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Ni Una Mas
Since 1993, almost 400 women in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua,
Mexico, a town on the U.S./Mexico border, have been violently murdered
without reason or explanation (Amnesty International). For the most
part, they all fit a certain description; pretty, petite, dark haired,
and extremely poor (Teresa Rodriguez 2007). There are several theories
as to who is behind the killings, ranging from cults, to drug dealers,
to police themselves, however the cases remain unsolved.Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Weekly Roundup: Blog Picks for September 26, 2008
This week’s blog heroes, doing good one click at a time
- In honor of their 10 year anniversary, Google announced their Project 10^100, a contest based on the idea that “helping helps everybody, helper and helped alike.” They are committing $10 million dollars to fund a winning proposal that “will help as many people as possible.”
- Gaurav Mishra, the Yahoo! Fellow in International Values, Communications, Technology, and Global Internet critiques the cliché of “using technology to do good” and proposes a framework to help think systemically and strategically about the possibilities of communication technologies to “create disruptive models of social change.”
- Might the Planned Parenthood/Sarah Palin (subversive) fundraising campaign that Ashley Bowen blogs about be an example of the kind of disruptive model of social change that Gaurav refers to? She explains: “This campaign combines the two actions campaign organizers are always begging for: donate some cash and/or write a letter. Now, in just a few clicks you can do both.”
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Viral Fundraising
Lately, I’ve been very interested in the role online/e-mail rumors play in elections. I heard an "On the Media" segment last week about how hard it is for political campaigns to beat back the false assertions made in fwd email.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Cult of the Political Celebrity
In the now (in)famous TV commercial, McCain’s ‘celebrity’ ad against Obama portrayed Obama as an over-hyped spectacle. However you may feel about this ad or McCain’s campaign strategies – his criticism is reflected in the images we find in the media. Consider these examples –
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Falsifying my Paradigms
Did you know that 80-90% of all scientific discovery has been accomplished in the last 100 years? Apparently if we calculate the percentage of scientists who are still alive from the total number of scientists that have ever lived, we will get just about the same number: 80-90% (Sismondo, 2004).
These two numbers popped out of my readings this week for my Science and Technology Studies course taught by Dr. Ribes. This semester we have already produced a variety of answers to the question I posed several weeks ago: "How does one produce truth?" The production of knowledge deserves lifetimes of attention, for sure, but today I am perplexed with a different question: What if we’ve got it all wrong? Or more importantly, how would we even know?
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Weekly Roundup: Blog Picks for September 19, 2008
The debate between technophiles and technophobes rages on this week. From the CCT blogosphere, read two positive
reports on the impact of gaming on children and education. Compare these with the The Chronicle Review’s latest report that on-line reading is of a
lesser kind.Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Hypothesis Based vs. Grounded Theory
I don’t have an academic background in theory. My undergraduate degree was in international business at a practice-oriented university where the only primary texts I was ever required to read were annual reports. Learning how to manipulate theory was and remains one of the reasons I chose CCT. But the application of theory, as any other tool, is continually evolving which makes mastering it that much more difficult.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Why We Blog, Part 4 of 4: Personal Obligation
Telenovelas, first dates, and fertile ground — everyone has their own relationship with this defined, yet far from settled, medium. Justin Hall, often considered the first blogger, probably had no clue what he was on to when he first started coding his diary into HTML. The personal journal remains one of the most popular forms of individual blogging, but political, technical, l and news aggregate blogs have entirely reshaped the boundaries and potentials of self-publishing.
So what then is an academic blog? And what does it mean to be an "academic blogger"? Definitions are problematic. When I look through my blog subscriptions in Google Reader for some model to follow, the topics and purposes are as divergent as the titles.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Why We Blog, Part 3 of 4: Intellectual Coffee Talk
Margarita, in her contribution to this series, likened her
blogging history with telenovela. Since this is my first blog, my relationship
with blogging is more like a first date. I’m excited and eager to make a good
impression, nervous but trying to sound as relaxed as I can in my perpetual
state of over-caffeination. I’m sure at
some point well meaning friends offered the same advice to prepare me for both
activities – just be yourself.Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Why We Blog, Part 2 of 4: Why I (normally don’t) blog (and 3 reasons why it will be different this time)
My blog history is best compared to a telenovela. Passionate beginnings followed by drawn out break-ups. Promises of commitment interrupted by threats of abandonment. Short-lived reunions interspersed with long spells of neglect.
Starting with my first blog in my sophomore year of college, I spent five years switching from one blog service to another, hoping that a change in applications would lead to a change in habit – I was the bad craftsman blaming my tools.
Category: The Gnovis Blog