Opinion on Stone Money
To me, the value of money is what people are willing to value it as. The yap decided to value stones as their money, which is really no different than us using paper for money; besides it weighing a lot more. If that system works for them then their value system is working well.
Kit-Kats for Nerds
My first reaction to the money used by the Yap was that they were out of their minds.
This is the second paragraph.
This is the third and final.
Partly for the practice of learning to post, but mostly because I want to know what you found most surprising or intriguing about the Stone Money source material, Publish your first post during today’s class, THU JAN 19.
Thank you for your texts. I’ve compiled your adjectives describing your academic writing careers (so far) into a word cloud. The most commonly-used adjectives are the most prominent. All of your submissions appear in the cloud.
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Is Nuclear Power Worth the Risk?
Bob Herbert asks the question in the Opinion pages of the New York Times. It’s pretty clear from the evidence he cites that he thinks the answer is No, it’s not worth the risk (or Yes, the price is too high, if that’s how you phrase the question).
Since he’s willing (sort of) to go on the record with his objections, let’s examine his essay as an opportunity for rebuttal, the better to understand what rebuttal means when it comes time to craft your own essays, days from now.
Let’s examine some Rebuttal Types in the context of Bob Herbert’s argument.
Herbert’s text is in bold.
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CATASTROPHES HAPPEN
Catastrophes happen.
No one thought the Interstate 35W bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis would collapse. No one thought the Gulf of Mexico would be fouled to the horrible extent that it was by the BP oil spill. The awful convergence of disasters in Japan — a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami and a devastating nuclear power emergency — seemed almost unimaginable.
Worst-case scenarios unfold more frequently than we’d like to believe, which leads to two major questions regarding nuclear power that Americans have an obligation to answer.
First, can a disaster comparable to the one in Japan happen here? The answer, of course, is yes — whether caused by an earthquake or some other event or series of events. Nature is unpredictable and human beings are fallible. It could happen.
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TRUE ANALOGY / FALSE ANALOGY
Analogy is prediction based on close comparisons. If I’m planning to release The Matrix Revolutions shortly after the outrageous success of The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded, I point out that the new film shares the same writing and directing team, an almost identical cast, and the same subject matter as the first two films, and should therefore be a huge success too. What one difference made that analogy false? The new actress who played the Oracle? Or the fact that the script was anticlimactic and the audience was already saturated with better material?
What’s a BAD False Analogy Argument?
When Bob Herbert compares the nuclear disaster at Fukushima with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, he emphasizes that they were both almost unimaginable: nobody could have predicted them, he says. He uses that similarity to prove that a similar nuclear catastrophe could happen here. But surely the fact that Fukushima was unpredictable didn’t cause it to occur. It’s not an effective rebuttal to say that Herbert “uses false analogy” when comparing Fukushima to nuclear plants in the US. But it’s a start.
What’s a GOOD False Analogy Argument?
An effective rebuttal of a false analogy is one that points out the essential differences that falsify the analogy. In our example, the differences are audience saturation with the franchise and the crappy third script. In Herbert’s case, the essential differences between Japanese nuclear plants and US plants are mostly geographical. If new nuclear plants ARE NOT positioned as precariously as Fukushima—on massive, active earthquake-prone fault lines just hundreds of feet from the ocean—he’s got no business saying that the failure of one predicts the failure of the other.
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EITHER DANGEROUS NUCLEAR OR NO NUCLEAR
So the second question is whether it makes sense to follow through on plans to increase our reliance on nuclear power, thus heightening the risk of a terrible problem occurring here in the United States. Is that a risk worth taking?
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KNOWN RISKS
Concern over global warming has increased the appeal of nuclear power, which does not produce the high levels of greenhouse gases that come from fossil fuels. But there has been a persistent tendency to ignore the toughest questions posed by nuclear power: What should be done with the waste? What are the consequences of a catastrophic accident in a populated area? How safe are the plants, really? Why would taxpayers have to shoulder so much of the financial risk of expanding the nation’s nuclear power capacity, an effort that would be wildly expensive?
A big part of the problem at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power station are the highly radioactive spent fuel rods kept in storage pools at the plant. What to do, ultimately, with such dangerous waste material is the nuclear power question without an answer. Nuclear advocates and public officials don’t talk about it much. Denial is the default position when it comes to nuclear waste.
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What’s a BAD Stacking the Deck Rebuttal?
It’s not an effective rebuttal to say that the author is unfair to your “side” of the argument and should offer evidence to support your position. But if the author clearly (but usually stealthily) “stacks the deck” by suppressing evidence, as Rob Herbert does in A Price Too High?, you should be able to call him on it easily.
What’s a GOOD Stacking the Deck Rebuttal?
You could say, for instance: Bob Herbert acts as if the only benefit we obtain from nuclear power is reduced greenhouse gas emissions. If that were the case, the price might truly be too high. But he neglects to mention nuclear power replaces unsustainable fossil fuels; makes us less dependent on foreign oil imports; eliminates the mercury, sulfur, and countless other emissions from burning coal, and improves our national security by making us less beholden to Middle East dictators.
What’s ANOTHER GOOD Stacking the Deck Rebuttal?
You could also say, for instance: Bob Herbert acts as if fossil-fuel power is without risks, costs, and dangers. power is reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Nobody has ever died from exposure to spent fuel rods, but millions have died, and continue to die, from respiratory ailments, cancers, and the floods and famines that are the direct or indirect result of our dependence on fossil fuels to provide our energy.
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EITHER DANGEROUS NUCLEAR OR NO NUCLEAR
In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said again this week that the 40-year-old Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County, 35 miles north of New York City, should be closed. Try to imagine the difficulty, in the event of an emergency, of evacuating such an area with its millions of residents. “This plant in this proximity to New York City was never a good risk,” said the governor.
There are, blessedly, very few catastrophic accidents at nuclear power plants. And there have not been many deaths associated with them. The rarity of such accidents provides a comfort zone. We can look at the low probabilities and declare, “It can’t happen here.”
But what if it did happen here? What would the consequences be? If Indian Point blew, how wide an area and how many people would be affected, and what would the cleanup costs be? Rigorously answering such questions is the only way to determine whether the potential risk to life and property is worthwhile.
The 104 commercial nuclear plants in the U.S. are getting old, and many have had serious problems over the years. There have been dozens of instances since 1979, the year of the Three Mile Island accident, in which nuclear reactors have had to be shut down for more than a year for safety reasons.
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NUCLEAR PLANTS ARE TOO EXPENSIVE
Building new plants, which the Obama administration favors, can be breathtakingly expensive and requires government loan guarantees. Banks are not lining up to lend money on their own for construction of the newest generation of Indian Points.
In addition to the inherent risks with regard to safety and security, the nuclear industry has long been notorious for sky-high construction costs, feverish cost-overruns and projects that eventually are abandoned. The Union of Concerned Scientists, in a 2009 analysis of the costs associated with nuclear plant construction, said that once a plant came online it usually led to significant rate increases for customers:
“Ratepayers bore well over $200 billion (in today’s dollars) in cost overruns for completed nuclear plants. In the 1990s, legislators and regulators also allowed utilities to recover most ‘stranded costs’ — the difference between utilities’ remaining investments in nuclear plants and the market value of those plants — as states issued billions of dollars in bonds backed by ratepayer charges to pay for utilities’ above-market investments.”
The refrain here is familiar: “The total cost to ratepayers, taxpayers and shareholders stemming from cost overruns, canceled plants and stranded costs exceeded $300 billion in today’s dollars.”
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CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE / INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE
Evidence is neutral. A 50/50 split on any topic can be a good outcome, a bad outcome, a perfect balance, or a hideous compromise. Simply providing evidence that nuclear power plants are EXPENSIVE TO BUILD does not prove anything about the COST EFFECTIVENESS of nuclear power as a source of electricity.
What’s a BAD Inconclusive Argument Rebuttal?
It’s not an effective rebuttal to say that “The evidence provided doesn’t quite add up to a proof.” If the author offers substantial evidence that doesn’t actually support the argument though, as Bob Herbert does in A Price Too High?, you should be able to identify the logical fallacy at fault.
What’s a GOOD Inconclusive Argument Rebuttal?
As always, providing alternative explanations is the best rebuttal. Demonstrating how a correct interpretation of the evidence proves something other than the author’s argument is an effective rebuttal. In rebuttal of Bob Herbert’s four-paragraph description of cost overruns, for example, you could say: Herbert makes a good case for unanticipated costs of building nuclear power plants, but offers nothing to indicate that the higher costs are unsustainable. Is the electricity generated by nuclear plants more expensive per kilowatt-hour than coal-fired juice? If it is, he should have said so; probably would have said so. If in fact nuclear power is as affordable as traditional electricity, his fretting about cost overruns is a fruitless complaint without real substance.
What’s a SLAM DUNK Rebuttal for Inconclusive Evidence?:
Evidence to the Contrary!
Find and cite the evidence that EVEN THOUGH a nuclear plant’s construction costs radically exceeded expectations, the COST PER KILOWATT HOUR to consumers was LESS than what they were paying for electricity from a coal-fired plant!
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NUCLEAR POWER ISN’T UNAMBIGUOUSLY GOOD.
WHAT IS?
Nuclear power is hardly the pristine, economical, unambiguous answer to the nation’s energy needs and global warming concerns. It offers benefits and big-time shortcomings. Ultimately, the price may be much too high.
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Insufficient Evidence Rebuttal
WHAT ISN’T: It’s not an effective rebuttal to request more evidence from the author. If the author offers insufficient evidence, or no evidence at all, one good piece of evidence can easily refute it.
WHAT IS: Providing that good evidence is an effective rebuttal.
Irrelevant Evidence Rebuttal
WHAT ISN’T: It’s not an effective rebuttal to complain that you really don’t see what the evidence provided has to do with the argument. If the author offers irrelevant evidence, logic should tell you what the evidence does prove, or could prove.
WHAT IS: Pointing out that the evidence supports a different conclusion than the author’s is an effective rebuttal.
I find it hard to imagine anything more counterintuitive than the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe in Japan.
The only place in the world that has suffered nuclear attack is Japan. The only people on earth who have ever been fired on by nuclear weapons were Japanese. The country on earth that should be most terrified of nuclear power is Japan. The country on earth most vulnerable to earthquake is Japan. The most dangerous place to site a nuclear power plant is wherever earthquakes are likely. WTF are nuclear power plants doing in Japan?
The only species of life on the planet that would contemplate (let along follow through on) a plan so patently suicidal as to locate a nuclear reactor in the place most likely to be rocked by earthquake is homo sapiens. The translation for “homo sapiens”? Wise man, or knowing man.
I’m certainly not the only, nor the first, writer to object to the whole idea of nuclear power plants, but I’m proud to be among them. My argument against them is quite simple. 1) They can release as much radioactivity into the atmosphere as nuclear bombs. 2) We should avoid massive releases of radioactivity. 3) The chance of a meltdown is small but measurable. 4) The more plants we build, the more we increase the odds of a meltdown. 5) Eventually (and especially if we build them where earthquakes are likely) one will fail and melt down, and the containment building will be so compromised it can no longer contain anything. 6) As bad as they are, coal burning plants never release radioactivity.
Here’s how Greenpeace feels about it at the moment.
Buying Legitimacy: How A Group Of California Executives Built An Online College Empire
Huffington Post March 10, 2011
by Chris Kirkham
CLINTON, Iowa — Inside the red brick campus of Ashford University, perched on a bluff above the Mississippi River, the door marked “President’s Office” remains perpetually shut. Telephone calls to the university’s head are swiftly transferred to a corporate office some 2,000 miles away, in San Diego.
A new, 500-seat football stadium adorns the campus, and is featured prominently in Ashford’s promotional literature, though the university has no football team. Signs around campus proudly read “Founded 1918” and “90 Years Strong,” despite the fact that Ashford — one of the nation’s fastest-growing for-profit colleges — has existed for less than a decade.
The perplexing campus landscape here in Iowa amounts to an elaborate stage set for a lucrative, online education empire that uses these trappings to sell itself to students as a traditional college experience. That strategy was the brainchild of the corporation behind Ashford: Bridgepoint Education Inc., a publicly traded venture started by a group of former executives from the University of Phoenix, a name now synonymous with for-profit higher education and the controversial marketing practices that have brought the industry crosswise with federal regulators.
Six years ago, Bridgepoint purchased what was then called Franciscan University of the Prairies, a near-bankrupt, 300-student college that for decades had been run by a local order of Franciscan nuns. The school delivered a crucial commodity: legal accreditation. That enabled Ashford’s students to tap federal financial aid dollars, the source of nearly 85 percent of the university’s revenues — more than $600 million in the last academic year. Ashford now counts nearly 76,000 students, 99 percent of whom take classes online.
Link to the full story, including video tours of the campus less than 1% of the student body ever see in person.
Well, we certainly hope not, but in the spirit of counterintuitive thinking, we have to admit, it’s a strong possibility. Ever since airbags, drivers are less likely to feel they need seat belts and therefore more likely to drive without them, thereby making driving less safe, not more. So, is it possible that driving a car that’s more fuel-efficient and which emits less might cause drivers to log more miles, offsetting the green benefits, and then some?
A story in Mother Jones quotes a report from a group charmingly named Treehugger. Apparently, in Sweden,
purchases of fuel-efficient cars are on the rise, but so are emissions. Does this mean that Swedes are actually driving more (and thus creating more emissions) because their new green cars allow them to do so more cheaply?
This question is an example of the Jevons Paradox, which David Owen recently wrote about in the New Yorker: Make something more efficient, and people will use it more. “This effect is usually referred to as ‘rebound’—or, in cases where increased consumption more than cancels out any energy savings, as ‘backfire,'” he writes.
It is true that we tend to think technology can solve our problems and that, once science has produced a “fix,” it’s no longer our responsibility to rein in our behaviors. Can you think of other examples of the Jevons Paradox?
Driver Accused of Injuring Brazil Cyclists
By MYRNA DOMIT and J. DAVID GOODMAN
Published: March 2, 2011, New York Times
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — The monthly bicycle ride known as Critical Mass began in the southern city of Porto Alegre as such rides do in cities around the world: with activist cyclists riding through downtown streets, blocking traffic, ringing bells and shouting slogans about the environment and the superiority of bicycling for transportation over driving.
But the display of two-wheeled solidarity last Friday turned bloody after a motorist rammed his car through the group, injuring 30, half of them severely, the police said. A video that appeared to have been made by participants in the leaderless bicycle ride captured the moment when a black Volkswagen accelerated through the group of more than 100 cyclists as they pedaled down a tree-lined street in Porto Alegre, about 700 miles south of São Paulo.
The police tracked the man suspected of being the driver, Ricardo José Neis, 47, to a private psychiatric clinic that he checked himself into on Tuesday. On Wednesday he was placed under detention there on suspicion of deliberately driving into the riders.
The city’s police chief, Rodrigo Pohlmann Garcia, said he expected Mr. Neis to be moved to a prison in the next few days.
“We found him in a hospital last night, and doctors told me he was emotionally unstable and suicidal, so we are keeping him in a psychiatric institution for the time being,” Mr. Garcia said.
The police chief said that Mr. Neis admitted to having some contact with the riders: he told the police that cyclists were scratching his car while he waited for them to ride by.
Since the early 1990s, Critical Mass rides have taken place in hundreds of cities, generally on the last Friday evening of every month. They are meant to counter the vulnerability single riders normally experience by gathering a group of cyclists that is large enough to temporarily take over roads.
But the rides, which in most cases do not have formal leaders and are organized by word of mouth, can raise the anger of drivers and the local police. In one case, captured on video in 2007, a California driver flattened a bicycle that was blocking his path before accelerating through a crowd of cyclists. No injuries were reported in that episode.
In New York, the police and cyclists have clashed frequently over the rides since August 2004, when about 5,000 riders took to the streets during the Republican National Convention, and the police arrested hundreds for violating local parade rules and other traffic regulations.
Myrna Domit reported from São Paulo, and J. David Goodman from New York.
We Only THINK We Learn Better Using our “Preferred Learning Style”
This claim is far from proven, but on the other hand, there’s very little proof that we DO in fact learn better when using our “preferred learning style.” The myth, if that’s what it is, remains very popular because it feels so right. If we prefer to learn by listening, or by reading, or by doing, for example, then that preference is likely to be obvious in the results. But no. At least the first evidence indicates we might have to start learning things the hard way.
Bad Economy keeps couples together
It seems illogical, but a bad economy might keep couples from divorcing. Of course, the legal process of divorce can be expensive, what with all the legal fees, but it’s also very difficult to split assets if a couple can’t expect to put their house on the market and sell it. Couples used to stay together “for the kids.” Now they may be staying together for the house. What other connections might there be between the national economy and the marriage or divorce rates?
Defending the 33 Round Magazine
It’s hard to imagine, in the aftermath of the Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and six others, that anyone would write a defense of a Glock with a 33-round clip like the one Jared Loughner fired that horrible day. But Stephen Hunter must have had our class in mind when he decided to think out loud, and very counterintuitively, in the Sunday Washington Post.
Academically Adrift
There may be no better place to improve writing skills and make big advances in critical thinking and reasoning than an American college, but if Richard Arum, the author of Academically Adrift is right, that’s a sad state of affairs. “Commitment to these skills appears more a matter of principle than practice, as the subsequent chapters in this book document. The end result is that many students are only minimally improving their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing during their journeys through higher education,” says the author.
According to one study, one possible reason for a decline in academic rigor and, consequentially, in writing and reasoning skills, is that the principal evaluation of faculty performance comes from student evaluations at the end of the semester. Those evaluations, Arum says, tend to coincide with the expected grade that the student thinks he or she will receive from the instructor.
Wikileaks Proves US Actually Quite Competent
Well, at least according to Leslie Gelb. His column in The Daily Beast says, in part: “The Wikileakers dumped a vast pile of secrets to prove that the United States was selfish, stupid and wicked–but their revelations proved just the opposite. When you remove the gossip and obvious trivia that mesmerized the press, you clearly see what the Wikileakers never expected: A United States seriously and professionally trying to solve the most dangerous problems in a frighteningly complicated world, yet lacking the power to dictate solutions.”
A BROAD TOPIC
The whole topic of digital media influencing governments in the wide open newsmaking, news-influencing culture we live in is full of mystery and discontinuity. If any of it interests you, I’ll be happy to help you find a specific bit to focus on. Here’s one: Facebook Revolution
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 
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