GIS and Sustainablity

I went to a short lecture given by Tom Evans from the Department of Geography about GIS (Global Information System) and how it is linked to sustainability. While the lecture was enlightening, it was also very boring and it was informative, but offered no room for criticism.

GIS is used to map land resources, design and plan structures and gardens that reflect the landscape, infrastructure planning, and much more. When combined with GPS, it adds time to a space-based program and can track travel patterns, which can be used to map a person's route and use it in research, it can be used to map simulation models (such as the expansion of rubber plantations in Laos), track deforestation, have an early famine warning, drought warning, or predict food shortages and see where aid would be needed, and it can also be used by volunteers to track environmental changes like Sudden Oak Death. Lastly, it can be used to interface with cell phone network to make an alert system for victims of disasters, like the earthquake in Haiti.

Again, the lecture was purely informative, so there is not much to criticize or comment, except that it was horribly dull. One question I had was if these were being implemented now, and if they weren't, why?

Thomas Friedman's Hot Flat and Crowded

Thomas Friedman came to IU to discuss his new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. He is a New York Times columnist and a Pulitzer Prize winner for his book The World is Flat. His new book, Hot Flat and Crowded is a "green" book, meaning that it's about the recent environmental crisis and how we are "losing our groove" and "how we get it back".

He started out by talking about where the US is now and showed a picture of a billboard in an unnamed country that claimed that the United States is contributing absolutely nothing towards green innovation, which he claimed was untrue and that "innovation is exploding in the US today". However, he claimed that our "booster rocket" (that is, the Capital) is "cracked" and our "pilots" (meaning the government) are "fighting over the flight plan". He claimed that we have had a values breakdown in the last decade and that we have "lapsed into situational values where Mother Nature and the marketplace have hit a wall" and they are actually directly related to each other and if we take care of one, the other will follow. He also claimed that oil was a kind of leech on freedom and every country that has oil does not have adequate human rights or democracy. He cited Lebanon as an example of one of the few countries that does not have oil and is a democracy.

He also said that we are living in an age of Energy Technology revolution, and yet 1.6 billion people have no regular conenctions to an electronic grid and are "energy poor". We are also suffering from a biodiversity loss, meaning that we are losing a new species every 20 mins. Three other "problems" that are highlighted by his book are Energy and Natural Resource Supply and Demand, Petrodictatorship (meaning the tyranny of the oil contributors, companies, etc.), and Climate Change.

However, he stated that these are not problems, but opportunities. They all have the same solution, which is abundant, cheap, reliable energy and that the United States must be at the head of the green revolution. "Green is the new red, white, and blue" and we are not have a green revolution right now, only a "party". The idea of "green" needs to disappear and be replaced with the every day. It is not a "green building" it is so commonplace that it is simply a "building". We need to have a revolution where it's messy and is more "revolutionary" and in this revolution, "price matters". One way to do this is to "change your leaders, not your light bulbs". To start this green revolution, we either need a Democratic China (or a democracy that works) or a Banana Republic (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).

Thomas Friedman had some very good points and was very inspiring. It does seem true and practical that as long as the "green" solution is more expensive or inconvenient than the not so green solution, it will never catch on. I have had personal experience where I've seen recycling and other green solutions become popular because they were able to save a customer money. Freidman even commented that many times at book signings, he usually gets a few people that are bursting to tell him their ideas for green inventions. I don't want to rain on Freidman's parade, but it takes a lot more than ideas to power a "green revolution". Right now, people are just too apathetic or are so indirectly influenced (or see themselves indirectly influenced) that they are not driven to help the environment. What we need is some way to convince people that they are influenced and it does matter what they do, and I haven't seen a solution, not even from Friedman.

His talk was very good, though. He was humorous and intelligent and knowledgable, but he did make a very bad joke in very poor taste. He referred to Mother Nature and the market as "autistic"and said that they had "no feelings whatsoever". As a public speaker and a columnist, Friedman shouldn't even had considered making this joke or comparison. It nearly ruined the speech for me and he should definitely have apologized.

Short Assignment #4

Part 1

Wells-Barnett’s article use of classical oration form instills a sense of urgency into her arguments that makes the audience much more susceptible to her discourse. By instilling this urgency, she captures the reader’s attention and holds it long enough to make her claim. By the time she has made her claim, the reader is so surprised by the factual evidence that they are completely sucked into her article and are compelled to read it all the way through.

She first uses her exordium to hook the reader, “OUR country’s national crime is lynching” (Wells-Barnett 1). First of all, the idea that there is a national crime being committed is astounding and surprises the reader. Secondly, she uses a collective pronoun to grab the reader and also turn them into criminals. It is not “The country’s national crime” but “Our country’s national crime”, the reader is made a part of it and is therefore part of the blame and also the solution. She also italicizes the word “lynching” to emphasize it and also introduce the idea that she will be speaking of a taboo subject.

She goes on to state her narratio, or her case. This takes up the majority of the article. She delves into the history of lynching, including the history of the man Judge Lynch, who was well known for lynching criminals, and the original reason for its use (Wells-Barnett 1). She goes on to state the rise of the popularity of lynching by the Ku Klux Klan and how it spread across the United States, and it is “no uncommon thing to read of lynchings north of Mason and Dixon's line” (Wells-Barnett 1). She speaks of the fact that lynching is an “unwritten law” and implies that as an unwritten law, it is unregulated and unrestrained and unjust (Well-Barnett 1).

She continues into a confirmatio, or her proof of the injustice of lynchings. She not only gives tables of the yearly amount of lynchings in the United States by State, but also lists the victim’s supposed crimes (Wells-Barnett 4). She also tells an account of the lynching of a supposed “guilty” man and his innocent children. The reason for the children’s execution? It was never stated.

The reader might argue that it may not be nice to lynch, but certainly there was some reason for it, which Wells-Barnett anticipates and the next paragraphs become her reprehensio, or her refutation to her opponent’s case. She speaks of international incidents caused by lynchings and the reparations the United States was forced to pay as compensation (Wells-Barnett 5). This transitions the argument from ethical and into economical and diplomatic. If lynchings are causing international incidents and are costing the United States money that could easily be used for other causes, then lynchings should be stopped.

Lastly, in her peroratio, Wells-Barnett sums up her argument. She appeals to the reader’s sense of nationalism and pride where many Americans are ashamed to travel abroad and have to hear other country’s citizens criticize them for “lynching bees” (Wells-Barnett 5). She appeals to the reader’s emotions to ensure that her message rings true and strikes hard where it will hurt most. Also, by following this form, she hooks the reader tightly in the beginning, reels them through her arguments, and eventually wrenches them out of their waters of ignorance and leaves them gasping in the air of shame.

Works Cited

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. “Lynch Law in America” (1900). Mindfully.org. Web. 7 Jan. 2009.

Winterowd, W. Ross. “Dispositio: The Concept of Form in Discourse.” College Composition and Communication 22,1 (Feb 1971): 39-45.

Part 2

An issue I want to pursue is the issue of homosexual marriage. I would be examining the history of marriage itself and how it is defined. In the discourse surrounding this issue, I would have to look at how marriage is defined today and the legal and social applications that come along with it. It would be investigated best in a historical and causal analysis because it can examine homosexual marriage in a secular context and not religious and it would make it more of a level 4 than a level 5 and it could come to an easier conclusion.

Class Blog

Question One:

I was talking with a friend once and she asked my opinion on what she should wear to a formal interview. I told her that she should definitely wear either a suit or a skirt with a blouse and jacket and she protested, claiming that her job wasn't professional enough to need such a nice outfit for an interview. I replied that since it was the final interview, she should dress as professionally as possible because the position she was applying for was competitive. Also, if she arrived to the interview under-dressed, she would probably be passed over immediately because appearance is important in interviews. She eventually agreed with me, and because we were giving decisive weight to different evidence (my friend on the regular job expectations and me to the final interview) this was a Level Three conflict because we both had different ideas of what constituted a good outfit for a final interview.

Question Two:

Savio's overall claim is that the university bureaucrats are violating student rights not only by discouraging free speech, but also by refusing to listen to their protests over being censured. He uses the analogy “Sproul Hall is to student rights as Mississippi is to civil rights” and melds it with the allusion "that impersonal bureaucracy is the efficient enemy in a 'Brave New World'" (Savio). He brings in a real conflicts in the United States, the civil rights movement in Mississippi, and combines it with a dystopia novel where the population is so constructed and regulated that people cannot handle individuality or breaking away from society. In both situations, there is a common enemy: the government and the society the government upholds. The government views racism and the 'separate but equal' laws as the status norm and the idea of giving African Americans equal rights is unthinkable. In the "Brave New World" every person is psychologically and chemically altered to permanently be part of a social class (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_new_world). These back up Savio's claims where the university bureaucrats are wanting to mold their students to a certain job, that "it is a factory that turns out a certain product needed by industry or government" (Savio) and is unconcerned with individual freedoms and discourages them. These strong value claims make Savio's speech at conflict level 5, which is the argument of global values, because he is arguing for human rights, but he also specifies it for student rights, which brings the conflict level down from 5 to 4, making it open to argument.

Question Four:

By arguing in the stasis of cause, Bullard avoids accusations of his motives by not appearing to be skewed, but just by letting the facts speak for themselves. He does manipulate the facts to achieve his goal, but he doesn't let his opinions override his speech. He lists the different government responses from the anthrax scare in the Senate and the Brentwood Post Office and says that the time delay on the directly exposed postal workers allowed two employees to die while the immediate action in the Senate was very efficient and no one died. Bullard does not conjecture, does not specifically talk about rights or values, he simply says what happened and that it should be changed. Wells-Barnett uses the same strategy. She does not argue that it ius wrong to lynch specifically, but she explains that African Americans are being lynched for weak or no reason and gives the statistics of how many African Americans per year and by state are lynched. Like Bullard, she let's the facts speak for themselves and does not overtly state her opinion and is very objective. Savio is a little more opinionated, but he too uses the cause stasis and reiterates what happened when he tried to speak with the Dean of Students and, while he is much more subjective, he is also trying to rally the people to him. By combining causal stasis with his opinion, he is much more able to connect with his listener's passion and rally their support. Bullard, Wells-Barnett, and Savio all use the causal stasis in their ethos to achieve their listeners/readers trust in that they are passionate, and yet not biased in their speeches and their use of actual facts and evidence gets this across very well.

Ink on a Page

In Jonah Lehrer’s The Future of Reading, he creates a hypothesis that, with the introduction of e-readers and e-ink in general, deep reading will diminish and eventually disappear. To prove this hypothesis, he uses neurology and neuroscience to describe how a person reads material. According to Lehrer, the brain contains two pathways to make sense of words. These pathways are activated in different contexts. One pathway is the ventral pathway, which “is turned on by ‘routinized, familiar passages’ of prose” and the other is the dorsal stream, “is turned on whenever we’re forced to pay conscious attention to a sentence, or perhaps an obscure word…or bad handwriting” (Lehrer, 1). Lehrer focuses on the “bad handwriting” aspect of the dorsal stream and proceeds to claim that possessing devices that make reading easier will make the text more forgettable to the average reader.

Putting aside the obvious logical fallacy of this theory for now, I want to concentrate instead on how The Future of Reading is (and is not) scientific. In order to prove and disprove this analysis, I will use Ramage’s Rhetoric and Persuasion II: The Stases and Toulmin. The six questions are ‘what is this thing (definition)’, ‘how much is this thing like/unlike that thing (comparison)’, ‘why did this thing happen (casual)’, ‘how good or bad is this thing (evaluative)’, ‘is this good (ethically)’, and ‘what should we do about this thing (proposal)’ (Ramage, 102-120).

Lehrer does not use all of these questions in his article. He first ignores the definitional stasis and does not define what he means by “reading”. To an English student, reading, at the most basic level is the exchange and absorption of information. To a neuroscientist, reading can be seen as the ability to recognize written characters on a page. Because Lehrer does not define what he means by reading, his hypothesis is unclear. He does answer the resemblance question when he goes to state how like/unlike a book is to an e-reader. To Lehrer, books are solid, old, and harder to read. E-readers are small, new, and “bright and clear” (Lehrer, 1). He also answers the casual question of why e-readers were invented; with the advancement of technology and HD screens, e-readers were inevitable.

As for the next question, the evaluative question, he seems to answer it, but because he failed to answer the definitive question, it seems superficial and incomplete. He claims that e-readers are bad because they make content clearer and therefore forgettable (if we use our ventral pathways), but since he failed to define what reading is, I cannot rely on his definition of bad and good. He vaguely touches on the ethical question, “we’ll become so used to the mindless clarity of e-ink…that the technology will feedback onto the content, making us less willing to endure harder texts” (Lehrer, 2). He does answer the proposal question, but half-heartedly. He says that bad handwriting is the only way to exercise our use of the dorsal path and “perhaps we need to alter the fonts, or reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color screen” (Lehrer, 2).

Overall, Lehrer’s article falls just short of being scientific because with his failure to define what reading or deep reading is, I cannot follow the rest of his arguments well. One stasis question leads to another, and if the first question is unanswered, the rest are just ink on a page. As for his proposal that making text less clear would make people concentrate harder, it’s completely unfounded and ridiculous. If this theory were true, reading would have died out with the invention of the printing press, or the word processor. Ramage makes a comment on how in ethical arguments, consequences are also taken into account and some “consenquentialists” only look at consequences, such as “the drinking of caffeinated beverages…will lead to heroin addiction” (Ramage, 116). With his hypothesis that making text clearer will make reading less memorable, Lehrer can now be seen as a consequetialist.

Bibliography

Lehrer, Jonah. “The Future of Reading.” The Frontal Cortext Science Blog. 8 September, 2010

Ramage, John D. “Rhetoric and Persuasion II: The Stases and Toulmin.” In Rhetoric: A User’s Guide. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2006. 102-120 (excerpts).

The Writer's Audience Needs to Know All of the Angles

In Jane Brody's All in the Name of Science, she makes it very clear who her receptive audience should be: the average citizen that reads the Opinion section of the New York Times. All of her examples of unethical scientific testing, starting from the Tuskegee Study to a study done using convicted criminals in 1969 are biased. This is not to state that unethical testing is right (it clearly isn't) but the examples of the article are unbalanced. There are no examples of unethical testing that actually succeeded in proving a hypothesis or developing a cure. All Brody lays out on the page are experiments that were unsupervised, torturous, and were so sloppy that not even inklings of results were achieved.

If Brody was writing for a different audience, such as a group of scientists, the entire article would have to be rewritten. Many of the examples can be reused, but shown in a different light. Brody has to adjust her perceptions from an audience that is easily swayed by shock and emotion to one that is open to be receptive to the atrocities, but it also needs more information. It is not enough to see the failures, but also the struggle of those who achieved success. A scientist needs to see a situation from all sides. If Brody can become an "original writer" (Ong, 11) like Ong suggests, she can do more than project the imaginary scientific audience, she can "alter" it (Ong, 11) and then her audience will "fictionalize" itself (Ong, 12) in order to fit the role.

Besides finding other examples of unethical testings, Brody can concentrate on the sloppiness of the unsupervised testings that lead to the lack of results. One such example is the research on the prisoners in 1969. Brody claims that the prisoners are coerced into becoming voluntary patients and were examined under "highly questionable studies or drugs and donations of blood plasma" (Brody) and because of the substantial monetary gain, the prisoners failed to report if they had any signs of illness for fear of losing their income. Now, leaving behind the dubious morality of the experiments, one can logically use this example to show the negative aspects of the experiment by explaining that the results from the test because not every symptom and setback was recorded or analyzed. Therefore, the testing would be seen inconclusive and therefore useless and those prisoners lives were endangered or lost for nothing.

All in all, this article was carefully geared towards the general public and not the scientist, which is unwise on Brody's part. The average citizen can be horrified and disgusted with unethical experiments, but it is the scientist's duty to ensure that the studies they conduct are ethical and do not violate any human rights, whether they are uneducated, criminals, or disadvantaged in any other fashion. Also, it makes a much more interesting and convincing argument to hear more than one side of the debate. Brody closes the article by claiming that "there is to this day no universal agreement on what is and what is not an ethical experiment" (Brody), which I highly disagree, but perhaps ethical reforms besides the Nuremberg Code only occurred after 1972.

Bibliography

Brody, Jane E. "All in the Name of Science". New York Times, 30 July 1972. E2.

Ong, Walter J. "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction". PMLA, January 1975. Vol. 90, No. 1.

Style, Not Honesty, Is The Best Policy

The most persuasive aspect of Michael Lemonick’s article, Honesty is Always the Best Policy, is his matter-of-fact elocutio and his seemingly honest portrayal of himself and what he writes. While his article is mainly about his experience in writing pieces on global warming and climate change, the key point of the article is his claims that he is a journalist because he tells the truth. His article is mainly autobiographical when he talks about his career and why he is a journalist and it is deliberative rhetoric with an undertone of epideictic rhetoric.

He starts off the article by claiming that, when speaking to science-journalism classes, most students become journalist to “make the world a better place” (Lemonick, 1) and he himself became a journalist, not to improve the world, but to write about what he loved. Somehow, even though this comment seems to superficially discredit his opinions on global warming, the truth somehow places him deeper into the audience’s trust. Because he is willing to admit his less-than-ideal intentions, the audience is willing to listen.

He talks about how he was tempted in characterizing global warming as a proclamation of “impending doom” (Lemonick, 1) and decides not to because the information simply didn’t show that at the time, it makes him even more honest to the audience. He later brings up that while the “vanishing snows of Kilimanjaro…may not be a victim of climate change alone” (Lemonick, 2) but “the underlying science of climate change is solid” (Lemonick, 2), it is almost a physical relief to read. By the time this article was published, the audience is thoroughly sick of being told that the world is ending and is relieved to hear that the human race hasn’t actually caused all the world’s problems.

In writing about how he words his articles and why he is a journalist, he says that he doesn’t want to be a sensationalist, but he wants to “get at the truth the best I can” (Lemonick, 2) and that his style of journalism will appeal to readers through the enormous changes of his profession. At first glance, his article is only about global warming, but the undertone of Lemonick’s determination to tell the truth overrides the climate change message and changes the reception of the article completely. In enabling this message to be clear to readers, he sticks to his “honest” (Lemonick, 1) and matter-of-fact elocutio and it succeeds in communicating the message.

Bibliography

Lemonick, Michael. “Honesty is Always the Best Policy.” One Earth. 27 May. 2010. http://www.onearth.org/article/honesty-is-always-the-best-policy