TOW #16 "A Time to Break Silence"

Today being Martin Luther King Day I decided to read one of his speeches. The "I have a dream" speech immediately comes to mind at the thought of Dr. King, but I wanted to read one of his less famous speeches, so I chose an excerpt from "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence". In this speech, Dr. King protests the war in Vietnam and calls on the government and people of the United States to bring an end to it. He begins by explaining why he protests the war. Among his reasons he lists that the expense of the war is detrimental to the attempts to help the poor in the United States, that it forces the poor to fight in Vietnam for rights or privileges that they don't have at home, and above all that the fighting is not on behalf of the Vietnamese people and it is destroying their society. After enumerating the crimes of the war, Dr. King calls on the US government to put an end to the war. He lists five steps to achieving this goal, to show that it can and must be done. He also appeals to the American people and asks them to peacefully protest to pressure the government to end the war. Throughout the speech, Dr. King uses many rhetorical questions. For example, he asks "What do they [the Vietnamese people] think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building?" (King par. 19). These questions serve to drive home the points to the audience, to get them to seriously consider the US actions in Vietnam and what should be done about them. They also question the motives and morality of the US government, and call for change. Ultimately, they help Dr. King connect to the thoughts of the audience and to call them to help bring an end to the war.

Here is where I found the excerpt of the speech: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm

TOW #15 "The Book of the Future" Visual

This is a comic by cartoonist Grant Snider depicting the rise of the book of the future: really the regular paper books that we already have. In the nine panels Snider describes how e-readers would, in a futuristic society, inspire the need to revert back to normal books. It makes an ironic statement by parodying the modern excitement of the e-reader. Though most people still read regular books, the e-reader fits into our generation of excessive technology. At this time we are continuing to develop technology, but the cartoon describes how we will be unsatisfied by that technology and and will "create" a new one in going back to our old "device". It parodies the promotion of a new technology by exemplifying the issues of an e-reader, including ones about which people regularly complain. It proposes a solution to that problem by presenting the book of the future, which is really the book of the past. This irony continues to be played out through the cartoon by noting how the book solves the problems of the e-reader in ways that we have already used and taken for granted. Overall, the cartoon amusingly achieves its purpose by reminding people that we already have what we need with our old "technology". Though in the last panel, the cartoon concedes that e-readers are more convenient for travel (especially by jet-pack, in the potential future) it ultimately reminds the audience that while e-readers are useful and good for somethings, in our excitement over them and need for technology, we should not forget the merits of a good, old-fashioned book..

TOW #14 IRB Post

In the second half of Blink, Malcolm Gladwell continues to explore how the brain's unconscious thinking works, as well as the power and implications of this kind of thinking. Though the unconscious has the ability to pick up on details and rapidly make accurate assessments, there are times when it can be wrong. Gladwell explains how one can become "mind blind" when one's thinking narrows during high stress situations, or how judgement can be influenced by stereotypes and prejudices unconsciously. Again, Gladwell uses anecdotes from real events and evidence from studies to convincingly support his ideas. Each chapter in the book is organized around one main story that deals with an aspect or idea of unconscious thinking, and then throughout the chapter it is analyzed with support from other anecdotes, events, or research. For example, in the chapter "Seven Seconds in the Bronx", Gladwell tells the story of a police shooting in New York City in 1999, in which a young man was killed by the police because they thought he was acting suspiciously and they thought he had a gun. In the chapter, Gladwell goes into depth on the story, then cites cases of other police brutality stories and introduces the idea of mind-blindness. Ultimately, he analyzes the anecdote to show how our unconscious can drastically mislead us in fast moving situations of overwhelming stress, and how we need to understand this and be able to control it. In the conclusion of the book, Gladwell writes about a female trombonist who made it into the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in a blind audition, but was demoted and discriminated against when it was discovered that she was female. With this story he explores the issue of the lack of women in professional orchestras before the blind audition process was established. When the judges could see the performers, their opinions were unconsciously influenced by the gender of the performer, as well as their posture and demeanor, and their instrument, thus letting their personal prejudices affect their decisions. The important part of this story, Malcolm Gladwell emphasizes, is that the problem was fixed by the implementation of blind auditions. This story at the end of the book, ultimately reinforces Gladwell's purpose: to make the audience aware of how their unconscious thinking works so that they can understand it and train it to use it better. He gets his message across strongly and effectively because his evidence and research and his analysis of these shows the reader the ideas and how they are influential in real life.