The HISTORY OF IDEAS QUIZ- Varun

January 10, 2016

“In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an ____X____ political _____Y_____ - and ____X____ as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is ________ because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

Identify X, Y and The author(who was in the news in December 2015.)

Imagined CommunitiesBenedict Anderson

In the speech titled “Britain Awake” at The Kensignton Hall, Maggie Thatcher starts with the following quote “The first duty of any Government is to safeguard its people against external aggression. To guarantee the survival of our way of life.” Mid-way into the speech Mrs. Thatcher refers to a classic example of production-possibility frontier and says “The men in the Soviet politburo don't have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put _ _ _ _ before _ _ _ _ _ _, while we put just about everything before _ _ _ _. Fill in the blanks

Answer

Guns and butter

In the excellent blogpost “Obstacles for Games as a Storytelling Medium”, the author Alessandro Ituarte, cites “fail state”, “ludonarrative dissonance”, and _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _as obstacles for Games as a Storytelling Medium. “In games, the XY is usually broken in order to prompt action from the player. Eg., objects you can interact with in a game tend to have a magical glow or sparkle around them. These indicators help the player assimilate the interaction boundaries of the game faster, as opposed to having to poke at everything all the time in order to figure out the limitations of the interaction system. Violating the _____ _____ causes the player to distance herself from the experience and compels the player to focus on grokking the game, effectively dismissing the game’s story as secondary or irrelevant. Fill in the blank(Hint: This about theatre, and aesthetics)

Answer

Aesthetic Distance

What 10 letter word with Greek origins– the scientific study of which emerged sometime in the 1940s as a consequence of the growing realisation that technical equipment became increasingly complex – is often used to refer to Human Factors Engineering?

The term “Human factors engineering” is more prevalent in the US. The word in question is prevalent in the UK.

Answer

Ergonomics

An excerpt from the Harvard historian’s book. “The mechanical _ _ _ _ _ was self-contained, and once horologists learned to drive it by means of a coiled spring rather than a falling weight, it could be miniaturized so as to be portable, whether in the household or on the person. It was this possibility of widespread private use that laid the basis for ‘____ discipline,’ as against ‘____ obedience.’ One can … use public _ _ _ _ _ to sumon people for one purpose or another.”

According to the author, the _ _ _ _ _ drove the economic development of the West, leading it into the Industrial Revolution and eventually into an advanced form of capitalism. FITB

Answer

Clock

The image shows the Cannaregio area of Venice. The use of this area (for a particular purpose) first started in 1513 and was mandated in 1516.

This exercise has lent a word(6-letters) to the English language that evokes “a forbidding image of people who lived locked behind walls from dusk to dawn in crowded, narrow streets, under their own authorities”

Answer

Ghetto

In her review of Bajirao Mastani, Ranjita Ganesan, says “The songs, which span nearly 30 minutes, could have been curtailed. The track ‘Malhari’, a celebratory jig with Singh and his battalion stomping and shimmying, is especially avoidable. In _______ fashion, during this song the dancers look directly at an aerial camera, shaking viewers out of their fantasy.”What is the adjective used?

Hint: Think German Epic Theater

Brechtiannamed after Bertolt Brecht.

In the book Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, the author advocates ______ ______. A reviewer from the American Libraries magazine had the following to say about ______ _____. “These disconnected spaces inspired by ________’s (19th century author, poet, naturalist etc) experiment to withdraw from society while remaining within it. We suggest that this idea would be a perfectly natural one for libraries. These safe harbors would be free of the external distractions of computers, cellphones, and social networking tools, allowing sustained focus and contemplation.”

The idea and the 19th century character, please.

Walden ZoneThoreau

What resulted in the passage of Representation of People Act of 1981 in Britain? The act provides:(a) for the disqualification from membership of the House of Commons of any person who is detained anywhere in the British Islands or the Republic of Ireland (or who is unlawfully at large at any time when he would otherwise be detained) for more than a year for any offence,(b) that the election or nomination of such persons shall be void, and(c) that the seat of a Member who becomes so disqualified shall be vacated?

Death of Bobby Sands – member of IRA who was fasting(actually unto death)

A Los Alamos Research laboratory— a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security— report in December 2014 concluded that “One in Five articles suffer from reference rot”. What is reference rot?

404Loss of web references

This Japanese word means “buying books and not reading them; letting books pile up unread on shelves or floors or nightstand”. Its literally translates to ‘reading pile’. The good word please

Tsundoku

An excerpt from Magha’s Sishupalavadhanam.

sakāra-nānāra-kāsa-kāya-sādada-sāyakārasāhavā vāhasāra-nāda-vādada-vādanā.

The army, whose arrows (sāyakā) were the destroyers (sādada) of the movements and troops (kāsa-kāya) of their various striving enemies (sakāra-nānā-ara), and which carried triumphal war music (vāhasāra-nāda) instruments (vādanā), relished the battle (rasa-āhavā)“

This verse is often described as sarvatobhadra. What is sarvatobhadra?

It's a super-palindrome that reads the same in any direction -- left, right, top or bottom!

sa kā ra nā nā ra kā sakā ya sā da da sā ya kāra sā ha vā vā ha sā ranā da vā da da vā da nā (mirrored)nā da vā da da vā da nāra sā ha vā vā ha sā rakā ya sā da da sā ya kāsa kā ra nā nā ra kā sa

The fourth largest town and municipal council(according to Wikipedia) in Gurdaspur District of Punjab(India) is a cause of major disagreements and hate in the neighbouring country.

Name the town. And the reason for hate and disagreements.

QadianAhmaddiya

Karlheinz Brandenburg and his other colleagues at the Fraunhofer Society in the 1990s spent long hours under the hypothesis that most of the content was ‘a maximalist repository of irrelevant information often ignored by the ear’. What resulted thus?

Mp3

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ is a method of market segmentation based on personality, lifestyle, and geodemographics. These techniques promise to offer marketers the ability to define their target buyers by their beliefs, values, and self-perception.

Psychographics

This speech in 1901 by a certain Mr. Edward Barton “The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman. There is deep-set difference, and we see no prospect and no promise of its ever being effaced. Nothing in this world can put these two races upon an equality. Nothing we can do by cultivation, by refinement, or by anything else will make some races equal to others”

What parliamentary action was this speech a precursor(many believe, at least) to?

White Australia Immigration policy

The idea of “a state of affairs in which resources are distributed such that it is not possible to improve a single individual without also causing at least one other individual to become worse off than before the change” is a microeconomic dream.

The idea, named after the Italian Economist, please?

Pareto Efficiency

What ’boundary’ is the comic depicting?

Iron curtain

A _ _ _ _ _ _ _ fund is a type of financial instrument where the strategy is to buy sovereign debt instruments when a country is most vulnerable, which enables the funds to purchase the debt at a deep discount from its face value and attempt to enforce the full claims. Hence named after the scavenging avian.

Vulture Fund

The South by South West is a set of media, film and music festivals conference. The 2012 conference led to the coining of the term ___ _________ by James Birdle, which is described by The Atlantic as an “art movement obsessed with the otherness of computer vision and information processing”.

The Atlantic piece went onto say “You know that art has changed when a ___ _________movement announces itself not with a manifesto, but with a tumblr”

The term please.

New Aesthetic

Let’s Learn metrology a) 11 letter word referring to comparison of two measurement devices or systems, one of known standard and one of unknown uncertainty?

B) 10 letter resolute word referring to the smallest interval that can be read between two readings?

C) 8 letter word that states the closeness of a measured value to a known reference value

D) 9 letter word, something that was a matter of great debate recently in another context, is a design feature that defines limits within which a quality characteristic is supposed to be on individual parts. It represents the maximum allowable deviation from a specified value.

E) 10 letter words referring to deviation in output at any point within the instrument’s sensing range, when first approaching this point with increasing values, and then with decreasing values.

a) 11 letter word referring to comparison of two measurement devices or systems, one of known standard and one of unknown uncertainty?

Calibration

B) 10 letter determined word referring to the smallest interval that can be read between two readings?

Resolution

C) 8 letter word that states the closeness of a measured value to a known reference value

Accuracy

D) 9 letter word, something that was a matter of great debate recently in another context, is a design feature that defines limits within which a quality characteristic is supposed to be on individual parts. It represents the maximum allowable deviation from a specified value.

Tolerance

E) 10 letter words referring to deviation in output at any point within the instrument’s sensing range, when first approaching this point with increasing values, and then with decreasing values.

Hysteresis

The practice of placing an appendage around a castrated ram that leads a flock lends its name to a 10 letter term that is often used to describe a trend. The good sounding word, please.

Bellwether

What speculative geopolitical term is described here?

String of pearls

The definition of this legal principle according to World Justice Project: _ _ _ _ / _ _ / _ _ _ is a system in which the following four universal principles are upheld:1) The government and its officials and agents as well as individuals and private entities are accountable under the law.2) The laws are clear, publicized, stable, and just; are applied evenly; and protect fundamental rights, including the security of persons and property.3) The process by which the laws are enacted, administered, and enforced is accessible, fair, and efficient.4)Justice is delivered timely by competent, ethical, and independent representatives and neutrals who are of sufficient number, have adequate resources, and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.

Rule of law

Excerpt from a paper by Aqa Raza. The _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ doctrine is a judge-made doctrine which was propounded by the Indian Judiciary on 24th April 1973 in Keshavananda Bharati Sripadagalvaru case to put a limitation on the amending powers of the Parliament so that the ‘_ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ of the basic law of the land’ cannot be amended in exercise of its ‘constituent power’ under the Constitution.

Basic Structure

The word _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _(X), according to the the Webster Dictionary is 1) military supplies including weapons, ammunition, combat vehicles, and maintenance tools and equipment2) a service of the army charged with the procuring, distributing, and safekeeping of _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.

Vocabulary.com says that the word The word_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _(Y) , meaning “command” lost an i in the 1500’s and became _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _, meaning “military materials.”

OrdnanceOrdinance

The McArthur’s Universal Corrective version was launched on 26-Jan-1979, to challenge the casual acceptance of European perspectives as global norm. An article on Al Jazeera said, “The orientation of our _ _ _ _, like so many other features of the modern world, arose from the interplay of chance, technology and politics in a way that defies our desire to impose easy or satisfying narratives. But at a time when the global south continues to suffer more than its share of violence and poverty, let’s not dismiss McArthur’s Universal Corrective version too quickly. It continues to symbolize a noble wish: that we could overturn the unjust political and economic relationships in our world as easily as we can flip the _ _ _ _ on our walls.

The blank and the idea please

MapsWhy do maps always show the north as up?

According to the author, James Boyce, author of “Born Bad: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ and the Making of the Western World” the doctrine of _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ has now morphed into the “selfish gene” of evolutionary psychologists. The science of Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and others essentially repurposes the notion of hereditary depravity.The Christian doctrine, please?

Original Sin