Summary on the Video "Let my dataset change your mindset" by Hans Rosling

Let my dataset change your mindset" by Hans Rosling is an informative video on research done over the past 100 years about the relation between health and success of various countries and regions. Rosling speaks about how misinterpretations have been made over other regions in the world. He proves his point right by showing data sets of countries and GDP. In most instances, regions such as Europe and North America were on the high scale of most graphs. Africa was usually one of the lowest.

Rosling's students defined Western World as a long life in a small family and a developing world is a short life in a large family. This means that the people which has large families had a shorter life expectancy due to limited resources and vice versa. They inherited these assumptions and preconceptions on world view from their teachers and the year from which they were born. 


When Rolsing breaks down the regional bubbles on his graphs into smaller bubbles that represent countries, their is a vast difference because the regional bubbles are higher on child survival rate making Africa the lowest on the child survival rate. Once the bubbles split into specific countries, Africa's countries get even lower from the before average of 80%. The new average of the countries within Africa drop to 70 percent (that being Sierra Leone).


The data set that Rosling represents challenges assumptions about global health because in general, the more prosperous nations have higher health and survival rates. Throughout the development of the world, Rosling's data set shows that the impoverished regions/countries catch up to the more prosperous nations. Rosling calls this "development" convergence because it's not exactly a development in the world, but a convergence of equal health and prosperity. Rosling also shocks the audience by showing that the more prosperous countries in Africa have higher HIV rates possibly due to situations faced with their heterosexual partners. He begs for people not to make the HIV "epidemic" a race issue because its not just all African poor people; his data set shows that the outlook we, as the more prosperous nations, had were wrong because we thought that the epidemic for survival was severe all over Africa, which is not true. 


As Rosling is demonstrating, the audience gets a sense that the more research we do in specificity, then the more we would learn about the assumptions we've had. Rosling gives a sense of hope in his speech because he shows that the convergence has moved in significant rates within the past100 years. By having the "industrialized" nations provide aid for the "developing" nations, we can have a complete convergence into a fairly equal world, in terms of health and survival. I agree with Roslings research because we, especially as Americans, have a mindset that is wrong because we're not developing, but we're converging. 






Bibliography

Rosling, H. (2009). Let my dataset change your mindset. TED Talks. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVhWqwnZ1eM

Summary on "Revision of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers" by Nancy Sommers

In the article Revision of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers, Nancy Sommers find distinctions between writers on different levels: experienced writers and student writers. sommers conducted a series of studies in the course of three years. Her research examined the revision process of student writers and experienced adult writers to see what role revision played in their writing processes. She conducted her research on twenty freshmen student writers from Boston University/University of Oklahoma and twenty experienced adult writers (them being editors, journalists, and academics) from Boston and Oklahoma City. Each writer from both groups wrote three essays (expressive, explanatory, and persuasive) and they also had to revise each essay twice. Sommers interviewed each writer and made a transcript with a scale of concerns that each writer had. 


Ronald Barthes was also a research conductor and found that writing and speech have vital distinctions; Inexperienced writers feel the need of constant revision and experienced writers imagine a reader. In this article, Student writers believe revision is defined as "a sequence of changes in a composition-changes which are initiated by cues and occur continually throughout the writing of a work." (Sommers, 1980). But, according to Sommers, revision is located after the first or second draft. The idea of revision being at the end, gives the writer better evolution in thoughts.


With this being said, she found that student writers would become too in focused on their revision. In addition while students were revising their paper, they would "scratch out" certain things for easy replacement; Sommers found that most student writers used certain operations: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering.  The student writers emphasized levels of revision which is being more on the specific words they were using, the phrases being written, the way the sentence is structured, and then their theme. 


The elements that were included in the experienced writers were that they envisioned a reader reading their product, their first draft would be made solely by figuring out what their argument is and trying to figure out what they want to say, and by seeking meaning in the engagement. Sommers  found that the emphasis on this rather than their organization was much more effective and stronger in comparison to student writers.


In concluding terms, Sommers found that Ronald Barthes theory of speech and writing is valid because you cant revise a speech. Sommers believes that writing should be more similar to a speech because through a speech the audience (readers) become more engaged. I'm in compliance with Sommers findings because my own personal experiences have led me to realize this. These ideas relate to the current topic in class because we're writing a paper and we're not focusing on any revision for the most part. 




Bibliography

Sommers, N. (1980). Revision strategies of student writers and experienced adult writers. College Composition and Communication, 31(4), 378-388. 

Summary on "Responding to Student Writing" by Nancy Sommers

In the article Responding to Student Writing, Nancy Sommers with Lil Brannon and Cyril Knoblach conduce research on teachers and their commenting styles of their students. Sommers explicitly emphasizes how comments have affected students writing in terms of the student writers derive from their original message, solely to meet the "guidelines" for writing a good paper. 


Sommers points out that comments are important because teachers feel the need to provide assistance for their students; without comments, students will feel that their paper has properly emphasized their ideas. Confusion strikes student writers, "The teacher appropriates the text from the student by confusing the student's purpose in writing the text with her own purpose in commenting." (Sommers, 1982)  The usage of the verb "appropriates" identifies that teachers don't necessarily pay attention to the paper, but rather set apart what's written to establish some sort of correction of their own. Student writers often level the importance of the correction over the importance of the meaning and ideas. 


This article states that comments are genuinely important when revising a paper, but the process of doing so conflicts with the normative of revising a paper. Sommers goes on to explain that generic comments or grammatical corrections aren't as useful as the years of workshop trainings go on to explain. Many teachers use the same "rubber-stamped" comments, which may not be effective. A rubber-stamp comment is a comment that can be interchanged between papers; this does not expose interest in students writing which may ultimately put students into an  unmotivated mood. 


Sommers concludes her research findings in a very ironic way by saying that teachers must revise their commenting/revising strategies. This will help writers organize their priorities of what their writing and how they're writing it. I completely agree with Sommers because of my own experience, It never struck me that my ideas were being pushed aside due to grammatical corrections and what professional writers expect. I can use this idea to cohesively write a paper/essay without thinking too much about "how" it should look like. Sommers findings are related to the current subject in my English class because we're always in a process of writing without concentrating too much on grammatical errors. 




Bibliography

Sommers, N. (1982). Responding to student writing. College Composition and Communication 33(2), 148-156. 

Summary on "The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam"

Palczewski in The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam speaks about the adversities in the women's suffrage movement during the early 1900s. Palczewski informs his audience about the difficulties women went through in order to simply feel important in the country, in terms of voting.


Palczewski studied the many, various postcards from Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company of New York. Dunston-Weiler had their very own Suffrage Series that would not only insult men and women, but pressured men to feel insulted through the work "woman" (Man being a very essential part if the word). These postcards included women smoking, men taking care of children, and women trying to take part in masculine positions. The point of these postcards was to almost instill fear into people about the "chaos" that would happen if women were really given the right to vote. 


The line of the collection that exposed visual arguments was the "Uncle Sam Suffrage" postcard. The postcard consisted of Uncle Sam (Uncle Sam being the representation of the United States and everything the country stands far) with his beard cut short, wearing heels, standing in a feminine way with women's curves. The line that was merely visual consisted of a man sitting in a rocky chair with children and with a frame behind him that said "What is home without a father." This phrase was obviously sarcasm, but in a sense could instill fear into men about what their lives would be everyday with a simple voting right given to women.


Palczewski states that the type of women that would be likely to vote would be bad women. He states this by referring to prostitutes that would be called "public woman" at the time of the suffrage movement. By letting women vote, people were defeminizing women from what the normative perspective. This also connects with the idea that men will not be as masculine, leaving them no choice but to stay at home. Palczewski explains this situation by referring back to the postcards of Dunston-Weiler, in particular the "Suffragette Madonna" postcard really embodies the male's position after women receive the freedom of voting. This postcard is a man feeding a baby at home. This is further explained by handing out the idea of women becoming too powerful in politics; meaning them not settling for just voting, but wanting more. The visual aspect of this postcard really captured the attention of many people because it showed the epitome of emasculation.  Instead of women being in "their place" men would take control over it. 


I believe that verbal and visual arguments are very important when trying to persuade someone to agree with their point. These postcards most likely scared men into believing things that aren't necessarily true nowadays; this can be supported through the idea of this collection being made in the early 1900s, but women's right to vote wasn't established until the late 1900s. A picture itself is just enough to instill emotions in people, which brings to the point of images being vital. 




Bibliography

Palczewski, C. H. (2005). The male madonna and the feminine uncle sam: Visual argument, icons, and ideographs in 1909 anti-woman suffrage postcards. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 91(4), 365-394.