Mix Tape Reflection

So I did made my mix tape for my mom because I remembered her telling me that I should make one for her some time ago. I've made mix cds before but I had never thought about organization before. They didn't have any common theme either. I would just throw a bunch of songs that I liked onto a cd so I could listen to them in my car. I knew my mom likes certain artists so I didn't follow the one-song-per-artist "criteria." So my criterion for song selection were that they had to be certain artists that she likes, and that they were oldies and ballads which are the type of songs that she likes to listen to. I tried to make the cd flow with more sentimental-like songs followed by more upbeat songs to give it a sort of rhythm so that the songs didn't all sound the same. I didn't do my liner notes for individual songs but for the whole cd because a lot my songs were pretty similar. I think they help to kind of get the listener in a certain mood to listen to the songs, which gives it more meaning. The assignment really demonstrated that creativity can come in any form. It allowed us to show our creativity in yet another form.

mix tapes

In discussion this week we talked about making mix tapes. The rules the class came up with were interesting but not all of them applied to my case. For instance, I didn’t want to use each artist just once because I decided to make the mix cd for my mom, who likes specific artists. She usually listens to the radio in her car so I'm sure she'll like it. Especially since she won't have to deal with advertisements in between songs. The assignment wasn't a hard one for me after I decided to make the cd for my mom because I know her taste pretty well. I'm still unsure of how to order the songs however.

Cut-up assignment

The cut-up assignment was fun but in the end, none of my sentences really made sense. I can see how new combinations of words can be made from Burrough’s method of cutting different texts and putting them together but I see no way for them to make much sense when just randomly putting texts together. Here are some of the “sentences” that were made by my random cut-ups. “That’s not anic bacteria to blue whales rtable analyzers U.S. Army’s forlkswagens. Biologists have out a half-dozen. Tion is any indiomily trees since the mid.” “One approacle story; careful anatomi-dyas of lab work existing portablucial means of comparing the field-the ing them into de fact.” As you can see, they really don’t make any sense. I guess if you use your imagination, you might be able to change some of the words for them to make more sense. In this sense, I can see how this kind of assignment may inspire some creativity. I don't see it being very useful for anything though.

Graders' Preferences

Wednesday's discussion about how different classes have different expectations and constraints on writing assignments got me thinking about whether I change my writing style to satisfy the professor or TA to get a better grade. I remember last year I took a Bacteriology lab course (304, some of you guys might have taken it too) and we had to turn in two reports over the course of the semester. I wanted to get a good grade and I must've referred to the grading rubric more than a dozen times to make the report exactly how the instructors wanted it. There were a few different instructors for the class and one of the instructors who was also the class coordinator answered everyone's questions about the report on learn at uw. I remember doing exactly as he told us to do and got some points docked off because I had a different instructor and he graded it a bit differently. That's one example of how depending on the grader, the same paper may receive different grades. I think biases/preferences are inevitable in the world we live in (not just with grades) so whether we like it or not, we'll have to conform to the standards or rules of the person with the power (in this case the grader) if we want a good grade. As a side note, I thought that it was nice to have a specific rubric for grading because that made it easier to know what the instructors were looking for in the report as opposed to a writing assignment with so few constraints that you're not even sure what the graders want.

Book vs Music

After reading rhythm science I felt like I didn't understand too much of what he said. He seemed to take a bunch of topics and sort of mix them together. I thought listening to the CD would make things clearer but it really didn't. Although the style of his music is not what you might hear everyday, I didn't feel that it was all that different from many other kinds of underground music I've heard and I didn't get much "meaning" out of it. In other words, I didn't think it was anything special. A review I found about the book on a BBC website said that "an oft-levelled criticism aimed at Spooky's output is that his rhetoric has too often outweighed the substance of his musical output"(http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/release/jx8c/). I agree with this criticism. His book, although difficult to understand, seemed to have more meaning and content than his music.

Sampling Project Reflection

I had never used photoshop before doing this assignment so I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to make it do what I wanted. So for my first assignment I tried to make a point that laws against copyright infringement are unreasonable by showing two people selling lemonade for 5 cents a cup and one person accusing the other that he should pay a fine of $100,000 for copyright infringement. I wasn't able to find lemonade stands for the second assignment so I decided to attempt to draw them. Looking at everyone's collages in class, I realized that I didn't really "show" people my point, but rather made one of the characters say my point. Overall, I think I sort of missed the point of the assignment, so I decided to redo my assignment. This time I got some help from the college library staff so that I could edit the pictures better. Here they are:

In both, I tried to make a point that corporations are benefiting at the expense of artists and their creativity by fining them if they break any copyright laws. As you can see, in the first image the artist is being crushed by the copyright sign and the businessman is using the sign to reach the money on the tree. The second image is demonstrating the same point with a small difference: the artist is using a pulley to push the official up to reach the money. I personally thought the first one was easier to do because I could use any image on the web. It was a little harder to find the images for the second image but wasn't too bad thanks to the creative commons website. Overall, I think I did a better job for my second set of collages than my first. Between the two collages of the second set, I liked my first collage better because I had more images to choose from but they are very similar and make the point just as effectively in my opinion so in my case the restrictions didn't really stifle any creativity. However, I can see how in other cases, that could be the case because the images that someone wants may not be on the creative commons website because they have a much more limited number of images.

This experience changed my view on authorship and copyright somewhat because before I wasn't really aware of how many legal barriers artists had. I think as long as artists have the patience to go through all the legal barriers, it wouldn't have a negative impact on creativity, but looking at the population as a whole, I think it will have a negative impact because I doubt many people will be willing to go through the extra work of getting permissions for every image they want to use.

Remix of Bridgette's Collage

We're felons?

The fact that half of Americans can be defined as felons tells us that the law undoubtedly needs to be changed. I agree with what was brought up in class that because many aspects of the law are unreasonable, people often break it and this can somewhat "desensitize" people to the fact that they are breaking the law and make them feel that it is not a big deal. This reminded me of some history lessons involving Japanese rule over Korea before WWII. (I often heard stories about this topic as I'd lived in Korea for 5 years) I remember hearing people saying that when the Japanese controlled Korea, any Korean that broke the law were treated like heroes since it was an act of standing up to the Japanese government. Many believe that this attitude towards the law that had been created during this time carried over to current times and explains some of the generally careless attitude of the citizens towards the law (more than half a century since Japanese rule ended). One example that comes to mind is when I once took a taxi late at night in Korea the taxi driver ran several red lights when he noticed there were no cars in sight. In Madison I noticed that at midnight the lights all turn into blinking red or yellow lights. Anyway, my point being that laws should be reasonable for people to take them seriously.

Laws against Sampling not good for creativity

This week we watched a film about sampling. I never really thought how someone making a remix from someone else’s song can get into so much trouble. I always assumed that no one would care. After watching the film, I learned that under current laws and regulations, you can’t even pay royalties to sample other people’s work, and even if you had all the money in the world it would take a long time to get through the regulations. I think there’s definitely something wrong there and it sends out a red light in terms of creativity in the music industry. In my opinion, I think sampling should be allowed without permission if it is not for commercial purposes and if it is for commercial purposes paying royalties should be enough as long as it doesn’t somehow hurt the original artist’s profits.

Reflection on Plagiarism assignment

I feel like this assignment was easier than the ghostwriting assignment. My paper was an informative paper on the destruction Cane Toads have caused on the natural habitats of Australia. I learned about the threats of non-native species in a class I took a couple semesters ago. The paper was basically a summary of my lecture notes which came from my textbook and paraphrasing sources that I found on the web. I feel like the topic I chose made it relatively easy to plagiarize because being an informative paper, I didn’t need to include any of my own opinions so all I had to worry about was including relevant information in the paper. Paraphrasing the information that I found was the most difficult because I had to have a good enough understanding of what the source was saying to write it in my own words.

This assignment made me realize that it is actually easier to plagiarize and get away with it than I had previously thought. It seems that as long as you don’t use word-for-word quotes, it is difficult to find out that you plagiarized, at least through google. Originally, I had tried to copy and paste from my sources but I knew I would be caught within 5 minutes so I decided to paraphrase a lot. As a result, my classmates found it fairly hard to find what I did and didn’t plagiarize.

Reflection on Ghostwriting Assignment

I had a fairly hard time doing this assignment because I did my paper on the Miller's Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, which is written in Old English. Therefore, I had to rely on my friend's explanations of it and summaries that I could find on the internet. The friend who I did my assignment on is a Legal studies major and this was a paper in English 367, a more advanced class than any English class I have taken, and I noticed a lot of the vocabulary he uses in his papers are ones that I barely know the meaning of. It definitely made me realize that people's styles in writing are fairly easy to notice. It seems like a lot of others attempted to ghostwrite by first writing in their own style, and then trying to change it to make it sound like the other person's work. I did this as well, but found it very difficult to do this because it just didn't seem to sound right to me if I changed it. I think this is because I like my style of writing and how it flows. I think my papers usually flow fairly well even if I don't use difficult vocabulary like my friend and in my opinion, flow is more important. This resulted in a pretty bad job of ghostwriting for my friend and I don't think he would want to use it for his paper. Nevertheless, I feel like I have learned a lot from this assignment and I think I can appreciate the work Ghostwriters do now because this assignment made me realize how hard writing in someone else's voice can actually be and it also made me appreciate my own writing style more.

Plagiarism : When should students be punished?

Reading Howard’s essay on plagiarism and our school’s definition of plagiarism showed just how vague the definition of plagiarism actually is. In her essay, Howard shows how different people have different definitions on plagiarism, some requiring intent as an important prerequisite for it to be called plagiarism and some not. High school teacher Hildegarde Bender identifies five types of plagiarism and yet says that they should all be given F’s. This definitely doesn’t seem fair because this means that someone that intentionally plagiarizes is treated the same as someone who accidently left out a citation. Therefore I think intent should be considered when determining if a student should be punished for plagiarism. If the student left out a citation by accident or because he or she didn’t know the rules, he/she should be informed and educated about the rules rather than punished. What is the point of going to school when we aren’t educated about our mistakes? Punishing the student by giving him a failing grade would be unfair in this case, to say the least. It would be very careless to do so because rather than taking the time and effort to properly educate the student, the instructor or school has instead chosen to punish him.

The Hypocrisy of Ghostwriting

On Wednesday we talked about how ghostwriting is not considered as fraud or plagiarism. I have to say that I wasn’t fully aware of the extent ghostwriting takes place before the discussion in class. It surprises me how many celebrities can have a book ghostwritten and barely acknowledge the ghostwriters and get away with it without any consequences. In fact, it makes no sense to me at all because if a student plagiarizes on a paper, he or she would probably get a zero or maybe even expelled. This is definitely hypocrisy because we are taught that plagiarism is unacceptable, but we see celebrities facing no negative consequences for having ghostwriters.

Invasion of privacy or safety?

On Wednesday we talked about some pros and cons of the advancement of technology. With technological advancements, it has become increasingly easier to keep in touch with friends or relatives. It was brought up in discussion that if social networking services like facebook or myspace didn’t exist, we would probably lose contact with many friends.

Although today’s technology has many benefits like these, I thought it would be worth mentioning a recent article I read which describes the FBI’s plans to create a computer database of people’s physical characteristics including fingerprints and iris scans. The FBI say that if they do this, it will allow them to better identify criminals and terrorists. According to Bush, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, countries that are already using images of palm prints they have collected find 20 percent of their positive matches from prints left at crime scenes.

However, this could be a major privacy invasion because it may allow the government to track people anywhere. Also, according to Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Project, there will likely be thousands of cases in which people travelling by airplane will be mistakenly identified as possible terrorists and be thoroughly searched, resulting in unnecessary delays. In addition, the FBI is also planning a service in which an employer can ask the FBI to keep an employee’s fingerprints and let them know if the employee ever breaks the law. I feel that it should be carefully considered whether or not the benefits(safety) outweigh the costs(privacy).

Here's a link to the original article for those of you that are interested:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/04/fbi.biometrics/index.html?iref=newssearch

What really is originality?

The topic of originality was brought up in our discussion, and that led me to think about what originality really is. I agree with a point that was brought up in class that people’s thoughts and writing is greatly influenced by others so I think that in a way, nothing can be truly original. Human civilization and the invention of writing has allowed us to collect our knowledge and technology and pass them on from generation to generation, culminating into the amazing world that we know today, full of unimaginable technology like television, computers, and automobiles to name just a few. So why should writing be any different? We are taught how to write based on styles that have been passed on and in some sense we are taught how to think as well. Of course, that doesn’t mean that nothing can be original, just that we are given a platform to work on, so we should acknowledge that even a piece of work that is considered original has likely been influenced by other things. That being said, I think that for example, a novel (or any other form of writing) can be thought of as original as long as it shows some creative thought.

That brings up another question. What constitutes plagiarism then? Sometimes it is clear that one plagiarized the work of another. In other cases, it doesn’t seem to be as clear. What if you read someone else’s work a while ago and later write a paper that expresses some of the ideas presented in that person’s work without realizing that you had obtained those “ideas” from that person? What if you were influenced by that writer and your paper did contain some similar ideas but expressed your own ideas as well?

About Me

Hi my name is John and I'm a senior here at UW-madison. I'm a genetics major and plan on attending med school after I graduate and I'm taking this class for my english requirement. I have to say that this class seems a bit different from other english classes and it's my first time creating a blog so hopefully it'll be a fun and worthwhile experience. Well, I'll see everyone in class tomorrow. I should get back in the habit of sleeping a bit earlier because it's almost 4 in the morning.