TOW #14: Media-GoldieBlox

In this advertisement for GoldiBlox, three girls sit bored in front of a TV showing a princess show. Instead of watching TV, they put on their goggles and hats decide to make a Rube Goldberg machine out of household items and toys. A lot of the parts of the Rube Golberg include "girl" toys, like teapots or pink boas. The Rube Goldberg follows a trail out of the house, onto the front lawn, and then back into the living room to turn off the show on the TV and instead show the GoldieBlox product. The whole time in the background, there is a song about not underestimating girls.
The advertisement draws mostly on an appeal to pathos. All three child actors are adorable, and the Rube Golberg is really fun and fascinating to watch. Also, the whole idea that the product will get more girls interested in the STEM fields is a very good angle to pitch, since there is still a gender gap in those fields. Parents will be more inclined to buy the product because they believe that GoldieBlox will make their daughter more interested in such areas.
This ad is certainly effective in addressing its target audience, parents with daughters and making parents think they are "empowering" their children. However, I also noticed that the product itself has very little to do with the Rube Goldberg. Even after the ad, I was not sure what was inside the GoldieBlox box, and this can come off as a little misleading. Furthermore, when inspected closer the product itself seems to be little more than  some pink gizmos, not at all the same quality as Legos, or other similar toys that girls can enjoy just as much as boys. The song itself, chanting about female empowerment, just seems like a marketing ploy.
Although GoldieBlox plays up an effective angle, upon closer inspection the advertisement just seems more about the glamour than the actual product.

TOW #13: "Raising Minimum Wage is a Bad Way to Help People" by Clive Crook

Author Clive Crook is arguing that Obama's push to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 an hour is well-intentioned but unnecessary. Although the government has said that there is no "solid evidence" this change would cost jobs, Crook argues that it has no way of telling if it would either. Although the author acknowledges that by certain standards raising the wage to $9 isn't a big jump, and $7.25 is low even by international standards, he still believes that the best way to help those in poverty working minimum-wage jobs would be to lower tax rates for those people. This would keep costs for employers low and encourage them to hire more people.
The main device that Crook uses in his argument against minimum wage is a structure that allows for counterargument. Crook methodically takes each point the opposing side has to say and then rebuts it by pointing out logical flaws in the argument. For example, he says that many liberals and even some conservatives see all minimum wage earners as people under the poverty line, but this image is untrue. A majority of minimum-wage earners are actually students or come from households with additional income. Crook also uses rhetorical questions like, "what if you think employers are shrewdly paying unskilled workers less than their labor is worth? " to try to incorporate the perspective of his opponents before answering their questions as well.
The audience for this article would be people interested in economics, since it came from Bloomberg. The article achieved its purpose because it was convincing and also rebutted arguments from the other side. Clive Crook a senior editor of The Atlantic and graduated from the London School of Economics.

TOW #12: Hiroshima by John Hersey

Hiroshima follows the lives of six people who survive the desolation of the atomic bomb on their city. The story is divided into four parts, starting with the bomb being dropped. The first section sets the scene by describing the lives of each of the six people, alternating perspectives every few pages. The first character introduced is Reverand Mr.Kiyoshi Tanimoto, followed by Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamaru, Dr. Matasakazu Fujii, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, and Toshiko Sasaki. These people are very different, all with different personalities and professions. The one thing that binds them is that all of them were in the city of Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. This section ends with each of them feeling the impact of the bomb.
Although I have not finished the story, it seems clear that the author's purpose in writing Hiroshima was to inform the American public about the effects of the decision to drop the atomic bomb. This book, published in 1946 a year after the event occurred, sought to put faces on those who suffered at Hiroshima. One rhetorical device used by Hersey is his distinct writing style, combining a journalistic professionalism with a narrative-like story-line. Hersey narrates the lives of each of the six survivors from an outside perspective, impartially but with detailed descriptions as well. Writes Hersey, "Mr. Tanimoto was a small man, quick to talk, laugh, and cry. He wore his black hair parted in the middle and rather long...he moved nervously and fast, but with a restraint which suggested that he was a cautious, thoughtful man" (5). This may be reflective of his desire to turn his writing into a news story, since it was originally published in The New Yorker, without losing a human appeal. Hersey also employs multiple perspectives from each of the characters. By doing so, he widens the scope of his story and makes it more comprehensive and detailed as to all the events that were occurring at the same time. Hersey achieves his purpose by factually detailing the events that occurred and leaving out his own emotions in favor of the much more powerful emotions of his six characters.
John Hersey was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist who wrote for Time Magazine and The New Yorker.

TOW #11:"There Is No Left Brain/Right Brain Divide" by Stephen Kosslyn and Wayne Miller

The commonly accepted idea that our brains are divide neatly into two sections, the left "logical and analytical" side and the right "intuitive and creative side" is actually a myth, according to Kosslyn and Miller. The truth is that the differences between left and right sides of the brain is actually very subtle, and the two sides mostly work together to process information. This article also addresses the root of the myth, an experiment done by the California Institute of Technology. The results of the experiment were skewed out of proportion by subsequent news sources, leading a majority of the public to believe in the idea of two very separate and different sections of the brain. Ultimately, although this theory is not true, the authors admit that exactly how the left and right side of the brain function separately and with each other is still vastly unknown. They do, however, hypothesis that a model of a "top-or-bottom" brain is better than the original.
The article mostly attempts to dispel the original theory through an appeal to logos, but the effort falls short. It describes the original experiment done by Caltech, but does not analyze it further or point out its flaws. It merely quotes one of the experimenters, Roger W. Sperry, cautioning the extrapolation of the data. Thus the reader is unsure why the left-right brain theory is baseless.
The new theory that the authors offer is also vague. Readers are told a "top or bottom" model would be better, but the article does not go into much detail about the differences between the top and bottom of the brain and how these differences influence behavior. It claims that "The characterizations of what each part does are based on years of solid research." But the article fails to show this research.
The audience of this article is probably the American public, given that this is Time magazine. But I feel the author's attempted too hard to put this concept into Layman's terms, which ended up cutting out a lot of crucial information regarding the two theories. Because of this, their argument that the current "Right vs. Left" theory should be changed into a "Top vs. Bottom" theory becomes muddled.
Kosslyn is a neuroscientist and former Harvard Professor of Psychology. Miller is a filmmaker and Providence Journal staff writer.