"Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult."
Samuel Johnson
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Individual Writing Conferences
I am available on MONDAY from 8-9:15 and from 10:30 to 1:30 and on FRIDAY from 8-1:30.
You must meet with me during one of these times.
Campus is closed on Wednesday for Veteran's Day...thank a veteran!
You must meet with me during one of these times.
Campus is closed on Wednesday for Veteran's Day...thank a veteran!
In Class Synthesis Work
1. Look at your three sources.
2. Look at one common point that all three share (your best similarity or key argument between the three sources)
3. In one sentence, state the theme that these three sources have in common.
4. In one sentence, state how one of the sources relates to that theme. (mention the source by name in your sentence)
5. In one sentence, state how the next source relates to that theme. (mention the source by name in your sentence)
6. In one sentence, state how the third source relates to that theme. (mention the source by name in your sentence)
7. In one to two sentences, make some commentary on the common theme you just discussed. What are the implications of this common theme?
2. Look at one common point that all three share (your best similarity or key argument between the three sources)
3. In one sentence, state the theme that these three sources have in common.
4. In one sentence, state how one of the sources relates to that theme. (mention the source by name in your sentence)
5. In one sentence, state how the next source relates to that theme. (mention the source by name in your sentence)
6. In one sentence, state how the third source relates to that theme. (mention the source by name in your sentence)
7. In one to two sentences, make some commentary on the common theme you just discussed. What are the implications of this common theme?
Monday, November 2, 2009
VOICE YOUR CONFUSION
What is your trouble with the synthesis essay? Write them here, or respond to someone else's problem with a wonderful solution. This is a tough assignment, sure to expand the brain(we hope right?)!
The odd thing about this post is what they say in the first paragraph: sweet, sour, salty and bitter, and now umami?
EARLY BIRD: Umami Burger
'Umami' -- that fifth taste on the tongue -- flavors the name and the savory specialties at the tiny L.A. chain's new outpost in Los Feliz.
By Jessica Gelt
November 2, 2009
For ages, it was accepted that there were only four primary tastes on the tongue from which all others arose. Those would be sweet, sour, salty and bitter. But over the last few decades, a fifth taste called "umami" has gained acceptance among gourmands worldwide. A Japanese scientist identified it in 1908, and it can best be described as savory.
That flavor (enhanced by an all-natural umami rub made of proprietary ingredients) is the secret in the sauce at the ascendant L.A. chain Umami Burger. The first Umami Burger opened less than a year ago on La Brea; last month, a second outpost opened in the old Cobras & Matadors space on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Feliz. The second Umami has an attached Japanese-centric beer and wine bar called Salaryman (the space was formerly Sgt. Recruiter).
Owner Adam Fleischman isn't thinking about stopping there. Since the first Umami opened, he's sold about 100,000 burgers. "We create different umami extracts from different products and put them in the burgers," he says. "That, along with the umami-rich ingredients we use, creates the craving." And he's counting on that craving to support three additional Umami Burgers and an Umami catering truck.
The Umami empire will resemble a compass with locations in all major directions and the original in the center. The new location is East, and Fleischman is fairly certain that in the West, Umami will reside at Fred Segal. North and South are still being worked out.
In the meantime, customers are busy working their way into the new Umami Burger, which was packed on a recent Wednesday night. Cobras & Matadors owner Steven Arroyo (he is an investor in the location) designed the large room to resemble, Fleischman says, "an old restaurant in Japan that decided to serve burgers." Concrete floors, high wooden rafters, reclaimed wood walls, American flags and a giant yellow-and-red neon sign that reads "Chow Fun" make for a light and playful environment.
Then there are the burgers: juicy patties smothered in fresh cheese that literally drip and crumble and bleed into their chewy buns. The flavor, that umami magic, is there, begging you to gobble it up.
There are eight burgers on the menu (though there are other options), including the signature Umami; the Manly burger with zesty beer cheddar, smoked-salt onion strings and gooey bacon lardons; the Hatch burger, which sets a pleasant fire in your mouth with four types of green chiles; and a veggie burger (Fleischman says they take an entire day to make) that is created without using grains or legumes and tastes an awful lot like fresh beef.
Add a side of beautifully un-greasy malt-liquor tempura onion rings or salty sweet potato fries with a spoonful of roasted garlic aioli and a bottle of Hitachino Nest Red Rice Ale, and you just might melt into a food coma.
When you come to, you may have a strange craving for more.
Japanese fishing trawler sunk by giant jellyfish
A 10-ton fishing boat has been sunk by gigantic jellyfish off eastern Japan.
Friday, October 30, 2009
BOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! SCARY STORIES ABOUND!
Did you know that the CSUB theatre is haunted? Did you know that students once chased each other around this campus with weapons? Did you know that those animals on the walls of the old Science Building are actually...no, I can't bring myself to tell you.
What are your scary Halloween stories? The only rule is that they must be set at CSUB.
What are your scary Halloween stories? The only rule is that they must be set at CSUB.
Final Essay Assignment
Your final essay will be a synthesis. The question you will answer is simple: what constitutes good music?
You have the opportunity to write a 3-5 page essay synthesizing three sources. Remember, you are not doing compare and contrast. Instead, you are finding common threads that run through your three sources and examining them in detail.
Your three sources are as follows.
1. The lyrics from the song you chose (you may choose any song lyrics).
2. The essay defining good music.
3. Another source of your choice that relates to your particular choice of music.(music review, review of the cd, review of the artist)
Here's an idea of where to find #3:
http://pitchfork.com/
www.metacritic.com/music/
www.punknews.org
http://www.rollingstone.com/
SCHEDULE
11/2 Bring your "five points."
11/4 regular class
11/6 Furlough Day...no class
11/9 Individual Writing Conferences
11/11 Campus Closed: Veteran’s Day
11/13 Individual Writing Conferences
11/16 Typed Rough Draft Due in Class (no draft=no pass)
11/18 regular class
11/20 FINAL DRAFT DUE IN CLASS
BY MIDNIGHT ON 11/20 YOUR PAPER MUST ALSO BE UPLOADED TO TURNITIN.
You have the opportunity to write a 3-5 page essay synthesizing three sources. Remember, you are not doing compare and contrast. Instead, you are finding common threads that run through your three sources and examining them in detail.
Your three sources are as follows.
1. The lyrics from the song you chose (you may choose any song lyrics).
2. The essay defining good music.
3. Another source of your choice that relates to your particular choice of music.(music review, review of the cd, review of the artist)
Here's an idea of where to find #3:
http://pitchfork.com/
www.metacritic.com/music/
www.punknews.org
http://www.rollingstone.com/
SCHEDULE
11/2 Bring your "five points."
11/4 regular class
11/6 Furlough Day...no class
11/9 Individual Writing Conferences
11/11 Campus Closed: Veteran’s Day
11/13 Individual Writing Conferences
11/16 Typed Rough Draft Due in Class (no draft=no pass)
11/18 regular class
11/20 FINAL DRAFT DUE IN CLASS
BY MIDNIGHT ON 11/20 YOUR PAPER MUST ALSO BE UPLOADED TO TURNITIN.
Defining Good Music
http://www.indianmusiclessons.com/docs/DefineMusic.pdf (essay written by a professor of music)
Can We Define Good Music?
Sanjoy Bandopadhyay
In India we see the music lovers and connoisseurs frequently discussing music performances. When we hear some appreciative comments, those are mostly focussed on renowned musicians' performances or towards the musicians' music those are following some established style of some celebrity. Although, I do not mean to say that the celebrities are spared from severe criticisms. The topic "What is good music?" seems to be more subjective than objective, still the factors those make music good and a search for the definitions of good music may be an interesting study.
A music performance accepted as good by a group of listeners may be rejected as 'not so good' or even 'bad' by another group clearly shows its subjective nature. But, there are performances those are generally accepted as good by most of the listeners present in a concert hall. What makes some music widely acceptable? With this comes another question. A music performance that is performed in Bhopal if performed in Calcutta, would it receive similar response from the general audience? Are some elements common in any accepted good music? Are the same elements of music are accepted to be good by any general band of listeners of any place? Good or bad is always subject to some references. The general references are the place, time and
the person or the subject. This again takes to two different basic references; one is the performer and second the listener. A music performance can be good to the performer and also good to the listener, a music performance may be 'not so good' to a performer but very well accepted by the listeners, and other possible combinations of good and not so good between the performer and the listeners.
I had mail exchanges on this with Dr. Bernard Bel1 he pointed out two basic references. He wrote:
"Perhaps you would get two definitions (on Good music), one by musicians and one by
listeners. For a musician, good music is probably associated with dedication (no cheap work) and sincerity (no pretense). The musician ought to feel "in tune" with his/her creation in the same way loving parents relates with their children: a child is the parent's product but she is also an autonomous human being. In the same way, artists should consider their creation as something autonomous whose relation with the public does not affect them. In my view, therefore, "good music" is associated with a musician being modest about it. I think that the great music masters in India nurtured this idea that they do not "compose" music, rather it is channeled through their medium. For a listener, things are more simple. Good music is what makes them feel in harmony with whatever they call their deep being. A feeling of peace, indeed, most of the times, but occasionally a strong urge to change their lives and to change the world."
We do not easily find any reference of "good music" in any of our well-known treatises.2 We see the mention of "guna-dosa of Gayaka and Vadaka", i.e. the qualities and shortfalls of a vocalist or instrumentalist but rarely any discussion3 on good music. The "guna-dosa" (good qualities and shortfalls) is mainly concentrated on the physical movements of the musicians during performances. What we listen today, the basic values for good music are to be in tune, in laya
and in raga with good tayyari and taseer. Tayyari literally means preparation to do something. For music the general understanding for tayyari is the ability to perform fast passages with clarity, tunefulness and command. Tayyari is usually associated with tana-s but can be associated with any musical executions like meend, murki, gamaka, etc. Taseer refers to expected musical effect created out of musical executions. Taseer literally means to be effective/effect/quality. So a desired effect produced from one or a series of musical action/s may be called taseer. Supposing a vocalist land on the Shadaj with effective intonation, timing etc.
resulting to a musically effective phrasing, this will be called taseer. Sometimes we hear people saying that a particular musical piece creating "lav"4 (meaning flame). "Lav"5 indicates towards a compelling musical effect when a piece gradually reaching compositional climax. With the passage the audience's inner self gets ignited. The quality of a particular music rendering has some subjective references. For music there are two basic references; one is the performer and second the listener. As I told earlier also, a music performance can be good to the performer and also good to the listener, a music performance may be 'not so good' to a performer but very well accepted by the listeners, and other possible
combinations of good and not so good between the performer and the listeners. Here is a scope of long discussion. I believe there is a specific role of the listeners also in the complete frame of music making. It is not only the musician who makes music but the listeners also play an important role.
One point of consideration may be the general speed of receptivity of music by the audience. There is a speed of understanding of musical depictions. If the flow of music becomes too much within a short span of time the height of musical content can not appropriately register on the audience. I have seen the well known sitar player Budhaditya Mukherjee failing to impress the audience to the expected level when he himself was quite satisfied with his performance (as I could find out after
later discussions with him). It happens because quite often his speed of progress and going towards deeper (and more complicated) executions are without giving appropriate time to the audience to get prepared for taking it or the speed of progress to the subsequent stages is too fast for the audience. So, the effect on the audience is a clumsy type of feeling although they accept that the technical
executions were of very good level because the executions were tuneful, crisp and clear. The same thing we can find with our veteran sarod player Buddhadev Dasgupta. Buddhadev Dasgupta is my senior gurubhai 6 and is a musician with brilliant musical ideas. But the flow of musical ideas stream out at such a speed and as there is no appropriate respite for the audience, the listeners at times fail to enjoy the music to its appropriate height. The same thing may be the root cause behind many less
successful performances of able musicians. The thing to understand is, the listeners also play a kind of interactive role as the music proceeds. The general audiences reach the optimum response level under a specific speed belt of musical progression. When this speed of music progression matches the listeners requirements then the music registers optimum effect. Here I would like to put it clearly
that I am not talking of the speed of music execution, I am referring to the speed of music progression where music may progress from one phase to another with due highlighting of each phase. The raga may get incarnated and make its presence felt at every phase. The audience must get the opportunity to play their part with the performer and this interactive process helps the music to hit its peak. In the process the musician must give space for the listener to "fill in" in a
creative/imaginative process.
Dr. Bel puts down audience's role in effective music making process nicely. He writes:
A necessary condition for experiencing rasa (aesthetic pleasure as a "gustative process") is a sufficient degree of imprecision, an incompleteness of the codification triggering the imagination (kalpana) of each auditor, thereby yielding a "second creation" (bhavana) within the field of the "unspoken.”
Again back to the main point; why is the rose beautiful? It is beautiful because it is beautiful. To define the good and the beautiful through a medium other than the medium of expression itself is difficult. One point is how the receiver takes on a particular piece of art. Assessment of good or bad is done out of one's contextual understanding of the particular creative form. One can, of course, try to underline the general values of a particular art form. For Indian Music the values
are the archaic qualities fused with the artiste's liberty for expressions and creations. In raga music the subtle mixture of the musicians' individuality in their performances and the retaining of the traditional values of the performed raga are some of the important qualities. The sense of being boundless under confinement of the raga prescription is possibly the keyword. The musician takes the flight within the defined territories of a chosen raga and expands the provided
space to generate an effect of boundlessness.
I have been wandering for a long time to find out the answer that why a music piece gets easy entry to the mass audiences' hearts and the others can not. It is not easy to define why the first stroke of Ustd. Vilayet Khan, at times, compels the audience (initiated ones) to say "aah" or for example, how Ustd. Zakir Hussein gets such an easy entry with his tabla to the audiences' heart. Why does this happen? The possible explanation is that the music hits the mass' inner being immediately. The audience gets impressed in two ways. They get moved when the music matches their imagination and they get dazzled when the music taking some unexpected shape
that is even much more beautiful than what the listeners had expected. When this happens then the pleasure of creation of the performer spread around successfully and reaches the listeners' inner being and this is apparently one of the points that makes good music. At this point the music starts articulating like a language.7 This is like an orator giving a speech on a topic with full command. An orator's speech brings in many articulations naturally. If the language is converted to some meaningless articulations still one can hear the basic effects of the intended
ideas that the orator possibly wanted to express. [A closer simile is, reciting a poem with full poetic feelings.] Music has more pronounced tonal and pitch shades and this is capable of expressing ideas those are difficult or near impossible to transmit even through vocal language expressions. Music is capable to transmit subtle feelings of human and nature's different moods.
When this happens then the music becomes acceptable to the listeners and they start enjoying the performance with complete unison with their inner self.
As a performer my feeling is, when I totally get united with the flow of musical images and the instrumental execution the music gets much louder expressions and the audiences start enjoying the musical flow. Here the raga gets its life and start behaving like an incarnated character.
Every executed ang and the delineation relate itself to the post and pre-stated contexts. Each meend, each tana, krintan, zamzama, murki and all the ornamentation forms are played down with meaning and with reference to the context.
Here are some qualities of good music:
Ø The sound of the instrument/voice should be pleasing and warmly acceptable.
Ø Each musical phrase must carry some aesthetic meaning and not just the execution of some musical habits.
Ø Musical phrases must be executed with aesthetic timing, with required density of sound, crispness and clarity matching to the music creation needs.
Ø The speed of music progression may match with the receptivity demand of the audiences. The listeners may comfortably play a silent interactive role as the performance goes on.
Ø There are some puritans those like the old type of instrument sounds and very faithful
adherence to the archetype music. These days such music connoisseurs are getting reduced in number. Most of the present music lovers look for high speed tan-s, meends, gamaka-s etc. Some look for interesting laya patterns, different speed variations, interesting starting and ending points, etc. But, it is good that the archaic values of music may be present with its full glory and substance.
Ø Only in appropriate mental state effective music making and receiving is possible. So, the musician before and during the performance must be appropriately receptive to his musical ideas so that the ideas may get the right medium for full musical expressions. The same is true for the listeners who should be rightly receptive to receive the subtle and brilliant musical effects.
Ø When the inner being of the performer vibrates harmoniously with the music, this indicates that good music taking shape and consequently this music naturally vibrates harmoniously with the inner beings of the receptive listeners.
Can We Define Good Music?
Sanjoy Bandopadhyay
In India we see the music lovers and connoisseurs frequently discussing music performances. When we hear some appreciative comments, those are mostly focussed on renowned musicians' performances or towards the musicians' music those are following some established style of some celebrity. Although, I do not mean to say that the celebrities are spared from severe criticisms. The topic "What is good music?" seems to be more subjective than objective, still the factors those make music good and a search for the definitions of good music may be an interesting study.
A music performance accepted as good by a group of listeners may be rejected as 'not so good' or even 'bad' by another group clearly shows its subjective nature. But, there are performances those are generally accepted as good by most of the listeners present in a concert hall. What makes some music widely acceptable? With this comes another question. A music performance that is performed in Bhopal if performed in Calcutta, would it receive similar response from the general audience? Are some elements common in any accepted good music? Are the same elements of music are accepted to be good by any general band of listeners of any place? Good or bad is always subject to some references. The general references are the place, time and
the person or the subject. This again takes to two different basic references; one is the performer and second the listener. A music performance can be good to the performer and also good to the listener, a music performance may be 'not so good' to a performer but very well accepted by the listeners, and other possible combinations of good and not so good between the performer and the listeners.
I had mail exchanges on this with Dr. Bernard Bel1 he pointed out two basic references. He wrote:
"Perhaps you would get two definitions (on Good music), one by musicians and one by
listeners. For a musician, good music is probably associated with dedication (no cheap work) and sincerity (no pretense). The musician ought to feel "in tune" with his/her creation in the same way loving parents relates with their children: a child is the parent's product but she is also an autonomous human being. In the same way, artists should consider their creation as something autonomous whose relation with the public does not affect them. In my view, therefore, "good music" is associated with a musician being modest about it. I think that the great music masters in India nurtured this idea that they do not "compose" music, rather it is channeled through their medium. For a listener, things are more simple. Good music is what makes them feel in harmony with whatever they call their deep being. A feeling of peace, indeed, most of the times, but occasionally a strong urge to change their lives and to change the world."
We do not easily find any reference of "good music" in any of our well-known treatises.2 We see the mention of "guna-dosa of Gayaka and Vadaka", i.e. the qualities and shortfalls of a vocalist or instrumentalist but rarely any discussion3 on good music. The "guna-dosa" (good qualities and shortfalls) is mainly concentrated on the physical movements of the musicians during performances. What we listen today, the basic values for good music are to be in tune, in laya
and in raga with good tayyari and taseer. Tayyari literally means preparation to do something. For music the general understanding for tayyari is the ability to perform fast passages with clarity, tunefulness and command. Tayyari is usually associated with tana-s but can be associated with any musical executions like meend, murki, gamaka, etc. Taseer refers to expected musical effect created out of musical executions. Taseer literally means to be effective/effect/quality. So a desired effect produced from one or a series of musical action/s may be called taseer. Supposing a vocalist land on the Shadaj with effective intonation, timing etc.
resulting to a musically effective phrasing, this will be called taseer. Sometimes we hear people saying that a particular musical piece creating "lav"4 (meaning flame). "Lav"5 indicates towards a compelling musical effect when a piece gradually reaching compositional climax. With the passage the audience's inner self gets ignited. The quality of a particular music rendering has some subjective references. For music there are two basic references; one is the performer and second the listener. As I told earlier also, a music performance can be good to the performer and also good to the listener, a music performance may be 'not so good' to a performer but very well accepted by the listeners, and other possible
combinations of good and not so good between the performer and the listeners. Here is a scope of long discussion. I believe there is a specific role of the listeners also in the complete frame of music making. It is not only the musician who makes music but the listeners also play an important role.
One point of consideration may be the general speed of receptivity of music by the audience. There is a speed of understanding of musical depictions. If the flow of music becomes too much within a short span of time the height of musical content can not appropriately register on the audience. I have seen the well known sitar player Budhaditya Mukherjee failing to impress the audience to the expected level when he himself was quite satisfied with his performance (as I could find out after
later discussions with him). It happens because quite often his speed of progress and going towards deeper (and more complicated) executions are without giving appropriate time to the audience to get prepared for taking it or the speed of progress to the subsequent stages is too fast for the audience. So, the effect on the audience is a clumsy type of feeling although they accept that the technical
executions were of very good level because the executions were tuneful, crisp and clear. The same thing we can find with our veteran sarod player Buddhadev Dasgupta. Buddhadev Dasgupta is my senior gurubhai 6 and is a musician with brilliant musical ideas. But the flow of musical ideas stream out at such a speed and as there is no appropriate respite for the audience, the listeners at times fail to enjoy the music to its appropriate height. The same thing may be the root cause behind many less
successful performances of able musicians. The thing to understand is, the listeners also play a kind of interactive role as the music proceeds. The general audiences reach the optimum response level under a specific speed belt of musical progression. When this speed of music progression matches the listeners requirements then the music registers optimum effect. Here I would like to put it clearly
that I am not talking of the speed of music execution, I am referring to the speed of music progression where music may progress from one phase to another with due highlighting of each phase. The raga may get incarnated and make its presence felt at every phase. The audience must get the opportunity to play their part with the performer and this interactive process helps the music to hit its peak. In the process the musician must give space for the listener to "fill in" in a
creative/imaginative process.
Dr. Bel puts down audience's role in effective music making process nicely. He writes:
A necessary condition for experiencing rasa (aesthetic pleasure as a "gustative process") is a sufficient degree of imprecision, an incompleteness of the codification triggering the imagination (kalpana) of each auditor, thereby yielding a "second creation" (bhavana) within the field of the "unspoken.”
Again back to the main point; why is the rose beautiful? It is beautiful because it is beautiful. To define the good and the beautiful through a medium other than the medium of expression itself is difficult. One point is how the receiver takes on a particular piece of art. Assessment of good or bad is done out of one's contextual understanding of the particular creative form. One can, of course, try to underline the general values of a particular art form. For Indian Music the values
are the archaic qualities fused with the artiste's liberty for expressions and creations. In raga music the subtle mixture of the musicians' individuality in their performances and the retaining of the traditional values of the performed raga are some of the important qualities. The sense of being boundless under confinement of the raga prescription is possibly the keyword. The musician takes the flight within the defined territories of a chosen raga and expands the provided
space to generate an effect of boundlessness.
I have been wandering for a long time to find out the answer that why a music piece gets easy entry to the mass audiences' hearts and the others can not. It is not easy to define why the first stroke of Ustd. Vilayet Khan, at times, compels the audience (initiated ones) to say "aah" or for example, how Ustd. Zakir Hussein gets such an easy entry with his tabla to the audiences' heart. Why does this happen? The possible explanation is that the music hits the mass' inner being immediately. The audience gets impressed in two ways. They get moved when the music matches their imagination and they get dazzled when the music taking some unexpected shape
that is even much more beautiful than what the listeners had expected. When this happens then the pleasure of creation of the performer spread around successfully and reaches the listeners' inner being and this is apparently one of the points that makes good music. At this point the music starts articulating like a language.7 This is like an orator giving a speech on a topic with full command. An orator's speech brings in many articulations naturally. If the language is converted to some meaningless articulations still one can hear the basic effects of the intended
ideas that the orator possibly wanted to express. [A closer simile is, reciting a poem with full poetic feelings.] Music has more pronounced tonal and pitch shades and this is capable of expressing ideas those are difficult or near impossible to transmit even through vocal language expressions. Music is capable to transmit subtle feelings of human and nature's different moods.
When this happens then the music becomes acceptable to the listeners and they start enjoying the performance with complete unison with their inner self.
As a performer my feeling is, when I totally get united with the flow of musical images and the instrumental execution the music gets much louder expressions and the audiences start enjoying the musical flow. Here the raga gets its life and start behaving like an incarnated character.
Every executed ang and the delineation relate itself to the post and pre-stated contexts. Each meend, each tana, krintan, zamzama, murki and all the ornamentation forms are played down with meaning and with reference to the context.
Here are some qualities of good music:
Ø The sound of the instrument/voice should be pleasing and warmly acceptable.
Ø Each musical phrase must carry some aesthetic meaning and not just the execution of some musical habits.
Ø Musical phrases must be executed with aesthetic timing, with required density of sound, crispness and clarity matching to the music creation needs.
Ø The speed of music progression may match with the receptivity demand of the audiences. The listeners may comfortably play a silent interactive role as the performance goes on.
Ø There are some puritans those like the old type of instrument sounds and very faithful
adherence to the archetype music. These days such music connoisseurs are getting reduced in number. Most of the present music lovers look for high speed tan-s, meends, gamaka-s etc. Some look for interesting laya patterns, different speed variations, interesting starting and ending points, etc. But, it is good that the archaic values of music may be present with its full glory and substance.
Ø Only in appropriate mental state effective music making and receiving is possible. So, the musician before and during the performance must be appropriately receptive to his musical ideas so that the ideas may get the right medium for full musical expressions. The same is true for the listeners who should be rightly receptive to receive the subtle and brilliant musical effects.
Ø When the inner being of the performer vibrates harmoniously with the music, this indicates that good music taking shape and consequently this music naturally vibrates harmoniously with the inner beings of the receptive listeners.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
OKAY, I LIED...HERE'S ANOTHER CHANCE FOR EXTRA CREDIT
Go to the presentation of author Joseph Williams on November 4th and you get 2% extra credit on your Lakota Way essay.
I'll be there. Find me and say the following secret code: "I am inspired to live a life of virtue, like a good Lakota would."
I'll be there. Find me and say the following secret code: "I am inspired to live a life of virtue, like a good Lakota would."
Monday, October 26, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
Should husbands who cheat be whipped?
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN (Reuters) – Most Bruneians want husbands who cheat on their wives to be whipped, according to a recent survey in the Muslim-majority country.
The survey, conducted by website brudirect (www.brudirect.com), found 76 percent of 272 respondents said men should be whipped for having affairs while only 55 percent said unfaithful wives should receive the same punishment.
"The result of the survey is an indication of the pent-up feelings that women harbor against irresponsible men," an unnamed social worker from Brunei was quoted as saying on the website.
The oil-rich state of Brunei, located on Borneo Island, has a population of almost 400,000 of which 66 percent are Muslim.
(Reporting by David Chance, editing by Sugita Katyal)
Officers Swarm South LA in Gang Crackdown
Is this healthy, good for our cities, to conduct such gang sweeps?
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More than 45 people had been arrested by 7 a.m. Thursday in a major gang crackdown in South LA.
Hundreds of police officers and federal agents served warrants on the Rolling 40s. The gang has a "vice grip" on the neighborhood, according to police.
Authorities said the operation involves about 1,100 law enforcement agents. They plan to serve warrants for 75 individuals.
Authorities set up a booking area in a parking lot in Exposition Park.
Gang Crackdown in South LA
They have a vise grip on the neighborhood, and we are going to release that grip this morning," LAPD Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese said.
The operation is part of a 16-month investigation.
Neighborhoods in which the warrants were served included Crenshaw, Jefferson Park, West Adams, Baldwin Village, University Park, Athens Park, Gramercy Park and Hyde Park.
Families get to raise their children, send the kids to school, without as much fear involving this particular street gang. ... The communities are held hostage, in a sense," Albanese said.
The FBI's Laura Eimiller said more than 500 people have been arrested since May in 10 Southern California anti-gang sweeps.
The sweep occurred during nationwide raids against a Mexico-based drug cartel. Eimiller said the LA raids are not related.
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local-beat/Officers-Swarm-South-LA-in-Gang-Crackdown-65523132.html
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More than 45 people had been arrested by 7 a.m. Thursday in a major gang crackdown in South LA.
Hundreds of police officers and federal agents served warrants on the Rolling 40s. The gang has a "vice grip" on the neighborhood, according to police.
Authorities said the operation involves about 1,100 law enforcement agents. They plan to serve warrants for 75 individuals.
Authorities set up a booking area in a parking lot in Exposition Park.
Gang Crackdown in South LA
They have a vise grip on the neighborhood, and we are going to release that grip this morning," LAPD Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese said.
The operation is part of a 16-month investigation.
Neighborhoods in which the warrants were served included Crenshaw, Jefferson Park, West Adams, Baldwin Village, University Park, Athens Park, Gramercy Park and Hyde Park.
Families get to raise their children, send the kids to school, without as much fear involving this particular street gang. ... The communities are held hostage, in a sense," Albanese said.
The FBI's Laura Eimiller said more than 500 people have been arrested since May in 10 Southern California anti-gang sweeps.
The sweep occurred during nationwide raids against a Mexico-based drug cartel. Eimiller said the LA raids are not related.
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local-beat/Officers-Swarm-South-LA-in-Gang-Crackdown-65523132.html
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Modern man a wimp, says anthropologist
By John Mehaffey
LONDON (Reuters) - Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 meters record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.
Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood.
Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle.
These and other eye-catching claims are detailed in a book by Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister entitled "Manthropology" and provocatively sub-titled "The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male."
McAllister sets out his stall in the opening sentence of the prologue.
"If you're reading this then you -- or the male you have bought it for -- are the worst man in history.
"No ifs, no buts -- the worst man, period...As a class we are in fact the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet."
Delving into a wide range of source material McAllister finds evidence he believes proves that modern man is inferior to his predecessors in, among other fields, the basic Olympic athletics disciplines of running and jumping.
His conclusions about the speed of Australian aboriginals 20,000 years ago are based on a set of footprints, preserved in a fossilized claypan lake bed, of six men chasing prey.
FLEET-FOOTED ABORIGINALS
An analysis of the footsteps of one of the men, dubbed T8, shows he reached speeds of 37 kph on a soft, muddy lake edge. Bolt, by comparison, reached a top speed of 42 kph during his then world 100 meters record of 9.69 seconds at last year's Beijing Olympics.
In an interview in the English university town of Cambridge where he was temporarily resident, McAllister said that, with modern training, spiked shoes and rubberized tracks, aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 45 kph.
"We can assume they are running close to their maximum if they are chasing an animal," he said.
"But if they can do that speed of 37 kph on very soft ground I suspect there is a strong chance they would have outdone Usain Bolt if they had all the advantages that he does.
"We can tell that T8 is accelerating toward the end of his tracks."
McAllister said it was probable that any number of T8's contemporaries could have run as fast.
"We have to remember too how incredibly rare these fossilizations are," he said. "What are the odds that you would get the fastest runner in Australia at that particular time in that particular place in such a way that was going to be preserved?"
Turning to the high jump, McAllister said photographs taken by a German anthropologist showed young men jumping heights of up to 2.52 meters in the early years of last century.
STARK DECLINE
"It was an initiation ritual, everybody had to do it. They had to be able to jump their own height to progress to manhood," he said.
"It was something they did all the time and they lived very active lives from a very early age. They developed very phenomenal abilities in jumping. They were jumping from boyhood onwards to prove themselves."
McAllister said a Neanderthal woman had 10 percent more muscle bulk than modern European man. Trained to capacity she would have reached 90 percent of Schwarzenegger's bulk at his peak in the 1970s.
"But because of the quirk of her physiology, with a much shorter lower arm, she would slam him to the table without a problem," he said.
Manthropology abounds with other examples:
* Roman legions completed more than one-and-a-half marathons a day carrying more than half their body weight in equipment.
* Athens employed 30,000 rowers who could all exceed the achievements of modern oarsmen.
* Australian aboriginals threw a hardwood spear 110 meters or more (the current world javelin record is 98.48).
McAllister said it was difficult to equate the ancient spear with the modern javelin but added: "Given other evidence of Aboriginal man's superb athleticism you'd have to wonder whether they couldn't have taken out every modern javelin event they entered."
Why the decline?
"We are so inactive these days and have been since the industrial revolution really kicked into gear," McAllister replied. "These people were much more robust than we were.
"We don't see that because we convert to what things were like about 30 years ago. There's been such a stark improvement in times, technique has improved out of sight, times and heights have all improved vastly since then but if you go back further it's a different story.
"At the start of the industrial revolution there are statistics about how much harder people worked then.
"The human body is very plastic and it responds to stress. We have lost 40 percent of the shafts of our long bones because we have much less of a muscular load placed upon them these days.
"We are simply not exposed to the same loads or challenges that people were in the ancient past and even in the recent past so our bodies haven't developed. Even the level of training that we do, our elite athletes, doesn't come close to replicating that.
"We wouldn't want to go back to the brutality of those days but there are some things we would do well to profit from."
Monday, October 19, 2009
Quinceaneras often symbolize family's hard work, success
MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- From the custom-made, hand-beaded white dress to silver-studded high-heeled shoes, diamond jewelry and tiara, Jenny Ferro is preparing for a day she's dreamed about since she was 3 years old.
Marlene Ferro, left, who emigrated from Cuba, says Jenny's quinceanera was a gift to both of them.
"I'm really excited," says Jenny, eagerly nodding her head. "Really, really, a lot!"
She isn't getting married. The 15-year-old is preparing for her quinceañera, a coming-of-age ritual in Latin culture, marking a young girl's entrance into womanhood. The centuries-old tradition began as a ceremony to introduce girls to society on their 15th birthday and signified that they were ready for marriage. Today, many quinceañeras have become much more elaborate.
Jenny and her mother, Marlene Ferro, have worked out every detail of the party well in advance, from the rehearsal to the reception to the flower girl and the music. The theme of the party is bedazzled.
First, there is the dress, which Marlene had designed specially for her daughter. It cost about $800. Then there are the shoes, high-heeled and silver to match the dress. During the party, the high heels will be ceremoniously slipped onto her feet to replace her flat shoes -- a symbolic transition of her journey from childhood to womanhood. Soledad O'Brien takes a look at Jenny's dress, shoes and photos »
"It makes her look like a princess," gushes Marlene Ferro.
Quinceañeras are becoming increasingly popular in the United States. One reason for their popularity is a greater acceptance of Latin culture in America, according to Michele Salcedo, author of "Quinceañera!" a comprehensive guide to the celebration.
'Latino in America'
The Latino population is set to nearly triple by 2050. CNN's Soledad O'Brien journeys into the homes and hearts of a group destined to change the U.S. Witness the evolution of a country as Latinos change America and America changes Latinos.
"The 15th birthday, culturally, is a milestone. It doesn't have to be celebrated with a party at all, but it is generally marked by something quite special," Salcedo says.
Experts believe the quinceañera is rooted in Mayan, Aztec and European traditions. Today, many coming-of-age ceremonies resemble lavish "Sweet 16" celebrations. Beyond the elaborate apparel, food and festivities, modern quinceañeras often feature a court of 15 people, typically consisting of family and friends. As the event continues to grow in popularity, the makeup of the court has also changed.
"It has gone beyond Latinos, so that a lot of Latino girls will have not only family members in court but they will reach out to non-Latino friends," says Salcedo. "So it's a way of reaching out and extending social ties and bringing people in who might not otherwise have an opportunity to know a Latino family and to know the culture."
Family plays the largest role in the quinceañera, leading up to and during the party. Mothers, fathers, grandparents and godparents can spend years preparing a night to remember for the young girl. The tradition is just as important to the family as it is to the young woman. The large, extravagant celebrations often symbolize a family's hard work and success. How has America changed Latinos?
Marlene Ferro, who emigrated from Cuba as a child with her parents, says Jenny's quinceañera was a gift to both of them. The 43-year-old, single mother of three, saved for years and estimates that she spent at least $20,000 on her daughter's quinceañera.
"I was able to accomplish something that I had been looking forward to for 15 years," says Marlene Ferro.
The parties can be as big and expensive as a family can imagine and costs can escalate into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to Salcedo. She recommends that families manage expectations before the party planning even begins. iReporter Alexis Fernandez's quinceañera was a big event in Alaska
"Sometimes people go way overboard and [spend] much more on the celebration than they can afford and that's the downside of the quinceañera," says Salcedo. "Because when it's done right it can be a beautiful family celebration and a celebration of a milestone that a young girl goes through."
Quinceañeras have changed over the years. Even though her tiara was taller than her daughter's, Marlene says her quinceañera was simple. It was a small gathering at her sister's apartment with family and friends. She wore borrowed jewelry from a family member, had a homemade cake and danced with her father. Marlene Ferro's 15th birthday present was a telephone in her bedroom.
"I didn't have a big quince party. I chose to have a small party with my friends," she remembers. "My dress was really easy ... I didn't have an option. It was this one or that one. Now, we give our kids the option." iReporter Diamond Ramirez's mother, grandmother never had quinceañeras
There's a spiritual element to these celebrations as well, says Salcedo. The church plays a role in helping to prepare teenage girls for this transition to womanhood. Ceremonies and classes before the coming-of-age celebration teach the young women that with adulthood come certain responsibilities, both physical and spiritual.
"When it's done in the spirit that it probably should be, the girl has certain responsibilities and by the end of the process, she's met them and she has showed her mother that she can, in fact, be responsible and she does acquire ... a bit more maturity then she [had] before," says Salcedo.
As the celebrations become more popular in the United States, they also offer an opportunity for more Americans to participate.
"It's a way to push back a lot of the negativity that a lot of Latinos feel is directed at Latinos," says Salcedo. "It is a way for people who have recently arrived, or maybe not so recently arrived, to say 'I have done well here' ... I'm throwing this party for my daughter and I'm inviting all of you to partake of my generosity so that you can see exactly how well we've done."
Moscow Mayor Promises a Winter Without Snow
By SIMON SHUSTER / MOSCOW Simon Shuster / Moscow
Sat Oct 17, 9:15 am ET
Pigs still can't fly, but this winter, the mayor of Moscow promises to keep it from snowing. For just a few million dollars, the mayor's office will hire the Russian Air Force to spray a fine chemical mist over the clouds before they reach the capital, forcing them to dump their snow outside the city. Authorities say this will be a boon for Moscow, which is typically covered with a blanket of snow from November to March. Road crews won't need to constantly clear the streets, and traffic - and quality of life - will undoubtedly improve.
The idea came from Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who is no stranger to playing God. In 2002, he spearheaded a project to reverse the flow of the vast River Ob through Siberia to help irrigate the country's parched Central Asian neighbors. Although that idea hasn't exactly turned out as planned - scientists have said it's not feasible - this time, Luzhkov says, there's no way he can fail. (See TIME's photo-essay "Vladimir Putin: Action Figure.")
Controlling the weather in Moscow is nothing new, he says. Ahead of the two main holidays celebrated in the city each year - Victory Day in May and City Day in September - the often cash-strapped air force is paid to make sure that it doesn't, well, rain on the parades. With a city budget of $40 billion a year (larger than New York City's budget), Moscow can easily afford the $2-3 million price tag to keep the skies blue as spectators watch the tanks and rocket launchers roll along Red Square. Now there's a new challenge for the air force: Moscow's notorious blizzards.
"You know how every year on City Day and Victory Day we create the weather?" Luzhkov asked a group of farmers outside Moscow in September, according to Russian media reports. "Well, we should do the same with the snow! Then outside Moscow there will be more moisture, a bigger harvest, while for us it won't snow as much. It will make financial sense." (See pictures of Russia celebrating Victory Day.)
The plan was unsurprisingly rubber-stamped this week by the Moscow City Council, which is dominated by Luzhkov's supporters. Then the city's Department of Housing and Public Works described how it would work. The air force will use cement powder, dry ice or silver iodide to spray the clouds from Nov. 15 to March 15 - and only to prevent "very big and serious snow" from falling on the city, said Andrei Tsybin, the head of the department. This could mean that a few flakes will manage to slip through the cracks. Tsybin estimated that the total cost of keeping the storms at bay would be $6 million this winter, roughly half the amount Moscow normally spends to clear the streets of snow.
So far the main objection to the plan has come from Moscow's suburbs, which will likely be inundated with snow if the plan goes forward. Alla Kachan, the Moscow region's ecology minister, said the proposal still needs to be assessed by environmental experts and discussed with the people living in the area before Luzhkov can enact it. "The citizens of the region have some concerns. We have received lots of messages," she told the RIA news agency. (Read TIME's 1991 article "The End of the U.S.S.R.")
With only a few weeks left before winter comes, environmentalists will have to work fast to keep Luzhkov from implementing his zaniest plan to date - and to stop the first snowflakes from wafting down to the city streets.
Sat Oct 17, 9:15 am ET
Pigs still can't fly, but this winter, the mayor of Moscow promises to keep it from snowing. For just a few million dollars, the mayor's office will hire the Russian Air Force to spray a fine chemical mist over the clouds before they reach the capital, forcing them to dump their snow outside the city. Authorities say this will be a boon for Moscow, which is typically covered with a blanket of snow from November to March. Road crews won't need to constantly clear the streets, and traffic - and quality of life - will undoubtedly improve.
The idea came from Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who is no stranger to playing God. In 2002, he spearheaded a project to reverse the flow of the vast River Ob through Siberia to help irrigate the country's parched Central Asian neighbors. Although that idea hasn't exactly turned out as planned - scientists have said it's not feasible - this time, Luzhkov says, there's no way he can fail. (See TIME's photo-essay "Vladimir Putin: Action Figure.")
Controlling the weather in Moscow is nothing new, he says. Ahead of the two main holidays celebrated in the city each year - Victory Day in May and City Day in September - the often cash-strapped air force is paid to make sure that it doesn't, well, rain on the parades. With a city budget of $40 billion a year (larger than New York City's budget), Moscow can easily afford the $2-3 million price tag to keep the skies blue as spectators watch the tanks and rocket launchers roll along Red Square. Now there's a new challenge for the air force: Moscow's notorious blizzards.
"You know how every year on City Day and Victory Day we create the weather?" Luzhkov asked a group of farmers outside Moscow in September, according to Russian media reports. "Well, we should do the same with the snow! Then outside Moscow there will be more moisture, a bigger harvest, while for us it won't snow as much. It will make financial sense." (See pictures of Russia celebrating Victory Day.)
The plan was unsurprisingly rubber-stamped this week by the Moscow City Council, which is dominated by Luzhkov's supporters. Then the city's Department of Housing and Public Works described how it would work. The air force will use cement powder, dry ice or silver iodide to spray the clouds from Nov. 15 to March 15 - and only to prevent "very big and serious snow" from falling on the city, said Andrei Tsybin, the head of the department. This could mean that a few flakes will manage to slip through the cracks. Tsybin estimated that the total cost of keeping the storms at bay would be $6 million this winter, roughly half the amount Moscow normally spends to clear the streets of snow.
So far the main objection to the plan has come from Moscow's suburbs, which will likely be inundated with snow if the plan goes forward. Alla Kachan, the Moscow region's ecology minister, said the proposal still needs to be assessed by environmental experts and discussed with the people living in the area before Luzhkov can enact it. "The citizens of the region have some concerns. We have received lots of messages," she told the RIA news agency. (Read TIME's 1991 article "The End of the U.S.S.R.")
With only a few weeks left before winter comes, environmentalists will have to work fast to keep Luzhkov from implementing his zaniest plan to date - and to stop the first snowflakes from wafting down to the city streets.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Nobel Prize for Pres. Obama
A Decadent Nobel
A prize for soft moralism.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
So Donald Rumsfeld was right about Old Europe.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has taken it in the neck for awarding this year's Peace Prize to a nine-month old American presidency. There's been much mockery of pencil-necked Norwegian academics in faraway Oslo. This is unfair.
The committee said it chose Barack Obama for his "vision of . . . a world without nuclear weapons" and for "meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting." I'd say that completes the argument over old and new Europe. This is a Nobel of decadence.
Let's be clear. This decadence isn't primarily about Roman Polanski or Silvio Berlusconi's playboy club or French culture minister Frederic Mitterrand's adventures in Thailand. Though these are not irrelevant.
This Nobel is about political decadence.
"Decadence," an enduring word, emerged from the Latin "de-cadere," which means "to fall down." Decadence stripped bare means decay.
Daniel Henninger discusses the Norwegian committee's decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama and what it says about Europe.
•Podcast The unanswered question at the center of this odd Nobel is whether Barack Obama admires Old Europe for the same reasons it admires him.
When it was a vibrant garden of ideas, Europe gave the world more good things than one can count. Then it discovered the pleasures of the welfare state.
Old Europe now lives in a world of unpayable public pension obligations, weak job creation for its youngest workers, below-replacement birth rates, fat agricultural subsidies for farms dating to the Middle Ages, high taxes to pay for the public high-life, and history's most crucial proof of decay—the inability to finance one's armies. Only five of the 28 nations in NATO (the U.K., France, Turkey, Greece and Spain) achieve the minimum defense-spending benchmark of 2% of GDP.
The effect of arriving at a state of political decadence, of no longer being able to rise in the world, is that many people increasingly discover that soft moralism is a more congenial pastime than producing answers for the hard questions. As when David Cameron, the Tory leader and likely next British prime minister wonders: "The insatiable consumption and materialism of the past decade; has it made us happier or more fulfilled?"
This isn't to say that soft moralism is about nothing. But when matters such as climate change become life's primary concerns, it means one is going to spend more time preaching, which is easy, than doing, which is hard. One thinks of Nobelist Al Gore's unstoppable sermons.
Among the hardest questions Europe faced after World War II was the placement of anti-Soviet Pershing missiles on Europe's soil in 1983. Led by Helmut Kohl and Maggie Thatcher, Europe did something hard: It overcame its pacifists. A decade later, with the siege of Sarajevo, old Europe came to understand that making the hardest decisions was now beyond its reach.
Current hard questions include Pakistan and Afghanistan. Darfur is a hard question. Where to hold captured terrorists is a hard question.
Americans heard often the past four years how much Europe "hated" us because of that most complex of hard questions, the Iraq war. Unpopular wars cause bad feelings to be sure, but past some point Europe's antipathy toward the U.S. over Iraq began to sound a lot like moralistic decadence. It is a neurotic resentment of a superpower merely because it possesses the resources to do something Europe can no longer do, for good or ill.
Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland:
What we are in the process of discovering is just how much President Obama's worldview coincides with that of the continent that claims to have seen itself reflected in him and its Peace Prize.
Mr. Obama is at a crossroads in his presidency. As George W. Bush departed the White House, he said his successor would one day arrive at the need to make a decision that made clear the reality of being the American president. That moment has arrived. It is the pending troop-deployment for Afghanistan, a very hard decision.
After that, Mr. Obama will go to Oslo Dec. 10 to receive the Prize itself. That will occur in the middle of the Dec. 7-18 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, whose goal is among the explicit reasons why Mr. Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize.
Between Afghanistan and Oslo, we're going to get some clarity about the Obama presidency.
Perhaps the most intriguing onlooker to this education is European Nicolas Sarkozy. On his good days, France's president seems aware of the political and economic decay he has inherited. So it was striking at the United Nations last month when Mr. Sarkozy said that Mr. Obama "dreams of a world without nuclear arms." Then, describing Iran's nuclear threat, he said, "At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions."
By "us" he means that the U.S. must lead. In the West, only the U.S. president can still make decisions based on hard facts rather than recede into soft moralism. The day that is no longer true, the U.S. will finally deserve a decadent Nobel.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574473543586270418.html#printMode
A prize for soft moralism.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
So Donald Rumsfeld was right about Old Europe.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has taken it in the neck for awarding this year's Peace Prize to a nine-month old American presidency. There's been much mockery of pencil-necked Norwegian academics in faraway Oslo. This is unfair.
The committee said it chose Barack Obama for his "vision of . . . a world without nuclear weapons" and for "meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting." I'd say that completes the argument over old and new Europe. This is a Nobel of decadence.
Let's be clear. This decadence isn't primarily about Roman Polanski or Silvio Berlusconi's playboy club or French culture minister Frederic Mitterrand's adventures in Thailand. Though these are not irrelevant.
This Nobel is about political decadence.
"Decadence," an enduring word, emerged from the Latin "de-cadere," which means "to fall down." Decadence stripped bare means decay.
Daniel Henninger discusses the Norwegian committee's decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama and what it says about Europe.
•Podcast The unanswered question at the center of this odd Nobel is whether Barack Obama admires Old Europe for the same reasons it admires him.
When it was a vibrant garden of ideas, Europe gave the world more good things than one can count. Then it discovered the pleasures of the welfare state.
Old Europe now lives in a world of unpayable public pension obligations, weak job creation for its youngest workers, below-replacement birth rates, fat agricultural subsidies for farms dating to the Middle Ages, high taxes to pay for the public high-life, and history's most crucial proof of decay—the inability to finance one's armies. Only five of the 28 nations in NATO (the U.K., France, Turkey, Greece and Spain) achieve the minimum defense-spending benchmark of 2% of GDP.
The effect of arriving at a state of political decadence, of no longer being able to rise in the world, is that many people increasingly discover that soft moralism is a more congenial pastime than producing answers for the hard questions. As when David Cameron, the Tory leader and likely next British prime minister wonders: "The insatiable consumption and materialism of the past decade; has it made us happier or more fulfilled?"
This isn't to say that soft moralism is about nothing. But when matters such as climate change become life's primary concerns, it means one is going to spend more time preaching, which is easy, than doing, which is hard. One thinks of Nobelist Al Gore's unstoppable sermons.
Among the hardest questions Europe faced after World War II was the placement of anti-Soviet Pershing missiles on Europe's soil in 1983. Led by Helmut Kohl and Maggie Thatcher, Europe did something hard: It overcame its pacifists. A decade later, with the siege of Sarajevo, old Europe came to understand that making the hardest decisions was now beyond its reach.
Current hard questions include Pakistan and Afghanistan. Darfur is a hard question. Where to hold captured terrorists is a hard question.
Americans heard often the past four years how much Europe "hated" us because of that most complex of hard questions, the Iraq war. Unpopular wars cause bad feelings to be sure, but past some point Europe's antipathy toward the U.S. over Iraq began to sound a lot like moralistic decadence. It is a neurotic resentment of a superpower merely because it possesses the resources to do something Europe can no longer do, for good or ill.
Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland:
What we are in the process of discovering is just how much President Obama's worldview coincides with that of the continent that claims to have seen itself reflected in him and its Peace Prize.
Mr. Obama is at a crossroads in his presidency. As George W. Bush departed the White House, he said his successor would one day arrive at the need to make a decision that made clear the reality of being the American president. That moment has arrived. It is the pending troop-deployment for Afghanistan, a very hard decision.
After that, Mr. Obama will go to Oslo Dec. 10 to receive the Prize itself. That will occur in the middle of the Dec. 7-18 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, whose goal is among the explicit reasons why Mr. Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize.
Between Afghanistan and Oslo, we're going to get some clarity about the Obama presidency.
Perhaps the most intriguing onlooker to this education is European Nicolas Sarkozy. On his good days, France's president seems aware of the political and economic decay he has inherited. So it was striking at the United Nations last month when Mr. Sarkozy said that Mr. Obama "dreams of a world without nuclear arms." Then, describing Iran's nuclear threat, he said, "At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions."
By "us" he means that the U.S. must lead. In the West, only the U.S. president can still make decisions based on hard facts rather than recede into soft moralism. The day that is no longer true, the U.S. will finally deserve a decadent Nobel.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574473543586270418.html#printMode
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
HOMEWORK IS FUN
HOMEWORK DUE FRIDAY: May be typed or handwritten.
Based on Quick Access, what’s the difference between a run-on and a comma splice?
Where do you find the information on run-ons in the Quick Access text?
Read the section on run-ons.
In one sentence, tell me what is the best way to detect a run-on?
Based on Quick Access, what’s the difference between a run-on and a comma splice?
Where do you find the information on run-ons in the Quick Access text?
Read the section on run-ons.
In one sentence, tell me what is the best way to detect a run-on?
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Don't Moon the Train
BERLIN (Reuters) – A German man mooning at railway staff in a departing train got his trousers caught in a carriage door and ended up being dragged half naked along the platform, out of the station and onto the tracks.
The 22-year-old journalism student shoved his backside against the window of a low-slung double-decker train when staff forced him off in Lauenbrueck for traveling without a ticket, a spokesman for police in the northern city of Bremen said.
"It's a miracle he wasn't badly hurt," the spokesman said on Monday. "This sort of thing can end up killing you."
Instead, dangling by his trousers, the man got pulled along for about 200 meters, all the while managing to keep his legs away from the wheels of the train.
The ordeal ended when a passenger pulled the emergency brake. Rescues services were called in, causing rail services between Bremen and Hamburg to be suspended for over an hour, delaying 23 trains.
The man -- unharmed except for cuts and bruises -- now faces charges of dangerous interference in rail transport, insulting the train staff, and may face sizeable a compensation claim for the delays he caused, police said.
"He was full of remorse when I talked to him," the spokesman said. "And he advised others not to try the same thing."
(Reporting by Dave Graham; Editing by Louise Ireland)
The 22-year-old journalism student shoved his backside against the window of a low-slung double-decker train when staff forced him off in Lauenbrueck for traveling without a ticket, a spokesman for police in the northern city of Bremen said.
"It's a miracle he wasn't badly hurt," the spokesman said on Monday. "This sort of thing can end up killing you."
Instead, dangling by his trousers, the man got pulled along for about 200 meters, all the while managing to keep his legs away from the wheels of the train.
The ordeal ended when a passenger pulled the emergency brake. Rescues services were called in, causing rail services between Bremen and Hamburg to be suspended for over an hour, delaying 23 trains.
The man -- unharmed except for cuts and bruises -- now faces charges of dangerous interference in rail transport, insulting the train staff, and may face sizeable a compensation claim for the delays he caused, police said.
"He was full of remorse when I talked to him," the spokesman said. "And he advised others not to try the same thing."
(Reporting by Dave Graham; Editing by Louise Ireland)
Monday, October 12, 2009
Vegetarian Spider
A spider that dines almost exclusively on plants has been described by scientists.
It is the first-known predominantly vegetarian spider; all of the other known 40,000 spider species are thought to be mainly carnivorous.
Bagheera kiplingi, which is found in Central America and Mexico, bucks the meat-eating trend by feasting on acacia plants.
The research is published in the journal Current Biology.
The jumping arachnid, which is 5-6mm long, has developed a taste for the tips of the acacia plants - known as Beltian bodies - which are packed full of protein.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
What's your opinion on this issue?
Pot legalization gains momentum in California
By MARCUS WOHLSEN (AP) – 18 hours ago
SAN FRANCISCO — Marijuana advocates are gathering signatures to get at least three pot-legalization measures on the ballot in 2010 in California, setting up what could be a groundbreaking clash with the federal government over U.S. drug policy.
At least one poll shows voters would support lifting the pot prohibition, which would make the state of 40 million the first in the nation to legalize marijuana.
Such action would also send the state into a headlong conflict with the U.S. government while raising questions about how federal law enforcement could enforce its drug laws in the face of a massive government-sanctioned pot industry.
The state already has a thriving marijuana trade, thanks to a first-of-its-kind 1996 ballot measure that allowed people to smoke pot for medical purposes. But full legalization could turn medical marijuana dispensaries into all-purpose pot stores, and the open sale of joints could become commonplace on mom-and-pop liquor store counters in liberal locales like Oakland and Santa Cruz.
Under federal law, marijuana is illegal, period. After overseeing a series of raids that destroyed more than 300,000 marijuana plants in California's Sierra Nevada foothills this summer, federal drug czar Gil Kerlikowske proclaimed, "Legalization is not in the president's vocabulary, and it's not in mine."
The U.S. Supreme Court also has ruled that federal law enforcement agents have the right to crack down even on marijuana users and distributors who are in compliance with California's medical marijuana law.
But some legal scholars and policy analysts say the government will not be able to require California to help in enforcing the federal marijuana ban if the state legalizes the drug.
Without assistance from the state's legions of narcotics officers, they say, federal agents could do little to curb marijuana in California.
"Even though that federal ban is still in place and the federal government can enforce it, it doesn't mean the states have to follow suit," said Robert Mikos, a Vanderbilt University law professor who recently published a paper about the issue.
Nothing can stop federal anti-drug agents from making marijuana arrests, even if Californians legalize pot, he said. However, the U.S. government cannot pass a law requiring local and state police, sheriff's departments or state narcotics enforcers to help.
That is significant, because nearly all arrests for marijuana crimes are made at the state level. Of more than 847,000 marijuana-related arrests in 2008, for example, just over 6,300 suspects were booked by federal law enforcement, or fewer than 1 percent.
State marijuana bans have allowed the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to focus on big cases, said Rosalie Pacula, director of drug policy research at the Rand Corp.
"It's only something the feds are going to be concerned about if you're growing tons of pot," Pacula said. For anything less, she said, "they don't have the resources to waste on it."
In a typical recent prosecution, 29-year-old Luke Scarmazzo was sentenced to nearly 22 years and co-defendant Ricardo Ruiz Montes to 20 years in federal prison for drug trafficking through a medical marijuana dispensary in Modesto.
At his bond hearing, prosecutors showed a rap video in which Scarmazzo boasts about his successful marijuana business, taunts federal authorities and carries cardboard boxes filled with cash. The DEA said the pair made more than $4.5 million in marijuana sales in less than two years.
The DEA would not speculate on the effects of any decision by California to legalize pot. "Marijuana is illegal under federal law and DEA will continue to attack large-scale drug trafficking organizations at every level," spokeswoman Dawn Dearden said.
The most conservative of the three ballot measures would only legalize possession of up to one ounce of pot for personal use by adults 21 and older — an amount that already under state law can only result at most in a $100 fine.
The proposal would also allow anyone to grow a plot of marijuana up to 5 feet-by-5 feet on their private property. The size, Pacula said, seems specifically designed to keep the total number of plants grown below 100, the threshold for DEA attention.
The greatest potential for conflict with the U.S. government would likely come from the provision that would give local governments the power to decide city-by-city whether to allow pot sales.
Hundreds of medical marijuana dispensaries across the state already operate openly with only modest federal interference. If recreational marijuana became legal, these businesses could operate without requiring their customers to qualify as patients.
Any business that grew bigger than the already typical storefront shops, however, would probably be too tempting a target for federal prosecution, experts said.
Even if Washington could no longer count on California to keep pot off its own streets, Congress or the Obama administration could try to coerce cooperation by withholding federal funds.
But with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement earlier this year that the Justice Department would defer to state laws on marijuana, the federal response to possible legalization remains unclear.
Doug Richardson, a spokesman for the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the office is in the process of re-evaluating its policies on marijuana and other drugs.
Richardson said the office under Obama was pursuing a "more comprehensive" approach than the previous administration, with emphasis on prevention and treatment as well as law enforcement.
"We're trying to base stuff on the facts, the evidence and the science," he said, "not some particular prejudice somebody brings to the table."
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Ummm, what should be the punishment for this?
Ala. woman lets daughter ride in box on top of van
Mon Oct 5, 9:07 pm ET
ALBERTVILLE, Ala. – An Alabama woman has been charged with endangering the welfare of a child after police say she let her daughter ride in a cardboard box on top of their van. Albertville Police spokesman Sgt. Jamie Smith said the 37-year-old woman was arrested Sunday after police received a call about a minivan on a state highway with a child riding on top.
Smith said the woman told police the box was too big to go inside the van, and that her daughter was inside the box to hold it down.
Smith said the mother told officers it was safe because she had the box secured to the van with a clothes hanger.
The 13-year-old daughter wasn't harmed and was turned over to a relative. A jail worker said the mother was out on bond Monday.
___
Information from: The Huntsville Times, http://www.al.com/hsvtimes/hsv.html
Mon Oct 5, 9:07 pm ET
ALBERTVILLE, Ala. – An Alabama woman has been charged with endangering the welfare of a child after police say she let her daughter ride in a cardboard box on top of their van. Albertville Police spokesman Sgt. Jamie Smith said the 37-year-old woman was arrested Sunday after police received a call about a minivan on a state highway with a child riding on top.
Smith said the woman told police the box was too big to go inside the van, and that her daughter was inside the box to hold it down.
Smith said the mother told officers it was safe because she had the box secured to the van with a clothes hanger.
The 13-year-old daughter wasn't harmed and was turned over to a relative. A jail worker said the mother was out on bond Monday.
___
Information from: The Huntsville Times, http://www.al.com/hsvtimes/hsv.html
Monday, October 5, 2009
UNHEARD OF!!! EXTRA CREDIT? ONE DAY AND ONE DAY ONLY!!!
...okay, it's actually available for a few days, but you can take advantage of this opportunity to get some extra credit on the restaurant review paper. How might one do this, you wonder? Simple. Go into the Oasis this week and ask them to help you with one problem you had on the RR essay. You do not need to even bring the paper with you. If you need help with run-ons, tell them the following: "I need help with run-ons." Get it? Here's what it's worth. You may receive 2% extra credit for a total of two visits and a total of 4%. Here's the catch. The visits must be completed by Friday of this week and must be on separate days. Hence, you could go in today and tomorrow. Or you might choose to go in tomorrow and Thursday. When you go into the Oasis, someone there will stamp a piece of paper and date it, verifying that you have been in for tutoring. By Friday at the beginning of class, I'll accept all Oasis stamps to verify your visits.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
LAKOTA WAY ESSAY ASSIGNMENT/CONTEST
2-4 Pages long
12 point font
MLA documentation
In The Lakota Way, Joseph Marshall describes the importance of twelve virtues through his own personal narrative as well as the narratives of friends, family members, historical figures, and cultural and religious beings.
For this essay, choose one of these twelve virtues that has meaning to you as an individual or as a member of your own culture. Compare and contrast this virtue's significance as it is depicted in narratives you have inherited (from your family or culture) from Marshall's depiction.
This essay should be based solely on The Lakota Way and should not contain any other sources. Instead, you should be sure to cite specific examples from the book for supporting evidence using MLA-style documentation.
Remember, if you do not have a typed, complete rough draft in class on the 21st, you do not pass this assignment:
TYPED COMPLETE ROUGH DRAFT DUE IN CLASS, 10/21
FINAL DRAFT DUE, 10/23
12 point font
MLA documentation
In The Lakota Way, Joseph Marshall describes the importance of twelve virtues through his own personal narrative as well as the narratives of friends, family members, historical figures, and cultural and religious beings.
For this essay, choose one of these twelve virtues that has meaning to you as an individual or as a member of your own culture. Compare and contrast this virtue's significance as it is depicted in narratives you have inherited (from your family or culture) from Marshall's depiction.
This essay should be based solely on The Lakota Way and should not contain any other sources. Instead, you should be sure to cite specific examples from the book for supporting evidence using MLA-style documentation.
Remember, if you do not have a typed, complete rough draft in class on the 21st, you do not pass this assignment:
TYPED COMPLETE ROUGH DRAFT DUE IN CLASS, 10/21
FINAL DRAFT DUE, 10/23
Monday, September 28, 2009
JOB MARKET
Gauge your level of confidence versus your level of anxiety regarding your post-collegiate job prospects. Do you believe that the job market will turn around by then? Are you choosing a major based at least partly on the economic crisis?
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Excerpt from Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
Outlier, noun.
out·li·er
\-,li(-#)r\
1 : something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2 : a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
1.
Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome, in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine—Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely-clustered two-story stone houses with red tile roofs.
For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night. It was a hard life. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment—until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.
In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans—ten men and one boy—set sail for New York. They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan's Little Italy. Then they ventured west, ending up finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city in Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one group of Rosetans after another packed up their bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream of immigrants became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leaving entire streets of their old village abandoned.
The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside, connected to Bangor only by a steep, rutted wagon path. They built closely clustered two story stone houses, with slate roofs, on narrow streets running up and down the hillside. They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and named the main street on which it stood Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification. In the beginning, they called their town New Italy. But they soon changed it to something that seemed more appropriate, given that in the previous decade almost all of them had come from the same village in Italy. They called it Roseto.
In 1896, a dynamic young priest—Father Pasquale de Nisco—took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land, and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyard, and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up, making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant—given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians, in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans: if you wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania, in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian spoken, and not just any Italian but the precise southern, Foggian dialect spoken back in the Italian Roseto. Roseto Pennsylvania was its own tiny, self-sufficient world—all but unknown by the society around it—and may well have remained so but for a man named Stewart Wolf.
Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the stomach, and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma. He spent summers at a farm he'd bought in Pennsylvania. His house was not far from Roseto—but that, of course, didn't mean much since Roseto was so much in its own world that you could live one town over and never know much about it. "One of the times when we were up there for the summer—this would have been in the late 1950's, I was invited to give a talk at the local medical society," Wolf said, years later, in an interview. "After the talk was over, one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer. And while we were having a drink he said, ‘You know, I've been practicing for seventeen years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease.'"
Wolf was skeptical. This was the 1950's, years before the advent of cholesterol lowering drugs, and aggressive prevention of heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease. But Wolf was also a man of deep curiosity. If somebody said that there were no heart attacks in Roseto, he wanted to find out whether that was true.
Wolf approached the mayor of Roseto and told him that his town represented a medical mystery. He enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They pored over the death certificates from residents of the town, going back as many years as they could. They analyzed physicians' records. They took medical histories, and constructed family genealogies. "We got busy," Wolf said. "We decided to do a preliminary study. We started in 1961. The mayor said—all my sisters are going to help you. He had four sisters. He said, ‘You can have the town council room.' I said, ‘Where are you going to have council meetings?' He said, ‘Well, we'll postpone them for a while.' The ladies would bring us lunch. We had little booths, where we could take blood, do EKGs. We were there for four weeks. Then I talked with the authorities. They gave us the school for the summer. We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested."
The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under 55 died of a heart attack, or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over 65, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was something like thirty or thirty-five percent lower than it should have been.
Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. "I hired medical students and sociology grad students as interviewers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to every person aged twenty one and over," Bruhn remembers. This had happened more than fifty years ago but Bruhn still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he remembered what they found. "There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it."
Wolf's profession had a name for a place like Roseto—a place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.
2.
Wolf's first thought was that the Rosetans must have held on to some dietary practices from the old world that left them healthier than other Americans. But he quickly realized that wasn't true. The Rosetans were cooking with lard, instead of the much healthier olive oil they used back in Italy. Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt, oil, and perhaps some tomatoes, anchovies or onions. Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough plus sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham and sometimes eggs. Sweets like biscotti and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and Easter; now they were eaten all year round. When Wolf had dieticians analyze the typical Rosetan's eating habits, he found that a whopping 41 percent of their calories came from fat. Nor was this a town where people got up at dawn to do yoga and run a brisk six miles. The Pennsylvanian Rosetans smoked heavily, and many were struggling with obesity.
If it wasn't diet and exercise, then, what about genetics? The Rosetans were a close knit group, from the same region of Italy, and Wolf next thought was whether they were of a particularly hardy stock that protected them from disease. So he tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the United States, to see if they shared the same remarkable good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania. They didn't.
He then looked at the region where the Rosetans lived. Was it possible that there was something about living in the foothills of Eastern Pennsylvania that was good for your health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor, which was just down the hill, and Nazareth, a few miles away. These were both about the same size as Roseto, and populated with the same kind of hard-working European immigrants. Wolf combed through both towns' medical records. For men over 65, the death rates from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were something like three times that of Roseto. Another dead end.
What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.
"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."
When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. They went to conferences, where their peers were presenting long rows of data, arrayed in complex charts, and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they talked instead about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to each other on the street and having three generations living under one roof. Living a long life, the conventional wisdom said at the time, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions people made—on what they chose to eat, and how much they chose to exercise, and how effectively they were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of a place.
Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that you couldn't understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about their individual choices or actions in isolation. You had to look beyond the individual. You had to understand what culture they were a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town in Italy their family came from. You had to appreciate the idea that community—the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with—has a profound effect on who we are. The value of an outlier was that it forced you to look a little harder and dig little deeper than you normally would to make sense of the world. And if you did, you could learn something from the outlier than could use to help everyone else.
out·li·er
\-,li(-#)r\
1 : something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2 : a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
1.
Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome, in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine—Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely-clustered two-story stone houses with red tile roofs.
For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night. It was a hard life. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment—until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.
In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans—ten men and one boy—set sail for New York. They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan's Little Italy. Then they ventured west, ending up finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city in Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one group of Rosetans after another packed up their bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream of immigrants became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leaving entire streets of their old village abandoned.
The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside, connected to Bangor only by a steep, rutted wagon path. They built closely clustered two story stone houses, with slate roofs, on narrow streets running up and down the hillside. They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and named the main street on which it stood Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification. In the beginning, they called their town New Italy. But they soon changed it to something that seemed more appropriate, given that in the previous decade almost all of them had come from the same village in Italy. They called it Roseto.
In 1896, a dynamic young priest—Father Pasquale de Nisco—took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land, and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyard, and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up, making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant—given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians, in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans: if you wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania, in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian spoken, and not just any Italian but the precise southern, Foggian dialect spoken back in the Italian Roseto. Roseto Pennsylvania was its own tiny, self-sufficient world—all but unknown by the society around it—and may well have remained so but for a man named Stewart Wolf.
Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the stomach, and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma. He spent summers at a farm he'd bought in Pennsylvania. His house was not far from Roseto—but that, of course, didn't mean much since Roseto was so much in its own world that you could live one town over and never know much about it. "One of the times when we were up there for the summer—this would have been in the late 1950's, I was invited to give a talk at the local medical society," Wolf said, years later, in an interview. "After the talk was over, one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer. And while we were having a drink he said, ‘You know, I've been practicing for seventeen years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease.'"
Wolf was skeptical. This was the 1950's, years before the advent of cholesterol lowering drugs, and aggressive prevention of heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease. But Wolf was also a man of deep curiosity. If somebody said that there were no heart attacks in Roseto, he wanted to find out whether that was true.
Wolf approached the mayor of Roseto and told him that his town represented a medical mystery. He enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They pored over the death certificates from residents of the town, going back as many years as they could. They analyzed physicians' records. They took medical histories, and constructed family genealogies. "We got busy," Wolf said. "We decided to do a preliminary study. We started in 1961. The mayor said—all my sisters are going to help you. He had four sisters. He said, ‘You can have the town council room.' I said, ‘Where are you going to have council meetings?' He said, ‘Well, we'll postpone them for a while.' The ladies would bring us lunch. We had little booths, where we could take blood, do EKGs. We were there for four weeks. Then I talked with the authorities. They gave us the school for the summer. We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested."
The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under 55 died of a heart attack, or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over 65, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was something like thirty or thirty-five percent lower than it should have been.
Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. "I hired medical students and sociology grad students as interviewers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to every person aged twenty one and over," Bruhn remembers. This had happened more than fifty years ago but Bruhn still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he remembered what they found. "There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it."
Wolf's profession had a name for a place like Roseto—a place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.
2.
Wolf's first thought was that the Rosetans must have held on to some dietary practices from the old world that left them healthier than other Americans. But he quickly realized that wasn't true. The Rosetans were cooking with lard, instead of the much healthier olive oil they used back in Italy. Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt, oil, and perhaps some tomatoes, anchovies or onions. Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough plus sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham and sometimes eggs. Sweets like biscotti and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and Easter; now they were eaten all year round. When Wolf had dieticians analyze the typical Rosetan's eating habits, he found that a whopping 41 percent of their calories came from fat. Nor was this a town where people got up at dawn to do yoga and run a brisk six miles. The Pennsylvanian Rosetans smoked heavily, and many were struggling with obesity.
If it wasn't diet and exercise, then, what about genetics? The Rosetans were a close knit group, from the same region of Italy, and Wolf next thought was whether they were of a particularly hardy stock that protected them from disease. So he tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the United States, to see if they shared the same remarkable good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania. They didn't.
He then looked at the region where the Rosetans lived. Was it possible that there was something about living in the foothills of Eastern Pennsylvania that was good for your health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor, which was just down the hill, and Nazareth, a few miles away. These were both about the same size as Roseto, and populated with the same kind of hard-working European immigrants. Wolf combed through both towns' medical records. For men over 65, the death rates from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were something like three times that of Roseto. Another dead end.
What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.
"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."
When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. They went to conferences, where their peers were presenting long rows of data, arrayed in complex charts, and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they talked instead about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to each other on the street and having three generations living under one roof. Living a long life, the conventional wisdom said at the time, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions people made—on what they chose to eat, and how much they chose to exercise, and how effectively they were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of a place.
Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that you couldn't understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about their individual choices or actions in isolation. You had to look beyond the individual. You had to understand what culture they were a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town in Italy their family came from. You had to appreciate the idea that community—the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with—has a profound effect on who we are. The value of an outlier was that it forced you to look a little harder and dig little deeper than you normally would to make sense of the world. And if you did, you could learn something from the outlier than could use to help everyone else.
Red Sky/Normal Sky, Sydney, Australia
These photos have not been tampered with...what do you think about when you look at this?
What should the U.S. do about its borders?
Here's the headline from the latest episode of border violence. What is the good and right thing to do regarding the borders of this or any nation?
----------------
Three shot as border agents fire on vans at port of entry
By Jose Luis Jiménez and Susan Shroder
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS
Originally published 4:25 p.m. September 22, 2009, updated 5:25 p.m., September 22, 2009
SAN DIEGO – Three federal agents fired shots Tuesday as three vans filled with illegal immigrants tried to run the border at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, and four people were injured, three by gunfire, authorities said.
THEY SAY/I SAY, Graff and Birkenstein's Templates for Improving your Writing:
Why Templates?
1. “As soon as possible you state your position and the one it’s responding to together…think of the two as a unit.” (19)
2. “State your Own Ideas as a Response to Others”
3. These templates are all about mimicking sound writing. Have you ever seen someone do something that you want to do on the basketball court or soccer field, in the pool or in a car, on a skateboard or with a guitar? This is the same thing on paper. You should be mimicking the moves of great writers.
The Most Important Templates:
On the one hand, __________. On the other hand, __________.
Author X contradicts herself. At the same time that she argues __________, she also implies __________.
I agree that __________.
She argues __________, and I agree because __________.
Her argument that __________ is supported by new research showing that __________.
In recent discussions of __________, a controversial issue has been whether __________. On the one hand, some argue that __________. On the other hand, however, others argue that __________.
Introducing Standard Views:
Americans today tend to believe that __________.
Conventional wisdom has it that __________.
My whole life I have heard it said that __________.
Making those Views Something You Say: I have always believed that __________.
When I was a child, I used to think that __________.
Writing a Summary:
She demonstrates that __________.
In fact, they celebrate the fact that __________.
Introducing a Quote:
X insists, “__________.”
As the prominent philosopher X puts it, “__________.”
According to X, “__________.”
In her book, Book Title, X maintains that __________.
X complicates matters further when she writes that __________.
Disagreeing:
I think that X is mistaken because she overlooks __________.
I disagree with X’s view that __________ because, as recent research has shown, __________.
Introducing Your Point of View:
X overlooks what I consider an important point about __________.
I wholeheartedly endorse what X calls __________.
My discussion of X is in fact addressing the larger matter of __________.
These conclusions will have significant applications in __________ as well as in __________.
1. “As soon as possible you state your position and the one it’s responding to together…think of the two as a unit.” (19)
2. “State your Own Ideas as a Response to Others”
3. These templates are all about mimicking sound writing. Have you ever seen someone do something that you want to do on the basketball court or soccer field, in the pool or in a car, on a skateboard or with a guitar? This is the same thing on paper. You should be mimicking the moves of great writers.
The Most Important Templates:
On the one hand, __________. On the other hand, __________.
Author X contradicts herself. At the same time that she argues __________, she also implies __________.
I agree that __________.
She argues __________, and I agree because __________.
Her argument that __________ is supported by new research showing that __________.
In recent discussions of __________, a controversial issue has been whether __________. On the one hand, some argue that __________. On the other hand, however, others argue that __________.
Introducing Standard Views:
Americans today tend to believe that __________.
Conventional wisdom has it that __________.
My whole life I have heard it said that __________.
Making those Views Something You Say: I have always believed that __________.
When I was a child, I used to think that __________.
Writing a Summary:
She demonstrates that __________.
In fact, they celebrate the fact that __________.
Introducing a Quote:
X insists, “__________.”
As the prominent philosopher X puts it, “__________.”
According to X, “__________.”
In her book, Book Title, X maintains that __________.
X complicates matters further when she writes that __________.
Disagreeing:
I think that X is mistaken because she overlooks __________.
I disagree with X’s view that __________ because, as recent research has shown, __________.
Introducing Your Point of View:
X overlooks what I consider an important point about __________.
I wholeheartedly endorse what X calls __________.
My discussion of X is in fact addressing the larger matter of __________.
These conclusions will have significant applications in __________ as well as in __________.
Friday, September 18, 2009
MY WRITING GROUP IS SO CREATIVE!!!
You have five minutes to write a story. Everyone has to contribute, and someone has to type it into this space.
RESTAURANT REVIEW ASSIGNMENT DETAILS
For this assignment you need to go research a restaurant (meaning, eat there and take notes) and write a review of your experience. Your review should be creative, specific, and enticing. You should use your writing to make your reader taste, see, and smell the food you ate. In other words, be descriptive. If possible, go with someone else so that you can experience (and even taste?) various dishes. However, try to avoid writing about restaurants that you think others in class might choose. If you choose a chain restaurant, be sure to tell your reader which one it is—i.e. not just “McDonalds” but “the McDonalds at the corner of Coffee and Hageman.” Also, if you choose to do a review of a chain, like Der Wienerschnitzel, you had better do something to make your review stand out.
You may follow one of the samples we examine in class, create your own rating system, or follow any creative instincts that allow you to effectively convey the information on this restaurant.
Your review must comment on the ambiance, the food, and the service.
Your review should be between 700 and 1000 words. (approximately 2 pages)
TYPED COMPLETE ROUGH DRAFT DUE AT BEGINNING OF CLASS ON 9/28
If you do not have a complete, typed rough draft at the start of class, you will automatically fail this assignment.
Final Draft Due on 9/30
You may follow one of the samples we examine in class, create your own rating system, or follow any creative instincts that allow you to effectively convey the information on this restaurant.
Your review must comment on the ambiance, the food, and the service.
Your review should be between 700 and 1000 words. (approximately 2 pages)
TYPED COMPLETE ROUGH DRAFT DUE AT BEGINNING OF CLASS ON 9/28
If you do not have a complete, typed rough draft at the start of class, you will automatically fail this assignment.
Final Draft Due on 9/30
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Restaurant Review
What makes a good restaurant review?
How do you judge a restaurant when you are out and about and eating?
Monday, September 14, 2009
SIGNED STATEMENT FOR SYLLABUS
I read and understand all of the policies of the syllabus and composition standards.
Signed ___________________________
DUE ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16
Signed ___________________________
DUE ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16
Sunday, September 13, 2009
DEPARTMENTAL COMPOSITION STANDARDS
California State University, Bakersfield
Composition Standards
English 100: Critical Thinking and Writing
Prerequisite: A total English Placement Test score between 142 and 154 OR a grade of C- or higher in English 80 or 90.
To advance to English 110, students must earn a grade of C- or higher in English 100.
To be eligible for a C- in English 100, students must earn a C- or higher on at least one in-class writing assignment and a C- average on all other course assignments.
Course Description: Study of rhetorical patterns as critical thinking strategies to help students develop effective college-level writing skills. Frequent short papers in a variety of essay modes are assigned, and the fundamentals of grammar, usage, punctuation, and spelling are reviewed as necessary. Tutoring is required with this course.
Course Goals
At the end of ten weeks, students in English 100 should be able to do the following:
1. read and write literally, interpretively, and analytically or critically;
2. recognize the differences among thesis statements, topic sentences/main ideas, and supporting details/evidence;
3. understand how the thesis statement, topic sentences, and supporting details work together;
4. recognize a writer’s tone and how it informs a text’s statements; this includes analyzing diction and syntax;
5. begin to recognize how a writer’s choices affect and inform the text;
6. summarize the main and supporting points contained in an article or essay on a particular topic;
7. write essays that are logically organized, well developed, coherent, and mechanically sound;
8. recognize bias in readings;
9. synthesize ideas from various sources;
10. incorporate quotation, summary, and paraphrase, using in-text documentation;
11. use a handbook;
12. recognize plagiarism;
13. revise and edit their own writing using standard, edited American English.
If time permits, instructors should incorporate, but are not limited to, the following goals:
1. identify a text’s ethos, logos, and pathos appeals;
2. introduce rhetorical strategies as appropriate;
3. detect logical fallacies;
4. understand how evidence can prove a statement true (i.e., claim, support, and warrant in Toulmin logic).
Minimum Reading Requirements
All of the writing assignments should move from reading to writing.
Sustained Silent Reading (SSR): Fifteen minutes of each class period should be dedicated to guided reading of a full-length book at least once a week. Students should choose their own books; instructors should read with them. Informal written responses to the readings, such as journal entries, should be a part of this exercise. Reading strategies––such as think aloud, chunking, annotating, highlighting, key words, T charts, and “Say, Mean, Matter”––should be used to teach the following:
• identifying main idea, both stated and unstated;
• identifying supporting details;
• identifying patterns of organization;
• distinguishing between fact and opinion;
• determining tone, mood, and bias;
• detecting errors in reasoning;
• determining underlying assumptions.
Minimum Writing Requirements
A diagnostic prompt is available and can be accessed from the online Composition Handbook.
Three one-paragraph summaries of readings.
One three-to-four-page documented synthesis (may be informative or argumentative) using three to four sources provided by the instructor. Using familiar sources helps the instructor and the students readily identify and address issues of plagiarism. You may ask students to get one to two sources on their own, but this assignment should focus on students’ ability to synthesize and document information, not research it.
Three to five two-to-three-page essays, at least two, but no more than three, of which must be written in class and at least one of which is an argument.
The Common Essay: The Common Essay is an in-class exam given to English 100 and/or110 students mid-quarter. The Common Essay serves a dual purpose: to insure that all composition instructors are normed with one another in reference to grading and to provide students with a contest opportunity. The norming and grading process may vary depending on the number of faculty involved.
Instructors may choose to count the Common Essay as either one of two mandatory in-class essays, as a replacement grade for one of the two in-class essays, or simply as a writing experience that counts towards participation or homework percentages. Instructors should indicate on their syllabus how they intend to factor the Common Essay grade into the course grade.
Instructors will receive a detailed Common Essay package, including the essay prompt and further instructions, from the Common Essay Coordinator.
Writing Workshops
Required: A MyWritingLab online workshop is required for this course. The workshop consists of the following 10 topics that students work on outside of class at their convenience:
prewriting
supporting details
thesis statements
developing the thesis
pronoun agreement
using parallelism
fragments
fused sentences
subject-verb agreement
the comma
This requirement is 10% of the overall course grade. To receive full credit, students must master approximately one topic per week, for a total of ten topics by the end of the quarter. To demonstrate mastery, students must earn a score of 80% or higher on both the Recall and Apply sections for each topic.
Instructors may deviate from the order and schedule of topics for individual students and/or for the class as a whole, so long as students are required to master the given ten topics throughout the quarter. For example, an instructor may require that all topics be completed earlier than the last week of class or that students work on fragments before parallelism or that an individual student work on a specific topic, and so on.
Instructors may use their own discretion when calculating grades for students who fail to master all ten topics or fail to master them by the deadline so long as these students are not given full credit.
Instructors who deviate from the schedule will have to self-monitor students’ progress by requiring students bring in their “student detail” page from the MyWritingLab site for each topic.
Instructors should also use the OASIS Referral Forms to require students who need additional help to get individual, drop-in tutoring.
Students who are registering to MyWritingLab for the first time need to register and create a user profile using the code packaged with their Ouick Access textbook and a course identification number provided to instructors by a MyWritingLab spokesperson. However, some students may have already registered to the site in a previous class. In this case, students can use their previous code so long as the code has not expired. Codes expire approximately one year after activation. Students who still have an active code simply need to login, click on “join a different class,” and follow the directions from there.
Instructors should schedule class time the first or second week of classes to help students register to the site. Instructors will also need to provide Brooke Hughes and/or Randi Brummett with an approved class roster by the third week of classes. Indicate on the roster any students who have switched classes, dropped, or added your class.
Instructors will then receive weekly updates indicating each student’s progress, and instructors should actively monitor and promote the lab to encourage maximum participation.
Note: To avoid double enrolling students in the MyWritingLab, please inform students that they should not be enrolled in Humanities 277.1 while also enrolled in English 100. Probationary students instead may choose Advancing Academic Confidence (General Studies 157), Improving Academic Fitness (General Studies 102), or My Reading Lab (Humanities 277.2/477.2).
.
You are responsible for completing 10 MyWritingLab topics in conjunction with your English 100 class. This requirement is worth 10% of your overall English 100 grade. To receive full credit, you must master at least one topic per week, for a total of ten topics by the end of the quarter. To master a topic, you must earn a score of 80% or higher on both the Recall and Apply sections for each of the following MyWritingLab topics:
prewriting
supporting details
thesis statements
developing the thesis
pronoun agreement
using parallelism
fragments
fused sentences
subject-verb agreement
the comma
You will be held responsible for these new skills every week in your writing. Since this is an online workshop, you can work on these topics outside of class at your convenience, so long as you master approximately one topic per week, for a total of ten topics. This means that if you wait until the end of the quarter to complete all ten topics, you will not receive full credit and your essay grades may suffer.
You will need a MyWritingLab workbook, which you can purchase from Reprographics; your access code, which is packaged with your Quick Access text; and the following course identification number:
Course ID#--####
A time will be scheduled during your first or second week of class to help you register to the site and create your user profile, and you will need your MyWritingLab code and course identification number to do this. If you have already registered to the site in a previous class, you do not need to register and create a new user profile. Instead, you will need to login to the site, click on “join a different class,” and follow the directions from there.
For additional information on MyWritingLab, view the power points at the following Web sites:
How to register for MWL
http://www.csub.edu/mwl/updated mwlreg.ppt
How to switch classes in in MWL
http://www.csub.edu/mwl/mwlswitchclass.ppt
How to get around MWL for English100
http://www.csub.edu/mwl/mwleng100.ppt
Note: If you exhaust a topic before mastering it, let your instructor know, and he or she will have it “unlocked” for you.
Note: To avoid double enrollment in MyWritingLab, students should not be enrolled in Humanities 277.1 while also enrolled in English 100. If you are enrolled in Humanities 277.1, please let your instructor know immediately.
Note: Instructors should contact Brooke Hughes (bhughes@csub.edu) or Randi Brummett (rbrummett@csub.edu) for help registering students to the site or for problems or questions regarding codes, exhausted topics, or any other concerns. When reporting an exhausted topic, instructors need to provide the students name, class, and instructor.
Composition Standards
English 100: Critical Thinking and Writing
Prerequisite: A total English Placement Test score between 142 and 154 OR a grade of C- or higher in English 80 or 90.
To advance to English 110, students must earn a grade of C- or higher in English 100.
To be eligible for a C- in English 100, students must earn a C- or higher on at least one in-class writing assignment and a C- average on all other course assignments.
Course Description: Study of rhetorical patterns as critical thinking strategies to help students develop effective college-level writing skills. Frequent short papers in a variety of essay modes are assigned, and the fundamentals of grammar, usage, punctuation, and spelling are reviewed as necessary. Tutoring is required with this course.
Course Goals
At the end of ten weeks, students in English 100 should be able to do the following:
1. read and write literally, interpretively, and analytically or critically;
2. recognize the differences among thesis statements, topic sentences/main ideas, and supporting details/evidence;
3. understand how the thesis statement, topic sentences, and supporting details work together;
4. recognize a writer’s tone and how it informs a text’s statements; this includes analyzing diction and syntax;
5. begin to recognize how a writer’s choices affect and inform the text;
6. summarize the main and supporting points contained in an article or essay on a particular topic;
7. write essays that are logically organized, well developed, coherent, and mechanically sound;
8. recognize bias in readings;
9. synthesize ideas from various sources;
10. incorporate quotation, summary, and paraphrase, using in-text documentation;
11. use a handbook;
12. recognize plagiarism;
13. revise and edit their own writing using standard, edited American English.
If time permits, instructors should incorporate, but are not limited to, the following goals:
1. identify a text’s ethos, logos, and pathos appeals;
2. introduce rhetorical strategies as appropriate;
3. detect logical fallacies;
4. understand how evidence can prove a statement true (i.e., claim, support, and warrant in Toulmin logic).
Minimum Reading Requirements
All of the writing assignments should move from reading to writing.
Sustained Silent Reading (SSR): Fifteen minutes of each class period should be dedicated to guided reading of a full-length book at least once a week. Students should choose their own books; instructors should read with them. Informal written responses to the readings, such as journal entries, should be a part of this exercise. Reading strategies––such as think aloud, chunking, annotating, highlighting, key words, T charts, and “Say, Mean, Matter”––should be used to teach the following:
• identifying main idea, both stated and unstated;
• identifying supporting details;
• identifying patterns of organization;
• distinguishing between fact and opinion;
• determining tone, mood, and bias;
• detecting errors in reasoning;
• determining underlying assumptions.
Minimum Writing Requirements
A diagnostic prompt is available and can be accessed from the online Composition Handbook.
Three one-paragraph summaries of readings.
One three-to-four-page documented synthesis (may be informative or argumentative) using three to four sources provided by the instructor. Using familiar sources helps the instructor and the students readily identify and address issues of plagiarism. You may ask students to get one to two sources on their own, but this assignment should focus on students’ ability to synthesize and document information, not research it.
Three to five two-to-three-page essays, at least two, but no more than three, of which must be written in class and at least one of which is an argument.
The Common Essay: The Common Essay is an in-class exam given to English 100 and/or110 students mid-quarter. The Common Essay serves a dual purpose: to insure that all composition instructors are normed with one another in reference to grading and to provide students with a contest opportunity. The norming and grading process may vary depending on the number of faculty involved.
Instructors may choose to count the Common Essay as either one of two mandatory in-class essays, as a replacement grade for one of the two in-class essays, or simply as a writing experience that counts towards participation or homework percentages. Instructors should indicate on their syllabus how they intend to factor the Common Essay grade into the course grade.
Instructors will receive a detailed Common Essay package, including the essay prompt and further instructions, from the Common Essay Coordinator.
Writing Workshops
Required: A MyWritingLab online workshop is required for this course. The workshop consists of the following 10 topics that students work on outside of class at their convenience:
prewriting
supporting details
thesis statements
developing the thesis
pronoun agreement
using parallelism
fragments
fused sentences
subject-verb agreement
the comma
This requirement is 10% of the overall course grade. To receive full credit, students must master approximately one topic per week, for a total of ten topics by the end of the quarter. To demonstrate mastery, students must earn a score of 80% or higher on both the Recall and Apply sections for each topic.
Instructors may deviate from the order and schedule of topics for individual students and/or for the class as a whole, so long as students are required to master the given ten topics throughout the quarter. For example, an instructor may require that all topics be completed earlier than the last week of class or that students work on fragments before parallelism or that an individual student work on a specific topic, and so on.
Instructors may use their own discretion when calculating grades for students who fail to master all ten topics or fail to master them by the deadline so long as these students are not given full credit.
Instructors who deviate from the schedule will have to self-monitor students’ progress by requiring students bring in their “student detail” page from the MyWritingLab site for each topic.
Instructors should also use the OASIS Referral Forms to require students who need additional help to get individual, drop-in tutoring.
Students who are registering to MyWritingLab for the first time need to register and create a user profile using the code packaged with their Ouick Access textbook and a course identification number provided to instructors by a MyWritingLab spokesperson. However, some students may have already registered to the site in a previous class. In this case, students can use their previous code so long as the code has not expired. Codes expire approximately one year after activation. Students who still have an active code simply need to login, click on “join a different class,” and follow the directions from there.
Instructors should schedule class time the first or second week of classes to help students register to the site. Instructors will also need to provide Brooke Hughes and/or Randi Brummett with an approved class roster by the third week of classes. Indicate on the roster any students who have switched classes, dropped, or added your class.
Instructors will then receive weekly updates indicating each student’s progress, and instructors should actively monitor and promote the lab to encourage maximum participation.
Note: To avoid double enrolling students in the MyWritingLab, please inform students that they should not be enrolled in Humanities 277.1 while also enrolled in English 100. Probationary students instead may choose Advancing Academic Confidence (General Studies 157), Improving Academic Fitness (General Studies 102), or My Reading Lab (Humanities 277.2/477.2).
.
You are responsible for completing 10 MyWritingLab topics in conjunction with your English 100 class. This requirement is worth 10% of your overall English 100 grade. To receive full credit, you must master at least one topic per week, for a total of ten topics by the end of the quarter. To master a topic, you must earn a score of 80% or higher on both the Recall and Apply sections for each of the following MyWritingLab topics:
prewriting
supporting details
thesis statements
developing the thesis
pronoun agreement
using parallelism
fragments
fused sentences
subject-verb agreement
the comma
You will be held responsible for these new skills every week in your writing. Since this is an online workshop, you can work on these topics outside of class at your convenience, so long as you master approximately one topic per week, for a total of ten topics. This means that if you wait until the end of the quarter to complete all ten topics, you will not receive full credit and your essay grades may suffer.
You will need a MyWritingLab workbook, which you can purchase from Reprographics; your access code, which is packaged with your Quick Access text; and the following course identification number:
Course ID#--####
A time will be scheduled during your first or second week of class to help you register to the site and create your user profile, and you will need your MyWritingLab code and course identification number to do this. If you have already registered to the site in a previous class, you do not need to register and create a new user profile. Instead, you will need to login to the site, click on “join a different class,” and follow the directions from there.
For additional information on MyWritingLab, view the power points at the following Web sites:
How to register for MWL
http://www.csub.edu/mwl/updated mwlreg.ppt
How to switch classes in in MWL
http://www.csub.edu/mwl/mwlswitchclass.ppt
How to get around MWL for English100
http://www.csub.edu/mwl/mwleng100.ppt
Note: If you exhaust a topic before mastering it, let your instructor know, and he or she will have it “unlocked” for you.
Note: To avoid double enrollment in MyWritingLab, students should not be enrolled in Humanities 277.1 while also enrolled in English 100. If you are enrolled in Humanities 277.1, please let your instructor know immediately.
Note: Instructors should contact Brooke Hughes (bhughes@csub.edu) or Randi Brummett (rbrummett@csub.edu) for help registering students to the site or for problems or questions regarding codes, exhausted topics, or any other concerns. When reporting an exhausted topic, instructors need to provide the students name, class, and instructor.
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