Rhetoric: September 2005 Archive Page

WASHINGTON, DC—Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. "The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. "But when so-called 'contributors' began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought it might be best to cancel the project." Congress intends to restore the Constitution to its pre-Wiki format as soon as an unadulterated copy of the document can be found. --Congress Abandons WikiConstitution (The Onion (Satire))

That's the whole news item.

Usually once a decade an invention comes along that makes everyone revise the way they think about an accepted form of technology. In the first decade of the 21st Century the invention is Uni-Screw?.

Uniscrew? replaces Slotted, Phillips,? Pozi-Drive,? Torx? and Square Head style screws and offers significant advantages compared to these fastening mediums. As such, Uniscrew? represents the most significant development in fastener technology for decades! --What is Uni-Screw? (Uni-Screw)

I like hexagons quite a bit, and I happen to like fasteners and tools, so naturally this product appeals to me.

But the language of the website reminds me of this article from The Onion: "Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber Greatest Invention In The History Of Mankind Ever.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Update, 07 Jul 2008: Link is dead... Wayback Archive, uniscrew.com.

During the 1990's, Lorin Anderson (a former student of Benjamin Bloom) led a team of cognitive psychologists in revisiting the taxonomy with the view to examining the relevance of the taxonomy as we enter the twenty-first century.

REMEMBERING

Recognise, list, describe, identify retrieve, name ?.

Can the student RECALL information?

UNDERSTANDING

Interpret, exemplify, summarise, infer, paraphrase ?..

Can the student EXPLAIN ideas or concepts?

APPLYING

Implement, carry out, use ?

Can the student USE the new knowledge in another familiar situation?

ANALYSING

Compare, attribute, organise, deconstruct ?

Can the student DIFFERENTIATE between constituent parts?

EVALUATING

Check, critique, judge hypothesise ...

Can the student JUSTIFY a decision or course of action?

CREATING

Design, construct, plan, produce ...

Can the student GENERATE new products, ideas or ways of viewing things ? --Revised Bloom's Taxonomy (oz - TeacherNet)

Via Mike Arnzen's Pedablogue.

I've heard this revision mentioned at conferences, but I've never actually tracked it down. Thanks for pointing it out, Mike.

Proof by clever variable choice
"Let A be the number such that this proof works. . "

Proof by tessellation
"This proof is the same as the last."

Proof by divine word
"And the Lord said, 'Let it be true,' and it was true."

Proof by stubbornness
"I don't care what you say-it is true!" --36 Methods of Mathematical Proof (BlueMoon.net)

Thanks, Josh... this makes a great companion to Twenty Special Forms of Rhetoric.

Reflection on Wojtyla's The Jeweller's Shop (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last night, I read Karol Wojtyla The Jeweller’s Shop for the first time. I knew it was mostly a collection of monologues with little action, in part because it was written to be performed in secret, in Nazi-Communist-occupied Poland.

It is a poetic drama, in which the spoken word dominates over all other components of theater. (I’m reading it in translation, of course.) The old jeweler who figures in the lives of three couples only appears through their lines – he never appears in the play.

In the play, numerous references to “ego” and “alter ego,” which recalls the influence of Freud in the early 20th century. But even more notable is the anti-romantic stance. “I wanted to regard love as passion,” says Teresa, who lives for many years as a widow. If she expected love to sweep her away, she would have been disappointed.

Andrew dismisses “beauty accessible to the senses,” and prefers a stronger bridge between people: “beauty accessible to the mind.” It is perhaps this bridge that gives their brief marriage meaning even after his death.

I found personal meaning in the hesitation that Teresa and Andrew feel outside the jeweller’s shop window. “suddenly we were together / on both sides of the big transparent sheet / filled with glowing light.”

During my own engagement, for months I felt a horrid knot in my stomach when passing jewelry shops. Not because I didn’t want to get married or because I was worried about spending money, but because the sparkling metallic teeth of the salesbots gleamed so intensely whenever their sensors detected a young couple slowing down to take a look. (“May I help you?” “Why yes, you can BACK OFF, you gleaming metallic salesbot!”)

Where was I?

Teresa and Andrew are equal in height, still choosing their fate before the window, which has become a mirror.

The involvement of the chorus in the wedding scene reminded me of the abstract depiction of the wedding in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which was written about 20 years earlier, though Wilder was toying with minimalism for its aesthetic effect, not out of theatrical necessity. At any rate, the wine-cheered crowd is present for the wedding, which is public, and follows the couple part of the way. But at some point the crowd will drop out of the picture.

The rush and fun of the wedding will be over, and the hard work of the marriage will begin. Teresa sees it as “The will of Teresa being Andrew, / the will of Andrew being Teresa.”

Wojtyla, who would eventually become a priest, bishop, and John Paul II, knew suffering. His own mother died when he was about nine, his elder brother died a few years later, and his father died when Wojtyla was in college. While the play speaks highly of married love, unlike a traditional comedy (which ends with a wedding), this play includes that staple of country music, “old love on the rocks.”

Echoing Teresa’s formula for married love, Anna laments, “It was as if Stefan had ceased to be in me. / Did I cease to be in him too? / Or was it simply that I felt / I now existed only in myself?” (32)

Ibsen represents a similar discovery as a liberating, dollhouse-shattering force in Nora’s life, but Ibsen was more an individualist than anything else (including feminist). Wojtyla presents the ego as empty deadness, and points out the futility of Anna’s self-absorbed attempts to lash out: “So I fought for Stefan’s love, / ready to retreat at any time, / if he did not realize the sense / of the battle.”

Wojtyla has to convey to the audience a deeper understanding of Anna’s character than Anna herself possesses. “I thought the guilt was Stefan’s -- / I could find no guilt in myself.” (34) But she and Stefan are both guilty of sins of cold hearts. (This affects their daughter, Monica, whom the passionate Anna finds strange and reserved.)

The play’s final section focuses on Christopher (the son of Teresa and the late Andrew, who died when Christopher was a baby) and Monica (the daughter of Anna and Stefan, who are still together).

The line that struck me the most powerfully is Monica’s: “I want so much to be yours, and there is only one thing constantly in my way – that I am myself” (57).

As the play was wrapping up, we see the mature Teresa’s discussion of the effect on her son of the mysterious Adam, and we see the mature Anna’s recognition that a chance encounter with the same Adam did some work to heal the rift between her and Stefan. I thought the play was going to end on a realistic note, but suddenly we have a final redeeming reflection from Stefan (who hasn’t spoken at all during this time).

# Proof by Name Dropping
A: What do you think about objection X?
B: Well, BigNamei, BigNamej, and BigNamek agree with me. LittleNamei might agree with you, if only they were that silly.

# Proof by Absentee Belittlement
A: What do you think about objection X?
B: Person C, who is not here to defend themselves, thinks that. They are silly. You are silly.

# Proof by Humility
A: What do you think about objection X?
B: You state that so forcefully. I could be wrong. You seem so sure of yourself. That is silly.

# Proof by Humiliation
A: What do you think about objection X?
B: Have you read Book Z, or Book Y, even Book W?
A: Well, no.
B: That explains why you asked such a question. Sit down silly person. --Twenty Special Forms of Rhetoric (Speculative Grammarian)

That is silly.

Infidelity is genetic, say scientists. Electricity allergy real, says researcher. I've been collecting "scientists have found the formula for" stories since last summer, carefully pinning them into glass specimen cases, in preparation for my debut paper on the subject. So far I have captured the formulae for: the perfect way to eat ice cream (AxTpxTm/FtxAt +VxLTxSpxW/Tt=3d20), the perfect TV sitcom (C=3d[(RxD)+V]xF/A+S), the perfect boiled egg, love, the perfect joke, the most depressing day of the year ([W+(D-d)]xTQ MxNA), and so many more. Enough! Every paper - including this one - covers them: and before anyone bleats excuses on their behalf, these stories are invariably written by the science correspondents, and hotly followed, to universal jubilation, with comment pieces, by humanities graduates, on how bonkers and irrelevant scientists are.

[...]

So how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. "Scientists today said ... scientists revealed ... scientists warned." And if they want balance, you'll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why (an approach at its most dangerous with the myth that scientists were "divided" over the safety of MMR). One scientist will "reveal" something, and then another will "challenge" it. A bit like Jedi knights. --Ben Goldacre --Don't dumb me down  (Guardian)

Because Katrina scattered Tulane students across the nation like dandelion spores, Whiteside hopes that interest might grow near colleges from New York to California that have taken in Tulane students. ?We might ask some of our students in other places to visit high schools with us,? he said.

He also hopes that from the wreckage, Tulane can present an unprecedented educational opportunity to students. ?If you want to study hydrology, restorative work, social work, engineering, reestablishing public health and educational systems, there will by no place like New Orleans over the next decade,? Whiteside said. ?We?re going to rebuild a city in very short order. There are few places in the world where someone can watch that as a laboratory unfolding before them.? --David Epstein --Homeless Recruiters (Inside Higher Ed)

Life goes on... it's amazing to see how quickly Tulane's PR folks have come up with this pitch.

--Bus-ted! Update (Junkyard Blog)

This satellite photo shows some 255 unused buses in a flooded New Orleans lot. (Found via Instapundit.) The photo -- found, I presume, via Google Earth, and mailed to a weblog by a reader -- depicts an unused escape route for some 15,000 New Orleans citizens. The blog, which defends George Bush against attacks from the left, represents another example of the power that citizens have -- we can access Google's images of the Earth, analyze them, and publish our findings. While amateur sleuthing is probably not the way to definitive answers, it can raise powerful questions.

Bush himself has to answer questions raised by photos of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, coffins returning from Iraq, and war death in general. But for now I’ll consider Katrina’s aftermath.

Why the National Guard took so many days to get into the city baffles me, as does the sight of these unused buses.

The New Orleans mayor is understandably stressed, so I can understand his cry for help:

I need 500 buses, man. We ain't talking about -- you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here. I'm like, “You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans.”

But one has to ask -- why didn't the city's bus drivers get off their asses and get the refugees out?

The answer is, of course, that no one person made a single mistake that caused this disaster. Not President George W. Bush, not Ray Nagin, not the bus drivers (who were presumably doing their best to take care of their families) and not the tens of thousands of individuals who chose to ride out the storm. Few disasters are really the fault of one person. Consider the grade of steel used in the construction of the Titanic, the captain’s decision to keep up speed despite the warnings he’d received of icebergs, the telegraph operator’s decision not to deliver to the captain all the warnings he received, an administrative decision to remove several rows of lifeboats in order to give the upper-class passengers more deck space – the list goes on and on.

Between the rage of those who attack George Bush for not being God ("We'd have been able to control the weather if there were a Democrat in the White House! As a senator, didn't Al Gore take the initiative in inventing a weather-control machine?") and the indignation of others who still think he can walk on water, I still find it shocking that the stories of death and misery -- not only in New Orleans, but also in the surrounding area -- are coming from within my own country.

Update: Upon re-reading this entry, I think I may have given the impression that all the people who rode out the storm in New Orleans did so by choice. Many were trapped. But to the passengers of the Titanic, who weren't aware of the extent of the damage, staying on board the ship (which still had lights and where the officers seemed to be in charge) seemed a lot more sensible than taking one's chances on the open sea. Few people who make bad survival decisions live to regret their errors; so people who've lived through rough times tend to get the feeling that disasters happen to other people (hence my earlier shock to realize that these reports were coming from the world's only remaining superpower). This isn't about policy or politics, it's about human psychology.

As my original column made clear (and many amid the outcry reiterated) when it comes to blogging, I just don't "get it." That's right, I don't. Many in the tenured generation don't, and they'll be sitting on hiring committees for years to come.

If that's bad news, I'm sorry. But would it really be better if no one bothered to mention it? --"Ivan Tribble" --They Shoot Messengers, Don't They? (Chronicle)

Tribble responds to the outcry against a column in which he warned academic bloggers that the search committees on which he has served have all considered blogging to be a negative in the hiring process.

Tribble commends Matt Kirschenbaum for inviting bloggers to assemble evidence for a rebuttal.

Private vs. Public
• Anyone can read this: professors, classmates
• Don’t write about your love life or last weekend’s activities unless you want your professors (or the academic dean) to read about it
• Take caution when complaining about classes or classmates
  
• Also, watch what you write – don’t link to pictures of you doing anything illegal while at school. Someone will invariably turn you in.

Academic=Thought
• As with everything, try not to make hasty generalizations about issues, and don’t be offensive to people or groups!
• Don’t start out your homework assignments with the title: “Homework.” That is very boring. Few will actually read it.
• Add links and use them well. Don’t type out the address – make the words describing the link be the link.
• Don't plagarize, and attribute what you "borrow."

Foster Discussion

• Comment on other people’s blogs. It makes them feel loved and needed.
• Intellectual sparring is okay, but few people enjoy personal attacks
• If you write it, it will be misunderstood
• Use emoticons when you think you might be taken the wrong way (but don’t use them when blogging or commenting on a serious or professional issue)

The Upside
• Your own weblog not only gives you a handy personal publishing outlet, but it also is much better than jweb's forums.
  
• You get to know your classmates better. Make friends through your blog.
• Future employers might read your blog, and might want to hire you because of it.
• Well-thought-out weblogs aren’t born every day – just look at the recently updated lists of Blogger.com and LiveJournal. You’ll stand out in a crowd.

Helpful hint: before you click “save,” highlight and copy it should MT foul-up. Also, thanks to all of you who provided examples for this educational purpose... ;) --Julie Young --Getting the most out of your academic weblog (Work in Progress)

A good overview, written by a former student who has since graduated.