Article of the Week 15

Panel: Limit Medical Experiments on Chimps

By Dan Vergano, USA Today

See Article Here

This article describes that issues with using chimpanzees for medical experiments and how more and more scientists are moving away from the use of chimpanzees. The reason being that for the most part they are unnecessary. This is because many other animal tests would work just as well. "If chimpanzees were not available for research, science would still go forward" The author is certainly on the side against the use of chimpanzees, but he doesn’t seem to try to persuade others to be on his side. I think the main purpose of his article is just to better inform people of the topic. For the most part he just sticks to logos, providing information from various professors, doctors, scientists, and activists. The only time he appealed to the audience emotionally was in the first sentence when he included"...chimpanzees, the closest cousins to humans in the animal world..." Overall, his writing was very informational, clear, and concise. He didn't crowd the article with much fluff, not taking as much as a dusting of artistic liberties. Not too much imagery and not a great quantity of figurative language. This author just stuck to the facts, through and through. As to the audience the author was directing towards, it could be anyone who is not well informed on the topic. That seems to pull back to his main purpose, which was to give uninformed people a general idea of what’s going on in the world of chimpanzees. In the end, he has reached that goal, and by informing of the topic, he also will have turned people to his opinion on the topic, whether it was done consciously or not.

Article of the week 14

http://www.theonion.com/articles/november-7-2011,26568/

This political cartoon is titled, November 7th, 2011, after looking up that date; I am under the impression that this was when China decided to ban incandescent light bulbs in 5 years. I am not entirely sure of the background facts, but even without that I can gather a good general view of the topic just by this picture. The cartoonist certainly does a good job in ensuring that we know the topic just by labeling some people, and using speech bubbles. The lights we are beginning to change to, which are supposedly more ecofriendly, are not exactly the best type of lighting. This would be implied by the teary eyed ghost of Thomas Edison and the "dim bulbs" comment being made by the man in the corner. The cartoon makes you wonder, are the lights truly more ecofriendly, or are they just a new scheme China has worked up to make more money? The American light bulb consumers seem to have very naive attitudes in the picture. The words “Latest Fad” printed on the box just further add to defining them as being ignorant in their change, not to mention the Chinese man depicted laughing and clutching of large wad of bills that gives you the impression he would be thinking “hehehe, yet again I have scammed the Americans”. I have no background on the topic, so I have no idea if the way it is being presented is at all accurate; it is after all coming from The Onion. But that just goes to better express the Illustrators effectiveness. I have a pretty good idea of his opinion on the subject, and it makes sense. The only problem, which often comes up in non-written pieces is the lack of credibility and any usage of facts or statistics that make me certain the illustrator must be depicting everything truthfully. Overall the cartoonist does a good job of getting across the implications of this change, through his strong use of text in speech bubbles and as labels. The text directed the views train of thought.  

Article of the Week Thirteen

Bobby McFerrin Hacks Your Brain with Music

See clip here

In this Ted Talk, Bobby Mcferrin illustrates "expectation" with the pentatonic scale. His method of doing so though isn't through lecture. He shows it by making the scale visible. He pretends the floor is a keyboard, and expects the audience to sing the pitch that would be relative to where he stands. He doesn't tell the audience what every pitch is though. He gives 1 or 2 and then our brains figure out the rest of the pattern. It is similar to when your finding the blind spot by looking at a paper with 2 dots. One dot will eventually vanish because your brain fills in the blank with what would make most sense, the white of the paper. Bobby Mcferrin is a very talented musician, but he also presents himself in a very happy and kind way. He doesn't use his talents to distance himself from people, he engages them. (speaking of him not distancing himself from normal people, I saw him going to see a movie at the ambler theater a few months ago) The way he presents himself make you want to soak up every word he says. Come to think of it though, he didn't need to say much in this clip. He was able to "lecture" about the way we think, with only a few guiding words. His methods were purely based on letting the audience get involved. He was able to get across his point by letting the audience experience it for themselves. This was a highly successful method. It brings to mind that saying about how if you hear something you forget it, but if you do it or experience it, it will stick with you. I wish that teachers appealed to these methods more often, it would make learning an entirely different experience.