Nov 21:   Sniper influenced by video games? 
November 17 and 19    Delivery Dynamics.  Method Acting.  Evaluation Form for Presentations. Gianotti Commencement Speech.    Representative Poetry Online. Maya Angelou Gertrude Stein's If I Told Him:  A Completed Portrait of Picasso. Amiri Baraka.   All the World's a Stage.  Boulding Sonnets.  Poetry. 
November 12 - The Future of Communication and the Internet. 

• Decline of the book or of literature?  Future ofe-books?  These have been a failure so far, people prefer books on paper, except for encyclopedias.  Printed books have the big advantage of being difficult to copy, as opposed to electronic files.  Similar problems with online magazines. Slate and Salon survive. Scholarly journals on the other hand, are more successful online, but this does not generate revenue.

• Music, on the other hand, is being taken over by the Internet because of file-sharing which makes it possible to get high quality digital files of songs as illegal downloads.  Kazaa.  Napster is back as a pay service. Pay download services pioneered by Apple, iTunes. 
  
• Wireless, which makes it possible to be connected all the time.  This is already here, but bandwith, coverage and utilisation will increase.  Blackberry. 
• Extreme miniaturization, molecular computers, nanotechnology  This leads to the possibility of more and more devices being computerized, something which is happening rapidly.. 
  
• This leads to Cyborgs, wearable computers for the working class. 
  
• Computers that sense our emotions? 
  
• Science becomes simulation modeling, e.g., weather simulation, modeling the genome.  Wolfram's New Kind of Science. uses cellular automata to show how complex patterns can evolve from simple principles cumulated over and over.
  
• Artificial Intelligence.  The computer become more like a brain, as discussed in the Global Brain movie.  But will this evolve naturally from the increase in the number of neurons, or do they have to be organized in a specific way? 
  
• Kevin Gurney's discussion of the Von Neumann Machine, Neural Networks, and his  summary of the differences between Neural Net and traditional Von Neumann machine computers.
• A review of"The Advent of the Algorithm" by David Berlinski.  This explains what an "algorithm" is.  The last three paragraphs of the review are not necessary for us.
• Look over the "Pseudo-Code" from three Artificial Intelligence algorithms from The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil.  This will give you an idea of what an algorithm looks like.  An algorithm is a set of detailed instructions for a computation which can be done by a computer.  Outlines of some AI algorithms are here: 
  
•  Recursive (rule-based) Algorithm follow definite prescribed rules, useful for tasks such as income tax preparation
•  Neural Net Algorithm - finds its own solutions to problems such as optical character recognition
  
•  Evolutionary Algorithm - creates a large number of solutions at random, then picks the best
  
• Novamente, my son's AI model. 
  

November  10  -  History and Development of PC and Internet:   Triumph of the Nerds and Nerds 2.0.1 Websites.   Microsoft lawsuit   Why I Hate Microsoft.  http://www.mozilla.org/   http://www.mozillazine.org/            http://mozillanews.org/index.php3   http://www.linuxworld.com/    MUDs 

November 3 -  Beginning of unit on computers and communications.  Viewing of Triumph of the Nerds...

We will discuss the history and development of the computer, and see a bit of the movie Triumph of the Nerds, which we will watch over the next two weeks. Materials to be discussed in class:  the History of the Computer and  Who Are These Nerds?  Vannevar Bush's article about the Memex Machine available from the Atlantic Monthly.  J.C.R. Licklider's classic articles "Man-Computer Symbiosis" and "The Computer as a Communication Device" are available from Digital.  Times Article on the Internet "From Two Small Nodes, a Mighty Web Has Grown."  A Salon story about Professor Cyborg, who has planted an implant in himself to become more like a machine.

Some background on computer programming:

• The earliest computer software was written in "machine language" which consisted of 0’s and 1’s, that gave specific instructions to registers in the Central Processing Unit. Programmers had to know exactly how the machine did everything it did.
• The next step was "assembly language" which uses alphabetic key words to write patterns of 0's and 1's.  This was still pretty close to the logic of the machine, but was a lot faster to write.
• Next came "high level" languages such as FORTRAN and BASIC, which used words and numbers similar to mathematical algorithms, e.g., one might write:
• FOR N = 1-190; GRADE(N) =  TESTS(N) + HOMEWORK(N) + ATTENDANCE(N); NEXT N
• A better example of "high language" programming language is the BASIC code for the Eliza Catterbot program.
• With high level languages, programs were not specific to a computer - there was a program called a "compiler" which converted the high level program to a form that could be understood by the "operating system" of a given computer.   The operating system is software which enables standard programs to run on any compatible computer.  Programmers did not have to know as much about hardware.
• JAVA is another step away from the details of the machine.  In a JAVA program, instructions are sent to a program called the "JAVA virtual machine" which translates them into codes which can be read by different operating systems.
• Early computer programs were organized around procedures (e.g., SORT, ADD, PRINT).  Programmers called up the procedures they needed them to process data, which was stored in a separate place. As programs got larger and larger, and especially when many programmers worked on them, this became cumbersome.  "Object-oriented" programs were created.  In these programs, the procedures and data are bundled together.  If one programmer needs to modify procedures for his or her purposes, those modified procedures can go into his or her "objects" without messing everyone else up.
• But programmers cannot be constantly reinventing the wheel each time they create an object.  They have general models or patterns or archetypes they rely on - in programming language these are called "classes".
• This "object-oriented" approach analogous to the logic of the brain, where there are thousands of independent units which have many features in common.

October 31 - Library Research in BSB 117.  Two things are needed for  many of your presentations: 
(1) better data to back up statements that you make, especially about the effectiveness of programs such as capital punishment and intensive supervision.  To find this, you should look for articles in scientific journals that give a reasonably review of the literature.  E.g., to study Intensive Supervision Programs, log on to the library and go to Academic Search Premier and type in intensive supervision programs.  You will find an article called "A Review of Research for Practitioners" which will give a good overview. 
(2)  better examples to illustrate a point you wish to make, e.g., to talk about "holistic educationi" you could use a film such as the Dead Poets Society that illustrates this concept.  There will be WEB sites with material from the film, there may be reviews.  You might also find scholarly articles on it, but probably no statistical evaluation studies since people in a field like that usually don't believe in statistical measures.  Typing in polygamy, I found the following: N GOD'S NAME. By: Fields-Meyer, Thomas; Jones, Oliver. People, 10/6/2003, Vol. 60 Issue 14, p74, 4p, 8c;, which is a recitation of cases.  There is a review of a book called Predators, Prey and Other Kinfolk, described as follows:  Solomon, Dorothy Allred. Predators, Prey,
and Other Kinfolk: Growing Up in Polygamy.
July 2003. 352p. Norton, $24.95 (0-393-
04946-9). 289.3.
Solomon, the only daughter of a polygamous,
fundamentalist Mormon, could well
have called her story Secrets and Lies to indicate
the tenor of the early life that she looks
back on with remarkable clarity and even
humor. The twenty-eighth of 48 children, she
was instilled, as were her many brothers, by
her father with the sense of the family’s difference,
which the world beyond its circle,
even most other Mormons (the church officially
abolished polygamy in 1890), wouldn’t
welcome. Although an inquisitive, sensitive
child with a strong desire to stake an individual
claim in the world, she also suffered an
identity crisis, which in the social context of
“plural wives,” as Mormons termed their
practice, is perhaps understandable. Exacerbating
her crisis was living in the constant
fear that her family would be discovered by
a government raid, torn asunder, and driven
into poverty while fleeing ever-encroaching
authorities. Eventually, she fell in love,
chose monogamous marriage—and many
members of her family disowned her. A rare
story, indeed, told with much grace and
humility. —June Sawyers

October 29:  Beth challenged me to come up with a metaphor for our class.  I have two:  "The Little Engine that Could" and "Building Blocks of Success"    We need to work on making our arguments stronger and richer, backing them up with better data and illustrations.  We'll spend some class time doing this in the lab on friday.  JFK Inaugural Address Text  - Martin Luther King "I have a Dream" speech Text.- (both of these are in audio on the History Channel if you have Windows XP).   Bill Gates' Powerpoint Presentation.  Introduction of Windows XP.

October 27:   The "stovepipe" as a methphor.  Winston Churchill's Battle of Britain speech can be found in audio on the History Channel or  at Webcorp.      The text is at the Churchill Center.  The audio clip is the last paragraph.  It is 181 words.

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

 ctober 22:  Constructing a Typical Five Paragraph Essay.  Sample Persuasive Essays.  Five Paragraph Essay Slide Show.   Rubric.  Another Rubric.  Criticism of Five Paragraph Essay assignment.

October 20:    Writing Exercises Used in Class.
October 8:  Global Brain Movie:  Based on evolutionary theory, an analogy between the evolution of the earth and the development of an individual, and the growth of the global "brain"   Complexity may emerge simply because the number of units increases, e.g., 10 billion individuals may be enough for a brain to emerge or for a global brain to emerge.  Trends in the past are used to project into the future.  Choices are also part of shaping the future, e.g., can we develop values and norms appropriate to our increasing technological power.  Will we fail as the dinosaurs failed?  Social evolution the successor to physical information.  The information age to be followed by the?  Probably the biotechnology age, or it may be exploration of the mind.  Do we get a shift in values?  Let go of petty, selfish ways?  Are we in a crisis?

October 6:    End Matter.   References for WEB pages.   The notes on McLuhan are in my review of McLuhan's ideas,   Another good source is The Playboy Interview with McLuhan.  Video Clip of McLuhan.   A Private School that Thrives on Rules.  Three letters on PowerPoint.
October 1:  Ten Tips for Creating Effective Powerpoint Presentations.    "Really Bad Powerpoints".    Some of my own work:  Compare   9/11 as a Turning Point in History (power point presentation at the World Future Society, July 20, 2002). with the text version "September 11, 2001:  A Turning Point for America's Future" on the World Future Society home page.  An html presentation:  There's something about south Jersey.   The Art and Science of Cause and Effect.   Sound effects:  Clips Online.  Advanced Powerpoint Tutorials and Tips.  A Sample from a Commercial Supplier.
  Sept. 24.  We will work on library research.  In addition to Rutgers, we can use the Burlington, Camden and GloucesterCherry Hill,  Haddonfield, but not Camden so far as I know (there is Camden, Maine, however).  See B.J. Swartz's page for local links.
Sept 22 -  We will work on choosing topics for research.  We will view a PowerPoint presentation called "Finding Your Writing Process" which is available on  at: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/    (click on powerpoints).  Your final product will be a powerpoint similar to those on this site.  You should have a point that you want to make, or a question you want to answer, that is related to your major field of study.  This can be combined with a project for another class.  It might also be related to topics you mentioned on your personal home page.  If you are in Methods and want to combine it with the survey we are doing, you can plan on using some of the survey data.  You should, however, also do a library search for other studies on the same topic.  As an example, we will discuss the project I am now working on, a study of the childhoods of eminent people (a new edition of the book Cradles of Eminence). If anyone  would like to work on this topic, read the "Afterword" chapter I posted on WEBCT, and decide if there are any famous people in the sample you would like to read about.
Sept., 10 - Writing for the WEB.  Personal Home Pages.  We also had our pictures taken.
Sept. 8 - We discussed the rhetorical triangle - ethos, pathos and logos - on page 8 of the Handbook, and the value of pictures vs. words in communication.
Sept 5 - we met in the lab and did Yahoo Start Pages and started work on Personal Home pages.
Sept 3 - In a writing intensive class, you are expected to do a project that requires research and documentation.  There are several possibilities for this class. county libraries.  Some towns have library WEB sites, e.g.,

1.  If you are taking Methods and Techniques of Social Research this semester, you can do an analysis of the data from the survey we will be doing in that course.  This applies to both my section and Jona's

2.  If you would like to participate in a research project on the childhoods of eminent people, related to the book Cradles of Eminence, Second Edition, I can use some collaborators.

3.  You can develop your own sociological research project, which may be related to one of your other classes.  This should involve forming some hypotheses, derived in some way from theory, and collecting some kind of data to test them.  This could be survey data, using the Microcase software or another source. Or it could be library data.  Look at Section 5 of The Brief Penguin Handbook for guidance in formulating a research project.

We will be focusing on communicating our results.  This will be done with different media of communication:  speaking, power point, web pages, formal papers, etc.  Theoretically, we will be examining the ways in which the media shapes or becomes the message.