but you should by all means go beyond that as warranted…The point is that this is very much a collaborative, iterative process."
Look for Shawn Moore's post, "Networks as Constructs: The Curious Case of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623?-1673)," in the next few days.
Gender and Name Recognition
In a recent post we talked about why SDFB currently does a poor job of including women, how we can fix it, and how it might eventually do an even better job of including women than some of our current intellectual tools.
There is, however, an additional reason why women are excluded that we didn't mention in the last post: the mismatch between the asymmetric naming conventions surrounding marriage (especially as they appear in the ODNB) and the capabilities of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and de-duplication ("de-duping") programs.
The naming conventions will surprise no one. Women in the 17th century regularly took their husbands' surnames when they married. Multiple marriages meant that a woman would have multiple surnames. For example, one of the founders of the Society of Friends (or Quakers) called herself Margaret Askew, Margaret Fell, and Margaret Fox at different stages of her life. Identified, as a result, by multiple names in the ODNB, Margaret had approximately three times more difficulty meeting the 5-mentions threshold that would, for practical reasons, become our initial cutoff for inclusion.
Scholars who study societies where women conventionally take their husbands' names, as well as those who live in such societies, have developed general rules, and indeed intuitions, about how women's names change as a result of marriage. These rules and intuitions are not foolproof - when misapplied they can lead to scholarly errors and even social embarrassment - but they do a good job of handling most cases. Scholars of 17th-century England have no conceptual problem recognizing that the names Margaret Askew, Margaret Fell, and Margaret Fox all refer to the same person. Scholars have conventional ways (some simple, some more complex) of designating this identity of reference. Fell's ODNB entry (authored by Bonnelyn Young Kunze), for example, begins, "Fell [née Askew], Margaret (1614–1702)." The French word "née" is one such convention of obvious and longstanding use. But other ways of acknowledging identity are tacit and of more recent vintage. If one searches the ODNB for "Margaret Fox," one is silently directed to the entry for Margaret Fell. Fell is never referred to as "Margaret Fox" in the entry (though she is in one of the sources); rather the identity is encoded only in the site's redirection to the entry.
Though the conventional rules and intuitions surrounding name changes are familiar enough to those who use or study them, NER and de-duping programs have to learn them from scratch. In some respects this is similar to other problems of name duplication. "Charles I," "King Charles," and "Charles Stewart" all refer to the same person. Briefly, and amusingly, we also had a "Charles I. King" among our set. To ensure that they don't appear as multiple nodes in the network ("King Charles knew Charles I who also knew Charles I. King!") we've simply had to tell the network estimation algorithm that they are the same person.
But changes in women's names as a result of marriage are different in a few key respects. There's little need to develop rules for de-duping figures like Kings and Queens (male name + roman numeral = "King" Name; female name + roman numeral = "Queen" name.) Such examples are few enough that it just makes sense to do it on an individual basis. But women who marry are obviously a much much larger class, such that developing general rules for de-duping would be essential to making sure SDFB adequately includes and represents them in the network. It would be useful to develop de-duping procedures, for example, that recognize that what follows the term "née" is an alternative last name for the same person. And it's not simply a matter of de-duping either. The NER program needs to recognize the different and often more elaborate formats of women's names in the first place. It needs, for example, to be able to read a string like "Fell [née Askew], Margaret (1614–1702)" and recognize this as a name in the first place.
The point, we suppose, is that the inclusion of women in a resource likes Six Degrees of Francis Bacon will depend on more than good will, scholarly self-critique, self-awareness, or even careful research. While these virtues remain important, it will also require good programming as well, programming that takes into account both the gendered naming conventions of the period and the notations by which we record those conventions.
An Entry of One's Own, or Why Are There So Few Women In the Early Modern Social Network?
in honor of International Women's Day
In this post, we will address what has long seemed to us a conspicuous shortcoming in the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) data: the relatively small number of early modern women. As Helen Smith cheekily put it on Twitter, there's "more sausage than Bacon" in "Six Degrees of Francis Bacon." Clearly, this is something necessitating further work, and it is worth emphasizing that we are currently in very early stages.
How will women feature more prominently? Our ultimate goal is to create architecture for scholars to curate, add, validate, and revise relationships. Groups like the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women are well placed to help fill in what are currently obvious silences in the graph. And, as we mine further data sources, including scholarship from the last half-century on women writers in the period, resources like the Brown Women Writers' project will continue to offer rich information about networks of women writers.
But the reasons why relatively few women appear in our earliest graphs are not self-evident, and those reasons open into intriguing questions about historiography, scale, and the kinds of relationships privileged by the DNB. Our work with the DNB data certainly shows us much about early modern history and culture but it also yields insights into the way early modern history and culture get refracted through the particular, biased, and fallible lens - lenses? - of the DNB.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has roughly 58,000 biographical entries. Once we had performed our Named Entity Recognition, our list of entities was already nine times as big, totaling in the end about 450,000 entities. We tried to bracket non-persons (cities, organizations, and other such entities captured by our wide net) and because we were interested in particular in the early modern period, we further limited our set to people who lived between 1550-1700. Limiting our set by these years was less straightforward than one might think. Some individuals appear in the body of the DNB who don't have their own entries. These individuals rarely appear with life dates. We therefore had to develop further methods to infer approximate years of life.
But even after we limited our data initially, our data set still remained too unwieldy for the kinds of validation and analysis we needed to do. Our quantatatively-minded readers may not necessarily be scared off by such numbers, but humanists will surely appreciate the difficulty of trying to validate inferences from a data set with tens of thousands of names and, squaring that number, hundreds of millions of possible relationships.
So, after dividing DNB entries into roughly 500-word chunks, or records, we introduced a threshold: we would limit our set further by working only with names that appeared five or more times in those 500-word records. Consider this: taking only persons prominent enough for their names to to appear in five or more DNB records, there are roughly 6,294 people who were alive between the years 1550-1700 who fit that criterion. Each of the 6,294 people could therefore have been associated with any of 6,293 others. This means that just at the highest levels of prominence—remember, we aren't even counting people whose names appear in 4(!) DNB records—estimating the early modern social network involves inquiring into roughly 39 million possible relationships (assuming both one-way and two-way relationships).
So why are there so few women in the early modern social network? Early modern women have far fewer of their own DNB entries, and even when one counts their appearances in records derived from others' entries, as we've tried to do, those appearances rarely total five or more.
As it grows, we hope to use SDFB to rectify such biases. While the social network inferred from the DNB currently does a poor job of including women and their associations, we believe that SDFB has the potential to enlarge our understanding of women in early modern England. As impressive and important as the Women Writers' Project is, for example, it is limited by the fact that it is dedicated only to women who were writers, and specifically those who published texts from 1526-1850.
What about those women who never set pen to paper, but who played crucial roles in creating and convening sub-networks of artists, intellectuals, diplomats, and politicians nonetheless? Early modern women assembled the society and culture of early modern England no less than men did, and by recording their associations SDFB is uniquely positioned to represent, and even to help us discover, the various ways in which they did so - including those that did not involve writing.
"More sausage than Bacon," it turns out, is, among other things, an argument for developing more sophisticated approaches to the DNB, for mining sources more sensitive to women's networks, for rectifying historical biases through more research on women, and for enlisting the expertise of individual humanists with detailed knowledge about early modern social networks. SDFB's present universe of 6,294 names and their possible relations is a very good start, but it is clear it is just that: a start.
Network Inference, Visualization, and the Generative Difficulties of "Knew": The Case of James Harrington (1611-1677)
While graphs like the one immediately below focusing on James Harrington (1611-1677) help make early modern social networks visible, they are based upon data like that in the included chart.
In this case, we have used line thickness, or edge weight, to indicate how likely it was, according to our analysis of the DNB, that two people knew one another (more on the generative difficulties of "knew" later). The thicker the line, the higher the "confidence estimate," which is to say, the more chance that two people knew one another, at least as far as the collective enterprise of the DNB is concerned. Another way to think about the confidence estimate is to see it as the answer to a specific question: "when the SDFB team runs its algorithm over a random selection from the full DNB-derived data set 100 times, how many times are these people connected?"
In the visualization above, we've introduced a threshold at 51% (or 51 times). Had we used a lower threshold, we would have introduced more names to the visualization (and more visual clutter), but our confidence—or more precisely, the confidence we've derived from the DNB—in those connections would have been lower.
James Harrington was of course the author of Oceana (1656) and several republican pamphlets, many issued around the Restoration when his "Rota" club was most active. Here, Harrington appears in a network composed largely of' "commonwealths-men" and late seventeenth-century controversialists, precisely as one familiar with the standard account of his milieu might expect.
Yet the visualization can also help us move beyond what we already know. Graphs such as this one are intended to spur new inquiry. When we think, for example, about the paths of books (given, purchased, lent and not lent), the social lives of manuscripts (shared, copied, annotated, altered, torn), relations of patronage or affection (given, or withheld), we find ourselves in a new world of hypotheses and scholarly conjectures. Intellectual affinities, linguistic patterns, and group boundaries all take on new dimensions.
Visualization even prompts us to clarify what we mean when we say two people "knew" one another. Were they friends, enemies, lovers? Political allies of convenience? Of conviction? Can a reader "know" an author if he hasn't met her in the flesh? What if the medium is the letter as opposed to the printed book? Inference and visualization operate in this way as a kind of "experimental metaphysics," to use Bruno Latour's term. Far from binding us to dry quantitative analysis, visualization and the confidence estimates on which they're based enable us to move swiftly toward complicated questions of affect, intimacy, and ideology. If we want to say, for example, that exchange of letters constitutes a relationship but reading one another's books does not, what are the ideological suppositions, modes of address, "radicals of presentation" (Frye), and textual effects underpinning such a claim?
Consider here the usefully challenging case of John Toland, whose relation with Harrington is, according to our model, 99% certain. James Harrington died when Toland was seven years old. Common sense suggests that something's gone wrong. However, we know from J.G.A. Pocock, Blair Worden, Justin Champion, and others that Toland is the figure most responsible for carrying Harrington's republican torch into the 18th century through his influential biography of Harrington, published with his similarly significant edition of Oceana (1700). Toland, we might say, "knew" Harrington as well as anyone in Harrington's lifetime. While the relation was not reciprocal (Harrington did not know Toland), there are strong grounds—empirical, theoretical—for including this relationship. Put somewhat differently, we would skew our results considerably if we tried to force Toland out of Harrington's network by altering the algorithm. If the DNB tells us they were related, do we need to say they were not? And this raises questions about the historical significance of the textual trace (life writing, editing), about ideological proximity vs. spatio-temporal proximity, and about the kinds of relationships privileged by the DNB itself.
At the same time, our "confidence estimates" might just as easily be called "doubt estimates," and these "doubt estimates" can have considerable scholarly value too. Consider two possible uses. While low scores suggest slim chance of a relation, they also show scholars (and students) where there's relatively high scholarly payoff for demonstrating evidence of connections. This is one of the reasons why we err on the side of inclusion, giving confidence estimates nearly down to nil. In shorthand, it helps scholars know more about what we don't know about. This "metaknowledge" is a key step on the path to new discoveries and arguments.
Secondly, low scores take us toward a category we've come to think of as "white space" in the social graph, specifically, the category of non-relation. What we've already said about the possibilities generated by networks might make "white space" or "non-relation" seem relatively uninteresting. Presence is much more fun than absence, right? But here, it's possible to develop more fine-grained understandings of groups, individuals, and their "publics," where publics are understood, in Michael Warner's sense, as self-organized relations among strangers. Insofar as tropes, images, ideas and so forth develop and operate within networks, we can posit a rough and ready dichotomy of network, on the one side, and public on the other. While undoubtedly reductive, such a dichotomy can be a productive heuristic, generating more concrete thinking about the kinds of languages and practices deemed worthy of "export" and the people and groups who made up audiences for publication, understood in its broadest sense.


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Monthly Archives: July 2009
Northern Lights Over Grand Teton National Park
The Aurora Borealis (aka Northern Lights) glow on the horizon in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
I normally wouldn't post this late at night, but I'm too excited about this one. When I was a kid there was a big solar storm and supposedly we could see the Aurora Borealis all the way down in New Orleans, Louisiana. I didn't see the bright lights that you see in the photos so I was a little disappointed and shrugged it off, not actually taking a close look. Then I had another chance during the summer of 2004 in British Columbia, but had the same feelings then as I did when I was a kid since it was only my second time to see them. Shortly thereafter I realized how silly I was being and regretted not at least trying to get a shot of them in British Columbia. - Continue reading
Posted in Landscape, Panorama Tagged Grand Teton National Park, Milky Way Galaxy, Mountains, Night, Northern Lights, Panorama, Wyoming 2 Comments
Fourth of July Fireworks Over Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Fireworks explode over Snow King for the 4th of July in Jackson, Wyoming.
Tonight I headed roughly 2/3 of the way up Snow King in Jackson, Wyoming to get an up close show of the fireworks being shot off at the base. Needless to say, there were a few in there that shook the ground so hard I wondered if the shots would come out clear. Definitely one of the more memorable fireworks shows I've seen. - Continue reading


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by Heather Graf
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Metro Police and U.S. Marshals have joined the fight to stop a deadly meningitis outbreak from taking more lives. The health department enlisted their help to locate at-risk patients.
On Friday, the CDC said there are now 338 confirmed cases of fungal meningitis nationwide.Of those, 25 cases are fatal. Sadly, the latest loss of life took place in Tennessee, bringing our state's death toll up to 10.
As the outbreak began in early October, state health officials wanted to make sure they made contact with each of the 1,000 Tennessee who received one of the tainted steroid injections from the New England Compounding Center in Massachusetts.
To do that, the state enlisted the help of local health departments.
"They sent out a letter to everyone who may have received this medication," said Brian Todd with the Metro Health Department. "And we were then needed to follow up with those, to make sure they got the letter, and check on their welfare."
In Davidson County, that meant making contact with about 170 people.
Todd says the health department located most of them quickly. A few, though, were hard to get in touch with.
"I think there were two that had a wrong phone number, and we were calling that number," said Todd. "And there was one that had an apartment building but not a number."
That's when Metro Health decided to enlist the help of Metro Police, where officers are trained to track down wanted individuals, every day.
In one day, Todd says, officers were able to find and make contact with the five remaining at-risk patients that health officials hadn't yet spoken to.
"We're very thankful to the police department for that," said Todd.
Those last five patients were located just this week. So far, none of them are showing symptoms.
There are now 74 confirmed cases of fungal meningitis in Tennessee. Only those patients who received one of the tainted injections are at risk.
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Crime, coming to a neighborhood near you. I wish that was a joke, but it's not.
In the past, Kernville was fairly bad until the houses started coming down, but as the houses came down, their inhabitants just moved on. So went Hornerstown and now Moxham.
Moxham was a great neighborhood when I was growing up, but now it's a cesspool of crime. There are still many good people left in Moxham, but they are being held hostage, unable to live life the way it was meant to be.
Old families are selling to slumlords (one of which is a prominent political figure), so as the old guard goes, so goes the neighborhood.
Johnstown Housing Authority should have its feet held to the fire for allowing the criminal element come to our door-steps.
Cheap digs for criminal cribs.
Even less than 10 percent Section 8 housing (if that's the real stat) is too much with this kind of inhabitants.
Gun violence here can be attributed to affordable housing, and it's not the product of good, law-abiding gun owners but of this infectious disease brought here to fester on our main drags and take over our good neighborhoods.
Be aware, because Roxbury, Ferndale and Southmont are in the crosshairs, as this moves along Franklin Street, Ferndale Avenue and Southmont Boulevard.
I hope the city's Drug and Crime Commission takes a very active role in helping these communities before all is lost.
David W. Lamison
Upper Yoder Township
Beware of scam involving computer
I was almost the victim of a computer scam, and feel it is my responsibility to warn others.
Recently, I received a phone call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft. This person said that my computer had many viruses but that nobody locally would be able to fix it. He said Microsoft was the only one that could fix it. All I had to do was turn on my computer and he would walk me through it. (I later learned that Microsoft would not call anyone and do this.)
After a half-hour of following all his explicit instructions, I was informed that this would cost me $199, and he needed my credit card number. At this point, my gut instinct was sending up red flags and, fortunately, I did not give him this information.
If I had, I'm sure my credit card would have been maxed out.
Never give out your credit card number unless you initiate the call and know who you are dealing with.
Donna L. Williams


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Catherine of Munchie Musings was our November Daring Bakers' host and she challenged us to make a traditional Filipino dessert – the delicious Sans Rival cake! And for those of us who wanted to try an additional Filipino dessert, Catherine also gave us a bonus recipe for Bibingka which comes from her friend Jun of Jun-blog.
I procrastinated, so of course, I was making my Sans Rival last night. I opted to keep the dessert-making to a minimum (seeing as how I already had 3 kinds of leftover pie in my fridge from Thanksgiving) and only made the Sans Rival. I loved that the recipe was already gluten-free (provided the cake pans were dusted with a gluten-free flour, of course) and I could easily adopt it to be dairy-free by substituting a vegan "butter" for the butter called for in the French buttercream. Which, by the way, if you've never had French buttercream, find an excuse to try it out. It's incredibly rich, but also incredibly delicious. Definitely a treat to enjoy only once a year or so.
The same is with this Sans Rival. I opted to take Catherine's suggested recipe, and make my Sans Rival a chocolate one. It wasn't overly loaded with chocolate, and it wasn't too sweet, but I promise you, this is still a rich dessert. That being said, it's a lovely gluten-free option that would be perfect at a holiday table.
I'll definitely be keeping this dessert in mind for future events, as I love a good meringue. However, it will definitely have to be an event where I don't end up with leftovers – I certainly don't need any more sweets lying around!
10 large egg whites, room temp
1 cup (240 ml) (225 gm) (8 oz) white granulated sugar
1 teaspoon (5 ml) (3 gm) cream of tartar
¼ cup (60 ml) (20 gm) (2/3 oz) Dutch processed cocoa (optional and not traditional)
2 cups (480 ml) (240 gm) (8½ oz) chopped, toasted cashews (chop half finely, and half coarsely)
Note: You will need four layers which will mean that you might have to bake in two batches. Be sure to use fresh parchment paper and cooled pans for each batch.
1. Preheat oven to moderate 325°F/160°C/gas mark 3.
2. Line cake pan bottoms with parchment paper and butter and flour the sides really well. (I used gluten-free cassava flour and olive oil instead of flour and butter here.)
3. In a large clean, dry glass or metal mixing bowl, beat egg whites on medium until foamy (2 mins.). Sprinkle with cream of tartar. Gradually add sugar, a couple of tablespoons at a time, continuing to beat now at high speed until stiff shiny peaks form. (about 7-10 mins.)
4. Fold in nuts, reserving enough to use for decoration.
5. Divide meringue into four equal parts. Spread in pans, evenly to edges. If doing batches, use fresh parchment paper and cooled pans for each batch.
6. Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove the meringue from the baking pans while still hot; allow to cool slightly. Peel off the parchment paper while it is still warm, it is difficult to remove sometimes when they have completely cooled.
7. When cool, trim edges so that all 4 meringue layers are uniformly shaped. Set aside.
French Buttercream:
5 large egg yolks, room temperature
1 cup (240 ml) (225 gm) (8 oz) white granulated sugar
1/4 cup (60 ml) water
1¼ cup (300 ml) (2½ sticks) (285 gm) (10 oz) unsalted butter, room temperature (I used Earth Balance buttery sticks)
Optional Flavorings: 2 oz (55 gm) unsweetened chocolate, melted, or 1½ teaspoon (7 ½ ml) almond extract, or 1½ teaspoon (7 ½ ml) vanilla extract, or any flavor you like (I used unsweetened chocolate and vanilla extract)
1. Put the egg yolks in a mixing bowl. Beat at high speed until the yolks have doubled in volume and are a lemon yellow.
2. Put the sugar and water in a heavy pan and cook over medium heat, stirring the sides down only until all the sugar is dissolved and the syrup reaches 235°F/112°C (or thread stage).
3. With the mixer on high, very slowly pour the syrup down the sides of the bowl, until all has been added. Be careful as the very hot syrup could burn you if it splashes from the beaters. Continue beating on high until the mixture is ROOM TEMPERATURE (about 15 mins). Still on high, beat in the soft, room temperature butter a tablespoon at a time. Add flavoring after you beat in the butter. Refrigerate the buttercream for at least an hour, and whip it smooth just before you use it.
Set bottom meringue on cake board with a dab of butter cream to hold it in place. Spread a thin layer of buttercream and then place another meringue on top. Repeat with a thin layer of buttercream, meringue, thin layer of buttercream, meringue, and finally buttercream the top and sides. Decorate with reserved nuts.
5 Responses to "Daring Bakers: Filipino Desserts (Chocolate Sans Rival)"
Didn't know you could have a butter free buttercream – looks fantastic.
Excellent! As a part of a large Filipino family, we often make Sans Rival for special occasions, especially since my grandmother is not supposed to have wheat. But even when there are tons of folks around to eat it, it is so rich, you really don't need to make much for it to go around. I am sorry I didn't know about this challenge, but I am definitely going to look up the bibingka recipe, as my grandmother remembers having that mornings after Mass.
Looks lovely. Yes, it is pretty rich. I halved the recipe and my cake served 10 instead of the supposed 6.
Glad you tried it. Good job.
I love Filipino food. The food in the Philippines is amazing. I could eat it everyday. I have actually never heard of Sans Rival before. I can't believe my wife has never made this for me before. It looks delicious.


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Mingwei Song
(781) 283-3588
East Asian Languages & Cultures
B.A., Shandong University; M.A., Fudan University; M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University
Assistant Professor of Chinese
Specializing in modern Chinese literature, film studies and youth culture.
My research interests include modern Chinese literature from the late Qing to the early 21st century, Chinese cinema, science fiction, and the youth culture. I have published books and articles in both English and Chinese. I am currently working on a monograph titled "Young China: Youth, Nation, and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959" (in English), an anthology of Chinese science fiction (in Chinese), and a special issue on Chinese science fiction for the journal Renditions (in English. My Chinese books include Criticism and Imagination: Collected Essays, 1997-2010 (Shanghai, forthcoming) and The Sorrows of a Floating World: a Biography of Eileen Chang (Taipei, 1996; Shanghai, 1998; Hong Kong, 2001. My articles have appeared in such journals as China Scholarship, Studies of Modern China, Shanghai Literature, Shanghai Culture, Frontier, and Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese. In 2003, I received a "Shanghai Literature Award" for literary criticism. A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, which I co-authored, won an "Excellent College Textbook Award" from China's Ministry of Education in 2001. I recently co-edited a special issue for Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, which was titled "The Obscure Decade: Literary Imagination and Political Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the PRC, 1949-1959" (winter 2009.
Since I joined the faculty of Wellesley College in 2007, I have designed, renovated, and taught a variety of courses covering the literature, film, and popular culture of modern China. My pedagogy emphasizes the following points: close reading and critical thinking, historical analysis, and intercultural literacy. The essential task of my teaching is to help students develop critical skills for engaging with texts and then to gain cross-cultural understanding through situating them in larger historical and cultural contexts. This mission applies to my literature courses as well as to my film and popular culture courses. My course offerings are designed and updated to appeal to Wellesley students' diverse interests in modern Chinese literature and culture in a wide range of themes, genres, and topics. Here are a few courses I have offered regularly:
- Writing Modern China
- Writing Women in Modern China
- Chinese Cinema
- The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film
- Popular Culture in Modern China


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La Roya Recovery Fund
for the San Gaspar Chajul Region, Guatemala
I am urgently asking for your support to help the Ixil coffee farmers from Asocaición Chajulense overcome the challenges of the Roya fungus that has so endangered their livelihoods. Your contribution towards raising $50,000 will help 500 farmers gain new skills in effective organic farming responses to fugal infections – knowledge they desperately need right now.
The Coffee Trust has worked in the Ixil region since 2009. Our work goes far beyond fair-trade coffee. We support food sovereignty, education, health care, and income diversity with programs such as micro-credit, weavings and honey production.
We support our local partners with an intense capacity building program that focuses on organizational development, sustainable financing, and democratic decision-making. In the process, we have witnessed the value of peer-to-peer training, the benefits of which tend to spread naturally throughout the countryside. These communities asked for our help in responding to this intense crisis.
Time is running out. Last month, I met with Andrés Torres Mendoza and many other a coffee farmers from the Ixil region of Guatemala where some of the finest quality, organic, fair trade coffee is grown. Andrés told me that he watched helplessly last year while his coffee plants suffered from La Roya, the rust-like fungus Hemileia vastatrix, which causes powdery yellow/orange spots to spread quickly on coffee leaves. He showed me how the infected leaves will eventually turn brown and drop from the coffee plant prematurely. The stressed plants can't produce beans. Left untreated, the plants can easily die.
Andrés's stunted harvest is having a ripple effect over the whole community. With less coffee to process, fewer women work at the processing plant. Families cannot afford school for their children, or basic medical care. I saw that hunger, already a problem, is now commonplace.
Andrés is a member of the fair trade, organic coffee association, Asociacion Chajulense, a beacon of hope for the Ixil people during Guatemala's brutal, 36-year civil war, and the first fair trade association in Guatemala. Last year, the association lost 75% of its production due to La Roya, and is facing one of the greatest challenges in its history.
What Andrés and so many other farmers in the area don't know is that there are time-tested organic farming approaches to fungal infestations that could be deployed right now.
It's not too late. What is missing is the effective means of sharing the knowledge, skills, and information with farmers. Through Asociacion Chajulense, The Coffee Trust is partnering with 500 Ixil farmers like Andrés in Sotzil, Ilom, Chel, La Perla and Saq'siwan, to rehabilitate their small-scale organic coffee farms.
The Coffee Trust employs the principles of Campesino-a-Campesino, a Farmer-to-Farmer approach to teach farmers how to:
1) Improve the rocky mountain soil and replenish their land with rich, nutritious, organic compost, thus strengthening the plants' ability to fight back from the inflection.
2) Use Effective Micro-Organisms to boost the impact of the organic fertilizer, and to decrease the spread of La Roya.
3) Create a process of widespread experimentation, such as spacing between plants that provide better results, or the use of grafting to strengthen the coffee plants. The principle is to share knowledge and techniques they have discovered throughout the years.
4) Continue to plant the high quality varietals that produce the finest quality coffee and generate the highest price for the farmers, and
5) Share knowledge and techniques from one local farmer to another in an easily digestible common language that is trusted, accepted and understood
Fair trade is great, but with little coffee to trade, the benefits are limited. In order to help keep these small organic farms going, and strengthen Asociacion Chajulense, your support is needed right now.
Please stand in support of the Ixil famers, families, and the communities of Asociacion Chajulense.
Thank you,
Bill Fishbein, Founder & Executive Director
A donation of $250 will help cover the cost of one experienced famer's transportation and materials to promote an organic response to la roya among 500 farmers in the remote villages of Sotzil, Ilom, Chel, la Perla and Saq'siwan in the Ixil region of Guatemala. Would you please be the catalyst that makes the rehabilitation project possible though the Campesino-a-Campesino (farmer-to-farmer) training? Lessons learned will be shared with interested farmers in Guatemala and elsewhere.


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A KOTA Territory community college is expanding a program that could help the ag industry.
Western Nebraska Community College offers a wind energy program for students. but it's expanding the program to include other types of alternative energy.
Jason Stratman, the Dean of Workforce Development at W.N.C.C says broadening the program to include solar energy could really help the ag industry here in the panhandle.
Stratman says solar energy could help farmers and ranchers save money and power.
"How it'll help probably here locally is just a basic understanding of how people in rural areas could use these applications for water pumps out in a field, as opposed to trying to get power in the middle of a field somewhere," Stratman said.
Stratman hopes that adding solar, as well as energy management will bring in more out of state students.


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TVA Credit Union
of Muscle Shoals, AL has
16,600 members and assets of $201 million.
The credit union, opened in 1936, has 38 full time employees and 19 part time employees
, or 353 members per employee, compared to a national average of 455.
TVA is classified as a state chartered natural person credit union.
Automation: TVA credit union offers access to your account over the web, has available a telephone audio response system and provides ATM access to your account.
Electronic services include apply for a loan, check balances, share draft orders, pay your loan online, account history, account transfers and online bill payment.
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Online newspapers and TV stations serving Muscle Shoals and Alabama: Montgomery Advertiser, USA Today, or view a national listing of newspapers.
Thinking of buying a car? See Alabama car dealers listed alphabetically by city.


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NOTE: This is only a sample of our vast range.
This handle is on the edge of modern design.
Love your curves.
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Designed to suit you. Our kitchens offer the highest quality, whilst still remaining affordable.
Style and luxury. Our designer kitchens are the very best in cutting edge design and unrivaled quality.
is operated by Mark Two Distributors Ltd.
The goods you buy from Tesco Kitchens will be purchased from Mark Two Distributors, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.


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Often described as a "living document," the Constitution has repeatedly been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, federal appeals courts and Congress in order to address the ever-changing needs and demands of the people. While many argue that "We the People of the United States," refers only to legal citizens, the Supreme Court has consistently disagreed.
Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886)
In Yick Wo v. Hopkins, a case involving the rights of Chinese immigrants, the Court ruled that the 14th Amendment's statement, "Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," applied to all persons "without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality," and to "an alien, who has entered the country, and has become subject in all respects to its jurisdiction, and a part of its population, although alleged to be illegally here." (Kaoru Yamataya v. Fisher, 189 U.S. 86 (1903) )
Wong Wing v. U.S. (1896)
Citing Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the Court, in the case of Wong Wing v. US, further applied the citizenship-blind nature of the Constitution to the 5th and 6th amendments, stating ". . . it must be concluded that all persons within the territory of the United States are entitled to the protection guaranteed by those amendments, and that even aliens shall not be held to answer for a capital or other infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."
Plyler v. Doe (1982)
In Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law prohibiting enrollment of illegal aliens in public school. In its decision, the Court held, "The illegal aliens who are plaintiffs in these cases challenging the statute may claim the benefit of the Equal Protection Clause, which provides that no State shall 'deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.' Whatever his status under the immigration laws, an alien is a 'person' in any ordinary sense of that term… The undocumented status of these children vel non does not establish a sufficient rational basis for denying them benefits that the State affords other residents."
It's All About Equal Protection
When the Supreme Court decides cases dealing with First Amendment rights, it typically draws guidance from the 14th Amendment's principal of "equal protection under the law." In essence, the "equal protection" clause extends First Amendment protection to anyone and everyone covered by the 5th and 14th Amendments. Through its consistent rulings that the 5th and 14th Amendments apply equally to illegal aliens, they also enjoy First Amendment rights.
In rejecting the argument that the "equal" protections of the 14th Amendment are limited to U.S. citizens, the Supreme Court has referred to language used by the Congressional Committee that drafted the amendment:
"The last two clauses of the first section of the amendment disable a State from depriving not merely a citizen of the United States, but any person, whoever he may be, of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or from denying to him the equal protection of the laws of the State. This abolishes all class legislation in the States and does away with the injustice of subjecting one caste of persons to a code not applicable to another. . . . It [the 14th Amendment] will, if adopted by the States, forever disable every one of them from passing laws trenching upon those fundamental rights and privileges which pertain to citizens of the United States, and to all persons who may happen to be within their jurisdiction."While illegal aliens do not enjoy all of the rights granted to citizens by the Constitution, specifically the rights to vote or possess firearms, these rights can also be denied to U.S. citizens convicted of felonies. In final analysis, the courts have ruled that, while they are within the borders of the United States, illegal aliens are granted the same fundamental, undeniable constitutional rights granted to all Americans.


text:
First published in 1847.
The text is from the Fourth Edition published by Chapman & Hall, 1866.
This web edition published by eBooks@Adelaide.
Last updated Tuesday, March 4, 2014 at 18:42.
To the best of our knowledge, the text of this
work is in the "Public Domain" in Australia.
HOWEVER, copyright law varies in other countries, and the work may still be under copyright in the country from which you are accessing this website. It is your responsibility to check the applicable copyright laws in your country before downloading this work.
The University of Adelaide Library
University of Adelaide
South Australia 5005
Last updated Tuesday, March 4, 2014 at 18:43


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Mac OS X comes with something important that Windows doesn't: development tools.
(continued beneath the break)
A standard install of Mac OS X Leopard has:
(plus various scriptable shells like Bash, and near-programming tools like Automator, and with a little effort you can get PHP up and running on the built-in Apache web server)
On the install DVDs, under "Optional Installs", is Xcode, the primary development tool for Mac OS X. Xcode is a professional IDE (Integrated Development Environment: an editor, compiler, debugger, profiling tools, and project management tools all integrated into one big tool) for Objective-C/Cocoa, C, C++, PyObjC (Python for Cocoa), Java, RubyCocoa, AppleScript. The Xcode you get free is the same one Apple uses, the same one I use. It's as good or better than the $3500 IDEs I used just a few years ago.
Of all those languages, Python, Perl, Java, Ruby, C, and C++ are standard and portable to any platform (Objective-C is specific to the Mac, but it's VERY powerful). You can make a really good living from any of them (Objective-C, Python, Perl, and Ruby are a little harder to find jobs in, but they pay well; Java is easy to find work in and pays very well), but more importantly, learn any of those and you develop the programming skills to learn any other language.
Getting started in Python is almost as easy as BASIC was on the Apple ][ 30 years ago:
- Open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
- Type python
- Type print "Hello, World!"
To go past "Hello, World!", Python has a useful documentation site, and great books like Think Python (free online, and soon in print), Learning Python, and Core Python Programming.
Obviously, I'm a big fan of teaching Python to new programmers (and it's fun and useful for experienced developers, too!), but the above applies to all of the Mac languages.
All Linux distributions ship with Python, Perl, C, and C++. Some have others around, but you can't rely on that, and almost none ship with a usable Java. Linux is certainly programmer-friendly, or at least hostile to non-programmers, but very few kids or programming novices are going to be exposed to Linux; mostly it sits quietly in data centers and serves web pages.
But MS Windows ships with nothing. No BASIC. No C compiler. You're trapped, stuck playing with Solitaire and MS Paint.
If you poke around the Microsoft site, you can find out about "Visual Basic Express 2008", try downloading it, installing it, and then reading incomprehensible tutorials full of screenshots and generated code. No non-programmer is going to go through that just to see a "Hello, World!".
Back in the '80s, Microsoft shipped QBASIC with DOS, just like every microcomputer maker did. But in the '90s, they stopped developing the classic BASIC, and went to Visual BASIC. Visual BASIC is a superficial copy of the NeXTstep and Turbo Pascal environments, but they got some things fundamentally wrong: "code-behind" and generated code from wizards made it impossible to build large systems, and kept people from playing with the internals; changing generated code would just ensure that the tools would break or your code would be wiped out. Getting real development tools for Windows is expensive, and they perpetrate the same kind of generated-code sins as Visual BASIC.
Hobby programming, on Windows, died out.
That sounds melodramatic, doesn't it? But for the last 10-15 years, Microsoft hasn't shipped a real language with Windows, and their "introductory language", Visual BASIC, became increasingly useless for newbies, only suited to gluing together Access, Word, and Excel. It became the domain language of corporate "code monkeys", just as COBOL had been 20 years before. With VB.NET, the last pretense of it being "BASIC" were dropped, and it's now just an ugly, incomplete syntax for the much more complex world of .NET.
Even if you learned it, all you can do after Visual BASIC is more Visual BASIC, getting paid half as much as real programmers for the rest of your life. Visual BASIC is madness, and teaches nothing about real programming.
There are other starting languages for Windows (even Python, etc.), but all of them have to be downloaded and installed, and sharing your Python or Java program with another random Windows user is a pain (they have to download and install Python or Java, too). While Turbo Delphi is free, the pro version necessary to even try another language is $900.
To become a professional programmer on Windows is even worse. Microsoft's serious tools aren't free, they cost $300 for the lowest-end version, with no support, $1200 for minimal MSDN support, $2500 for full MSDN support. So in other words, you work for a large corporation which can pay for it; hobby programming for Windows is a waste of a significant amount of money.
The result is that kids raised with Windows today don't generally have programming tools available.
Hobby Programming
So why is hobby programming, especially getting instant access to programming on a computer and teaching kids to program, important? Because that's where new programmers come from.
There's a massive shortage of younger programmers now. Some people blame this on the dot-com bust scaring kids out of computer science. That's obvious nonsense to anyone who knows programmers; once you teach someone to program, it's completely addictive. They'll do it every chance they get, until they die, regardless of consequences. You can't beat programming out of someone who got it in their system as a kid.
If you wait to teach them until college, it's almost always too late; adult brains generally can't form the deep structures necessary to learn real programming, only rote copy-paste code monkeying. Before microcomputers, most programmers were mathematicians, because math is similar enough to leave the brain receptive.
In the '80s, there were many competing microcomputers, almost all of which included BASIC or Pascal or LOGO, or HyperCard on the Mac. Hundreds of millions of kids and teens were exposed to programming. Millions got "infected", and became programmers.
In the '90s, Microsoft murdered everyone except Apple (and Apple only barely survived), just as they were also putting an end to hobby programming on Windows.
It is not a coincidence that we're low on programmers now, 10-15 years later. It has nothing to do with a temporary economic problem. It has to do with Microsoft's incompetence and negligence smothering a generation of young programmers in their cribs, and they're still at it.
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project tried to put Linux and Python in the hands of millions, maybe billions of poor kids, to make a Mouse Army of programmers, but they failed, and now if any OLPCs ship, they will ship with Windows, with no programming tools.
Everyone with a Mac has a really great development environment, full of the best languages and tools available. If you know a smart young person, give them a Mac and show them Python.


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The wild characters from the Outlaw series of games return for more competition, money, and fighting this time, on the tennis court. Outlaw Tennis features six gameplay modes, plus Xbox Live support for up to four players.
Outlaw Tennis is a Sports/Tennis video game for Xbox developed by Jack Of All Games and published by Jack of All Games on July 29, 2005. It's rated Mature by the ESRB and no users have rated it yet.
Our newest cheats for Outlaw Tennis were added August 11, 2006. We also have the game available on PlayStation 2, in addition to Xbox.
If you were looking for Outlaw Tennis for Xbox cheats, then you might also want cheats for:


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JoAnne "Grammy" Graham, Joplin, passed away at 5:40 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 15, 2012, at her home after a sudden illness.
Grammy, as she was known by all that loved her, was born in Joplin, to the late Earl Shade and Naomi Thompson Shade and had lived in the Joplin area most of her life.
She was currently the manager at Redwood Gardens. The management; employers; staff and residents have been her 'second family' for the past 11 years. She served as regional director for the National Kidney Foundation and was instrumental in establishing the Ride 4 Life several years ago. She worked as manager at the former Newman's Department Store, Pittsburg and Springfield locations. She also worked as an ophthalmology assistant and office manager for Patrick Butler, M.D. and was receptionist and sticker lady for Carolyn Prater, M.D.
Grammy was an avid sports fan. Her grandchildren and great grandchildren were the love of her life. She loved watching her grandchildren play their respective sports and never missed a game or match. She was "Grammy" to many Bulldogs; Cardinals; Tigers; Gorillas; Cougars and Cowboys! She was a fan of Carthage FFA and 4-H and the Soundwave Choir. She was the light of everyones life.
She is survived by her children, Scott Graham and his wife, Lori, Carthage, Sarah Wall and her husband, Jesse, Carl Junction, and Karen Graham, Webb City; one sister, Myrna Martz and her husband, Bill, Neosho; eight grandchildren, Abbey Webb and her husband, TJ, Katelyn Graham, Mischa Alves, Steven Brigham II, Parker Graham, Jacob Wall, Bradyn Wall and Zeke Wall; five great-grandchildren, Whitney Alves, Austin Alves, Sarah Alves, Imani Jackson and Olivia Jackson; Baby Webb on the way; two sisters-in-law, Susan and Rick Borum, Patricia Salverson; and many cousins, nieces and nephews.
Memorial services are planned for Sunday, Nov. 18, at 4 p.m. at Parker Mortuary Chapel. Rev. John Sherwood will officiate. The family will receive friends following the services at the mortuary.
Memorial contributions may be made to the Alzheimer's Association in care of Parker Mortuary.
Online condolences may be made at www.parkermortuary.com