Research found

 

• O'Malley, D. (2011). Updated four loko beverage doesn't pack same punch McClatchy - Tribune Information Services. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/862124743?accountid=13158
•  Public health; sen. klein & public health advocates unveil plan to combat underage 'alcopop' abuse (2011). NewsRx. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/860318741?accountid=13158

Bonding Over a Mascot

The author’s original questions could have been anything from what the Seminole mascot represented to the people in Florida, or to why the statues and mascot were seen as offensive to some nut not to those of Seminole descent. The purpose of the article is more or less to inform people about the Florida Seminole mascot, and explain why it isn’t offensive to most people, even those who are of Indian descent. The research that the author did was very helpful in proving his point. The author got quotes from important people that the issue concerned. He got a quote from other Florida State students who were of Indian descent, and they didn’t think that it was very offensive. They also got a quote from the Florida governor of Indian affairs, and he thought that it was offensive and outrageous. It shows you that most of the people who think that the Seminole is an offensive mascot are mainly the older people of Indian descent. Most of the younger kids and college students seem to think that it is ok, which is why it is nice that the author wasn’t biased. If they were biased it wouldn’t have been as good of an article because they wouldn’t have had any opposing arguments to oppose their beliefs, and there wouldn’t have been anything to research really.

Is Google making Us Stupid

I agree that Google is making us stupid. Google is making us stupid because it makes it so we don’t have to research or learn anything to understand something. Google allows us to just search for key words and we get the answer we are looking for. As the author stated in the article, the internet makes us unable to read in depth and stay focused is exactly what happened to me. I can’t focus enough now to read more than 8 pages at a time without getting completely distracted. Before the internet I could read a whole book in a weekend, and now I would be lucky if I could finish a book in a month without getting bored and just “googling” what the book is about. I couldn’t even stay focused enough to read all of this nine page paper. Will the internet as vast as it is it does all of the work that we used to have to do on our own. You can type in a key word or a phrase and it will give you thousands of results relating to that topic. The only example that I can think of that Google is actually helping us is because it gives us so much information. This limits the amount of useless searching for information in libraries, and can make us more productive by being more time efficient.

Joy Response

Bill Joy’s main concern is that people will become too dependent on robots, that we will use all of the robot’s decisions. Also that we won’t be able to maintain the intelligence that it takes to keep up our society that the robots will have to do everything for us and if we try to turn them off it would be suicide. Also that if the elite are in control of the most advanced machines as they are today, they may try to get rid of humanity and only leave the elite to rule the world. Some techniques that Joy uses to set up his argument are, examples of books that people have written on the issue, his own experiences in technology, and the progress of weapons of mass destruction, and how nanotechnology can be harnessed with only knowledge. The most effective example I think that he gives is how real nanotechnology can be created so easily with knowledge. He says that will bombs and other chemical warfare you need large areas to work and rare materials, but with nanotechnology you can simply control it with knowledge. Also how a bomb is made to only blow up once, where with this type of robotics they multiply thousands of time and can be even more devastating. I think that these issues of the human population becoming more dependent on robots and technology are very close. You see almost every day that there are new machines that can think and act on other machines without any human help. Already in most factories machines have replaced the human work force. Soon the skills and techniques that we know will be lost and the only ones who know how to keep our society running will be the robots. Especially as newer and better technology is released every day we are only moving towards a technology dominant civilization, and they will control us. 11 years from now I think this issue won’t even be one because it will have already happened. At the rate we are moving everything will be done for us. There will be cars that drive for us, and there are already at airports strips that walk for you and you don’t have to move. We will in 11 years become lazy an ultimately reguire some kind of technological help to go through our day.

Sunday's Proposal- Egypt and Middle east conflict

• http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/?gclid=CO752_jh3acCFcbc4AodTxcP-g
• http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/566454/201103180903/Energy-Stocks-Oil-Prices-Rise-On-Middle-East-Conflict.htm
• This is important because it is affecting global oil prices which we depend on

Saturday's proposal- Penn state's budget cuts

• http://www.publicopiniononline.com/localnews/ci_17641112
• http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/local/the_intelligencer_news/montco-legislator-addresses-board-on-state-budget-cuts/article_bb6efaab-23fd-5c19-9a99-e631419eb349.html
• http://www.wnep.com/wnep-harrisburg-state-university-hearing-budget-cuts,0,6318475.story
• This issue abou the state cutting funding to state schools is important because it affects everyone who goes to penn state. Students from PA will now maybe have to pay full tuition price, and like me who is out of state will have to pay even more money to go here.

Friday's proposal- natural resources

• http://www.cnas.org/naturalsecurity?gclid=CLS49Y_f3acCFeM85QodeHNC_w
• http://www.nrdc.org/
• One global issue is the amount of natural resources we have left in the world. This is important because electricity and most of our cars use natural resources as fuel.

Blog Entry #4

          I understand that he is trying to be sarcastic about eating the children, but it is just weird to read because he has thought up ideas to use every part of them. Some of the issues that he talks about that he uses satire in is the poverty in Ireland, the lack of jobs, and the lack of food available. I think the way he uses the satire undermines his point because it makes it seem like he is joking about the issues that Ireland is facing. These are clearly serious issue’s that he is making fun of, and I don’t think most people would respond in a positive way to this proposal. What he was saying was just so ridiculous that it was disturbing that he thought rich people should buy these poor children, and then when they get fat they should eat them. Also how you can use the skin of the children for boots or ladies gloves was weird, and made me think about referring this guy to a psychiatrist and not about the issues of the amount of poor people. I understand what satire is and know that it is supposed to be funny and shame people into changing, but I think he goes too far to the point where it doesn’t work anymore. The main purpose of this is to, like it is supposed to, shame people/Ireland to change and find a way to help the amount of poor children get food.

                The Middle Eastern protests are becoming a huge issue, and influencing the price on our oil. I have a simple plan to fix everything. We have the most nuclear weapons along with our allies, and we should just bomb the place and take over. No one would dare to challenge the U.S. to go to war. We can even use the dead bodies that are left over for fuel as well by burning them in a large furnace. This proposal would take care of two problems. The oil crisis would be over, and we would also eliminate all of the terrorist threats that there are. This way we would have all the oil that we would need to lower gas prices, and we wouldn’t have to wait for the protests to be over to get a large supplty.

Song Review

          The artist that is my favorite is Drake, and his album that is my favorite is Thank Me Later. He is a new artist from Canada who is only 23 years old. The review is supposed to be about his new album, “Thank Me Later,” but it is actually more about Drake himself as an artist. Although the critique does talk about some of the songs in the album, it isn’t the main purpose of the review. I agree with the evaluation because it portrays Drake in a positive sense, and really gives good examples of his music, and how he works different artists into his own. He also understands the meaning of Drake’s overall message of how we are alone, and that really speaks to a lot of people. He also says how Drake is a new pop star and is trying to change the pop music industry. I would change some things how Drake is evaluated, and focus more on the lyrics in his songs and not really the other artists that he has in the songs. The critic was a little indecisive with whether or not he was critiquing Drake’s music, lyrics, or the people he has in his music. Overall it was a good Critique of Drake and portrayed him in a positive way. Some other reasons that Drake and this album is my favorite are the beats and the lyrics of his music. All of his songs are relatively slow compared to other rap music, and they actually have meaning to them.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/clicktrack/2010/06/album_review_drake_thank_me_la.html

Defenition Proposal

·         I am going to be defining the phrase “browning out”

·         It basically means you get drunk and you only remember bits and pieces of the night, instead of blacking out and not remembering anything.

·         I am defining this word because it is starting to become a more commonly used phrase around college kids, that originated from the T.V. show “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

·         The purpose of this paper is to let people know what it means and to spread the phrases meaning to other people who maybe haven’t seen the show.

·         The audience will mainly be college kids

Let me know if you think just changing the word I use all together would be better.

Blog Entry #2

Oswalt defines the word otaku simply as someone who has an obsession with something very small and minute.  He never really says what geek and nerds were to him since he didn’t consider himself a geek, but he said other people classified geeks as people who were in to comic books and anime. He is defining these terms because he wants the audience, who might not of grown up in the 70’s or 80’s, to know what he is talking about. The point of this is really about how geeks and nerds used to be classified and seen as outcasts, but now because of the changing pop culture with movies, it seems as though what the nerds were into is now popular. The larger point about society is really that over time, because of technology advances, there isn’t really a category called nerds since everyone has their own small obsession, which is what otaku means. I agree with Oswalt’s point that everyone is becoming more accepting of these obsessions, but it would be nice as he said he wants his daughter to do, to discover something no one else has that really isn’t main stream yet. I think certain levels of geekiness have become normal. The people who like anime or comic books have definitely been accepted into society, but the ones who read all day and have bug collections or something are still looked at differently.

Supermarket Pastoral is basically a literary form where people feel as though they are eating safer food and helping the earth and encourage you to buy their product. Supermarkets basically make up little stories on their food labeled organic, which makes the consumer believe that the animals and food was grown as in stories we read when we were younger. He is talking about this word because as he started buying more and more organic foods he was wondering if the images he imagined of the animals was really what it was like on the farm. He believes that in order for the farmers to make more money that just have journalists write nice little descriptions of how the animal was raised without actually giving too much information. This then lets the buyer imagine their own image of the life of the animal. This essay basically is saying that the organic agriculture culture is more or less fake, and is only trying to get bigger revenue for taking better care of their products.

Topic Proposal

The specific event I am going to be writing about is when I had brain surgery.

This matters to me because it changed my life and affected me a lot. There are some things I can't do anymore because of it.

The purpose of this will be to explain what happened to me. Tell how I found out to the end of the surgery.

The audience in mind will probably be anyone who has had surgery and has affected their lives, or people who know someone that this has happened too.

First Blog Assignment

Colin Bonhag

Josh Call

First Blog Assignment

1/13/11

                Burke looks at the book, Mein Kampf, as a person in the world who had heard about what happened and was looking back on what Hitler did. Burke looks at Mein Kampf from a rhetorical perspective because Hitler’s book conveyed a message from him to the people of Germany, and to all of the Jews in Europe. Some of the rhetorical appeals that Burke talked about were how Hitler preached that Christian theology said that all other races, such as the Jews were inferior. Hitler responded to this exigence by pushing his ideas on his country while in economic depression, and the people’s minds were distracted. Hitler wanted the Aryan’s to remain superior and control the economy instead of the Jews, so they saw the Jews as a threat and attacked them. His support from most of Germany is what ultimately led to him declaring war on much of the world in his hunt to exterminate the Jewish population.

                Some recent propaganda that I don’t necessarily agree with, but everyone else seems to be the war in Iraq. The news, president, and media tell the public that we are over there to be friend to the Iraq people. They say that we are there to get rid of the Taliban, but really we just want to control people. We should stay out of other countries business, and stop putting the lives of our soldiers at risk. This still has a lot of followers because many people have family members in Iraq, or support the fight against terrorist. The audience of this rhetoric/propaganda is U.S. citizens because it affects all of our lives depending on the outcome. We are in a war which could always cause harm to us. The main audience is the people who have family members Iraq right now, and any government officials who are controlling what we do while in Iraq.