Fill Blanks Review Of Literature: Fill & Download for Free

I'd like to flip this question around and discuss the strengths of comics over film.Although comics traditionally don't have motion or sound (some digital comics not withstanding), this is not necessarily a weakness.Comics are a form of literature, and the power of literature stems from the way it stokes the flames of imagination. You must have an imagination to read a book (yes, even comics)!Comics are visual, yet they leave so much open. There's no actual motion or sound, just the implications of those elements.Your mind fills in the blanks from panel to panel. In a successful comic, this process will seem effortless, and yet it's actually a very abstract experience decoding how one panel flows into the next.Comics have no audio, so our minds can fill them in with the best voices and sounds. There are no bad casting decisions or flat deliveries of lines in your imagination!Perhaps the greatest strength of comics is that the reader has much greater control over the pace of the experience. Film has a linear progression, and once you get it going you're meant to sit there until it ends.Comics are less restrictive. If I find a particular passage in a comic particularly striking, I can slow down and savor it. I can study the art and drink in every detail at my leisure. If I want to review an earlier scene, i can very naturally flip back and fourth without destroying the narrative momentum of the experience.By leaving so many elements up to imagination comics potentially provide more opportunities for personal investment.

This is how you read a well written academic book in one sitting (with the caveat that not all academic books are well written). It is most useful if you have a good understanding of other literature in the subject the book is on, although if you don't I discuss how to get a working understanding of it below. This method won't work for everyone, and certainly won't work for fiction. But its what got me through grad school so far.What is a well written book? A well written book is written in a way that makes its structure as readily understandable to the reader as possible. This means that in the first couple of paragraphs of every chapter, there will be an overview of the argument in that chapter. This is also true for every subsection of the chapters.The basic strategy you should use is to get a large scale understanding of the book and then fill in the specific parts that interest you the most. Sometimes you'll want to read everything, and that's great. But even when you do, taking the time to build a large scale model of the argument will make filling it out by reading the whole book a lot faster, and leave you with a better overall understanding.First of all, have a purpose for reading the book. Have a question, subject, or aspect of the subject in mind when you pick the book up. There are some books that you want to read all the way through, and that's great. But for most books you're going to use them to develop your understanding of a key aspect of a subject. So, for example, when I was writing a literature review about Chinese nationalism and globalization I read every related book I could find looking for the argument the author was making about nationalism, and how it related to larger global currents. They often addressed more than just that, but at the time I didn't have the time to look other topics - so I just got an understanding of what I needed and moved on.Read the end of the introduction. In a well written academic book, the end of the introduction will give an overview of the entire book. It usually breaks the book down into sections and then chapters, telling the reader what to expect in every chapter.Skim the introduction. Once you have an overview of the book itself, skim the introduction. Read the first sentence of every paragraph or two, and only read the entire paragraph if you find it useful. A well written introduction will situate a book within the literature of the field. Academic books are a conversation between scholars, and here you're looking for an outline of the conversation the author is having. Who are they reacting to? Who are they agreeing or disagreeing with? And what is going on in the overall subject that they're responding to?Skim the bibliography and index. When looking at the index, you're looking for the key subjects with lots of entries under them. And you want to pay attention to which chapters the subject you're interested in appears in most often. When looking at the bibliography, you're looking for who they're responding to and drawing from. And you're also looking for who is conspicuously absent.Go through every chapter and read the first couple of paragraphs in every chapter, and in every subsection of that chapter. Skim the rest of the chapters, keeping an eye out for key words that interest you, and read the first couple of paragraphs of each chapter heading, and the last several paragraphs of each chapter.Depending on your speed as a reader and the size and density of the book, this might take you up to an hour. You now have a conceptual overview of what the book deals with. Now you use that map to decide which parts of the book to skim or skip entirely, and which to read in depth.This is something that gets easier the more you know about a subject. And even when you know a subject fairly well, there will be key works you want to read in depth. But this is how you go through a book and figure out how to incorporate it into your research in 1-2 hours.Now, I hear you asking, what if I don't already have a good understanding of the subject already? The mistake a lot of people make when learning about a new subject is that they try to build it piece by piece. If there are 30 main books on the subject, they start with the first book and read to the end. The most effective way to learn about a subject is to get a good macro-level understanding of the subject, and then fill in the blanks as you go along. This is the same overall process as I outlined with reading a book, just on a larger scale.As someone who is friends with a lot of academics, I start by just posting "Hey, what's a good introductory overview to recent scholarship on Islam and science?" on facebook, and that usually works fairly well. If you know someone who does research on the subject, don't be afraid to ask them - even a professor who taught a course you took five years ago. While some academics are cranky, for the most part we like helping people learn about what we're fascinated about. And most professors will be very happy if you ask them for further reading on a subject they've taught you about (Even if it has nothing to do with them, the'll take it to mean they've inspired you to learn more about the subject and it will brighten their day.)If you don't have an expert on the subject to consult, its still fairly easy. First, read review articles on the subject. A review article is a literature review, an overview of the main works of scholarship on a specific subject. While some of them can run on to 50-100 pages, most of them run from 15-20 pages. Scholars write in response to each other, and a review article is one scholar in a field's attempt to chart out the larger conversation. They will have up to a paragraph on the main works on a subject, and will make an argument as to how they're related to each other.After reading as many applicable review articles as you can find (there will often only be 1-2, depending on how specific your subject is), you should have good understanding of:What are the main trends in this area of scholarship?Who are the major scholars in the field?What are the main points of dispute, or different approaches?There are academic journals devoted solely to review articles that come out once a year called Annual Reviews (e.g. Annual Reviews of Anthropology, Annual Reviews of Materials Science, etc.). So, do an advance search in google scholar and put "Annual reviews" in the journal title field. I find it's best not to specify which annual reviews you're looking in - depending on your subject area, you might find good reviews in different disciplines. As an anthropologist, some of the best reviews I've found have been in sociology or political science. The best review of anthropological studies of gender in China was written by a historian, not an anthropologist - so start broad and narrow your way down. Search for whatever key words you can think of relevant to your subject. Sometimes the subject of a review can be a little specific, so you might have to try a few different keywords before you find the right fit. If you know the main work or scholar in the field already, just search for that. Keep in mind that there isn't a review about every subject, and some of them are a little old.Another thing to look for is an edited volume on the subject. An edited volume is a selection of academic writings on a specific topic which are edited together. Some of the time it comes from a conference on a subject, whereas other times its put together by an expert in the field. Edited volumes tend to have general titles which indicate that the general focus of the book (e.g. Handbook of Economic Anthropology, The Consumption Reader, etc.) and, have several editors, not an author. A lot of the time, your best bet is to go to the general area where the subject is in your library and scan the shelves. When you find an edited volume, read the introduction. Often, that's the most valuable part of the book - it will give the editors' understanding of the literature in the field, and what contributions the articles in the volume make to it.Then return to the book you want to read. First, read book reviews of the book in scholarly journal. Ideally, you want to find a longer review (i.e. more than a page) written by a scholar who works in the field (you can tell by googling their name and looking for the "research interests" section of their faculty profile. A good book review will tell you:The main argument of the authorWhere this fits in the overall body of scholarship on the subjectWhy its interesting (or not interesting)An assessment of its strength and weaknessesYou should keep in mind that most book reviews are short and not very comprehensive, so you'll want to look at more than one.Following this method, you should be able to get a broad outline of a subject in 1-3 hours of reading. You won't understand it as much as someone who has studied it for 10 years, but you will be able to fit a book into the overall scholarly conversation, which is all you really need at the beginning. Once you have this down, its time to read the book itself.

The article is based on a chapter from Philip Ball’s new book on interpretations of quantum mechanics, aimed at a popular audience.This is great, but another one? Honestly, these books … you wait decades for one popular rundown, then two come along at once. (Adam Becker’s What is Real is a semi-historical popular review of QM interpretations, published in March of this year.).On Everett, Philip Ball quotes an all-star parade of good thinkers on Everettian themes (Lev Vaidman, David Wallace, David Deutsch, Sean Carroll) but he himself remains violently opposed. As far as I read the article (and I have not seen the full book) his opposition is not so much based on argument, as it is on worry and distaste about what the Everettian project is asking him to do. This distaste is sometimes stated explicitly, but in other places, it is dressed up to look like an argument.Overall, Ball gives a fairly accurate summing up of the Everettian project: if Everett is right, then the “feeling” we have of being a single observer, the notions of probability and possibility, the perception of a single world, all have to be reinterpreted, as arising from our viewpoint as entities within a universal wavefunction. Everett gave most of the ingredients for doing so in his 1958 thesis, but left some blanks. Since then, decoherence and decision theory have filled some (perhaps all) of these gaps.Other than what appears to be some confusion around quantum suicide/sleeping beauty, Ball frames all this fairly accurately. This indeed is the scope of the Everettian project. And it is indeed a huge project.But then, he gets to what appears to be an argument that Everett is incoherent. And it is puzzling. Ball claims that scientific theories should not ask us to re-interpret concepts in this way. Here’s where he gets to the nub of it:Every scientific theory (at least, I cannot think of an exception) is a formulation for explaining why things in the world are the way we perceive them to be. This assumption that a theory must recover our perceived reality is generally so obvious that it is unspoken. The theories of evolution or plate tectonics don’t have to include some element that says “you are here, observing this stuff”; we can take that for granted.But the MWI [Many Worlds Interpretation] refuses to grant it. Sure, it claims to explain why it looks as though “you” are here observing that the electron spin is up, not down. But actually it is not returning us to this fundamental ground truth at all.The thing is, if you take this as written, then the claim about science is simply … well … wrong. Let’s take an exception to Ball’s rule - at least as stated here.Galileo claimed that while the earth may seem to be stationary, it is not. Our perception is simply mistaken. In fact, the earth, and we on it, are going around the sun at about 67,000 miles an hour. But Galileo also laid out mechanics that explained how our perceptions arose. Considerations like his “ship” thought experiment showed how the perception of stationarity could be wrong despite spinning in space on earth’s axis, and rotating around the sun.From the rule quoted above, a contemporary “Ball” (and there were many, then and since) would violently reject Galileo’s claims. After all, the existing scientific theory is supposed to explain why things in the world are the way we perceive them to be: stationary. Sure, Galileo claims to explain why it looks as though things right here are stationary and we observing any motion. But actually Galileo’s explanation is not returning us to this fundamental ground truth (ahaha) at all. (Compare to the passage quoted). And of course, you can multiply this example as many times as you want through scientific history.So while a broad prohibition on reinterpreting familiar concepts in the light of scientific progress is what Ball writes, I don’t think it can be what he means.Reading between the lines only-a-little, I think the point that really troubles Ball is the fact that Everett is not just asking us to reinterpret a bunch of familiar notions, but also notions of the self. That is, notions of the observer who stands at the base of science. And, of course, that’s right. Everett does ask us to do this.I think it is this selfhood step which is Ball’s central concern — though I may be wrong, it’s not quite stated in these terms. But at least, it seems to be the one he has in mind with his last two (unsupported, and incorrect) last paragraphs, which claims that Everett is self-defeating.Let’s consider this reframed point. I guess if you do have a prohibition on any scientific theory ever challenging the intuitive notion of the self, then you will reject Everett. Given that premise, then argument is valid.But Ball’s prohibiton on science challenging the intuitive notions of the self is going to come as a hell of a shock to [deep breath] … neurophysiologists, experimental psychologists, consciousness researchers, AI developers, brain imaging experimenters and related researchers who are all busy looking at these questions, all violently challenging our intuitive notions of selfhood. (Just spend a few minutes reading Marvin Minsky, Hofstadter, Dennett, or the primary literature that they draw on…)Sure, you can go on to worry about how to think about scientific evidence — as perceived by the self — and how it might or might not changed by a new version of the self given by each branch of science that considers it. This is exactly the Everettian project. But you need to give an argument that it doesn’t succeed, not just stare at it in horror and declare that such thoughts are forbidden.To state explicitly: there should be no prohibition on science challenging our intuitive notions of the human self. Ball can make up such a rule if he likes, but scientists are just going to ignore him.So, I guess I come back to a diagnosis. Ball is appalled by the scope of the Everettian project. He simply doesn’t want to re-interpret so many familiar notions; especially ones about the self. And he sees that other interpretations of quantum mechanics aren’t asking him to do that. So he prefers them.That’s a coherent attitude. But it’s no more than an expression of intellectual conservatism, and I can’t see any reason to believe that it tracks truth.Ah, sod it, a little philosophy to close:He once greeted me with the question: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?”G. E. M. Anscombe, on a conversation with Ludwig Wittgenstein