Final Exam: Vaccines

The anti-vaccination debate analysis

Field Map

The rhetoric of sports communication

Analysis of Visual Rhetoric

This image was on the website, Social Times, which has articles about games, apps, social media and other advertising and marketing topics. The purpose of the graphic was for informational and functional purposes. Since the two teams playing in this NBA playoffs were both in the southern part of the United States, it was obvious that the most tweets would be coming from people in nearby states. Since the two infographics are very similar, it would have been helpful if the article gave more of a description discussing the differences in the maps. Also the title of the article was "26.7 Million Tweets Sent During NBA Finals, 150,000 Tweets Per Minute Game 7 Peak" which could not be gathered from these tweet maps. The legend for the maps stated that the different colors represented the number of tweets per million population, so if the audience is not familiar with the population of each states, then it would be impossible to infer how many tweets actually were coming from those states. Since there was no caption for the two maps and they looked relatively similar, this was an ineffective way to compare tweets about the two teams unless the purpose was to show that there was no significant difference between the numbers of tweets about each team.

The Ethics of Expediency

Katz Article

• a piece can be written "technically correct" if it has all of the parts that the technical piece requires but still have "flaws" in regards to other types of rhetoric (ethics/ethos)
• in persuasive argument we have learned in my speech class two types:
• problem solution
• problem cause solution
• how can you use logic to persuade
• making the voice of the argument less personal (to remove responsibility)
• sometimes technical writing can make a topic trivial and vague emotionally
• clear, easy to understand

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• to write well is to have power
• can do good or bad things
• Cicero: the good man speaking (ethical, moral)
• Ex. Hitler, a good speaker, rhetorician, influenced many people --but without virtue
• "put weapons in the hands of madmen"
•  what words are not used?
• "persons", "humans"
• PROBLEM: that it is so stripped down emotionally on a topic that has a lot of emotion tied to it.

Ethics

• where do they come from?
• teachers, parents, peers, Bible, laws (government and natural), religion, conscience, media, societal norms, experience (nature vs. nurture), role models, employer,
• Philosophy --> Logical (things we don't think about)
• What's wrong? Why?
• hitting, cheating, stealing, lying, killing, adultery, incest, selfishness, greed, lust, gluttony, envy, laziness
•  What's right? What's the value?
• honesty
• loyalty
• protection of property
• Without ethics?
• chaos
• anarchy
• death

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

I think you could relate this passage to unboxing a black box. Since the output (record player) wasn't exactly to the turtoises' specifications and wasn't "perfect" he set out to have one created that was indeed "perfect". This meant he had to think about the details of the record player, the sounds it made and the materials it was made of. Many times we just accept the completed product and even if we are not completely happy with it we do not make suggestions to the manufacturer on ways to make the product better or more to our individual likings, we assume that we are the only ones who would want a specific detail added or removed. He also mentions the workings of musicians and poets as well and what goes into creating their masterpieces as well.

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• laws: 
• what goes up must come down
• once you have a law there is a possibly that there is a contradiction to the law
•  how do we figure out truth?
• dialectic to create rhetoric (Plato)
• Contracrosticpunctus: acrostics
• levels of hidden meaning
• if you had a machine that could fix itself before it broke, could it ever be broken?

Self Made Man by Jonathan Kingdon

• can history be scientific?
• we can use scientific measures in historical manners
• is history fact?
• Dates, names and locations can be factual
• there will always be bias depending on who is relaying the history
• history is based on experience
• we are constantly learning about history, and the learning will be never ending since each present moment eventually becomes history
• what history is the most important, recent history or the origins of mankind?
• what can we learn most from?

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• we come from a common ancestry--
• spasms of sexual chemistry, that pass on their genes
• everyone that has come before us had sex, eaten, lived
• acknowledging those who came before us
• sex as passing on a baton

Writing for Science 4/15

Chapter 6: Scientifc Visuals

• to make the argument
• Ex. recolored to make meaning
• dye or electron microscopy to differentiate imagery
•