A Proper Gander at Propaganda

Edward Filene, in 1937, created the Institute of Propaganda Analysis to educate the American public. There are seven main techniques, which are:

• Name Calling
• Glittering Generalities
• Transfer
• Testimonial
• Plain Folk
• Card Stacking
• Bandwagon

Wikipedia also has a detailed article on propaganda techniques which expands the list to include many more logical fallacies. For simplicity's sake we'll stick the the first seven. 

These are techniques used often for advertisements (of any kind) as they tend to impact people and manipulate the audience into investing into the advertiser. This investment can be with votes, money, whatever.

Let's take a look now at one of Ron Paul's presidential campaign ads*:

This video has examples of name calling, glittering generalities, transfer, card stacking, and band wagon. Only testimonial and plain folk weren't used.

Name Calling: Members of the current administration, namely Obama, were clearly associated with current debt crisis. There was no exploration of cause and effect, but a pairing of very negative trends with the incumbent.

Card Stacking: The video was set up to lead a viewer to believe the more spending is a bad thing, and less a good thing. While there is nothing wrong with that viewpoint, no reasoning was provided to support it, instead stating the information as a blind fact.

Transfer: The Statue of Liberty (an obvious symbol for freedom, American values, etc.) were coupled with both Ron Paul's name, and the Balanced Budget promise he is running under. Association with himself to values most Americans can agree to, regardless of party affiliation is another logical fallacy.

Band wagon: Simple. This is more subtle. This fallacy creates the illusion of widespread support, urging people to join in with the rest, to not "stand out". Imagery of Ron Paul at the end in front of crowds of avid supporters creates the feel that everybody wants him next.

Glittering Generalities: "Restore America Now" is a prime example. What American citizen wouldn't want America restored? It doesn't say much as to Ron Paul's qualifications. "Compromise or Conviction" also resonates with Christian values (which is an important demographic to get votes from) as Conviction is generally seen as favorably looked upon thing, although usually in a different context.


All that's left to do now is ditch the ad campaigns and do some real research before voting later this year!

*This isn't meant to pick specifically at Ron Paul, or to show any sort of political preferences. His ad, among all the others, is equally guilty of utilizing propaganda techniques.

From Madness to Mental Illness

We all know and understand (more or less) where mental illness comes from. Sometimes it's hereditary. Other times it has to do with drug/alcohol use during pregnancy. Sometimes it's due to vaccinations (but not really, vaccines don't do that)

Thanks modern science.

But some 400 years ago, modern science wasn't, well, quite as modern as it is now.

What people believed in was the four humors. To quote La Primaudaye (1594): "We understand by a Humor, a liquid and running body into which the food is converted in the liver, to this end that bodies might be nourished and preserved by them. And as there are four elements ...so there are four sorts of humors answerable to their natures, being all mingled together with the blood."

The four humors are blood, yellow choler, phlegm, and black bile. Any imbalance thereof in the body would cause some classification of mental disorder.

To much black bile would cause  Melancholy, classified by abnormally gloomy or depressed characteristics.

For those that are up to it, Robert Burton wrote (quite a lengthy) treatise on melancholy found here, at Project Gutenberg.


Interestingly, back then, melancholy was thought to sometimes lead to insanity, if the melancholy had been present for too long. This is obviously a stark contrast to 400 years later when we no longer know our mental illnesses to be caused by an overexposure to one of our four internal elements. Not to say that isn't close. Some mental disorders such as bipolar disorder are caused by chemical imbalances in the body.

They would use words that reflected the notion that the ratios of humors in the body placed one in a given state of mind. These diagnoses included sanguine (optimistic/silly, too much blood) choleric (violent, too much choler) phlegmatic (dull, to much phlegm) and melancholy (depressed, too much black bile). All of these were viewed as a spectrum, with somewhere in the middle being the "Golden Temperature" (i.e. perfectly healthy) and madness at the extremities.

We no longer posses such a unifying spectrum of all mental illnesses. We have identified many different causes, and have countless specific names. So we refer to "madness" as mental illness (slowly rearing away from mental retardation for political correctness). We have spectrums to denote the intensity of a given disorder, such as Autism, but they are specific to each disorder, as we now know that each one is caused by sometimes totally different factors.

Here's a question then: If one were to stage a Shakespearean play in a modern setting, do you act upon semi-obscure notions of where madness comes from, or do you adapt the play to fit modern understanding?

An Introduction to Piet Hein

Remember Piet Pieterszoon Hein, the Dutch naval hero of the 17th century, from History class?

Fast forward three hundred years or so in the family tree, and you get Piet Hein, 20th century Danish mathematician, scientists, poet. Following the Nazi occupation in Denmark, Piet began publishing his short poems dubbed Grooks in various newspapers.

These Grooks are no longer in print, but you can still find collections of them on Amazon.

Here's an example:

THE EGOCENTRICS

People are self-centered
to a nauseous degree.
They will keep on about themselves
while I'm explaining me.

As you can see, it's short. ABCB rhyme scheme. But apart from being short, quick, and fun, it manages to get a solid point across in a very efficient manner. It reminds readers not to be so quick to judge others for faults they may too posses. The fault in question being egocentrism. It also points out the tendency of egocentrics to discover others' egocentricity when they are no longer the subject of discourse. 

All this is done without explicitly saying that. It's done in a teasing, self-referencing manner. Here's another example:

IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN
A poet should be of the
                  old-fahioned meaningless brand:
obscure, esoteric, symbolic, --
              the critics demand it;
so if there's a poem of mine
              that you do understand
I'll gladly explain what it means
              till you don't understand it.
This one here speaks directly to Hein's brevity. On the one hand, he remains brief, and simple in message, which is to point out that there are quite a number of interpretations of his works. 
It is difficult to discern which lines, if any, are written sarcastically. The first three certainly seem to be, that a poet should be obscure and symbolic. Yet Hein directly responds to that claim by stating that his poems can be interpreted in as obscure a fashion as one would want. Yet the whole thing remains brief to the end.
One final example: 
MAJORITY RULE

His party was the Brotherhood of Brothers,
and there were more of them than of the others.
That is, they constituted that minority
which formed the greater part of the majority.
Within the party, he was of the faction
that was supported by the greater fraction.
And in each group, within each group, he sought
the group that could command the most support.
The final group had finally elected
a triumvirate whom they all respected.
Now, of these three, two had final word,
because the two could overrule the third.
One of these two was relatively weak,
so one alone stood at the final peak.
He was: THE GREATER NUMBER of the pair
which formed the most part of the three that were
elected by the most of those whose boast
it was to represent the most of the most
of most of most of the entire state --
or of the most of it at any rate.
He never gave himself a moment's slumber
but sought the welfare of the greater number.
And all people, everywhere they went,
knew to their cost exactly what it meant
to be dictated to by the majority.
But that meant nothing, -- they were the minority.

This one, as you can see, is a tad longer. This longer poem stands as a minority among his other works, much like his party. It seems as well to be poking fun at politics, particularly the democratic system. It is long to confuse, and to illuminate countless subdivisions in which there is a majority in each smaller segment, only to remind us that it still doesn't matter since they're a minority.
After all, one may subdivide eternally, but the whole never gets any bigger or smaller. It is in essence Zeno's paradox.
Piet Hein is a very accessible poet, in the sense that his work can be read by even those with the attention span of a squirrel, reading only 4 lines at a time. Yet it is also dense enough/thought-provoking enough that it shan't be immediately dismissed by a poetry lover either.

Anatomy of A Tweet

Twitter is at the forefront of modern social networking.


Ergo, it is a crucial tool for anyone in a public position, or just wants everyone to know that they just did their laundry.

Twitter serves as a sort of self-advertisement, and as such, a successful tweet is one that garners the largest number of reads. Ideally, people would read things you post, thus garnering yourself exposure.

This is this basic structure:

@Someone's_Username TEXT TEXT TEXT #PopularConnection *Link*

These components don't necessarily have to be in that order, but it's not a bad standard to use. A tweet allows only 140 characters to be used, so everything must be condensed.

Let's start with the @. An @Username will notify Username that you just included them in a tweet. Only that person will be notified of this, and can be seen as a political move. If you include others in your tweets, they might be brought to include you in theirs. If you are mentioned in other people's tweets, all of THEIR followers will be presented with a link to your account. This could significantly increase your following.

Next comes the hashtag, or #. This is a really interesting feature of Twitter, as at any giving moment the ten most popular hashtags are featured. This means that if a thousand people include #dinosaurs, there might appear a temporary dinosaur category, as so many people are tweeting about dinos. This can be used to the tweeters advantage, if you hashtag to popular (and relevant!) categories, as doing so increases the chances that somebody might stumble upon a tweet, and like it.

A truly successful tweet will integrate these components. Ex: @SomeScientist Colliding subatomic particles in the #LargeHadronCollider tonight! *link to page on the LHC*

This tweet would do a good job of garnering views. Now what's the point of getting viewers in the first place? Suppose you need people to donate money to a cause. The link provided could send readers to a page where they can easily donate. The possibilities are endless.

Twitter changes the evolution of language in a new and unforeseen way. Such writing is encouraged to be short and condensed, sometimes at the expense of proper grammar and/or spelling conventions. Similarly as in "text speak" ideas are forced to be expressed artificially short spaces. 

 The ability to @ or # doesn't exactly have much potential to change words or grammar. But, it changes the way language is used, as people are looking for ways to integrate links to outside information, and to further categorize information in as efficient a way as possible without disrupting the flow of a sentence. 

Book Review: Maus

Enter Maus, Art Speigelman's masterpiece that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. This is an award ever the more prestigious considering it is the only comic book to date to have received the honor. The book itself is about a series of interviews, in which Art has his father, Vladek, recount his memories of the holocaust and Nazi Germany. The book being written in two separate volumes, together was written over the course of 13 years and countless interview with his father.

Indeed all the images in the book are significant, as much as text would be in any other novel. According to interviews with Speigelman, every detail down to the tuft of grass was recorded from his father's recollections. It is a work that strives to preserve extraordinary historical accuracy while still transmitting the feelings of both father and son.

Speigelman conveys tales of his father, and manages to demonstrate what it was like for a Polish Jew in Auschwitz II. At the same time, however, is the story of Art himself and his relationship with his father. 

Interestingly, all nationalities / ethnicities are represented by some sort of animal. Jews as mice, non-Jewish Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, the French as frogs, etc. When in various tales Vladek impersonates Germans, he is depicted as a mouse wearing a cat mask. Notably, also depicted is Art himself, when discussing his own guilt of having never experienced the holocaust, wearing a mouse mask. 

In such a manner the book is written, with many visual subtleties becoming immensely important. It is a novel written in a different medium, and as such the experience of reading it is also very different. The animal metaphor would have been far more difficult to accomplish succesfuly and gracefully in an all text format. 

Maus reads like a movie: recollections transition into actual depictions of events while complementary story lines progress. Never does Art Speigelman directly state his ideas, instead he approaches them from the outside and hints at them with visual and dialogue cues. In using pictures, characters' emotions can be conveyed almost immediately, and precisely, because facial expressions are visible, and do not have to be "described". 

Recently Spiegelman has published MetaMaus (in stores near you). The book/DVD combo is a series of interviews with Spiegelman in which he recounts his own personal motives and explanations of the original book. 

An examination of "Philosophy Bro"

Philosophy Bro.


A haven for those seeking easy to read summaries of various academic philosophic works. But they're more than just summaries. Nothing on the site is written in "academic language". Everything is written in "bro speak".


The author's about me section states " Maybe you've got a big paper coming up, and you haven't done the reading. Maybe there's this guy you've heard about, but you don't have the time to wade through the text yourself. Whatever, bro, I don't judge." 


That's  just the thing: it's all written in a colloquial, college-student tongue, precisely the audience it generally seems to be aimed at. The result? It feels something like reading comedy blogging (such as on collegehumor or cracked) Except this time instead of just giggles the reader is actually learning in a slightly more traditional sense of the word.


The usage of vulgarities is somewhat controversial. To be true to "bro speak" the author periodically includes several four-letter words. Now these interjections serve no (direct) purpose to the learning of philosophy, and appear to exist mainly for the preservation of character. If very sparsely used, those interjection can create the illusion of having a personal and very informal chat with the author, but if overdone shows the he/she might be trying too hard to seem "bro". 

A Multilingual Internet...

From the people that brought you captcha and recaptcha, Duolingo.com is the brainchild of Luis von Ahn. The basic idea is this: you learn a language (for free, a full $500 less than Rosetta Stone) by a type of immersion, while simultaneously translating the internet.

Isn't the internet already translated? I mean, you can make a website in any language you want! And if it's not, Google Translate will do it for you! Well the thing is, most successful websites are available primarily in English, thus are accessible mainly to English speakers. To use the example of Wikipedia. The English version of the site has almost 4 million articles. The Spanish version? Under a million. As far as translating programs go, often times, as I'm sure many of you have noticed, are unreliable methods of accurately translating information.

Luis von Ahn's dream is to, in teaching people new languages, translate the rest of the internet into every major language on the planet. Users are given sentences of increasing complexity in the language they wish to learn to translate, and answers can be compared to answers from other users and rated. After extended use the user begins to learn how the language works, and is busy at work translating snippets of web pages.

The internet's potential for massive collaboration could potentially be revolutionary in the greater world's understanding of language. Since new websites and blogs are being CONSTANTLY updated, with a plethora of untranslated text being formed every minutes, learners will have no shortage of things to translate, thus material to practice with. As a result, it is possible that the world will become more worldly. Demographic chunks that otherwise would never have seriously bothered understanding another language (particularly in America) now have access to that in a both intrinsically and extrinsically productive manner. With more and more people becoming accustomed to the annuls of different languages, the world becomes a more interconnected and inter-linguistic communication becomes more seamless.

Every language functions a different way, with certain things that simply cannot be translated while maintaining its original beauty. It is in attempting to translate these phrases, or words, the ones who reference a literary canon apart from our own, that we become exposed to the self-contained beauty of other languages. And even if sometimes we cannot understand it, it would be great step forward to at least appreciate it.

Here is Luis von Ahn's TED talk on the subject.

Duolingo is currently in beta testing, and should hopefully start-up soon.