For my research, I chose to track the recent historical changes in demographics regarding  women and minorities. I started in 2010 and used charts, tables, and reports from the US Census, US Dept of Veterans Affairs, and the US Archives in order to see what demographics will look like over the next couple of decades. My findings were extremely interesting in that they project an exponential growth of minorities and women. I used a WordPress.com site in order to convey my results. It can be found at: http://futureofvetsinpolitics.wordpress.com/

I created a historical map of the place that I grew up and went to high school. Fullerton Union High School was established in 1893 and was one of the first high schools in southern California. It has always been a working class neighborhood but as produced many famous people including Leo Fender (inventor of the electric guitar), Richard Nixon, and Baseball Hall of Fame inductees.

Fullerton Union High School

Fun With Google Charts

I spent some time getting familiar with the Google Drive products. I have used Google Drive quite a bit in work settings due to the fact that it is much easier to create a document or spreadsheet and add people to the ownership/editing list. This is much easier that creating a word document having to email multiple times or continually re-add it to the sharedrive. I also spent some time on Google Maps (which is pretty fun by the way). I have also registered with Zotero. My name is alexanderpickett and I used my apicket2@gmu.edu address as the registered email.

When checking out the ethics behind the site, I was at first torn. I thought “teachers should be coming up with a lesson plan based on the needs of their children.” It seems to me that a one size fits all approach to teaching is just lazy. But then the economics student in me decided that this is actually a pretty brilliant idea. Teachers can find a lesson plan that they like and tweak it so that it fits their own class.

Another question that comes up is “why wouldn’t teachers just put up crap in order to make money.” Well, since this seems like a fairly free market system, if someone was putting up an inferior product, people would not buy from them and thus they would be excluded from the herd.

All in all I think that this is a great idea. I also do not see it very different from teachers who sell textbooks. Are they not selling their ideas? If a teacher is talented, why shouldn’t they make a little extra money by selling their good ideas. In the end, the bad ones would fail to be bought, and the good ones would benefit the students, which is the most important thing.

1. Look up whois.net

Domain Name: www.mapsofwar.com

Creation Date: 10-sep-2006

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC

Registrant:
Domains By Proxy, LLC
DomainsByProxy.com
14747 N Northsight Blvd Suite 111, PMB 309
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States

#2 Wikipedia Article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

Summary: Project MKUltra was a CIA covert operation that sought to understand LSD by giving it to unknown victims. Allegedly this included a San Francisco brothel and an unsuspecting village in southern France.

I picked this even because it is surrounded in conspiracy theories and I wanted to see if any of the sources were credible. What I found was that the sources are from a mixture personal statements, fringe news/blog sites, and credible declassified documents. I would say that you could use some of these sources because they are genuine government cables, but there are definitely some opinion pieces in there.

As far Jane Browning goes, sure her topic is a litter crazy, but it is a history thesis, not physics. She is seeking to see if a myth is actually true. Is this any crazier than those that seek Arthur at Camulodunum? It would be one thing if she was a physics major and was trying to prove time travel with historical sources. She goes to the library and finds sources that at least point her in the right direction. She is doing original research and that is pretty rare for an undergrad. She searches books, archives, and police reports. I would say that they are all credible. After all, it isn’t that crazy of a topic since pirates are still very real in other parts of the world.

For my question, and something that I have been interested in for a long time, I was wanted to know whether the internet has been a catalyst for political change, or whether it is more likely to be used to oppress.

In order to learn a little bit on this topic I used ProQuest to initiate a search. While looking for a newspaper article I wanted to choose something pre-Arab Spring in order to see if the internet had played a positive or negative role in revolutions of the 1990’s.

I found an article from 1999 published by the New York Times. Its tile is “The Internet Changes Dictatorship’s Rules: Rewriting Rules For Dictatorship” by Barbara Crossette. The article describes how the ruling Chinese leaders are in a panic over a subtle movement of Chinese expats who are starting a movement that almost seems comical compared to what the PRK leaders have had to deal with in the last couple of years. This movement is a peaceful internet community of people who believe that Buddhist style breathing can bring on supernatural powers.

It is important to understand that the PRK was not afraid of 1 billion of its citizens suddenly turning into democracy superheroes. It was worried that people were able to organize at all. One quote which I found interesting and also telling is

“It demonstrates in a flash of instant history that authoritarians, already flummoxed by the fax machine and the cellular phone, may be facing the biggest high-tech challenge of all in the internet.”

History will show us that the internet will be used as an increasing way to anonymously get out information in order to facilitate change, and that social media will allow people to organize without risking a government swat team barging in. It will also be used to repress, It is a two way street and governments will learn quickly. Repression will come in the form of mis-information, cutting servers, tracking ip addresses, and other things.

“Internet Egyptian Revolution By Awais_Ch☆”

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http://http://edwired.org/courses/h390sp13/

I particularly enjoyed the Atlantic article from 1945. One line in particular jumped out at me;

“Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.”

This is very reflective of the conversation that went on during the first class.  It seems that scholars have not learned from their mistakes as far as this example is concerned. Language is extremely important when writing an article and the reason that more people do not read scholarly articles is because they simply cannot understand the specialized jargon being used. This dramatically limits the audience that is willing to read the article. In doing this, people from outside the increasingly specialized fields within academia, may not benefit from the research and therefore, it may take much longer for advancements to take place.

Three potential historical topics that I would like to see covered during this course would be:

1) The impact of technology on Politics (Radio on speeches, TV for debates, etc)

2) The history of electronics being used for coercive things (Electronic Warfare, Code Breaking, etc)

3) What will be the next internet in the progression of radio, TV, internet, etc (maybe this can’t be answered)