so this might not have a lot to do with linguistics, but it is a really entertaining and inspiring article. and radical clowning did come up briefly in class last week. enjoy...

Superman Saves Bogota
How A Big City Mayor Made A Mockery of Crime
by William Thomas 05-12-05

Here's a program that should be useful in completing your projects.

FreeMind

Here's a sample:

Let me know what you think of it. I'll also keep looking for more tools.

I'm having trouble with setting up a concept map for my project. I understand the overall concept of a concept map, but the specifics... are escaping me at the moment. Were there any suggestions or specific tips anyone can give me?

Class will be starting at 6:00 pm today due to the Academic Fair.

I thought this article was an interesting contrast in language style to the stuff we usually read.

Vice Magazine: Toxicities

 

Speech Codes, the AHA, and Academic Double Standards

Though often well-intended, speech codes have proved to be detrimental to the academic freedom that is the hallmark of liberal education. So why are codes still so prominent in higher education?

It seems like only yesterday that American institutions of higher education began imposing “speech codes” and related policies on students, faculty, and staff. But twenty years have now passed since the speech code movement erupted in the late 1980s. So it is a good time to assess the status of this movement and its implications for higher education.

note: I know this should be obvious but I do not necessarily endorse anything I post as super-awesome or even "good."

Racial discourse, hate speech, and political correctness

When men open doors for women, they often say with a smile, "I know this is not politically correct but...." The request by groups that the literary canon be expanded to include the works of people of color and women has been denominated an example of political correctness. Efforts to diversify faculty also meet the political correctness charge, and concerns about pornography, hate speech, and sexual harassment are tarred by the same politically correct brush. The now broad usage of the phrase makes succinct characterization problematic, but in general the most serious charge of political correctness is an accusation that one espouses a cramped, narrow orthodoxy, or worse, censorship of free expression. At the extremes, critics of "political correctness" include charges of authoritarianism.

so i was thinking about what i had said in class last week about how freedom doesn't mean anything to me and the whole concept had been bastardized by bush and his overuse/misuse of the word so i decided to do some googling to try to figure out exactly what they did mean by freedom and i came across this which i thought might be interesting to some folks as its a linguistic analysis of bush's second inaugural speech. let me know what you think, do you agree with her? also, a quote from goethe: "None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free."

I really enjoyed the articles and the class discussion on the subjet of social framing. I found through the discussions that Framing is both negative and positive. I was in the Prison discussion group and I was amazed at the amount of froaming that was brought from the global to the near personal level, for me. I had no idea the range and how complex the thinking has to be to accomplish the end goal of the framing projects that are taken on in politics. This was very eye opening for me.

Big Brother is reading youI am reposting my graphic because it disappeared once. I get the feeling that the government or the government's representative here on earth is watching and will not allow non-conformity.

 

George Orwell (1903-1950) is one of the memorable writers of the 20th century and may have contributed more vivid images into the language than Dickens did per square word written. Big Brother will never die although allusions to him in modern discussions about our blossoming surveillance society turn the issue towards frivolity. Orwell’s 1984 is often called ‘prophetic’ although it is little more than a good story about his view of a totalitarian society. Orwell was no prophet and he never pretended to be one. 1984 is just 1948 backwards. He had to name it something and he was writing it in 1948. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was far more insightful into the future than 1984. He wrote about a total state that controlled the population with sex and drugs, but he didn’t know about rock and roll. In his Brave New World Revisited, Huxley wrote in 1958 about the ‘prophetic’ nature of his 1932 novel Brave New World and made predictions about what will come using the future tense in a very specific manner. Huxley’s view of a developing world of distraction and eugenics was far closer to today’s ‘shut up and shop’ society than Orwell’s militaristic future.