The Reason You Believe It is Because He Said It

Politicians lie! This has become as commonly held public belief as the fact the sky is blue and the grass is green. Politicians have lied and mislead the public in America since John Adams and Thomas Jefferson first began slinging mud on each other's overcoats. This week we are supposed to discuss what are the causes and solution of this misinformation and both seem to be fairly simple answers. Politicians lie because they can. Yes it truly is that simple. If only 50% of people believe their misinformation or half-truths, that's 50% more people following their rhetoric than previously. The reason they can is just as simple. There are no consequences for lying in a political forum these days. In the recent presidential election, when either major party's candidate was found to be misleading in their campaign the consequence was the urging too remove the ad. That doesn't account for the millions of people who had previously seen the ad and taken what it was saying at face value. Even after these lies have been brought to light, researchers have found they can leave a "belief echo" than can stay around. Now that we have identified the cause what possible solution is there to this problem? The answer is just as simple. Public interest more in the exposure of lies than actual issues has spurred facts checkers in the media to heavily scrutinize everything political candidates say to find possible misinformation. This interest is who is lying although more than likely more for dramatic reality tv style entertainment purposes has made it easy for misinformation to be quickly ferreted out and exposed. Unfortunately this will not free the political area of their dishonest nature, but at least this is a good step in a positive direction.

Is the Truth Multifaceted or Are They Just Lying?

In Mr. Kruse's article he explains how government constituents have fallen farther from the honest truth and more into embellished half-truths. As long as our country has had a government, the representatives of our government have stretched the truth or taken some facts and twisted them to fit their own propaganda machine.  Although his article uses the shock and awe technique of embellishing the extremism of government misdirection, there is still an underlying level of truth to it. Politicians and their campaign workers have more often than not taken one fact and spun it to suit their purposes. This has been evident through out the life of American politics as well as most other political systems.

I found it hard to be surprised by the claims made by Mr. Kruse because the majority of people consider politicians dishonest and perceive the government as lying to them in one way or another. The difficulty in this is  differentiating between knowing about these behaviors and changing them. I can't conceivably think of a way to stop politicians from their dishonest behavior. As long as they get the reaction they intended from their half-truths, they will continue to use them to persuade people to their side. It's sad that we are ever falling into a period of less and less trust in what our representatives say, but it would seem there is no way to change this trend.

Hey! Who's in Charge Around Here?!?!?

Being the father of two teenage boys, technology has been a topic of conversation many times over in my house. I was shocked when my 10 year old son asked me for a smart phone when I had only had one for about a year at that point. Don't get me wrong, I use to work as a computer technician and did some hobby programming through out my life, so I have always had a fondness for technology. As I asked in my last blog though when is enough, enough? I remember hearing about the invention of the google glasses, and my first though was how far are we from star trek now? People are becoming more and more reliant on their technological devices. I appreciate how technology is "making our lives easier", but what would happen to our society if technology ever fails? I'm not sure how many of you will remember the Y2K scare as well as I do, but at that time many people believe on the new years technology would glitch and we would have to start fresh on so many things. Movies such as Terminator, Matrix, and many more all focus on the day technology turns against us. For these movies to have the appeal they do for their viewers, this has to be a legitimate scare in society. The question is will technology ever reach a point where, the creation no longer needs the creator?

Memory v. Memory

     BECAME 

In 1994, when I graduated High School, I could recite all important phone numbers in my life at the time. Currently as I sit here writing this blog, it occurred to me I don't know my son's phone number without looking at my phone. Technology, in its ever increasing involvement in our lives, is there for the purpose of freeing up easier tasks to allow us to focus on more important things. As a consequence of this though, the average citizen of a developed country has developed a strong dependency on this technology. This has become the theme for many current television shows, showing us exactly how traumatic it would be to wake up one morning to find all out technology gone. In a psychology class last semester, we discussed nomophobia, which is the fear of not having your mobile device, aka phone. In a recent study 66% of people suffer from this phobia. (http://www.securenvoy.com/blog/2012/02/16/) This fear extends to having your phone but not having service as well. The ever increasing dependency on technology is apparent in ever expanding aspects in our lives. An example of this is my recent training for 5k runs, the first thing I did after buying new running shoes was to download a good running app to track my progress in training for me. We use primarily our phones for a majority of our activities in our day to day lives. By these and many other examples I'm sure all of us can relate that technology has drastically changed us as people and as a society. 

Is Big Brother Watching Me, or Am I Just Paranoid?

It's almost like a thought from a Sci-Fi novel that we are being watched and tracked and our actions are being recorded for future use, but this has become the case in our day and age. This innocuous action is reminiscent of the movie The Matrix. In the story it wasn't the development of a robot race that could take over the world, but rather a helper to make our lives easier. These helpers evolved and more were produced to help with other things until the point they surpassed the human race. Through the development of the "filter bubble" and online trackers we are edging ever closer to the realization of this story. I appreciate the usefulness of tracking our online activity and searches to help in our future searches, but at the same time, I find it hard not to be conservative about what information is left online for other to find and use. I think the question we have to each ask ourselves is how much is too much. As respecting the video involving Mrs. Turkle, a year ago I would have been shock and astounded by the information she provided. I was fortunate enough last year though to have had someone point this out to me, involving my children and how technology takes away from the quality in quality time with the family. After realizing how much time I spent with my children that we were all alone in our own activities, I have made huge leaps and bounds in trying to fix this situation. I realize adolescents need their own time and space, but I also feel they need the unity of a family as well.

The Proper Design of a Research Paper

Our third writing assignment is a research paper. This is quite different from our previous writing assignment. Unlike previous papers, we aren't suppose to try and persuade people about the information we are sharing with them. The first step in this assignment is finding a topic that interests us. After selecting a topic along these lines, we then do research into the topic. We should not include all the information we find. As our professor referred to this as an "info dump" it will more than likely be a unorganized mess rather than a cohesive source of information. The purpose of a research paper is to collect information and after digesting this, we then synthesize a report covering the important points of our research. The purpose of this paper is to inform our audience rather than persuade them towards one side or another of the argument. An important fact to keep in mind is that this topic will be used for our next writing assignment as well so choose wisely. Also keep in mind that your topic should be narrow enough for a short paper. Choosing too broad of a topic will either make our paper considerably too long or leave our points underdeveloped.   Remember the basic requirements of this assignment, 1500 words, MLA format, and 5 or more sources. Aside from these basic requirements, personally I feel I am focusing on my thesis statement being clear and straight forward, clear and concise supporting information, and a short but complete conclusion. I feel I have come up short on our last two writing assignments and hope to raise the bar for my writing with this one. Aside from a few select topic not allowed, the sky is the limit when it comes to choosing our topic for writing. I have been going over this for a few days now and want to be sure I made the right choice before starting my research. Realizing in our next writing assignment I am going to have to provide a persuasive argument for this topic, I want to be sure this is a topic I want to learn more about and feel strongly towards. This will make sure that I am interested in both writing assignments and motivate me to provide the best papers I am capable of. 

A Map to Finding the Droids You Are Looking For

Finding information on the internet is entirely too easy these days. An example of this was when I entered "Kent library" in Google to get the above graphic, I received About 86,800,000 results. The primary problem with this inundation of information is what is its actual source? Any person with a general idea of web design or any of hundreds of web design programs can create a web site stating whatever they want about any subject. The internet is not restrictive about the truthfulness of the information posted there, so finding information that is reliable is difficult to say the least. Through the use of the Kent Library web sight, this problem can be easily avoided. All information we find through this path is completely reliable enough to be used in our research. 

In itself this is a huge help to us in our research. We don't have to check and double check to avoid providing erroneous information. This is just the tip of the iceberg so to speak for this avenue to information. Through the use of the keyword search, we can take a topic and distill it down into a precise thesis for our paper. We can then also find addition supporting points for our topic as well as variation of the directions to go with our discussion and development of our supporting thoughts. 

To better learn the tricks and tools associated with the Kent Library site, I highly suggest the brief searchpath tutorial found on the library's page. This tutorial helps us to learn how to search for topics and ideas as well as how to narrow or expand our search to obtain the correct amount of information.  By improving our search, this shortens the amount of time it takes to find our source information and greatly simplifies our research part of writing.