Freakonomics AOW #3 (IRB)

Freakonomics was written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.  Levitt is a Professor of Economics at University of Chicago.  At the University of Chicago, he directs the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory.  Dubner is an award-winning author and journalist who also taught English at Columbia University.  In this first section that I read, these two authors talk about how many solutions to important issues are not always prominent, and how incentives can work positively and negatively.  For example, in the introduction they discussed that the reason that the crime rate dropped so much in the 1990's was not because of the proliferation of gun control laws, nor the new police strategies put into place, not even because of the great economy.  Dubner and Levitt showed us that it was one case for Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe, that was taken all the way to the Supreme Court.  This case ended with the legalization of abortion throughout all of the U.S.  This made the crime rate drop because the people who could not afford to have a child, or did not want to support one, could decide not to have one.  These fetuses that were now being aborted, it turns out, had a higher probability of turning to crime when they grew up, but they could not commit these crimes because they never got the chance.  When this book was published, the U.S. economy was not doing too well, just a year later the recession was declared.  It was written to help explain to people who are trying to understand economics where the base of all economics lie, which is incentives.  Some rhetorical elements I found in the piece were that they referenced the appeals through different types of incentives.  They said, "There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral." (Levitt and Dubner 17).  This connects to the appeals through economic being the logical reasoning, or logos, the social being the credibility among peers, or ethos, and moral being how you feel that you acted a certain way, or pathos.  So far, the authors have reached their purpose because I am learning a lot about economics very quickly, while also staying interested.

6 Ways to Get Anyone to Believe a Clearly Fake News Story- AOW #2

This week I read 6 Ways to Get Anyone to Believe a Clearly Fake News Story (found at http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-ways-to-get-anyone-to-believe-clearly-fake-news-story/), which explained to me different ways that could be used to develop fake news stories.  It mentioned that our society is ignorant on a lot of subjects and we are also to lazy to research what we read, so believing crazy stories happened to us many times before.  I noticed as I was reading that a lot of the topics connected to the appeals.  For example, one of the topics was about how we make specific studies more general to make it appealing to the reader.  This appealed to the logos by sounding so smart that people do not understand you, but still believe whatever you say.  Also, the article talked about how heart-wrenching stories made many believe stories that weren't true and I thought that that was a demonstration of how pathos is the most powerful appeal.

The author of the piece was Christina H, she has written many other pieces for cracked that have been viewed by millions of people.  This piece was written in a time where Americans have all of the resources they need to research everything at the tips of their fingers, but never do because they are too lazy.  This helped give the article a little humor because they had examples of news articles that weren't true.  The reason this article was written was to provide the lazy American a realization of how lazy they are and hopefully change so we do not make mistakes like believing these news articles again.  The audience that it was written for was the average, lazy American who believe everything they read, no matter how crazy the stories are.  Rhetorical elements in the piece were in the ways to get people to believe clearly fake news stories.  One point was that exaggerating scientific breakthroughs works because people do not know much on the subject, so the reader feels like the evidence applied to the logos.  Also, the article said that heart-wrenching stories work because people do not want to sound heartless by denying them; this is also an application to pathos.  The author reached their purpose because they effectively made me a little paranoid about where the articles I read are coming from and gave me a motivation to research the stories instead of just believing everything I read.

Freakonomics

Freakonomics
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Section 1: Introduction and Chapter 1
Section 2: Chapters 2 and 3
Section 3: Chapters 4 and 5
Section 4: Chapter 6 and Epilogue

I chose this book because I've heard of it before; I heard it was a great book.  Also, When Ms. Pronko brought it up in class as one of her 3 great books to choose from, she didn't have a bad word to say about it.  Then, when I got home I asked my family if they've ever heard of it, my brother said that he read it and enjoyed it very much.  This book also interests me because I like to figure out how things work and this book shows how one can figure out the puzzles of everyday life.  I am very excited to begin reading this book.

Google's Energy Consumption

This week, I read an article about how Google has recently come out with the secret that they had been keeping for a very long time; how much energy they use.  (Found at http://techland.time.com/2011/09/09/6-things-youd-never-guess-about-googles-energy-use/)  This article stated that 0.013% of the entire world's energy use is used by Google.  It also gave me interesting facts about how much energy that truly is.  For example, the article states that, "Google uses enough energy to continuously power 200,000 homes.

The article was written by Jared Newman, a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, G4, PCWorld.com and Technologizer.com.  He knows all about the new and upcoming technology and has written many other articles on Google.

This Piece was written in a time when Google is one of the biggest companies developing the new technology.  Everyone wonders how much energy it takes for Google to run their searches and support the millions of people who own Gmail accounts.  Not to mention the other cool things that Google can do.  The article was written to show the people how much it really takes to simply search "Yellow Lab Puppies" on a Google image search just to look at the cute pictures of playful puppies.  It did not try to tell us that we should not be using Google because they use too much energy.  The audience that they wrote this for is the ones who use Google, which is pretty much everyone, as far as I know.  The rhetorical elements that are used in this piece are:

1. A use of many different statistics to appeal to logos
• "Google accounts for roughly 0.013 percent of the world's energy use"
2. Little anecdotal examples to appeal to pathos
• "One Google search is equal to turning on a 60W light bulb for 17 seconds"
3. Jared Newman added smaller sentences that don't mean much that added to the persona that he depicted himself as
• "That's hard work!" and "Google's just getting silly with this statistic."

I believe that the author did accomplish his purpose because he effectively intrigued me into reading further on through the article.  Also, at the end, he left me wanting to read more and learn more about the site that I use everyday.  He really put into perspective how much energy it takes to run Google.