Rag
Rag may refer to:General uses
Cloth and material
A rag is a small, often torn or discarded piece of cloth, typically used for cleaning, wiping, or as a filler material.[1] The term entered English in the early 14th century, derived from Old Norse rögg meaning "shaggy tuft" or "rough hair," reflecting its association with frayed or rough fabric.[2] Common examples include the wash rag, a cloth for personal cleaning or bathing, and the oil rag, employed in machinery maintenance to absorb lubricants or remove grime.[1] In plural form, rags also denote tattered clothing, evoking images of wear and utility from repurposed textiles.[1] Historically, rags played a key role in European papermaking starting in the 14th century, where recycled linen and hemp cloths were sorted, fermented, beaten into pulp, and formed into sheets, enabling the production of high-quality writing and book paper until the late 18th century.[3] This process transformed waste fabric into a vital resource, with fine white rags yielding premium grades.[3] In early aviation, fabric-covered aircraft wings, colloquially known as "ragwings," utilized cotton or linen cloths stretched over wooden or metal frames and treated with dope for tautness and weather resistance, a construction method prominent from the 1910s through the mid-20th century in models like the Piper J-3 Cub.[4] Rags have long symbolized poverty, particularly in Victorian Britain, where the tattered garments of the urban poor contrasted sharply with the era's industrial textile abundance, marking individuals as socially marginalized and in need of redemption.[5] This imagery extended to literature, portraying ragged children as emblems of vulnerability amid societal neglect.[5] The recycling of such rags into low-quality paper incidentally influenced slang for inexpensive newspapers.[6]Journalism
In journalism, "rag" emerged as British slang in the early 18th century to denote a cheap, sensationalist publication, often printed on low-quality paper made from rags.[2] The term, first attested in 1734, carried a derogatory connotation, implying worthlessness and poor journalistic standards due to the inferior materials and exaggerated content used to attract readers.[6] During the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States, the term was applied to practitioners of yellow journalism, a style characterized by sensational headlines, exaggerated stories, and unethical reporting to boost circulation.[7] Prominent examples include Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, which in the 1890s competed fiercely with William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, employing lurid illustrations and fabricated details to cover events like the Spanish-American War.[7] In modern usage, "rag" continues to disparage tabloid-style newspapers focused on gossip, scandals, and celebrity news rather than substantive reporting.[8] In the United Kingdom, this applies to "red-top" tabloids—named for their bold red mastheads—such as The Sun and the Daily Mirror, which prioritize entertainment over accuracy and have faced criticism for misinformation and privacy invasions.[9] A related term, "rag sheet," refers to informal or lowbrow newsletters and pamphlets mimicking this sensationalist format, often produced for niche or temporary audiences.[10] In student traditions, "rag" magazines produced during charity events like Rag Week frequently adopt a satirical, exaggerated journalistic style to parody these professional rags.[11]Student traditions
In the context of student traditions, "rag" refers to student-organized charity fundraising events known as Rag Week or simply "rag," which emerged in the 1920s at UK universities such as Sheffield and Oxford, involving pranks, parades, and public collections to support local causes like hospitals.[12][13] These events allowed students to engage in lighthearted disruption while raising funds, often timed around Shrove Tuesday or other academic breaks.[11] The earliest documented rag occurred in 1920 at the University of Sheffield, where medical students initiated collections for city hospitals, marking the formalization of these activities from earlier informal "ragging" pranks dating back to the 19th century.[12][14] By the 1930s, rags had spread across civic universities, evolving to incorporate "rag mags," satirical student publications sold to the public for additional revenue and humor.[15] These magazines, produced by student committees, briefly overlapped with amateur journalism through their distribution of witty commentary on campus life.[13] Typical practices during Rag Week included students dressing in ragged costumes for visibility, organizing street parades with themed floats, performing car stunts like decorated vehicle processions, and holding auctions of novelty items to solicit donations.[15] In the 1950s and 1960s, events escalated with outrageous publicity stunts, such as mass fittings into telephone booths, raising significant sums—up to £200,000 nationally in 1962—for charities including Oxfam and anti-nuclear campaigns.[15][16] By the 1980s, controversies arose over safety risks and public nuisance from rowdy stunts and excessive drinking, prompting toned-down versions and occasional bans at universities to mitigate backlash.[14] These issues, combined with shifting student priorities toward year-round volunteering, led to a decline in traditional Rag Weeks post-2000s, exacerbated by rising insurance costs and health and safety regulations.[15][17] As of 2025, many universities continue RAG fundraising through structured events and year-round activities, though traditional rowdy formats have largely declined.[18] The tradition spread to Commonwealth countries, with similar events like "Prosh" processions at Australian universities such as the University of Adelaide dating to 1905, involving satirical parades and fundraising akin to UK rags.[19] In South Africa, the first rag began at the University of Pretoria in 1925, featuring ongoing parades.[20]Arts and entertainment
Music
In the context of music, a rag refers to ragtime, a genre of piano composition characterized by syncopated rhythms that emphasize rhythmic complexity and propulsion, serving as a key precursor to jazz.[21] The term "ragtime" originated around 1896, derived from "ragged time" to describe its distinctive syncopation, and the first published piece bearing the name appeared in 1897.[22] This style emerged from African American musical traditions in the late 19th century, blending elements of minstrel music, banjo styles, and cakewalk rhythms with European march forms.[21] Note that the Western musical "rag" is distinct from the Indian classical "raga," a melodic framework used in improvisation. Key characteristics of ragtime include a steady left-hand accompaniment in 2/4 or 4/4 time, often featuring an "oom-pah" bass pattern—alternating low bass notes on the downbeats with chordal harmonies on the offbeats—contrasted against a syncopated, melodic right-hand line that creates a lively, "ragged" feel.[21] Compositions typically consist of four-bar phrases organized into multi-strain forms, such as AABBACCC, with each strain comprising 16 measures and modulating keys for variety, though the music was generally not intended for dancing but for listening or performance.[22] Ragtime gained prominence through composers like Scott Joplin, dubbed the "King of Ragtime," whose "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899) became a massive hit, selling over one million copies by 1914 and establishing the classic rag form.[22] The genre reached its peak in the early 1900s, fueled by sheet music sales and exposure at events like the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, before declining around 1917 amid the rise of jazz.[23] Ragtime's influence extended to stride piano, an early jazz style that evolved in the 1910s by expanding ragtime's bass patterns and adding swing, as seen in works by James P. Johnson.[24] Modern revivals occurred in the 1970s, notably through Joshua Rifkin's recordings and the Academy Award-winning score for the film The Sting (1973), which popularized Joplin's pieces like "The Entertainer" and introduced ragtime to new audiences.[21][22]Film and television
In film, "rag" has appeared in titles and as a motif symbolizing poverty and social struggle. The 1925 silent comedy-drama The Rag Man, directed by Edward F. Cline, stars child actor Jackie Coogan as Tim Kelly, an orphan who escapes a fire at a New York orphanage and forms an unlikely bond with a Jewish ragpicker named Max. The story explores themes of redemption and makeshift family amid urban destitution, with Coogan's performance highlighting the resilience of the impoverished.[25][26] Television has featured "rag" in episodic contexts, often tied to chaotic student antics or historical music genres. In the British sitcom The Thin Blue Line (1995), the episode "Rag Week" depicts police officers dealing with rowdy university students during their annual fundraising "rag week," a tradition involving pranks and charity stunts that escalates into broader comedic mayhem.[27] Documentaries on ragtime music have also aired, such as the 1960 NBC production Those Ragtime Years, which traces the genre's origins through performances by artists like Hoagy Carmichael and Eubie Blake, emphasizing its cultural impact on early 20th-century American entertainment.[28][29] Thematic representations of rags as symbols of destitution recur in adaptations of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, where the protagonist's tattered clothing underscores Victorian-era poverty and institutional cruelty. David Lean's 1948 film version portrays Oliver's journey from the workhouse—clad in ragged attire—to Fagin's gang, visually amplifying the novel's critique of social neglect and the commodification of the poor. Subsequent adaptations, including Roman Polanski's 2005 take, maintain this imagery to evoke themes of vulnerability and survival in urban squalor.[30][31]Literature and publishing
The "rags to riches" trope, a staple in American literature, depicts protagonists rising from poverty to prosperity through hard work and moral virtue, as exemplified in Horatio Alger Jr.'s novel Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks, first published in 1868.[32] This serialized story follows a resourceful bootblack named Dick Hunter who transforms his life from street urchin to respectable clerk, embodying the era's ideals of self-reliance during the Gilded Age.[32] Alger's work, one of over a hundred similar tales he produced, popularized the narrative formula and influenced countless subsequent novels and stories emphasizing upward mobility.[33] In modern literature, the phrase "rag and bone" evokes themes of scavenging human remnants and spiritual inheritance, as explored in Peter Manseau's 2009 nonfiction work Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead.[34] Manseau travels to global reliquaries, examining sacred relics like bones and ashes to reflect on faith, mortality, and cultural devotion across religions.[34] The book blends travelogue, history, and memoir, highlighting how fragmented human artifacts sustain religious narratives in contemporary society.[34] Historically, the term "rag" has been integral to book production, referring to cloth fibers used in high-quality paper manufacturing from the 12th to 18th centuries.[33] European papermakers sourced linen and cotton rags to create durable sheets for printing books, prized for their longevity and resistance to decay compared to later wood-pulp alternatives.[33] This rag-based paper enabled the proliferation of printed literature during the Renaissance and beyond. In the early 20th century, "rag books" emerged as a publishing innovation for children's literature, with the Dean's Rag Book Company founding in 1903 to produce washable, cloth-bound volumes designed to withstand toddler handling. These indestructible books, featuring simple illustrations and nursery rhymes, marked an early effort to make literature accessible and resilient for young readers. Student "rag" magazines represent a niche in amateur publishing history, originating in British universities during the 1920s as humorous, satirical periodicals sold to fund charities.[13] Titles like Manchester's Rag Rag, first issued in 1924, combined jokes, cartoons, and student-written stories, evolving from rag week events into annual collections that blended entertainment with philanthropy.[35]Science and technology
Artificial intelligence
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a framework in artificial intelligence that integrates large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge retrieval mechanisms to improve the accuracy and relevance of generated text, particularly by mitigating hallucinations in knowledge-intensive tasks.[36] Introduced in 2020 by Lewis et al. at Facebook AI Research (now Meta AI), RAG allows LLMs to dynamically access external data sources, enabling responses grounded in verifiable information without requiring full model retraining.[36] The RAG process unfolds in three primary stages: indexing the knowledge base (including query processing), retrieving pertinent documents from a vector database, and generating augmented outputs. During indexing, documents and queries are transformed into dense vector embeddings using models like BERT, which capture semantic meaning through contextual representations. Retrieval involves querying the vector database to fetch the most relevant documents, typically by calculating a relevance score via cosine similarity: \cos(\theta) = \frac{A \cdot B}{\|A\| \|B\|} where A and B represent the vector embeddings of the query and document, respectively; this metric, equivalent to normalized dot product in many implementations, prioritizes semantic alignment over exact matches. In the generation stage, the LLM receives a prompt enriched with the top retrieved documents, producing a coherent response informed by external context.[36] By 2025, RAG has become integral to applications like intelligent chatbots and enterprise knowledge management systems, exemplified by Google's Search Generative Experience, which employs retrieval-augmented methods to deliver fact-based search summaries. In November 2025, Google introduced File Search, a fully managed RAG system built into the Gemini API for enhanced document querying.[37] This approach offers significant benefits, including access to current events and proprietary data in real time, while avoiding the high costs and data privacy issues associated with fine-tuning LLMs on vast datasets.[36] Nevertheless, RAG systems encounter challenges, including query ambiguity that can result in mismatched retrievals and suboptimal response quality.[38] Additionally, retrieval latency poses issues in high-volume scenarios, as embedding computations and vector searches can introduce delays, necessitating optimizations like approximate nearest neighbor algorithms.[39]Bioinformatics and computing
In computational biology, the RAG (RNA-As-Graphs) format refers to a specialized representation for storing RNA secondary structures derived from assembled genomic or transcriptomic sequences, along with associated annotations such as base-pairing information. Introduced as part of the RAG web resource in 2004, it leverages graph theory to model RNA topologies, enabling efficient analysis and prediction of RNA structures from next-generation sequencing data.[40] The structure of RAG files is primarily text-based, utilizing formats like BPSEQ or connectivity matrices to encode sequence data. A typical BPSEQ file includes columns for nucleotide position, base identity (e.g., A, U, G, C), and pairing partner (0 for unpaired bases), preceded by optional headers specifying sequence ID and length. Adjacency matrices represent helical connections as graphs, with vertices corresponding to nucleotides ordered from 5' to 3'. For large datasets from high-throughput RNA sequencing, outputs are often compressed into ZIP archives containing multiple structure files, supporting scalable storage without loss of detail.[41][42] RAG formats are employed in RNA structure prediction and design pipelines, where they facilitate the conversion and manipulation of assembled sequences. For instance, the RAGTOP tool within the suite processes secondary structure inputs (e.g., in CT or BPSEQ format) to generate tree graphs for 3D topology sampling, with a command likeragtop input.ct output.adj to convert to adjacency matrix format for further assembly refinement. These tools integrate with broader workflows, such as those involving transcriptome assemblers like rnaSPAdes for initial contig generation from RNA-seq reads, followed by graph-based annotation.[43]
The RAG resource has evolved significantly since its inception, with updates in 2011 adding programs for graph conversion and motif classification, and the 2020 RAG-Web release enhancing compatibility with next-generation sequencing outputs through web-based sampling and fragment assembly modules. Integration with libraries like BioPerl allows scripted processing of RAG-derived graphs in Perl environments for custom annotations.[44]
Despite its utility for graph-theoretic RNA analysis, the RAG format remains less prevalent than general-purpose standards like FASTA, owing to its specialization for structure-focused tools and limited adoption outside RNA-centric pipelines. Note that this biological RAG shares its acronym with retrieval-augmented generation techniques in artificial intelligence, though the contexts differ markedly.[40]