Tricky Technology's Ticket

At times, I’m wary of technology and its potential to control my life. That’s why I try to keep simple gadgets; like a simple flip phone rather than the crazy ones. At other times, I’m eager to embrace technology and its potential to enhance my life. That’s why I own a couple of computers and check my e-mail more than 100 times/day. A day without e-mail is like a day without food. And I enjoy eating, more than I enjoy anything else in the world.
Many other people are uncertain about technology. Like me, they’re searching for an answer to this important question: Is technology truly harmful to us or does it just give us an effective and efficient way.
No matter where we live, we hail to Bill Gates!

Good Writing: The 3 C's

After finishing 3 Levels of English in a university, I would say writing is about 3 things; the 3 C's. What is good writing? This is not an easy question to answer. Many different kinds of writing are considered "good" and for many different reasons. There is no formula or program for writing well. However, there are certain qualities that most examples of good writing share. Here let me briefly discuss the 3 C's that i learned form my 3 levels of English:

Level 1: Coherence

An essay or paper should be organized logically, flow smoothly, and stick together. In other words, everything in the writing should make sense to a reader.

Level 2: Correctness

A paper should be written in generally correct standard english, with complete sentences, and there should be no errors.

Level 3: Creativity

Creativity is very important. The best writing is that which carries some of the personality, the individuality of its author.

ABOR

ABOR - Academic Bill Of Rights

Academic Bill of Rights is a document designed to take politics out of the university curriculum and to protect the right of students to get an education rather than being fed bias. The Bill has eight points that focus on academic environment where decisions are made irrespective of one's personal political or religious beliefs. The Bill was created by Students for Academic Freedom and since its release has faced many criticisms. The first one to oppose the Bill was American Association of University Professors. AAUP says "the Academic Bill of Rights undermines the very academic freedom it claims to support. It threatens to impose administrative and legislative oversight on the professional judgment of faculty, to deprive professors of the authority necessary for teaching, and to prohibit academic institutions from making the decisions that are necessary for the advancement of knowledge".

Liberal Politics

Liberal or Conservative, media plain and simple is slanted. Anyway you put it, this statement is a fact. The country always seems to have something to say about media depending on the current events. If it is republican, the media is too left-winged, and if it is a democrat, then the media just seems to head a little too much to the right. It is definite that the most media today is liberal.

Corrupt Media

Media bias can be defined as bias within mass media as in what news is reported? How it is reported? And how do we perceive it? Media bias is the tendency for the media to represent different people in a particular way based on their own views, the views of their sponsors, and the views of society. Media bias could be blatant, but usually it is subtle. It can be expressed in the content of television shows. It can be expressed in the choices of types of stories that they show on the news. It can be expressed in the language used on shows, and that is written in the newspaper and magazines. Media bias is any stereotype set forth by the media that portrays individuals to society in a certain way. Media bias does not even have to be a negative portrayal, but more of an inaccurate portrayal of people that helps aid to the ignorance of individuals. Media bias plagues us everyday without us even realizing it. Although it is everywhere in news, sitcoms, newspaper, radio, magazines, we really don't recognize it when we hear it or see it. Are the impressions that we form about individuals a product of the media? Do we form certain opinions about particular types of people based solely on the things we see and hear in the media everyday without even realizing it? The problem is not only that there is media bias present, but also that we cannot avoid it when we see it. We cannot avoid it because it is just everywhere you can imagine. But we can get around it by learning more about it.

Revision Makes A Paper Perfect

Most of us should have heard the phrase "practice makes a man [or woman] perfect" but it is important to know that revision makes a paper perfect. Revising a paper is not just fixing the commas or spellings. Revision is an ongoing process of rethinking the paper: reconsidering the arguments, reviewing the evidence, refining the purpose, and reorganizing the presentation. It is all about "re", I think of revision as reread, rethink, redo, rewrite, and so on.

I would like to share some tips that I find useful for revision. Revision doesn't necessarily mean rewriting the whole paper. Sometimes it means revising the thesis to match what you've discovered while writing. Sometimes it means coming up with stronger arguments to defend your position, or coming up with more vivid examples to illustrate your points. Sometimes it means shifting the order of your paper to help the reader follow your argument, or to change the emphasis of your points. Sometimes it means adding or deleting material for balance or emphasis.

The worst case, very few times revision does mean trashing your first draft and starting from scratch; but trust me it is always better for you to do it than your teacher.

Local 4's coverage of the 10/31 bomb threat

Go to the below link to see the report. I cannot copy-paste the article here due to copyright issues.
http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/17857521/detail.html#

DFW - an article from TIME

Click on the link to go to the article on time.com or read the article below.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1842295,00.html?iid=perma_share

David Foster Wallace: The Death of a Genius
What would you write if you could write absolutely anything? This is the question that, as a reader, one imagined David Foster Wallace facing. Whereas ordinary authors resorted to the standard tricks of the trade--write what you know, look deep into your soul, whatever--Wallace seemed to have no earthly constraints. He knew everything and could look into anybody's soul he wanted to. Any writer in America would have killed for his talent, but the man to whom it belonged killed himself. On Sept. 12, Wallace's wife discovered his body at their home in Claremont, Calif. He had hanged himself. He was 46.
He was David Foster Wallace only on the page. His first agent suggested that he use his middle name, to distinguish him from another David Wallace, and it stuck. Born in 1962 and raised in Illinois, he was a competitive junior tennis player--at 14 he was ranked 17th in the Midwest. He studied philosophy at Amherst College and then Harvard, and when he was only 24, he published his first novel, The Broom of the System. In 1996 he vaulted into the upper ranks of the literary world with Infinite Jest, his 1,079-page (and 388-footnote) meta-epic of tennis, drug addiction, art, terrorism and loneliness set in a future when each year is known by the name of its corporate sponsor (e.g., the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar). Infinite Jest was the quintessence of 1990s literary maximalism, and it became instant required reading. Enough with those '80s party-boy writers! Here was a novelist with the industrial-strength intellectual chops to theorize even our resolutely anti-intellectual age. Wallace became a reluctant literary pinup, with his stubbly outsize chin and his shoulder-length hair. He was America's No. 1 literary seed, at the top of a hierarchy that was, one suspects, largely meaningless to him.
Reading it now, with the burden of hindsight, one sees that Infinite Jest is ominously infested with suicides, including that of the hero's father, who cooks his own head in a microwave. But back then, Wallace seemed invulnerable. How could a man who had put such crowds of people on the page--Wallace's ear for dialogue was unmatched in contemporary fiction--truly be lonely? Once you've gone inside the mind of a critically burned toddler, as Wallace did in his short story "Incarnations of Burned Children," what horrors can't you face? When he accepted a professorship of creative writing at Pomona College in 2002 and then got married in 2004, one imagined that his relentlessly generative genius might finally be undergoing some domestic mellowing.
Now we have some idea what it was that he couldn't face. Since his death, Wallace's family has stated that he was chronically depressed. He had been taking medication for his condition for 20 years and had occasionally been hospitalized. "Everything had been tried," his father said, "and he just couldn't stand it anymore."
What was "it"? In Infinite Jest Wallace wrote--in a passage that now reads like a lucid cell-phone call from the pilot of a crashing 747--that clinical depression is "lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one." What Wallace suffered was both agonizing and indescribable, even by him. And that last may have been what made it unbearable. Like Hamlet--who gave Infinite Jest its title--he had that within which passeth show. Even if he could have written on and on, an infinite number of words, it would never have been enough.

DFW's Host

The discussion part of David Foster Wallace's Host was very interesting, as everyone had one thing in common to say about: "boxes". There were different opinions about the boxes; helpful, misleading, important, negligible, long, short, and so on. Whatever there was to say, the boxes were irritating. The arrows led from words to boxes and the content in the boxes served the purpose of footnotes. Usually i would ignore footnotes unless there was something interesting, but the boxes here were hard to ignore as they were right in the middle of the text. And excluding them felt as if you were missing out on something.
It took me quite a time to do this reading and i would often get mad as the boxes made me pause, but the humor part kept me going.

Bartleby???

Lets tle (tell) something about Bar-tle-by; pretty interesting name and also a very interesting character. for me although the reading part was kind of boring, overall the story was exciting. this is b'coz i wanted to know what was the problem with such a good copy machine. Bartleby, a scrivener and a very good employee in a law firm, all of a sudden goes silent and doesn't fulfill what is expected of him. his "i would prefer not to" attitude surprises his boss and colleagues; he basically denies his proofreading and copying tasks. after losing his job, Bartleby lands in prison and encounters death.
what was the cause of Bartleby's self-isolation?
now the answer to this is open. you can say either it was a natural death or suicide or murder or depressed or whatever you want. but Bertleby is dead and his death is a mystery.