ISRP March 10 - Logical Fallacies In Advertising (and More Morality)

Today we talked about fallacies in advertising. You used fallacies to come up with ads for some pretty terrible products. Your homework is to look at 3 ads and fill in THIS SHEET.

Here is an example:

Advertisement for ______Guinness_________________

Summary of ad:

Guys in wheelchairs playing basketball. It looks hard. I felt bad for them. After the game, all but one get out of wheelchairs, then they go to a pub. We realize the others were in wheelchairs just to be good friends. The narrator says that the choices you make determine the kind of person you are.

Logical Fallacies in Ad:

Appeal to emotion - that these guys are being good friends doesn't make Guinness a desirable product.

Did the fallacies help sell the product, or did they make the ad worse?

Honestly, yes - I am a sucker for appeal to emotion. It made me associate the product with a good feeling.

(End of example)

Also, we listened to a follow-up episode of Radiolab:

Comments

Marvin Minsky, AI, Math Education

The audio is too good to make this a gif. So, to be clear, this is the blog post for THURSDAY, 1/28. If you are looking for Tuesday's post, go back a post. I wanted to mention to you all that a mathematician and artificial intelligence researched named Marvin Minsky died on Sunday. Among lots of amazing things he did in his life, he wrote about math education for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. Here is that article ; I'd like you to read it for homework. Speaking of death, check out this amazing visualization ! Finally, for classwork, I would like you to go back to Tuesday's blog post, and comment on other people's homework. Specifically do you like the charts they chose? Are they interesting? Any feedback? Homework IMPORTANT: Pick which 5 (or more) variables that you will track for the Feltron project. Think about how you will keep track of them - pen and and notebook? The Reporter App? A pedometer? Also, that Marvin Minsky article is really...

Bio Homework 3/15

Read this follow up to the movie we watched in class: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/silence-of-the-bees/how-can-you-help-the-bees/36/ and write a 1 paragraph response to the movie and the reading. And remember... study study study! There's a quiz on Wednesday.

ISRP March 17th, Transformation

Theme: Transformation First, I returned work. Checked in with people who have missing assignments. I should probably grade late ones, but haven’t. Second, share any good ads. Collect homework; if you don’t have it go to Liz. To wrap up with morals, mention that some of them, from the homework, seem amoral. To make it clear that morals are about right and wrong, ask questions like: Do animals have rights? Do all humans have rights? Is euthanasia acceptable? Is lying ever acceptable? If someone else can obviously make more out of their life than I, is it moral to sacrifice myself for them if needed? Then we introduced the idea of transformation with these stories: Samsa and Seuss from This American Life: (14 min) Goo and You - Radiolab - What happens to butterflies? (17 min) Homework: Write a short, short story involving transformation. Ideally, it would have a theme, or moral. Actually, ideally it would be really good and fu...

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