Verizon commercials: fallacy

Verizon's primary marketing strategy over the past years has been placing emphasis on its huge network. Because of this, there are a few logical fallacies that are clear in their commercials.

The first one is the bandwagon. In each and every commercial, Verizon boasts that they have America's largest network. They compliment this claim by lining up an army of people in their commercial as a visual to how large their network is. However, AT&T has been beating them in the telecommunications market share for over a year. Verizon uses their fallacy commercial visuals to lure people into their service.

Another one of Verizon's fallacies is their appeal to hi-tech. Although it's less major because almost every telecommunications company says the same things about their latest products. However, it is important to note that American has been behind Japan in cell phone technology for almost a decade. Thus, none of their latest phones are really all that "advanced" or impressive.

Jon Stewart on Fact Checking

In his cut CNN Leaves It There Jon Stewart criticizes the lack of factual support in public discourse. He uses CNN as the main example of anchors and government office holders who constantly throw out arbitrary numbers describing important concerns to the country. The problem is that the facts are left unchecked, and there is no way to verify any of the claims. In some cases, the claims contain a ridiculous amount of ambiguity. To make it even worse, CNN has a habit of ending the debates before they have the proper time to fully develop. Once a controversial point is made that does not align with the CNN's political affiliation, they just "leave it there."

Academic discourse does not suffer from this problem because facts are open for anybody in the audience to check. All claims are cited to a list of sources that are included at the end of the writing. Thus, it is impossible for an unsupported claim to pass on as truth. The integrity of the piece as a whole is reliant on the strength of all sources used in its compilation. The need for citations keeps the writer honest since the audience can check on the reliability of the sources and whether the author purposely altered any information.

Advantages of non-standard dialects

While having knowledge of the standard dialect is best for socioeconomic opportunities, the value of non-standard dialects might be underrated. The fact is, many minority populations show solidarity through their common use of a dialect. They grow up speaking it with their parents and friends. If they fully switch to the standard dialect, they may not be able to share the same relationships they would have had if they had maintained their "lower" dialect.

That's not to say that learning the standard dialect is bad. It is absolutely necessary to advance in the economic ladder. Knowledge of the standard for is essential to getting professional level jobs that require communication skills beyond particular regions. Ideally, people should be able to code-switch between their standard and non-standard dialect to match the situation. Depending on whether the situation is formal or with friends and family, they should be able to optimize each encounter by having access to two forms of speech. On the surface, there are disadvantages to only being able to use one or the other, but none of both can be used.

My Fair Lady

My Fair Lady is a romantic film about a man named Henry Higgins who attempts to revolutionize the language abilities of Eliza Doolittle, a poor guttersnipe. Higgins has a superiority complex and thinks the proper usage of English is dying. He takes Doolittle in his experiment to transform her speaking capabilities in six months. His egotistical methods are very degrading and put Doolittle through a very emotional experience. She eventually reaches a point where she loses her original identity and yet cannot fully assimilate into higher class society.

This film makes a lot of assertions about the linguistic identity and its social influences. For the most part, it is fairly accurate in its depiction. Social classes are divided up not purely because of linguistics, but because of a various number of other factors such as education, wealth, legacy, etc. So when Doolittle changes her style of speech altogether, she becomes lost within a purgatory between high class and low class. With the high class, she is only able to speak like them, but shares no other similar qualities. With the low class, she is unaccepted because of the way she speaks. Thus, it is more logical that the language people should should result from their social class rather than their social class resulting from their language.

Speaker series 2

The three presenters in the second installment of the Bovard environmental speaker series were altogether more effective encouraging action than Simran Sethi. Each presenter had their own specific methods of persuasion, and expressed them very well. One speaker provoked USC students to compete with UCLA in environmental preservation. She did a good job in inciting the competitive spirit of USC students. The second speaker attempted to guilt trip the audience into taking action. While this was the least effective, it still sent the message in a strong way. The last speaker appealed to logic. He used many business terms and spoke about the financial market that exists in switching to green.

Because these presenters were all college students, they were able to connect to the audience on a closer level. Each had founded an environmental club in their institutions, and led them to achieve great things. This lets the audience know that they too are capable of taking action and receiving prestigious awards for doing so. So unlike Simran Sethi, who offered no specific examples of how to preserve the environment and had little connection with the audience, these follow college students made their points in a focused manner and were able to achieve the goal of their presentation.

Reasons for the Tuskegee Apology

As previously mentioned, an apology for the Tuskegee incident was absolutely necessary. The government needed to restore public trust into human research, especially amongst the African American population and other minority groups. Given the results of this incident, it would have definitely frightened any potential test subjects from wanting to be betrayed. The apology would serve to remedy the situation. Unfortunately, by the time Bill Clinton gave the apology, there were only a few remaining survivors of the original 600 subjects.

Clinton's apology was effective in accomplishing its goal. He reminded everyone that the intended purpose of human research is to ultimately benefit the human race with medical advancements. In the Tuskegee incident, the poor ethics shown by the researchers should not represent the ethics of human research as a whole. Clinton stressed the importance of these ethics and promised to implement programs that spread the awareness of bioethics. The apology was well received by its audience and the country was able to heal from this event.

Clinton's Tuskegee Apology

For about 40 years, the United States Public Health Service misled 600 African American men in a syphilis study. The study was originally intended to test the short-medium term effects of syphilis; however, when a cure was discovered, the researchers decided to prolong the experiment and did not provide the test subjects with the cure. This went on for a few decades until finally the public questioned the ethics behind the study. Met with public outrage, the researchers ended the study and the government allocated 10 million dollars to create the Tuskegee Health Benefit Program.

The only reason to delay the apology would have been because it would have been too soon after the event. Rather, I feel the apology was too late. The consequences of the event were far too dire for the United States Public Health Service to just ignore. Their reputation was damaged and there was a negative public view on ethics in the field of human research. Thus, an apology was absolutely necessary to restore public trust. It was just a matter of time before it was actually given by President Clinton in 1997.

A link to the apology:
http://clinton4.nara.gov/textonly/New/Remarks/Fri/19970516-898.html

Speaker series 1: Simran Sethi

Yes, saving our environment is important. We can all agree that with the way people are treating the environment right now, resources are fast depleting and level of pollution is rapidly increasing. Renowned media journalist Simran Sethi presented on this topic as part of USC Bovard speaker series. Her goal - to spread awareness of the issue and encourage action amongst college students. While she succeeded in enlightening the audience about the environmental problems, she was not able to invoke action.

Simran's presentation lacked focus. It seemed as if she was jumping around from one point to another very quickly and was unable to make a strong appeal. The audience really had no time to fully comprehend everything she was saying. One moment, Simran gave facts. The next moment, she tried to appeal to emotion by telling the audience members to close their eyes and imagine the loss of a happy place. At the end of her speech, she made a call to action. But when an audience member inquired about specific ways to preserve the environment, she was unable to provide any. Essentially, the audience received nothing from the presentation other than the generic message about saving the environment.

Endangered Language: Manchu

In the city of Sanjiazi, located in northeast China, the language of Manchu only has about 70 native speakers left. The language initially gained very high prestige during the Qing dynasty. It was used as the primary language of the Qing Imperial court. However, the Manchu ethnic group either gradually lost influence in government or shifted to Mandarin Chinese. After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, no new documents were recorded in the Manchu language and all existing documents were kept in archives.During the formation of the People's Republic of China, many more ethnic Manchus gave up their language for Mandarin Chinese. Currently, there are about 10 million ethnic Manchus who do not know their native language.

Many aspects of the Manchu culture will disappear if the language dies. Even now, cities which have been inhabited by ethnic Manchus have torn down the old Manchu architecture, replacing it with Chinese style brick buildings. Many other traditions of the culture have already been lost. The remaining speakers are making a conscious effort to pass the language to their children, but they realize their hopes of preserving the language for a long period of time are very thin.

For more information, visit
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/16/world/asia/16iht-manchu.4935046.html

Ideal conditions for saving a language

About half of the world's 7000 language are projected to disappear within the next century. Twenty Percent of these are already moribund (not being effectively passed on to the next generation). With these statistics, it would seem that language death is a dire issue and that mankind must make an effort to save all these languages. However, there just are not enough resources to save each and every one. Thus, language preservation projects should prioritize languages which require minimal effort and cost to save.

A few criteria that measure whether a language is worth saving are the number of speakers remaining and their personal feelings towards preserving their native tongue. Endangered languages which still have at least a few thousand speakers are a lot easier to save with than ones which only have a few hundred. The difference is very significant considering that the higher population while have an exponentially higher rate of reproduction and potentially more children to pass the language onto. The other consideration - the speakers' attitude - is also important because speakers which are not motivated to keep their language (whether it is because of economic opportunities in other languages or the high prestige of another language) will want to resist passing their language to their offspring. In these situations, both the effort and possible cost of motivating speakers to maintain their language does not outweigh the end reward.

Application of critical thinking to LING 115

As outlined in "The Perry Model of Intellectual and Ethical Development," critical thinking is the practice of forming context-appropriate decisions in the realm of uncertainty. Uncertainty exists whenever facts and hard knowledge do not exist regarding a specific topic. All of the social issues courses (including LING 115) are based on contemporary issues in which no solution shares a complete consensus, thus individuals must apply critical thinking in forming a personal perspective of the issues.

In the linguistics 115 course, students must be able to make sense of the ambiguous processes of language development. It was stated in the first class that languages are not defined by formulaic linguistic properties but rather by variable social and economic factors. There is not enough hard evidence to develop a solid theories of how varieties of speech gain the status of a language. The mutually intelligibility hypothesis is a good attempt, but it is contradicted by many real life scenarios. The information presented in this course does not consist of only raw facts, but also ideas such as language preservation which have a high degree of uncertainty. As such, It is absolutely necessary necessary for students to think critically in order to fully grasp the course material.

A Self-righteous Pope

Most people would agree that it is counter-intuitive to associate a pious entity such as the Pope with the genocidal Nazi Germans. In his article A German Lesson: The Fallacy of One Path, Goldenhagen challenges the benevolent reputation of the Pope by casting doubt upon his values and motives. While Goldenhagen concedes that it would be impossible for the Pope to ever instigate a mass murder, he asserts that Pope's ideology and thought processes are fundamentally similar to those of the Anti-Semitic Nazis.

As an attack on the Pope's rejection of relativism, Goldenhagen states, "As an account of the sources of Nazism and its horrors, this is selective and false; as a lesson learned from Nazism, it is selective and deeply troubling." But is that in itself terrible? Even someone as publicly spoken as the Pope should not be denied his right to form his personal opinions regarding matters of religion. If this moral stance is Pope's only crime, You and I could probably find room for understanding. However, it is his self-righteousness and hypocrisy that puts him into category with the Nazis.

Now the issue of motive becomes apparent. Both the Pope and the Nazis use a closed-minded ideology to justify their actions. The Nazis had the nerve to kill six million Jews for reasons they thought were good for society. Goldenhagen brings to light the possibility that the Pope has the potential to make an irrational, world-changing decision just because he can convince himself that his reasons are valid.