I found the section on mentoring useful, I guess because I was a mentor and I didn’t really realize it. When I had a summer job where I had worked there the previous summer, there was a kid that came to work with us. He was younger than I was at the time, and I guess kind of looked up to me, since he was always asking me for advice about what to do. During the initiation stage, I guess I gave him kind of a hard time, since he could bug me a little bit at times. But eventually I saw that he was a good kid, so I tried to show him the ropes as best I could. I lost track of him after the summer was over, so there was definitely a separation phase, but when I was reading that section, I realized that it pretty much described our relationship.

Question#2

I think the main advantages that I gained from doing the first two assignments were that I was able to work on my group socialization skills, as well as being able to work on my editing ability. I think the biggest advantage overall though would have to be the editing, as I ended up doing the final editing on both assignments. What made it more challenging, but rewarding in the same regards was the fact that I was editing the writing of different group members. With this, you end up identifying different writing styles, and sometimes find certain grammatical mistakes that will be common to a particular individual. But I think with any person’s writing, you will be able to find certain patterns in their writing style, which forces you to think harder, to identify the pattern, as well as seeing the assignment from a different point of view. As far as being able to work on the group socialization skills and having to email the parts of the paper back and forth between group members, it forced us as a group to become more aware of deadlines and being able to communicate the need to meet them more effectively.

Week of March 21-27 Question 1

The section in chapter 8 that I found the most useful was the part about contradictory statements. There was an example that I found on the PETA website when we were doing research for our project. “The fact that they might suffer in the wild is no reason to ensure that they suffer in captivity.” This statement says that all animals suffer in captivity. However, there are many animals that not only seem to enjoy the comforts of life away from the elements and natural predators, but there are also may animals that are no longer able to survive in the wild, since their habitat or food source has been eliminated. Other animals depend on human for survival in other ways as well; I read about a cat that had epilepsy. Her owner gave her medicine to ward off the seizures, but said that the cat would probably not be able to survive on her own.

Question#2

http://www.enutramart.com/detail_LAT1011__Ab-Gymnic-Weight-Loss-Abdominal-Toning-Belt.html#

I found a dubious link for advertising for the Ab-Gymnic Weight Loss Toning Belt. This product claims to provide the equivalent of 600 situps in 10 minutes. However, they provide no reputable evidence for their claim. There are no testimonials by any doctors, which alone should be a dead giveaway that something is amiss, since real doctors should evaluate any device for safety, which is going to be altering something with your body, whether it is mental of physical. The site definitely has a bias, because they are actually the ones trying to sell you the product. However, neither one of these claims are strong enough to outright reject the claim. However, based on my personal experience of having seen someone who used one of those belts, I can reject the claim to be untrue, because I know that my own experience tells me that these products do not work as claimed.

Week of Feb. 28-Mar. 6 Question#1

I was asked to come up with an example of an argument, and to discuss what needs to be repaired. With Roy Ashburn in the news a lot lately, I thought this would make a good example.



Example: A senator has never publicly denied that he is not gay. So, it is likely that the senator is gay. This is a weak argument because not denying something doesn’t make it true. But this argument could be repaired if you added more evidence, like the fact that he was arrested for drunk driving leaving a gay bar with another man in his car, then the argument would be stronger. This makes the argument stronger because both of the premises are good: someone who was arrested for DUI near a bar was probably at the bar, and if he had another man in the car who was also at the bar, it is probably that they were both homosexual, since it was a gay bar. Since both of these premises are plausible, this strengthens the original argument that the senator is gay.