#practicums

I feel like everyone always tells you how hard the tests are going to be that you’ll need to adjust to how they’re worded etc. No one says anything about the Practicums. The showing off your skills while being judged without mercy because why should they be merciful? Some day you’re going to do this on a human being and you better be doing it fucking right!

Let me tell you, the only one I’ve passed first try so far has been the first one - hand washing. And I haven’t failed the next ones because of lack of studying, I assure you of that because without the cold stare of the instructors judging me I know my shit. When I go to remediation the person “remediating” me is always confused why I couldn’t do the skills before but seem fine doing them now.

I chose Chapter 16 (the start of Part 2) of A Thousand Splendid Sun by Khaled Hosseini, one of my favorite books. In Part 2 of the novel, the point of view shifts from that of Mariam, the 15-year-old child bride, to Laila, one of the children in the village.

I had some problems downloading the Topic Modeling Tool at first, but I finally got it to work. I chose Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace because it's notoriously long, and I wanted to see what topics the tool would pick up out of a novel that's supposedly one of the most important works of literature ever written (I have never read it, but I was hoping this would serve as inspiration/motivation to). I admit I still didn't have a great idea of what the book was about after I finished running it through the program:

The results weren't very conclusive, but all of the words were one I'd expect from a Russian novel about war. I went into "Advanced" settings and changed the number of iterations to 100, but kept the number of topics at 10.

This was an interesting change, as it picked up on words that were most frequently used, but not necessarily important (i.e., "called"). I noticed that it read more like a story when scanning the list of revised topics.

I used Lexos for my first text analysis assignment, so for the second part, I decided to use Voyant and AntConc. I analyzed Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, using the Voyant Bubblelines tool:

This was a very visually appealing way of studying word frequency. The tool took the most commonly occurring words in the text over the course of the novel, as well as their frequency in each part. The word "man" had the highest appearance rate, at 102 times, while "Kurtz" appeared 93 times. This is appropriate because the novel itself reflects on the dark nature of man, and centers around Mr. Kurtz.

I also used the Voyant Knots tool, which showed the interconnectivity of some of the same words. "Man," "project," and "work" displayed high interconnectivity, unsurprising because in the novel the operations of the steamer are contingent upon the cooperation of the men on board the Nellie, and the plot chronicles Marlow's recollection of his experiences as part of the crew.

I also looked at some of the words individually using trend graphs...I chose "saw," "man," and "great." The word "saw" saw a sharp incline in frequency as Marlow describes in first person his harrowing journey into the depths of the jungle, and the horrors he encounters with the rapidly deteriorating and increasingly mad Mr. Kurtz. "Man" is fairly frequently mentioned throughout the book, but displays a significant drop toward the middle of the book, perhaps reflective of his experience firsthand with Mr. Kurtz rather than speaking hypothetically or about him in theory. The word "suddenly" notably occurs at the height of the action, mostly toward the beginning and end of the middle part, but tapers off at the end after they escape the jungle and Kurtz dies.

The word "great" was a fascinating one to look at, especially given the context of the novel. Marlow is continually told about "the great Mr. Kurtz" by the other crew members, which may explain the high frequency in the beginning. However, it drops sharply in the middle of the book, when Kurtz is at the height of his insanity and Marlow is fighting for his and his crew's survival. At the end, the word reappears in relative frequency, possibly due to Marlow speaking about him in retrospect and reflecting upon his achievements as a great man prior to his madness.

And lastly, I used AntConc to compare both Heart of Darkness and The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, because both explore the nature of man and his descent into madness and/or darkness. "Man" appears consistently throughout Heart of Darkness, but is a little more concentrated in the beginning, when Marlow has not yet met Mr. Kurtz but discusses the idea of him. The Picture of Dorian Gray, with the degradation of the painting, delves into a more abstract, psychological conceptualization of the self as a being in the context of his own mind, thus the frequent appearance of the word "man" toward the end of the book.

I chose my favorite play, "The Importance of Being Earnest" to analyze, because I find British humor very amusing and thought that a close examination of it could reveal some things about Wilde's writing style and British humor.

My first attempt was with AntConc, but it refused to download, so I used Voyant and Lexos instead. I liked the colorful style, ease of use, and variety of interpretations of data of Lexos the best. It was an interesting and visually appealing way to analyze word frequency, and it was fun moving my cursor and observing the trends in word usage throughout the text.

I uploaded the file in its entirety and used the BubbleViz tool, removing the list of stopwords from the text:

"The Importance of Being Earnest" is written in play form, which means that any dialogue spoken is first labeled with the character's name. I thought it would be interesting to see if the amount of dialogue was important to the character. As you can see, "Jack" is the most frequently used word, with 286 usages. This makes sense as he's the main character, around which the play is centered. "Gwendolen" has 175 lines of dialogue, and "Cecily" has 254 lines. While Gwendolen is arguably a more important character than Cecily, it's interesting to see that she has a little more than half the amount of dialogue that Cecily does. This can perhaps be attributed to her intelligence (she is written as an extremely vain, shallow, and vapid character). Cecily, on the other hand, is portrayed as self-important and intelligent, thus, she speaks a little less than twice as much as Gwendolen, possibly because of her desire to be heard throughout the play.

Next, I also tried removing "project," "gutenberg," and all of the names from the text using the Scrub tool.  This is what the resulting graph looked like:

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare (plain text here)

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (plain text here)

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (plain text here)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (plain text here)

The Vision of Hell by Dante Alighieri (plain text here)

Beyond Good and Beyond Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche (plain text here)

Dream Psychology by Sigmund Freud (plain text here)

Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde (plain text here)

Originally appears on jayemsey.com

Brown Butter Salted Caramel Cookie Cups

I tried this recipe as an experience about a month ago, and they came out amazing. It was posted by a guy on Imgur claiming it was "the perfect cookie," so of course I had to test it. As it turns out, they're pretty damn near perfect, and I'll definitely be making them again. They were quite time-consuming, but the end result made them very worth it.

For the caramel:

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter

1/2 cup heavy cream or heavy whipping cream

3 tbsp water

1/4 cup light corn syrup

1 cup granulated sugar

A pinch coarse sea salt

In a small pot or tall-sided sauce pan, combine water, sugar, and corn syrup. Bring to a boil (it should bubble lightly). Do not stir, but swirl the pan a few times so it doesn't burn. As soon as it's boiling, drop in the cream and butter. Lower the heat and stir. It should "bubble furiously" according to the recipe, which is why you need a tall-sided sauce pan. Return to high heat and continue stirring, until it turns from a cream-yellow color to a rich, nutty brown color. The mixture will start out bubbly and slimy but will become smooth and viscous, and it should drip off your spoon in ribbons when it's done. Pour into a heavily-greased flat pan or dish (we used a glass bowl, which I do not recommend). Let stand at room temperature for 30 minutes, sprinkle with salt liberally, and let stand for another 60 minutes. You can also substitute ready-made caramel squares if you want to save time, but I promise the homemade kind is much better.

For the cookie:

1 cup (two sticks) butter (do not combine)

1 cup light brown sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 large egg

2 1/4 cups flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda (I didn't have this so I used 1 1/2 tsp baking powder)

Preheat oven to 350 °F.

In a small sauce pan (I suggest a silver-coated one), melt 1/2 cup (1 stick) over medium heat. Continue cooking until the butter is dark brown and smells nutty. The top will foam up and there will be brown sediment forming at the bottom which is okay, but MAKE SURE it doesn’t turn black. That means the butter is burning. Remember how I said to use a silver-coated one? We ruined two sticks of butter because the heat was too high and we couldn’t see what color the butter was. The butter should turn brown, but after it does it burns very fast. Take it off the heat before you need to, because the pan will still be hot and the butter will continue to cook even with no flame. When it’s done, pour it into a small bowl and set aside (you can put it in the refrigerator for faster cooling).

In the large mixing bowl, combine the other stick of butter and the brown sugar. Cream on high for 5 minutes until light and fluffy. Add the cooled brown butter and the granulated sugar.  Continue beating on high for another 2 minutes, adding the eggs one at a time. Texture should be light and soft. Sift the dry ingredients, turn the mixer down to a low setting, and add them in three parts, mixing after each one.

Remove dough from bowl and wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, turn your caramel out onto a cutting board and cut into small squares using a greased knife or pizza wheel. They should be roughly the size of Hershey’s kisses. Pull dough out of the refrigerator and portion into 1 oz balls. Stuff each one with a caramel portion, making sure the caramel is completely hidden. Drop each ball into a cup in a lightly-greased mini-muffin tray. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes (I did 12). Cookies should be lightly brown around the edges and soft on top. Turn upside-down onto a cooling rack, and let stand for at least five minutes before eating.

Also, it makes me really nervous that out of 50-odd positions there are only two or three that I can even vaguely get myself interested in. And I'm not even that interested, certainly not enough to make myself want to do these cover letters.