Gregory McNamee lecture 11-18-2009 unfinished

Gregory McNamee's lecture Wednesday, November 18 was described as entertaining on the posters. That was a good idea because, in smaller script he was also described as a contributing editor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However boring that sounds to college kids he managed to fill the entire Pima Community College West Campus Santa Rita student lounge to capacity. Hats off to profs for all that extra credit.

Lame Truthiness
McNamee began by illustrating a series of lame half-truths and flat out lies that were accepted as truth.The most interesting for me was the story about the creator of Raggedy Ann- Johnny Bruell a fierce advocate against vaccination. Bruell's daughter Marcela originally recovered from an early type of swine flu and later died after given a vaccination in a weakened condition.
Bruell used Raggedy Ann and Andy as powerful tools for the anti-vaccination movement, typically the characters were running in fear from "the people with the needles". McNamee then began dispelling his favorite popular anecdotes of misinformation, first declaring that there is not a shred of evidence that vaccinations cause autism. He said that people were willing to disregard facts because things make them uncomfortable.
There is no actual occurance that protestors of the Vietnam War ever spat on returning veterans. A large rumor has recently circulated that the pay differential of CEOs to their company's average worker pay is 400 times. The differential is actually 337 times and as recently as 1980 the pay differential was only 40 times the average worker's pay rate.
McNamee also cited other examples of popular misnomers like avian flu coming from Asia, which side actually started the Civil War, the brontosaurus dinosaur lived in arid desert locations not swamps, Einstein not flunking out of classes. It became clear to me that these were most frustrating only to someone who edits an encyclopedia.

The Point
To be blunt those examples and many more were a long and winding road to McNamee's chief complaint: Wikipedia is more popular than an encyclopedia whose accuracy is always correct. Wikipedia's 70 percent accuracy rate further incensed a man who edits encyclopedias and is angry that the public spreads gossip and most of it is bad. OMG.
McNamee was most irritated that we live in a time when expert opinion is mistrusted. "You'd be angered at how little people know about this world." He said that we all have to consult with experts: structural engineers, neurosurgeons and Indian chiefs. For instance one wouldn't want brain surgery performed by a doctor whose success rate or knowledge is only 70 percent right?
McNamee suggested to stay away from Wikipedia, interrogate sources of information read or heard. He seemed specifically to address journalism students when he said to gather information the old fashioned way from books in libraries. "Facts are stupid things. What makes them smarter or stupider is how they are used."
I think this lecture was a dumbed down version of what he really felt and was frustrated by the spread of bad information to wit: "When crowds have the chance to be wrong they usually are wrong." Perhaps since I just watched "Religioulous" by Bill Maher I felt a salty, scathing book about that topic should be written to send the literary world a-twitter. But I supposed McNamee didn't want to reveal possibly controversial and outright condescending opinions and beliefs he could verify with some well-chosen facts.
However since he had said, "You have to be unafraid to offend people if you're going to talk about facts" early in the lecture, maybe this lecture was all the ammunition he had. I enjoyed the lecture and was glad I spent an hour of my time there. I think he is just going to be that guy, the guy that gets offended by misinformation. Not a rocker, shocker, or anything profound or dramatic. I'm glad he's out there holding people accountable, holding b.s. to proper scrutiny and keeping the colors bright in this weird rainbow of life.

Gregory McNamee is available for lectures and can also check out his photography at: http://www.gregorymcnamee.com/

Sierra Russell

People come to the American Southwest from all over the world for very romantic reasons. The desert is a fascinating and exotic place that deserves all the attention and mysticism projected onto it.

Sierra Russell is one of those people who came to the southwest for very romantic reasons, speaking to her you can hear the very faint influence of a Tennessee accent betraying her origins. She has adopted and prescribed for herself Tucson as home.

I ask her where she was born expecting maybe a hospital name in any American city, her reply surprised me, "The flatlands of Illinois. At home. My parents were hippies they had all of us at home."

It surprised me that she was raised so unconventionally by non-religious parents in the Christian bible belt, I appreciate because I had been myself. "We moved to Colorado when I was a baby. To cabin with no running water or electricity. Then we moved to east Tennessee." Russell replied.

I ask Russell how her parent's being hippies had any influence in her life. She smiles, "Absolutely, we certainly have more of an appreciation of nature because we were raised in the country."

Having such a great background I wondered what would bring her all the way from Tennessee away from her parents, "I love the desert. I love living among the outlaws. and I wanted to finish school. I spent two years at University of Tennessee. I was undecided. I knew I loved writing but I resisted it. Now that's all I want to do."

Here is her great blog, I think it shows that her dreams of becoming a environmental journalist are right on:
http://sirenasierra.blogspot.com/

MLA Citations

1. Entire Website:

Close, Sandy. New American Media. Pacific News Service, 1996. Web. 16 November 2009.

2. A page on a Website:

"Guide to Lock Picking for Beginners" Greg Miller. Greg Miller's Guide to Lock Picking for Beginners, 1999. Web. 16, November 2009.

3. An Image:

Richardson, Terry. Terry Richardson is our favorite, 1994. Vice Magazine, New York. Vice. Web. 16, November 2009.

4. An Article:

Greider, William. "The Money Man's Best Friend". The Nation Mag. Novem. 11, 2009. Web. 16 November 2009.

5. A blog posting:

vanden Huevel, Katrina ed. Nichols, John. "Democrats to Obama: Get Out of Afghanistan." The Nation Mag Web. 16 November 2009.

Ad for Pima Community College students

Student Life App for Iphone

Trying to keep track of assignments keeping you down? Forgetting important projects and due dates making your grades suffer? Well suffer no more. The Student Life app for the new Iphone is a service that keeps track of your assignments for you and reminds you when rough drafts are due, quizzes are posted and tests are up.

The way Student life App works

Your student success is based on the quality of your work right? Well, if post-its don't work for you this feature is like an interactive calendar. You can type in homework assignments, upload pages, upload the syllabus and keep in touch with a professor's email with the touch of the screen. You can even record audio, video to play back for note-taking.

Student Life reminders

Student life provides you the option of free texts and emails for reminders. We even have a built in alarm clock to go off for your different assignments. You can even receive scheduling conflict updates for your appointments and classes. Why let your grade suffer for something you can control with the power of your phone and the touch of a finger?

Student Life app syncs up with Word
You can also write papers with the help of Word and its incredible editing features that work with MLA, AP Style and Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus. Student Life app will send your papers through several email accounts to make sure you can hand in everything on time every single time.

Commerical website

The website I reviewed was for the Target corporation.

Purpose

The purpose of the website is to show the viewer their wide variety of products for marketing. The purpose is achieved because the website shows several products at once and groups them together to appeal to parents and single people. The author has not misjudged the audience, because it is appealing to young shoppers and established shoppers with families. The author understands the conventions of the web because the website is set up for people to look at different products while they shop.

Audience

The audience is for experienced web young web shoppers, probably female because they feature more female specific products like house decorations, beauty products, children's toys and female specific clothing. There are some gadgets, and electronic devices featured like Ipods, flat-screen televisions that are more masculine in appearance. Since Halloween is past they are already pushing for Christmas and are offering Christmas delivery. The advertisement for delivery features a woman and child opening their door to receive a shipment of target products.

Content

The Target website is designed for hit and run, because a viewer can go to the store and get the items or order them online. There are also features of the website that can show you the availability of a product at a Target store near you. When one clicks on the chosen product, information is given about it, and underneath it one can scroll down to view a "Related Items" menu bar and "Guests who bought this item also bought". Each product has reviews that others wrote about their experiences with the product that I found very helpful. The text is clear and well-written. But I found the site could be better organized, it looks too busy.

Appearance

I like Target products in general because of their overall graphic sensibility. The website graphics are designed with three colors: black, white and red which would seem to simplify but it does not. There are four menu bars first offering one to sign in and create a profile, the others offer more products to choose from in different categories. Then on the sidebar more products are offered in a menu called "Similar items". This makes the page crowded and overwhelming to read, decreasing interest in concentration of one product at a time.

Accessibility

The page loads pretty well, some products take more time to load than others. It also is incredibly fast at finding products available at Target locations near the viewer, an improvement from past years.

Organization

The website is organized well for how much content they have and how many different products they offer. It is not overloaded with flash features. The other ads on their website are very subtle and in smaller script, I had to look to find them because they are in solid black lettering and use no coloring. These ads are off to the left side or down on the bottom. The ads are for similar products that the viewer clicks on or is interested in. There is no link rot and it is fairly easy to navigate, however I wouldn't think that I would find many older people or men using the Target website, it looks a little overwhelming and shows more female products than male products.

Multi-media topic

A. The multi-media topic I've chosen is mental illness and what I'd like people to learn is the prevalence of mental illness in society.

B.
1.) Introduction of the brief history of mental illness as a condition. I would like to inform the viewer of the development of psychology into an organized science and who were the thinkers that influenced psychological thought and what their concepts and observations were. This brief history will provide some background to people familiar with figures like Freud.

2.) Statistics will serve as the basis for science and data to the reader to look at. I would inform the reader to look at the percentages of the population in the (United States and Europe) who have mental illnesses or have been treated for mental illness. The statistics portion will serve to increase awareness of how many people are affected in our society.

3.) Introduction of different treatments to mentally ill patients throughout western history up to current methods with medication therapy. I would use this area to inform to the viewer how relatively new these methods are and how humanely they were carried out.

4.) Care for mentally ill patients. I would use this area to inform the reader how people who suffer from mental illness area treated in society, how they are cared for in the public health system and address issues including homelessness.

5.) This portion will serve to address future issues facing people with mental illnesses. Future concerns addressed will be cost of effectiveness in drug therapy and changing attitudes in mainstream society about mental illness.

C.)

1.) The brief history of mental illness would best be explained through the media of graphics in a time line. I chose graphics because reading the history of anything can be trying for the casual reader.
I plan to obtain that information by using pictures and making a timeline would help explain the history in a series of events more comprehensible than a long body of words. I would use available pictures of philosophers, doctors and book covers in the time line to break up the text into chunks of digestible information snippets.

2.) The statistics module would be explained through the media of text and video. Text would recite the statistics I've learned and read into smaller chunks. There is wealth of short videos available on the Internet concerning different mental illnesses that are concise and show real people living with illnesses. This area is ideal for video because it makes the viewer feel a human element to it rather than dryly reading information or case studies.

3.) The treatment module would be explained with text since therapies have changed so much over time and would necessitate description. Photos of drawings of treatment in history would also be effective to break up text, however copyright might make this difficult.

4.) The care module would benefit from personal audio clips, I could have links to different sites for videos and short personal stories from sources like "This American Life" where mental illnesses have been featured.

5.) The future concerns/changing attitudes module would include some text and include links to many films that have featured mental illnesses throughout the previous century and the current one. I would like to compare those films with the mainstream attitude towards mental illness and how they can illustrate how the attitudes have changed.

Map

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