A Good Journalist is never least himself & Variables 4 By Prof Dr Sohail Ansari

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

Even  a source is masked

·     A Good journalist is never least himself as he never talks in his own person. Even his source, that tells you a truth, has a mask

·      “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” » Oscar Wilde

Helen Rowland Quotes

It takes a woman twenty years to make a man of her son, and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.

A bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever.

A Bachelor of Arts is one who makes love to a lot of women, and yet has the art to remain a bachelor.

A man's heart may have a secret sanctuary where only one woman may enter, but it is full of little anterooms which are seldom vacant.

When a man makes a woman his wife, it's the highest compliment he can pay her, and it's usually the last.

The impact of the Qur'an of the Arabic language

Structure and content

As has already been pointed out, scholars have gone to great lengths over the past thirteen centuries to describe and emphasize the inimitability of the verses of the Qur'an. However, the impact of the revelation of the Qur'an on the Arabic language, its structure and content, has certainly been the focus of fewer studies. Works on the inimitability of the Qur'an have mostly focused on the literary beauty of the Holy Book, its conceptual strength and precision.

Another important aspect of the Qur'an, one not adequately addressed, lies in its linguistic impact on the form and content of the Arabic language.

The Holy Qur'an has undoubtedly helped reinforce and deepen the Arab people's awareness of the richness and beauty of their tongue. From a linguistic point of view, the revelation of the Qur'an was the most important event in the history of the Arabic language.

It was an event with far-reaching and lasting consequence, for the Qur'an gave Arabic a form which it had hitherto lacked. In fact, it was due to the desire to preserve the Qur'an that efforts were made to develop and refine the Arabic alphabet. It was within the same context that Abu l-Aswad al-Du'ali developed the dot system in the first century of the Islamic era in his attempt to lay the basis for Arabic grammatical theory.

His efforts were among the first to establish a permanent form for the Arabic alphabet and hence the Arabic writing system. As deciphered from the earliest inscriptions, the Arabic alphabet was vague, unsystematic, and inefficient. The dot system as developed by al-Du'ah helped to clarify and establish distinctions which were otherwise unclear. In fact, it can be maintained that had it not been for the strong desire to preserve the Qur'an, its form, grammar, pronunciation, and accuracy, the Arabic alphabet and writing system might not have developed as quickly as they did.

The Arabic alphabet and writing system were only one aspect of the Qur'an's impact on the language; it also gave Arabic a rigidity of form and a precision of presentation which were novel to the language, as well as a host of new locutions, complex concepts, meanings, and arguments. Furthermore, the Qur'an enriched the lexicon of the language by bringing new words and expressions into use, and by introducing loan-words from foreign languages. It also presented a firm set of linguistic standards and directions which were instrumental in the subsequent documentation of Arabic grammar.

ləˈkjuːʃ(ə)n/

noun

plural noun: locutions

A word or phrase, especially with regard to style or idiom.

o     

2.    2. An utterance regarded in terms of its intrinsic meaning or reference, as distinct from its function or purpose in context.

These words revived her moribund career,underscoring the truth that politics is mostly aboutlocution, locution, locution.

The Qur'an likewise helped to expand the scope of Arabic as it was known in the early years of the seventh century. Islam and the Qur'an helped to open new horizons and fields of study which included such disciplines as philology, Islamic law (the sharia), and Islamic philosophy. The Qur'an also introduced a host of new themes and linguistic forms not only to the Arabic language but to the Arab mind as well. Taha Husayn dealt with this particular aspect of the verses of the Qur'an when he wrote:

In its external form the Qur'an is neither poetry nor prose. It is not poetry because it does not observe the metre and rhyme of poetry and it is not prose because it is not composed in the same manner in which prose was customarily composed.

The Qur'an consists of verses which vary in length depending on their theme and the occasion for which they were revealed. What is most interesting about Qur'anic verses is the superb selection of words, a selection which helps to induce varying reading speeds, which render these verses most effective. On this particular point,

Taha Husayn wrote:

For example, those verses dealing with the dialogues that took place between the Prophet and the pagans as well as those dealing with legislation require the type of low reading speed appropriate to explanation and recapitulation. On the other hand, those verses in which the pagans are warned of the fate that awaits them require a higher speed appropriate to censuring and warning.

The varying speeds which Taha Husayn mentions appear to be achieved with remarkable spontaneity, which is the result, in Taha Husayn's words, of 'a careful selection of words and expressions.' He gives sura 26, al-Shu'ara', as an example of the type of verse requiring speedy reading, and sura 28, al-Qasas, as an example of that requiring slow reading.

Another aspect of the novelty of the Qur'an language has to do with its themes. These themes and topics represent a clear departure from those which had been hitherto familiar to the Arabs. As Taha Husayn explained:

It does not deal with any such things as ruins, camels, or long journeys in the desert; nor does it describe longing for the beloved, love, or eulogy, topics most familiar to pre-Islamic Arabs. But rather it talks to the Arabs about such things as the oneness of God, His limitless power, His knowledge, which is unattainable, His will, which is unstoppable, and His creation of heaven and earth.

This passage underscores yet another innovative aspect of the Qur'an, namely the presentation of novel themes through an abundance of examples all aimed at illustration and persuasion. The use of illustration is one of the most effective stylistic techniques of the Qur'an. One can hardly read a verse without experiencing the impact of this technique.

The art of narrative style represents another innovative aspect of the Qur'an. It relates in astounding detail the stories of Noah Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus, among others. It presents the dialogues that took place in such stories and the claims and counter-claims made by each of the opposing parties. Story-telling may not have been totally novel in pre-Islamic Arabia given the significant quantity of parables, epics, and myths that were inherited from that period.

What was novel, however, was the type of integrated, elaborate story involving such essential items as theme, plot, well-developed characters, and denouement which are to be found in the Qur'an, which refers itself to the benefit in telling such stories:

We do relate unto thee the most beautiful stories, in that We reveal unto thee this [portion of the] Qur'an. Before this thou too were among those who knew it not. (1: 3)

The final part of a play, film, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.

"the film's denouement was unsatisfying and ambiguous"

Categorical Variable

A categorical variable (sometimes called a nominal variable) is one that has two or more categories, but there is no intrinsic ordering to the categories.  For example, gender is a categorical variable having two categories (male and female) and there is no intrinsic ordering to the categories.  Hair color is also a categorical variable having a number of categories (blonde, brown, brunette, red, etc.) and again, there is no agreed way to order these from highest to lowest.  A purely categorical variable is one that simply allows you to assign categories but you cannot clearly order the variables.  If the variable has a clear ordering, then that variable would be an ordinal variable, as described below.

Ordinal

An ordinal variable is similar to a categorical variable.  The difference between the two is that there is a clear ordering of the variables.  For example, suppose you have a variable, economic status, with three categories (low, medium and high).  In addition to being able to classify people into these three categories, you can order the categories as low, medium and high. Now consider a variable like educational experience (with values such as elementary school graduate, high school graduate, some college and college graduate). These also can be ordered as elementary school, high school, some college, and college graduate.  Even though we can order these from lowest to highest, the spacing between the values may not be the same across the levels of the variables. Say we assign scores 1, 2, 3 and 4 to these four levels of educational experience and we compare the difference in education between categories one and two with the difference in educational experience between categories two and three, or the difference between categories three and four. The difference between categories one and two (elementary and high school) is probably much bigger than the difference between categories two and three (high school and some college).  In this example, we can order the people in level of educational experience but the size of the difference between categories is inconsistent (because the spacing between categories one and two is bigger than categories two and three).  If these categories were equally spaced, then the variable would be an interval variable.

Interval

An interval variable is similar to an ordinal variable, except that the intervals between the values of the interval variable are equally spaced.  For example, suppose you have a variable such as annual income that is measured in dollars, and we have three people who make $10,000, $15,000 and $20,000. The second person makes $5,000 more than the first person and $5,000 less than the third person, and the size of these intervals is the same.  If there were two other people who make $90,000 and $95,000, the size of that interval between these two people is also the same ($5,000).

Why does it matter whether a variable is categorical, ordinal or interval?

Statistical computations and analyses assume that the variables have specific levels of measurement.  For example, it would not make sense to compute an average hair color.  An average of a categorical variable does not make much sense because there is no intrinsic ordering of the levels of the categories.  Moreover, if you tried to compute the average of educational experience as defined in the ordinal section above, you would also obtain a nonsensical result.  Because the spacing between the four levels of educational experience is very uneven, the meaning of this average would be very questionable.  In short, an average requires a variable to be interval. Sometimes you have variables that are “in between” ordinal and interval, for example, a five-point likert scale with values “strongly agree”, “agree”, “neutral”, “disagree” and “strongly disagree”.  If we cannot be sure that the intervals between each of these five values are the same, then we would not be able to say that this is an interval variable, but we would say that it is an ordinal variable.  However, in order to be able to use statistics that assume the variable is interval, we will assume that the intervals are equally spaced.

Does it matter if my dependent variable is normally distributed?

When you are doing a t-test or ANOVA, the assumption is that the distribution of the sample means are normally distributed.  One way to guarantee this is for the distribution of the individual observations from the sample to be normal.  However, even if the distribution of the individual observations is not normal, the distribution of the sample means will be normally distributed if your sample size is about 30 or larger.  This is due to the “central limit theorem” that shows that even when a population is non-normally distributed, the distribution of the “sample means” will be normally distributed when the sample size is 30 or more, for example see Central limit theorem demonstration .

If you are doing a regression analysis, then the assumption is that your residuals are normally distributed.  One way to make it very likely to have normal residuals is to have a dependent variable that is normally distributed and predictors that are all normally distributed, however this is not necessary for your residuals to be normally distributed.