Natural language processing is a place of computational linguistics involved in processing of naturally occurring language. Natural language generation systems convert user input to actionable queries to search unstructured data from databases. This is done by converting samples from human inputted language into more formal representations which are easier for statistical algorithms to manipulate. NLP is still in its infancy and lots of work remains to be done.
Leadership is something that is not perfected, but rather a skill that is continuously molded as one moves from group to group. Simon Sinek explores the many shapes of leadership by sharing different stories across organizations in his book Leaders Eat Last. Key takeaways from Sinek that have impacted my views of leadership and how I will lead include the ideas of empathy, trust, and collective well-being within an organization.
Imagine slowly dying everyday from an addiction you have no control over. Imagine struggling to keep yourself alive. Imagine being a child born into a situation of unstable moods and unpredictable financial situations. Unfortunately, a part of the population suffering from these, and many other, hardships do not have any resources to help. These situations among others are realities for many homeless people and those on Welfare all across this land of the free. Is living in America truly free if you are dependent on the government for every necessity in everyday life? It is time for a program to be put in place that helps extend professional resources to those who live in poverty and gives them an opportunity to better their situation in order to grasp what the American dream truly is.
Education is the realization of pain. To see life through the lens of a rhetorically informed citizen, is to bring into focus the struggles of the world. David Foster Wallace believed that a liberal arts education gives the ability to see the world beyond the self centered needs held inside an individual. Education is in fact the key to unlocking the “default setting” of living “day in and day out”. In 2005, a year after marrying and three years before his suicide, Wallace gave a commencement speech to the graduating class of Kenyon University. This speech segments a deep look into the philosophical ideas of what Wallace believed leads to a fulfilling and “good life”. The core ideas he presented reflect the struggle he may have been experiencing in himself. Indeed, his awareness of the world and inability to fix it may have led him to suicide. These core ideas included the development of awareness through education giving the ability to reveal emotions and all things good and bad in everyday life.
Nine-hundred seventy-four million people (CBS News): a country, a continent, the contemporary rhetorical medium Twitter. McLuhan would agree that the inception of this new medium far outweighs any single message sent through it; however, to truly understand the gargantuan affect of Twitter in postmodern rhetoric a closer look can be taken of the New York Times Twitter account, more specifically their coverage of the 2016 political election.
Voter identification laws add an extra level of protection against voter fraud by matching ID cards to the registered voter’s documentation at polling locations. The Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, wrote that, “state prosecutors had won about 50 convictions related to…election fraud” (Savage, 191). At first glance, voter fraud may seem to be a nonissue compared to the number of total voters, but because of the difficulty in catching voter fraud due to false identification it leaves polling stations not knowing if someone is committing fraud.
Scholars have discussed the validity, the use, and the definition of Rhetoric for centuries. Plato believed Rhetoric to be an art of mere flattery within the the realm of politics. Aristotle took the idea of Rhetoric and built a foundation based upon three primary principles: ethos, logos, and pathos. Edwin Black further evaluated the ethics involved in Rhetoric. As the discussion continued towards the modern day, the theories of Kenneth Burke were introduced and additionally explored by Richard Vatz and Lloyd Bitzer. Both Bitzer and Vatz have widely different views on what is called the rhetorical situation.
