• We've finished grading the final papers and your grades have all been tallied up and submitted. You can pick up your final papers at the front desk in 909 Social Sciences. On them, I've written your grade for your final draft as well as your final grade for the course. They will be available in 909 through the first few weeks of the new year.


• If you need to reach me for any reason, I will be out of town all next week but I'll be available again after January 2. Email's best.


• Again, I really enjoyed this semester. You were a great group and I really appreciated the careful thought and hard work you put into this class.

Your final paper is due at noon on Tuesday, the 19th, in 909 Social Sciences.

Just hand it in to the front desk and tell them it's for this class.

• Writing Style: In the assignment guidelines, I've used pretty formal, ``scientific" language to describe the assignment. I did this to get you in the right frame of mind: virtually all of our assignments in this class have required that you actively seek out information about the world: in our class survey, in your media journals, in your blog entries, etc. So your assignments this semester have not just been busy work making you regurgitate facts and figures---they constitute data about the world that you yourself gathered. Now, this does not mean that I expect you to, say, stick to third person writing in your paper. I'm totally okay with the whole paper being written from a first person narrative perspective. What's important is that you approach the material in the right way: the goal is not to simply write an op-ed style rant about some political issue, but to find real puzzling questions about how the world works and then try to answer those questions by drawing on empirical evidence. You can do this from a first-person perspective: in fact, look to two of our books this semester (Wolfe & Pinker...probably others as well) for examples of this.


• The ``Data and Research Question" section: This confusion about writing style seems to be the worst with respect to the ``Data & Research Question" part of your papers. For this section, I like the way I worded it on the peer review sheet from today's class: ``Does the `Data and Research Question' section provide a detailed description---with specific examples---of what the author found this semester and how this lead them to a research question for this paper?' Remember, treat your work from this semester as data about the world and your research question as a question that this data inspired you to ask. Now pretend your friend asked you, ``Why on earth is this question worth asking? What did you find this semester that lead you to this question?" That's what you need to answer. Again, a first-person narrative is just fine! And don't be afraid to give a broad answer. If your topic is media bias, for example, your justification for why this matters can incorporate the discussions & readings we've had about the relationship between the media and democracy, theories about why the media represents the world the way it does, etc.


• On Choosing Sides: You may feel more confused at the end of this project than you did going in. Remember when I said this paper wasn't like an op-ed piece? Well, here's one big reason why: you don't have to come down firmly on one side of any issue. You may not have an answer to your question. This is fine! The key is to explain why you feel this way in light of the evidence & arguments you've encountered. Similarly, if you do come to some firm conclusion, you need to justify that conclusion!


• I put up more notes from class today under the Students Only link.

In particular, I want to point out a few people who did really great work on parts of the assignment that were difficult for others. For example:

• Context: This was hard for people. A few of you just didn't do it, and many of you focused too much on a "names and dates" history of the organization, instead of focusing on the sorts of things sociologists think of as "context" (organizational structure, institutional culture, economic & politic environment, etc.). Of course, many of you did a good job on this as well! In particular, Brian and Steve did an excellent job, so check their papers out.


• Chronicle: The goal of this section was to provide a rich, detailed description of what you read/watched/listened to. (In hindsight, perhaps I should've simply called it "Description"...) The best media journals are those that actually leave you with the feeling that you'd done the observing yourself: pointing out the tiny details as well as describing the big picture. For a few good examples see: Katusa, Sam, Vi, Bobbie-Jean.

I thought about the culture topic we had in class and I think that Microsoft could be right. I mean these people don’t have Internet or have ever used a computer. It just is not apart of their culture. One major question would be is, do these people want a computer? Or would they rather have something more productive like farm equipment or something that will actually help out these third world countries. I don’t think these business types are thinking this project through. I don’t really see this as a good idea. It is almost forcing our way of learning and our culture onto another. We know this does not work. Bill Gates describes it as, “just taking what we do in the rich world and assuming that that is something good for the developing world, too.�

Thinking back to class and the chart on multiculturalism, I don’t think that the US is all that multicultural at least in a single cohesive sense. I see it as a bunch of cultures that tolerate each other and accept a given set of societal norms or people would not want to come here. I see the U.S. as a religion refugee camp. Here people don’t go out and kill each other because they are one religion or the other. On the other hand the Iraq situation is just the opposite. Either you believe one or the other and you are considered the enemy or lesser people and if you are an extremist within your religion then you would kill the “non-believers�. One question I thought of when writing this is, How does one of the youngest nations in the world become a world expert on how an “ideal country� is run?

I am in favor of globalization because I believe it helps extinguish primordial conceptions of third world countries. Of course I subscribe to the definition of Globalization as the development of a country to make possible international influences or operations. I believe that a country has every advantage to be an open-market with the financial backing of America or NPO's or MNO's. Third-world countries have a chance to prosper for themselves if they are conditionally better at making a quality good that the world needs and wants. Technology is the future of this world and the recent globalization phenomenon is helping to develop very rural cities in the Far East and African nation's so they can enhance their way of life and develop into a contributing force on the international front.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6192144.stm

I feel that banning these "conspicuous" religious symbols is ridiculous because I don't feel that people wearing a veil, yamaka or crucifix identify themselves as superior to others because of this religious symbol. They wear them because they are proud of their faith and they believe in their faith. A nation-state such as France will always be France because of its history and it has always been the same way. I do not feel they need to be worried that the nation will converted to a Muslim or Jewish state but rather they should be worried about the consequences of this ban and the uproar it will cause if people are banned of wearing something that is often times required of their faith. However, I realize that the French have a right to do whatever they like with their laws I just worry that the abolishment of such articles will further intensify distinctions between religious groups and will only foster more racist tensions.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3311485.stm

Although, American's turned out in droves (if you consider a little over half of the eligible voters a "drove") to vote for their respective candidate with the hopes that their vote would make a difference, it would appear that American's are more interested in pop-culture and television than they are politics and the future of their nation. I find it alarming that people are more interested in a glorified karaoke singer than they are the leader of the free world. It is alarming to me and it should be to others that our society is so heavily complacent on celebrities and reality television when there are so many pressing issues the U.S. and its people face today. If you voted for Taylor Hicks or the runner-up in "American Idol" but you did not show up for the Presidential election in 2004 you should not be able to critique the government or the war in Iraq and how you wish things were different. I hope that people realize that when celebrities are more commonly known and are interested in more so than the President they will realize that something is wrong and become actively involved in changing this backwards cycle.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/05/american_idol_thoughts.html

This article is more interesting for how things are said by the author; not as importantly as what is said. Mexico has come under scrutiny from the US government lately for corruption in their government, which has led to rampant drug trafficking and illegal immigration to the United States. Basically we’re saying that our problems are their fault. The fact that there is fighting over an election is making news because of conduct of the members of the political parties. The first interesting point is that the article mentions that the Mexican government has come under scrutiny. The article doesn’t mention that it’s scrutiny by the US. The question there is how much legitimacy does a US criticism of any other country constitute a government being under scrutiny? If Panama has issues with the US government does that mean that the US government is under scrutiny? There is no good reason to have mentioned that in this article. The second point is that other countries have lawmakers fighting all the time. There are Asian countries where this is a fairly common practice. That doesn’t make it in the news every day. I just thought it was an interesting criticism of another country where, in some cases, we don’t have the right to talk.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/americas/11/29/mexico.government.ap/index.html

Whether or not these allegations of murder are true, the fact remains that someone, perhaps not the government is doing these acts. Leaders of other countries, including Britain and parts of Europe have voiced their concerns over what's happening in that country. A friend of Litvinenko's put it this way, "Those rogue people are, in my opinion, a direct responsibility of Mr Putin. They are the result of the ideology of falsely understood nationalism which is now being injected into the Russian people." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6184804.stm)

(Latest on Ex-spy death and contamination)

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,233218,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6159927.stm

(Russia's Secret police)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6169414.stm