CAT Parajumbles (TITA & MCQ) Questions

It can in fact be integrated into any function (education, medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the effect of this function, by being linked closely with it; it can constitute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of knowledge) may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the processes that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between ‘surplus power’ and ‘surplus production’.

It’s a case of ‘it’s easy once you’ve thought of it’ in the political sphere.

The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations.

In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact.

But man, woman or otherwise, there is no denying that the quality of our life and character will be significantly shaped by the way we handle our anger.

Once the taboos have been broken, women usually experience letting their fists fly as intensely liberating.

Though this might seem a stereotype, women—unlike men, who are frequently applauded for unbridled aggression—are often socialized to keep a lid on their ire.

Many of them are so at odds with their aggressive feelings that, as a coach, I often have to stop them from pulling their punches and encourage them to extend their arms so their blows might actually reach their fleshy target.

The effigy of a candidate establishes a personal link between him and the voters; the candidate does not only offer a programme for judgement, he suggests a physical climate, a set of daily choices expressed in a morphology, a way of dressing, a posture.

Some candidates for Parliament adorn their electoral prospectus with a portrait; this presupposes that photography has a power to convert which must be analysed.

Inasmuch as photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an ‘ineffable’ social whole, it constitutes an anti-intellectual weapon and tends to spirit away ‘politics’ (that is to say a body of problems and solutions) to the advantage of a ‘manner of being’, a socio-moral status.

Photography tends to restore the paternalistic nature of elections, whose elitist essence has been disrupted by proportional representation and the rule of parties (the Right seems to use it more than the Left).

When I ask the distinguished LGBTQ activist and writer Cherie Moraga whether she uses Latinx to refer to herself, she tells me, ‘I worked too hard for the “a” in Latina to give it up! I refer to myself as Xicana.’

Of our accumulated ethnic population, only a third use Hispanic to identify themselves, a mere 14 percent use Latino, and less than 2 percent recognize Latinx.

They have done this, although gender in languages is grammatical, not sociological or sexual, and found in linguistic families throughout the world, from French to Russian to Japanese.

More recently, activists seeking to render our name gender neutral, out of respect for our LGBTQ members, have devised yet another name for us: Latinx.

Like the ants that make up a colony, no single neuron holds complex information like self-awareness, hope or pride.

Although the human brain is not yet understood enough to identify the mechanism by which emergence functions, most neurobiologists agree that complex interconnections among the parts give rise to qualities that belong only to the whole.

Nonetheless, the sum of all neurons in the nervous system generate complex human emotions like fear and joy, none of which can be attributed to a single neuron.

Human consciousness is often called an emergent property of the human brain.

Algorithms hosted on the internet are accessed by many, so biases in Al models have resulted in much larger impact, adversely affecting far larger groups of people.

Though "algorithmic bias" is the popular term, the foundation of such bias is not in algorithms, but in the data; algorithms are not biased, data is, as algorithms merely reflect persistent patterns that are present in the training data.

Despite their widespread impact, it is relatively easier to fix Al biases than human- generated biases, as it is simpler to identify the former than to try to make people unlearn behaviors learnt over generations.

The impact of biased decisions made by humans is localised and geographically confined, but with the advent of Al, the impact of such decisions is spread over a much wider scale.

As books age, the cellulose and lignin in the paper begin to break down, releasing a mix of volatile organic compounds into the air.

Old books carry a scent that many people instantly recognize-and even love.

These compounds are benzaldehyde, which gives off an almond-like scent, vanillin, which smells like vanilla, ethyl hexanol (floral scent), toluene (sweet), and furfural (which has a slightly bready scent).

This familiar aroma isn't just dust or mildew; it's actually a result of slow chemical changes happening inside the paper and ink.

'Literature on screen' suggests something more capacious and defining than citation: the possibility that literary adaptations are at once cinema and literature.

Even though a growing number of films eligible for Academy Awards for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium borrow that material from print journalism, franchise characters, television series, comic books, video games and toys, academic studies of adaptation remain stubbornly attached to literature as cinema's natural progenitor.

It is as if adaptation studies, by borrowing the cultural cachet of literature, sought to claim its institutional respectability and gravitas even while insuring adaptation's enduring aesthetic and methodological subordination to literature proper.

Beneath this contradictory notion of film adaptations as not merely hybrid texts but texts holding dual citizenship in two modes of presentation is an even more pervasive legacy that haunts adaptation studies: the assumption that the primary context within which adaptations are to be studied is literature.

Veena Sahajwalla, a materials scientist at the University of New South Wales, believes there is a new way of solving this problem.

Her vision is for automated drones and robots to pick out components, put them into a small furnace and smelt them at specific temperatures to extract the metals one by one before they are sent off to manufacturers for reuse.

E-waste contains huge quantities of valuable metals, ceramics and plastics that could be salvaged and recycled, although currently not enough of it is.

She plans to build microfactories that can tease apart the tangle of materials in mobile phones, computers and other e-waste.

The creative element in product design has become of prime importance as it is one of the few ways a firm or industry can sustain a competitive advantage over its rivals.

In fact, the creative element in the value of world industry would be larger still, if we added the contribution of the creative element in other industries, such as the design of tech accessories.

The creative industry is receiving a lot of attention today as its growth rate is faster than that of the world economy as a whole.

It is for this reason that today's trade issues are increasingly involving intellectual property, as Western countries have an interest in protecting their revenues along with freeing trade in non-tangibles.

Some company leaders are basing their decisions on locating offices to foster innovation and growth, as their best-performing inventors suffered the greatest productivity losses when their commutes grew longer.

Shorter commutes support innovation by giving employees more time in the office and greater opportunities for in-person collaboration, while removing the physical strain of a long commute.

This is not always the case: remote work does not automatically lead to greater creativity and productivity as office water-cooler conversations are also very important for innovation.

Some see the link between long commutes and productivity as support for work- from-home scenarios, as many workers have grown accustomed to their commute- free arrangements during the pandemic.

From chemical pollutants in the environment to the damming of rivers to invasive species transported through global trade and travel, every environmental issue is different and there is no single tech solution that can solve this crisis.

Discourse on the threat of environmental collapse revolves around cutting down emissions, but biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse are caused by myriad and diverse reasons.

This would require legislation that recognises the rights of future generations and other species that allows the judiciary to uphold a much higher standard of environmental protection than currently possible.

Clearly, our environmental crisis requires large political solutions, not minor technological ones, so, instead of focusing on infinite growth, we could consider a path of stable-state economies, while preserving markets and healthy competition.

The trajectory of cheerfulness through the self is linked to the history of the word 'cheer' which comes from an Old French meaning 'face'.

Translations of the Bible into vernacular languages, expanded the noun 'cheer' into the more abstract 'cheerful-ness', something that circulates as an emotional and social quality defining the self and a moral community.

When you take on a cheerful expression, no matter what the state of your soul, your cheerfulness moves into the self: the interior of the self is changed by the power of cheer.

People in the medieval 'Canterbury Tales' have a 'piteous' or a 'sober' cheer; 'cheer' is an expression and a body part, lying at the intersection of emotions and physiognomy.

Women may prioritize cooking because they feel they alone are responsible for mediating a toxic and unhealthy food system.

Food is commonly framed through the lens of individual choice: you can choose to eat healthily.

This is particularly so in a neoliberal context where the state has transferred the responsibility for food onto individual consumers.

The individualized framing of choice appeals to a popular desire to experience agency, but draws away from the structural obstacles that stratify individual food choices.

If I wanted to sit indoors and read, or play Sonic the Hedgehog on a red-hot Sega Mega Drive, I would often be made to feel guilty about not going outside to "enjoy it while it lasts".

My mum, quite reasonably, wanted me and my sister out of the house, in the sun.

Tales of my mum's idyllic-sounding childhood in the Sussex countryside, where trees were climbed by 8 am and streams navigated by lunchtime, were passed down to us like folklore.

To an introverted kid, that felt like a threat and the feeling has stayed with me.

The work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life, when it is realized and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader.

The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence and this convergence is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader.

From this polarity it follows that the literary work cannot be completely identical with the text, or with the realization of the text, but in fact must lie halfway between the two.

The literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic; the artistic refers to the text created by the author, and the aesthetic to the realization accomplished by the reader.

In the central nervous systems of other animal species, such a comprehensive regeneration of neurons has not yet been proven beyond doubt.

Biologists from the University of Bayreuth have discovered a uniquely rapid form of regeneration in injured neurons and their function in the central nervous system of zebrafish.

They studied the Mauthner cells, which are solely responsible for the escape behaviour of the fish, and previously regarded as incapable of regeneration.

However, their ability to regenerate crucially depends on the location of the injury.

A popular response is the exhortation to plant more trees.

It seems all but certain that global warming will go well above two degrees—quite how high no one knows yet.

Burning them releases it, which is why the scale of forest fires in the Amazon basin last year garnered headlines.

This is because trees sequester carbon by absorbing carbon dioxide.

Look forward a few decades to an invention which can end the energy crisis, change the global economy and curb climate change at a stroke: commercial fusion power.

To gain meaningful insights, logic has to be accompanied by asking probing questions of nature through controlled tests, precise observations and clever analysis.

The greatest of all inventions is the uber-invention that has provided the insights on which others depend: the modern scientific method.

This invention is inconceivable without the scientific method; it will rest on the application of a diverse range of scientific insights, such as the process transforming hydrogen into helium to release huge amounts of energy.