Monthly Archives: November 2012

Week 10: UnexpecTED

Unlike the previous speech, I think my TED talk went a little better than expected. In addition to being in a room with some talented people to give me an example to follow, and some not-quite-as talented people to make me feel better about how it turned out, I managed to get a fairly good grade on what I considered a mediocre speech. Above all my failures was probably that when it came to engaging the audience, since my big punch line (which I refuse to accept is not funny) about hilariously inept creationist obscurantism didn’t get me any reaction at all. I’d also hoped to challenge the audience a little more with my final moments and questions, and perhaps elicit some thought.

I think, overall, my failure was that I didn’t project quite enough confidence. I like this issue, I know a lot about it, I’m utterly convinced that so many people have been ill-informed about it, and I came off as a little indecisive and flaky in presentation. I’ve always believed in being as confrontational as possible when it comes to issues of logic and rationality, and I wish I could have brought that through in my TED talk a little more than I ended up doing.

While I won’t nitpick what exactly happened during the talk, I’d like to think that I at least established the historical side of the evolution debate for people who may not have done as much research as I had prior to doing this talk. Overall, I call this foray an unexpected success as far as my grade, which is really the important thing.

Week 10: Public “Controversy”

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A) The distinction of a public versus a non-public issue is fairly important: a public issue is one that has some measurable effect on the body politic. Issues without such impacts aren’t for us to be speculating about or judging. Often, public issues concern legal policy and legislative actions, but not all issues legislated on are public (gay marriage is a good example of this). The problems we discuss have impact on people, in a practical as well as a symbolic way. From my group’s first topic idea, restrictions on the full face Islamic veil (burqua or niqab) in France give us important issues to talk about, including the relationship between religious liberty and security, which has consequences that go far beyond just this one case, making it a public issue.

Controversial, however, from my very mature and carefully considered quotation marks, is not in any sense a useful distinction. The only thing that makes something a controversy is that someone is willing to argue about it, which encompasses absolutely everything. There are people willing to argue that there are almost no racists left in the United States, that evolution is not an established scientific theory, that the Earth is not round, that a UFO landed in Roswell. You name any idea or fact, some frivolous charlatan is willing to take issue with it for the benefit of the willfully ignorant. That’s not to say that some things which are labeled as controversies are actually important issues that we should encourage debate on, it’s just that literally everything is a controversy, and as such calling something a controversy has no explanatory or distinctive power, making the word essentially useless.

B) Legally, what is the extent to which we can use copyrighted materials under fair use? I’m concerned with this idea, because I’ve seen fair use fail numerous times when it comes to copyright, although I know that “education” is a specifically marked purpose to which fair use applies.

Week 10: Dragon Age: Origins

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Welcome back, everyone, from a (hopefully) refreshing break! While many of you probably spent a lot of time with family members, friends, significant others, pets, step-uncles-in-law, household plants, maybe some complete strangers, I spent most of my time playing a game. You may be able to guess based on the title that this game is Dragon Age: Origins, and that I clocked an embarrassingly long time playing it (don’t ask). Here for you, I’m going to summarize one scenario from the game’s story to give a case study in what it does correctly:

The Darkspawn

You are a Grey Warden, one of the elite warriors in charge of keeping the world safe from the monstrous Darkspawn. While these creatures live mostly in the underground Deep Roads, occasionally they come in force, led by a corrupted god known as an Archdemon in a march known as a Bilght. After nearly having your entire order wiped out by a treacherous general in the King’s army, you are tasked with using some old treaties to gather up support against the Blight. However, once you show up to each of these locations, you learn that it takes a bit more than the threat of complete obliteration to solve everyone’s problems.

Orzammar: One of the last cities of the dwarves.

Enter Orzammar, the kingdom of the dwarves. They’re a hearty folk, very strong and with an in-born resistance to magic. In non-Blight times, their elite soldiers ceaselessly patrol the Deep Roads to keep the Darkspawn from wiping them out completely. The only problem is, they have no king. After the death of King Endrin, two candidates with seemingly equal claims to the throne appear: his son, Prince Bhelen Aeducan, and his confidant, Lord Harrowmont. While they do have a kingdom, the dwarves choose their king primarily by a vote of the noble class in the Assembly, which means that both sides need a lot of help to ensure victory.

Whichever side you choose, they eventually send you into the Deep Roads to search for their one guarantee of victory. In dwarven society, members who distinguish themselves above and beyond the call of duty are known as Paragons, and the vote of a Paragon outweighs any decision of the Assembly. The only living Paragon, Branka, has been gone for two years along with hundreds of fellow dwarves in search of the legendary Anvil of the Void, an artifact that long ago created the massive stone Golems that made the dwarven army invincible. Giant steel men impervious to pain and fatigue, bringing them back could be a huge boon against the Blight, but at what cost?

The Anvil

You learn before meeting her what lengths Branka was willing to go to to find the Anvil. The entire house of dwarves she brought with her, some two or three hundred, were killed, some thrown carelessly against the Anvil’s defenses to see what would happen, and others sacrificed to a fate much worse than death (don’t even ask) to that same end. Further, the Anvil itself isn’t morally neutral. As its guardian reveals, no smith can create life, they have to take it from somewhere else. Souls must be bound to the steel and stone of the golems. At first, only volunteers were used, but over time the pool expanded: prisoners, the poor, political enemies, anybody the king wanted to be rid of. As long as the Anvil exists, it can make slaves in the most pure and irreversible way. Could any threat possibly justify this?

Paragon Branka

It’s the ultimate example of the “ticking bomb” scenario. The Darkspawn, left unchecked, will raze the entire nation and everyone will die, but are we willing to make such a sacrifice? What happens to the Anvil when there isn’t a Blight? Could anyone be trusted with the power to mold souls? As with everything else in Dragon Age, the decision isn’t easy, and there is no un-contestable answer. Just as with real life, we have to decide not between the good and the evil option, but between security and morality, practicality and principle, or other equally murky sets of ideas. As I alluded to before, the clash between ideas such as these are prevalent in modern society, and it’s nice to see a game that can so adequately offer a choice in a virtual world that people may become involved in, in some small part, in the real world.

Week 9: Presidential Mandates

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So, seeing as we had an election earlier this week, in which Barack Obama easily defeated Mitt Romney (I know everyone knows that, but I want to say it again anyway) in not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote. In AP U.S. Government and Politics class last year, I learned about the concept of a presidential “mandate,” the idea that a president winning both the electoral college vote and the popular vote means that he has been, in effect, ordered the populace to carry out his policies. General wisdom holds that political scientists don’t put much in store by this term, but politicians tend to.

This begs the question of what President Obama will do or be able to do in his second term. Clearly a majority of the country is in favor of him, and the momentum of an election just won could go pretty far in rallying the populace and in winning congressional approval. This concept of a mandate directly ties into the rhetorical element of kairos. Now that the whole country is clear on who the president is, and that they’ll have to deal with him for the next four years. Further, the President now knows that he will not have to personally deal with another campaign, which naturally could lead to his being less careful and compromising in a political sense.

Presidential politics is fairly difficult and complicated, but rhetorical elements certainly factor into it. Kairotic moments are key for mobilizing both politicians and the populace behind particular ideas, and right now there’s a significant opportunity for the President’s party to get things done. We will see if he takes advantage of this particular kairos and what will ultimately come of it, but the ball is definitely in his court right this moment.

Week 9: The Stanley Parable

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This, is a tale of a man named Jeffrey. Jeffrey was in a class called Rhetoric and Civic Life at Penn State, where he had to maintain a blogging assignment every week. His passion blog, the one he was most proud of, was about the grand subject of video games. Video games had become a large part of Jeffrey’s life, but for some reason he found himself unable to find a single game that he bought to blog about. Whether it was due to the stresses of upcoming assignments, a massive creative deficit, or a sudden wave of onset stupefaction brought on by sunspots or Mars wobbles or something, Jeffrey was out of ideas.

This strange situation led Jeffrey to that great bastion of culture, Youtube. There, he heard of a free mod for Half-Life 2 called The Stanley Parable, a story that managed to put a unique spin on the whole genre of gaming.

Stanley works at a job pushing buttons. The monitor beside him tells him what buttons to press, when, and for how long.

The parable was about a man named Stanley, who arrived at his office job pushing buttons on a keyboard to find suddenly that nobody was around. He walks out of his office in search of answers, and discovers the hidden mysteries of his life that lay just beyond the very walls he’d worked within for years.

Stanley arrives at one of many possible locations, including a computer room that controls all of his and his co workers’ emotions.

The ever-present narrator, who orders Stanley around, can be ignored or heeded according to the player’s desire, and depending on which choices are made, a new ending will result. In the play Jeffrey did for the purposes of his blog, a total of about fifteen minutes, he was able to get an ending in which Stanley realizes he is a video game character. He shouts out “I’m not real! I’m not real!” and collapses on the ground outside of his office building. Stanley can represent the character on the other end of the mouse and keyboard from the player, who has no control whatever over his own being! He is told where to go, what to do, what allegiances to have, and even what to feel! I’d probably freak out in those situations too.

Symbolism! Being an English major with the insatiable need for deep meaning, definitively decided that he should use The Stanley Parable for week nine’s entry. He makes a reflective entry, giving some thought to the nature of his entire project. And Jeffrey is happy. Jeffrey remembers at the end of his post to recommend that whoever is interested download The Stanley Parable, which is a completely free mod. He also reminds his readers that they can recommend games for his analysis, with the addendum to Gwen, his blog group classmate, that he will not, under any circumstances, play Barbie Pet Rescue.

Week 8: The Point

Week 8: Talking TED

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Dan Ariley: Beware conflicts of interest

The way human brains go astray has been a bit of a topic of mine, considering that I’ve been in many situations in which I’ve had to decry people’s beliefs as being false or misinformed. It’s far easier, and more tactful, in such situations to be able to attribute the falsehood not to the stupidity or ignorance of the person, but to some kind of cognitive error or bias on their part. What Dan Ariley points out is very similar to this idea: he informs regarding the presence of cognitive biases in various important positions, such as scientists or doctors. As far as six-minute TED talks go, this was a very effective one. Ariley doesn’t attempt to assign classifications to different kinds of cognitive errors, nor does he attempt to provide substantive solutions to the problems he points out. The goal of this talk is simply awareness, and using the faculties of both humor and specific examples, he gets the job done. In my view, a TED talk is a good format to get one good point or a set of good points out there to create awareness in the public.

Keeping this in mind, my three major categories for evaluation of a TED talk are: Effective use of time, memorability of message, and style of presentation.

In the first category, this talk made a wise decision by not exceeding the scope of its time limit. All the time was spent on one point and on examples to reinforce that one point, without digression and undue increases in subject matter. Second, the message made is memorable, and can be distilled down to a very simple phrase, namely the one in the title of the talk. Were I not already aware of this, the talk would certainly have helped. Third, his style throughout was memorable, using both a humorous anecdote to begin, and a personal anecdote toward the end. This helped make the speaker appear more engaged with the topic, and avoid the ever-present danger of throwing stones in a glass house talking about others’ problems.

I’ll definitely take away from this talk that I need to have a very central point to focus on in my TED talk, not get as much of my paper in as possible in the 4-5 minute time limit (even though it may be possible simplistically). That way leaving an impression will be much easier.

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