WEEK EIGHT BLOG ENTRY

Interpret this poem:

GREAT, GOOD, BAD

A great book is a homing device
For navigating paradise

A good book somehow makes you care
About the comfort of a chair.

A bad book owes to many trees
A forest of apologies.

J. Patrick Lewis, Please Bury Me in the Library

WEEK EIGHT READING

Jackie Robinson -- crossing the line
The man who broke Major League Baseball's color barrier never forgot the indignities of his first trip to spring training.

By Chris Lamb

February 27, 2012

On Feb. 28, 1946, Jackie Robinson and his wife, Rachel, boarded an American Airlines flight in Los Angeles bound for Daytona Beach, Fla., for spring training. There he would try to prove that he was good enough to join the Montreal Royals, the top minor league team in the Brooklyn Dodgers' organization, and integrate professional baseball.

It would be more than a year before Robinson played his first game with Brooklyn, on April 15, 1947, breaking Major League Baseball's color line and forever changing baseball and society.

The story of the integration of baseball was perhaps the most important story involving racial equality in the years immediately following World War II. "Back in the days when integration wasn't fashionable," the Rev.Martin Luther King Jr. said of Robinson, "he underwent the trauma and humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of freedom."

Never before — or since — had so much been riding on an athlete in surroundings so hostile as the Deep South in 1946, where racial discrimination was legal and brutally enforced, and where blacks who challenged it were jailed, beaten or lynched.

Robinson grew up in Pasadena and attended Pasadena Junior College before he transferred to UCLA. The former four-sport athlete at UCLA was keenly aware of the risks involved with challenging Jim Crow on its own soil. He also knew he was putting his wife's life in jeopardy by taking her on the trip to Florida. The couple had been married less than three weeks.

Unlike Rachel, who had never been in the South, Jackie had searing memories of what had happened to him a year and a half earlier at Ft. Hood, Texas. In July 1944, Robinson, then a lieutenant in the Army, was ordered to the back of a city bus, and refused. He didn't back down and when the bus returned to the military base, he was arrested and subsequently court-martialed for insubordination. Robinson was exonerated and then discharged from the Army in late 1944.

If Robinson had not been court-martialed, he probably would have remained with his battalion and been shipped to Europe, and Dodgers President Branch Rickey would have signed someone else. Instead, Robinson was playing for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues when Rickey was searching for the right player to integrate baseball. Rickey secretly signed Robinson to a contract in August 1945, after receiving the ballplayer's assurances that he would have "guts enough not to fight back" against racial epithets, spikings by cleats and worse, that no matter what came Robinson's way, he would restrain himself.

Two months later, the Montreal Royals announced it had signed Robinson. When black America learned about the signing, the things denied for so long suddenly seemed possible. Ludlow Werner, editor of the New York Age, a black weekly, wrote that Robinson "would be haunted by the expectations of his race.... White America will judge the Negro race by everything he does. And Lord help him with his fellow Negroes if he should fail them."

The racial climate in the United States at that time — especially in the South — was tense, unpredictable and violent. In return for fighting for their country in World War II, black veterans wanted racial equality when they returned home. Instead, many were killed to teach them their place.

A few days before the Robinsons left Los Angeles, racial tensions erupted in Columbia, Tenn. A black woman and her son, who had recently been discharged from the Navy, complained to a white merchant about a radio he was supposed to have repaired. The merchant slapped the woman. Her son then shoved the merchant through the store's plate-glass window. The next morning, hundreds of law enforcement officers and white townspeople converged on the town's black section, destroying homes, businesses and churches, and beating up and arresting black citizens. More than 100 blacks were jailed and two were shot to death while in custody.

The Robinsons flew through the night that February and landed in New Orleans. After a layover they were scheduled to fly to Pensacola, Fla., before going on to Daytona Beach. When the Robinsons lined up to board the plane for Pensacola, they were told they had been bumped. When they tried to get something to eat at a segregated restaurant in the airport, they were prohibited from entering.

Twelve hours after they had landed in New Orleans, the Robinsons boarded a flight to Pensacola. When they landed to refuel, a flight attendant asked them to exit the plane. Once the Robinsons were on the tarmac, they were told that bad weather was expected so the plane needed to add more fuel. To counter the weight of the additional fuel, three passengers — the Robinsons and a Mexican woman — had to be removed. As Robinson listened to the explanation, he saw white passengers board the plane. Robinson felt a growing sense of rage, but remembering Rickey's words, he choked back the anger.

Instead of waiting for the next plane, the Robinson took a Greyhound bus across the state to Daytona Beach. They relaxed in reclining seats at the front of the bus. When white passengers boarded the bus at the next stop, the driver pointed a finger at the Robinsons and ordered them to the back of the bus. He called Jackie "boy." Robinson, knowing that an incident of any kind might jeopardize what was called "baseball's great experiment," did as he was told.

Nearly 36 hours after the Robinsons left Los Angeles, the couple — hungry, tired and angry — arrived at the Daytona Beach bus station. They were met by Wendell Smith and Billy Rowe, journalists with the influential black weekly the Pittsburgh Courier.

"Well, I finally made it," Robinson snapped, "but I never want another trip like this one."

Robinson stayed up into the early hours of the morning bitterly recounting what he and his wife had been through, seething over what the Greyhound bus driver had called him. "He was very annoyed and hurt," Rowe later remembered. "He had been called a 'boy.' This man had become a 'boy.'"

Robinson told Smith and Rowe he did not think he could get a fair tryout in Florida and said he wanted to quit and return to the Negro Leagues. Smith and Rowe talked with him, explaining — as Rickey had — that it was important for him to suffer certain indignities so other blacks could follow him. "We tried to tell him what the whole thing meant, that it was something he had to do," Rowe said.

Chris Lamb, a professor of communication at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, is the author of the forthcoming book, "Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball." Email: lambc@cofc.edu

WEEK EIGHT WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

Is there someone today who seems similar to Robinson? What is the importance of Robinson's story?

WEEK SEVEN BLOG ENTRY

If you could have a drink with anyone from all of history, who would it be and why? (and what would you be drinking?)

WEEK SEVEN READING

NEIL POSTMAN, AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH

There are two parts to this reading. The first is the foreward to the book:
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Here's the second part of the reading. It's a piece of a chapter:

How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio

or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your

plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have

taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?

For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such

consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an

occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime

occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of

our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us

something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This

fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an

abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be

called the "information-action ratio."

In both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its

importance from the possibilities of action. Of course, in any

communication environment, input (what one is informed about) always

exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). But

the situation created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later

technologies, made the relationship between information and action both

abstract and remote. For the first time in human history, people were

faced with the problem of information glut, which means that

simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social

and political potency.

You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series

of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in

the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment?

What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk

of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA,

affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'is in Iran?

I shall take

the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You

may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans,

as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or

four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of

expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even

say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. the last

refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a

version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it

in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what

else?--another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of

impotence: the news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which

you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you

can do nothing.

Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was

sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to

control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew

about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy,

this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became

the context for news. Everything became everyone's business. For the

first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had

asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.

We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public

discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was

not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent.

It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to

use Lewis Mumford's phrase. the principal strength of the telegraph was

its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze

it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography.

books, for example, are an excellent container for the accumulation,

quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas.

WEEK SEVEN WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

In general, this week you should write your Tech essay. But here's something to think about also: are POstman's ideas still valid and relevant?

WEEK SIX BLOG ENTRY

Think about something you are good at doing...it could be anything from throwing a baseball to cooking flan...anything! Discuss the process you went through to learn to do that. Did you learn to do this thing on your own, with moderate or occasional assistance, or with a great deal of support?

WEEK SIX READING...WELL, SORT OF READING

Okay, so here's a weird one. For this week's reading you are going to watch a video. If yuo have trouble getting the video to play, maybe try a different computer, if that's possible. Usually, these ted.com videos are pretty easy to use, so if you have trouble be sure to let me know and we'll try to work it out. Enjoy!

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

If, by chance, the above link does not work, simply type into google, "ted.com, kids teach themselves." That should work.

WEEK SIX RESPONDING TO WHAT YOU READ

So, this week's reading was odd, but I hope you enjoyed it. Tell me, do you believe that this is true? Can children teach themselves? If so, what are the limits of that belief? If we put a group of 10 year olds in a room full of calculus textbooks will they eventually learn calculus? Use any other examples to make a case for what you believe to be true.

ESSAY 2 DETAILS

ESSAY #2: Tech Essay: Consider the readings on the blog that have dealt with technology. In your opinion, have recent technologies been good or bad for people? Use specific examples and references to the readings or to other readings you find on this subject. This essay is double-spaced and about 2 pages.
At only two pages or so, it's more of a reflection than a complete essay with intro, body, and conclusion. You may use the first person.

Be sure to completely ignore the comments I made on your restaurant reviews while you write these papers.
BUT THEN, as you edit and revise the essay, take them very seriously. The point is, don;t let them stop you from creating a first draft. After that draft is done, revise, rethink, re-read, edit, edit, and then edit.

The original due date was March 10, but that was incorrect.

This essay must be emailed to me as an attachment by February 24th. I will print them out, comment on them, and hand them back at our meeting on March 3rd.

WEEK FIVE BLOG ENTRY

Everyone seemed to enjoy writing the restaurant reviews. I can truly say that I enjoyed reading and responding to them...honestly, enjoyed it. Why is it that some types of writing are easier and more enjoyable to read and write while others feel like such a chore?

If you are able, brainstorm some other types of assignments that might be similar to the restaurant review...

WEEK FIVE READING: TWO ARTICLES

ARTICLE 1: FROM  http://blogs.lawyers.com

Distracted Walking Injuries on the Rise

January 24, 2012 By Aaron Kase

Your parents probably taught you to look both ways before crossing the street. But the growing proliferation of cell phones and other handheld electronic devices means that more and more people are looking in neither direction when they step out in traffic, and wearing headphones only increases the sensory deprivation.
Distracted walkers have an annoying habit of getting in the way of traffic or other pedestrians, but worse, a new study finds, sometimes they end up in the hospital—or dead.

•   Study finds 116 deaths or injuries from headphone-abetted collisions

•   Liability unclear in distracted walking cases

•   No state laws exist regulating walking while phoning

Death by Headphone

A recently released study by the Injury Prevention publication, part of the British Medical Journal, found that 116 people have been killed or
injured in the United States since 2004 in collisions between people

wearing headphones and vehicles—cars, and, even more frequently,
trains. In nearly a third of the cases studied, the vehicle sounded a
warning, which went unheeded, presumably because headphones were blocking out outside noise. Over two thirds of victims were males and under the age of 30.

The Injury Prevention study isn’t the first time distracted walking has been the subject of inquiry. A New York

Times story from 2010 found that over 1,000 patients visited emergency rooms in 2008 after injuring themselves while walking and phoning, a number that had doubled each of the previous two years. With the rise of smart phones, that figure is likely to have increased again since 2008.

The Times lists some examples that might be considered humorous, as long as you aren’t the injured party:

“Examples of such visits include a 16-year-old boy who walked into a telephone pole while texting and suffered
a concussion; a 28-year-old man who tripped and fractured a finger on the hand gripping his cellphone; and a
68-year-old man who fell off the porch while talking on a cellphone, spraining a thumb and an ankle and causing dizziness.”

The most famous distracted walking case to date occurred last January, when YouTube hero Cathy Cruz

Marrero was caught on camera toppling into a mall fountain while sending a text message. Marrero considered suing the mall after her accident, until reports of her long history of retail theft came to light and she quickly ducked out of the spotlight.

Who Can I Sue?

“It’s remarkable to me that people will jaywalk at an angle with their back to traffic, with headphones on or
texting away,” says David White, a partner at Massachusetts personal injury and medical malpractice firm Breakstone, White & Gluck. “The burden on drivers is tremendous to avoid accidents with people like that. I wish people would be a little more careful.”

The potential dangers were illustrated in a 2009 Western Washington University

study, in which only 25 percent of people using a phone while walking across campus
noticed a man wearing a “purple-and-yellow clown costume with polka dot sleeves,
red shoes and bulbous red nose” riding around on a unicycle. If you are so engaged in
a phone call to not notice a clown on a unicycle, how are you going to be aware of
such an everyday sight as a car in the street, even if it’s bearing down on you at high speeds?

If an accident victim were to sue in such a case, the driver might be able to sway a

jury to consider the role of device usage by the pedestrian, says White. “The analysis
is the same as it would be in any kind of accident— you start with the negligence of

the defendant driver, who would compare the comparative negligence on the part of the pedestrian,” the

attorney says. Since there aren’t any laws prohibiting headphone or mobile use while walking, the defense wouldn’t be able to get a statutory leg up, but scientific studies like the one noted above could help the case. There’s also the common sense factor. “Just take ordinary analysis,” White says, “You could not have been paying too much attention where you’re going.”

Against the Law?

While distracted driving laws have been proliferating around the country the last five years, no states have yet
passed similar laws for pedestrians. Last year New York and Arkansas considered regulating use of electronic

devices and headphones while walking, though neither effort was successful. New York State Sen. Carl Kruger, a leading evangelical of distracted walking laws who has tried since 2007 to ban pedestrians from using electronic devices while crossing the street in major cities, expounds on his views in this WRGB Albany interview.

There was also a brief Internet uproar last summer after a false report that

Philadelphia was going to start handing out citations for texting while walking (“There is no policy, plan or activity in Philadelphia where pedestrians are being ticketed for texting,” Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s press secretary responded to a Gawker story. “Your whack job reporter . . . needs to get his facts straight.”).

Aside from anti-jaywalking ordinances in some cities, there are few laws

governing the behavior of pedestrians at all, and White doesn’t see walking
while phoning laws becoming a reality anytime in the near future. “It will be a
while before legislators start to pick up the pen and legislate distracted

walking,” he says. “They will be perceived as meddling a little too much, even though it makes perfectly good public health sense.”

 ARTICLE 2:

Is technology helping disability?

Suffering from "locked-in syndrome", Jeff Hall communicates with the world using just one finger.
The former TV engineer from San Antonio, Texas was paralyzed by a stroke when he was 40 years old and left with only limited movement including some control of his head, arms and legs.
With the help of technology he can live independently and has recovered some of the freedom he lost seven years ago.
He talks using a text to speech synthesizer called Ghost Reader and with the aid of an Apple computer and an Android phone he can pay bills, text friends and send emails.
"Thanks to those, the entire world has opened up for me," he says.

“ There is a certain amount of friction between open source like Android and accessibility ”
Robin Christopherson, AbilityNet

Seven years ago this enabling equipment was limited and expensive. The kit that helped Jeff to speak cost $10,000 (£6,000).
But today he is able to use the same common gadgets as other people.
"One of the beauties of mainstream devices is that they have hundreds of peripherals that you can just add on," says Robin Christopherson from AbilityNet, a British organisation that promotes accessibility in technology.
"In a specialist device, adding in say, Bluetooth connectivity will add another $100 (£60) to the price."
She says the main reason people like Jeff now feel comfortable with off-the-shelf technology is the way that operating systems are designed.
Disabled designers
Many of the major technology firms now involve the disabled community in development.
Jason Grieves is visually impaired and leads the Windows 7 accessibility team at Microsoft.

"In Windows 7 we were able to provide a Beta out and this allowed customers with disabilities to provide us with feedback.
"They were able to send us emails and send us tools that they wanted to see incorporated into the operating system," he says.
The critical thing, according to Hall, is how well these systems can be adapted for use with applications created by third party developers for disabled users.
It is these pieces of software that allow Jeff Hall to freely interact with the world. He uses them for everything from speaking to controlling the lights in his home.
But there is a contradiction here.
While leaving software open to manipulation can benefit disabled users, it also means that software systems evolve outside of the control of the big technology firms.
"Free for all"
This could disadvantage disabled users as accessibility may be overlooked when no one firm or group of firms is held responsible for ensuring it.
"There is a certain amount of friction between open source like Android and accessibility," says Robin Christopherson.
"It is one of these strange situations where a closed environment like the IOS (Apple's operating system) actually lends itself far more to make sure that accessibility is catered for.
"It's pretty much a free for all in the Android environment and because it's a disparate community working on open source software, the first thing that goes out the window is accessibility."
But surely technology cannot go backwards?
Jeff Hall worries that as systems develop, they could start to alienate disabled people.
Innovations such as multi-gesture controls - two-finger scrolling on the iPad and iPhone, or the use of a Microsoft Kinect, are impossible for people in his position.
Multi-gesture is in itself a small thing but he fears it could be a harbinger of worse to come.
People like Jeff are relatively few in number and, in his case, are literally voiceless.
He is calling for tech giants to continue to maintain awareness of users like him and of the way in which technological marvels can transform their lives, for better and for worse.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9485513.stm
 

WEEK FIVE RESPONDING TO WHAT YOU READ

Which of the two articles was more compelling and why?