One advantage of the blog is that we can communicate even when nasty weather keeps us apart.
I will post my Rebuttal Argument here for your benefit. I’ll also update today’s Agenda to reflect the fact that we did not meet in person.
Enjoy your break. Return refreshed. I’ll bring donuts, beverages, and breakfast sandwiches for all voters when we return on MON MAR 19.
In just a few seconds, I will create something unique in human history using an ordinary deck of 52 playing cards. I will shuffle them seven times, and the result will be a card order so unusual that the odds of it being generated by my shuffling are one in
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,
000,000,000.
Again, with no training or practice, never having performed this trick before, the odds that the cards I shuffle will end up in the order I shuffle them into will be:
Can I do it?
Would you like to bet me?
According to J.B. Morton on The Old Bailey blog, “The chances that anyone has ever shuffled a pack of cards in the same way twice in the history of the world are infinitesimally small, statistically speaking. The number of possible permutations of 52 cards is ‘52 factorial’ otherwise known as 52! or 52 shriek.
This is 52 times 51 times 50 . . . all the way down to one. The result of this factoring is
To give you an idea of how many that is, here is how long it would take to go through every possible permutation of cards.
If every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, each with a trillion people living on them, and each of these people has a trillion packs of cards and somehow they manage to make unique shuffles 1,000 times per second, and they’d been doing that since the Big Bang, they’d only just now be starting to repeat shuffles.
How big is this number?
Someone shuffling a deck of cards once per second since the beginning of the universe believed to be about 14 billion years ago would not have shuffled the deck more than 1018 times.
Thus it is almost certain that any given configuration achieved through random shuffling has never appeared before in the history of shuffling!
For comparison’s sake: the number of stars in the universe: 1023.
Su, Francis E., et al. “Making History by Card Shuffling.” Math Fun Facts. .
The material I gathered to prepare for this Argument I have moved to a special section of my White Paper to illustrate the value of collecting all my sources in the WP, the repository of all things useful to my Research Position Paper.
My Refutation Argument examines the primary claims of the hypothesis I defended in my Definition Argument, that because polio is fundamentally unlike smallpox—which was eradicated in the 1960s—the differences make it nearly impossible to eradicate polio, ever.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and in particular its Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) have maintained for decades now that the eradication of smallpox strongly argues in favor of the eradicability of polio. They use that analogy to raise $1 billion a year for their efforts. I entirely applaud their audacious enterprise, but I question the quality of their analogy. In 1000 words, I argue that smallpox and polio ARE NOT similar enough for the comparison to hold.
If it sounds ridiculous to devote 1000 words to the OPPOSITE of my own hypothesis, you’re misunderstanding a crucial element of good argument. To persuade skeptics to your point of view, you must address and refute the strongest counterarguments. Ignoring them is fatal. Readers will merely humor you if you try to skirt the best refutations and never change their minds.
The eradication of smallpox from planet Earth in 1980 by a worldwide immunization campaign raised unrealistic hopes that other diseases could be similarly vanquished. The exuberance of health professionals who set their sights immediately on polio, malaria, and cholera was understandable, but dangerous. If polio were identical to smallpox, the same techniques might suffice to eradicate it next. But if polio is fundamentally different, then the argument from analogy to smallpox fails, and efforts to eradicate polio, based on the argument that “it’s been done before,” could more than just fail; they could backfire catastrophically. The cost of the attempt is enormous, and the risk of failure is very high, so let’s examine the similarities between smallpox and polio and see if they augur success.
Several factors are considered essential to any eradication effort. Christopher Whitty, professor of public and international health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, identifies three. Others may count differently, but if polio and smallpox are sufficiently different in any category essential to eradication to void the comparison, the “did it before” argument will fail. In his Millroy Lecture “Eradication of Disease: Hype, Hope, Reality,” he names as the first pre-requisite: “effective interventions that alone or in combination can interrupt transmission of infection or at least take it well below R0 = 1 in all epidemiological settings.”
As Whitty explains it, R0 = 1 represents the situation where one infected person passes on the disease to just one other person who in turn does the same so that the disease stays stable in the population. At a minimum, then, interventions must exist that can prevent rapid spreading during an outbreak. In the best case, when the R0 can be forced below 1, local elimination and potential eradication can be achieved. For much of the world, local elimination has already been accomplished. In all but a few countries, no new cases of polio have been detected in decades. As described by Ganapathiraju, Morssink, and Plumb in “Endgame for Polio Eradication?“:
in 1955, polio paralysed and killed up to 500,000 people annually worldwide. Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) reduced polio transmission in the USA from 20,000 cases per year in the 1950s to around 1000 cases by the 1960s. [Since then,] polio worldwide has decreased from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to just 416 cases in 2013.
Such remarkable success—a 99.9% reduction in diagnosed cases in 30 years!—continues to encourage eradication advocates, including the Bill Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) that total triumph is inevitable, if not imminent. In fact, seemingly every year, when it solicits funding for its continuing effort, the GPEI announces a “game-changing” or “breakthrough” technology that will once and for all achieve the ultimate victory.
But that victory has so far proved elusive, perhaps because of fundamental differences between smallpox and polio. Again according to Whitty, to be eradicable, “the disease has to be easy to diagnose, preferably with minimal complex laboratory facilities.” But whereas schoolchildren were able to detect the last cases of smallpox among their classmates by casual external observations alone, they would be no help detecting polio, which can persist completely unnoticed in human hosts for decades without causing symptoms.
Fortunately for polio eradication advocates, Whitty’s third essential factor presents no challenge. Polio exists either in human hosts or not at all. There is no significant “wild animal reservoir” for the disease to harbor in between human hosts. But the final ironic difference between the smallpox and polio viruses is that polio uses humans as a sort of “animal reservoir,” and while it persists in unwitting human hosts, often subjected to repeated rounds of immunization efforts, it mutates, emerging as something no longer “wild,” but transformed into a “vaccine-derived virus.”
This last and perhaps most significant difference between smallpox and polio may be the distinction that finally tips public sentiment against spending staggeringly large sums to eliminate a disease that presently afflicts so few. As reported in “The Art of Eradicating Polio” by Leslie Roberts, a Nigerian boy recently voiced the bewilderment of his country in a conversation with Muhammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Health. “Why do they bring only polio vaccine when we get no help with all our other problems? And are you going to force us to take it?” he asked. His question illustrates a reluctance that is increasingly difficult to surmount among populations whose children die by the thousands from diarrhea.
The longer the final stage of eradication drags on the more challenges it faces. Despite impressive successes, and there have been many, setbacks seem maddeningly inevitable. Alwan and Maher report, in 2016, in “Closer to a Polio-Free Eastern Mediterranean Region” that
WHO alone has more than doubled the size of the teams working on polio in the two countries since the start of 2014, and now has nearly 2500 technical and operational experts in the field . . . only 30 cases of polio have been recorded by Pakistan (18 cases) and Afghanistan (12 cases) combined so far in 2016 – a far cry from the 334 cases recorded by these countries in 2014.
Yet, according to Svea Closser’s “We Can’t Give Up Now: Global Health Optimism,” after worldwide spending of nearly $1 billion again in 2016, the fight did not end. Neither did another billion accomplish the goal in 2017. One must ask, as many governments, private foundations, public health professionals, and that Nigerian boy already have, “How much longer can we justify spending so much of our scarce resources on a disease that most of the world has not seen in decades?”
Even success, if it’s achieved, might not be success. As Closser warns us, “When smallpox was declared eradicated, countries could decide independently whether or not to stop vaccinating. For polio, this approach could prove disastrous.” The cheaper OPV vaccines are a double-edged sword. They are favored for mass inoculations and millions of doses are delivered every year, preventing countless cases of polio. But they deploy “weakened live virus strains” that can “evolve to reacquire the ability to cause paralytic disease and to spread. Outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses have occurred before [in 11 countries since 2000]; more are virtually inevitable.”
It’s even possible that vaccine-derived viruses could evolve to mimic the three “wild” polio viruses we’ve taken such pains to eradicate. If that happens, according to Closser, “the gains from interrupting wild polio transmission will be lost; the entire effort will only have succeeded in replacing one set of viruses with another.”
References
Alwan, A., & Maher, C. (2016). Closer to a polio-free Eastern Mediterranean Region. Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal, 22(9), 645-646. doi:10.26719/2016.22.9.645
Closser, S. (2012). We Can’t Give Up Now. Medical Anthropology, 31(5).
Ganapathiraju, P. V., Morssink, C. B., & Plumb, J. (2015). Endgame for polio eradication? Options for overcoming social and political factors in the progress to eradicating polio. Global Public Health, 10(4), 463-473. doi:10.1080/17441692.2014.994655
Roberts, L. (2013, October). The art of eradicating polio. Science, 342(6154).
Whitty, C. J. (2014, August 01). Milroy Lecture: Eradication of Disease: Hype, Hope and Reality. Retrieved March 18, 2018, from http://www.clinmed.rcpjournal.org/content/14/4/419.full
I’ve posted the first draft of my Definition Argument for your benefit.
This post will remain pinned to the top of the blog
until I’m sure you’ve had a chance to see it.
Mine “defines” a term by comparing it to another.
In other words, polio eradication DOES NOT BELONG to the category: world health campaigns that can be accomplished with just money and effort.
The first time I saw this image of Christopher Walken,
I struggled to figure out who he reminded me of.
When it hit me that he resembled Scarlett Johanssen,
I went looking for an appropriate image of her to build a meme.
And I found several.
But they’d already been paired to show the same resemblance I had noticed.
Late again.
Bartering is trading services or goods with another person when there is no money involved. This type of exchange was relied upon by early civilizations. There are even cultures within modern society who still rely on this type of exchange. Bartering has been around for a very long time, however, it’s not necessarily something that an economy or society has relied solely on.
A barter system is an old method of exchange. This system has been used for centuries and long before money was invented. People exchanged services and goods for other services and goods in return. In ancient times, this system involved people in the same area, however today bartering is global. The value of bartering items can be negotiated with the other party. Bartering doesn’t involve money which is one of the advantages. You can buy items by exchanging an item you have but no longer want or need. Generally, trading in this manner is done through Online auctions and swap markets.
The history of bartering dates all the way back to 6000 BC. Introduced by Mesopotamia tribes, bartering was adopted by Phoenicians. Phoenicians bartered goods to those located in various other cities across oceans. Babylonian’s also developed an improved bartering system. Goods were exchanged for food, tea, weapons, and spices. When money was invented, bartering did not end, it become more organized. Due to lack of money, bartering became popular in the 1930s during the Great Depression. It was used to obtain food and various other services. It was done through groups or between people who acted similar to banks. If any items were sold, the owner would receive credit and the buyer’s account would be debited.
Just as with most things, there are disadvantages and advantages of bartering. A complication of bartering is determining how trustworthy the person you are trading with is. The other person does not have any proof or certification that they are legitimate, and there is no consumer protection or warranties involved. This means that services and goods you are exchanging may be exchanged for poor or defective items. It may be a good idea to limit exchanges to family and friends in the beginning because good bartering requires skill and experience. At times, it is easy to think the item you desire is worth more than it actually is and underestimate the value of your own item.
On the positive side, there are great advantages to bartering. As mentioned earlier, you do not need money to barter. Another advantage is that there is flexibility in bartering. For instance, related products can be traded, or items that are completely different can be traded. Another advantage of bartering is that you do not have to part with material items. Instead, you can offer a service in exchange for an item. With bartering two parties can get something they want or need from each other
I like to start the semester by creating as many comfortable ways to communicate as possible. We’ve emailed back and forth. I’m learning your names with the help of your photographs. I’ve asked you Preview Survey questions to prepare myself for your preferred learning styles. And we’ve traded texts.
Or at least most of us have.
Here’s a chart that shows our progress so far. If you haven’t responded to my email or completed the Preview Survey, if you didn’t text me, or if I don’t have your photograph, please bring yourself into full compliance. The more we communicate, the more help I can be.
| NAME | SURVEY | PHOTO | TEXT | |
| Taylor Arbitman | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Emily Baker | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Larry Birch | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Aaron Bradley | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Ryan Bussell | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Jake Dawes | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Claire DeMaio | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Kerrymae Doherty | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| John Dormann | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Devon Genao Torres | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Brinsley Granatella | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Shealyn Gruber | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Destinee Horne | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Tyler Johnson | YES | NO | YES | YES |
| Alexis Monguso | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Kianu Montenegro | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Michael Nguyen (no username) |
YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Nicholas Reina | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Marisol Smith | NO | YES | YES | YES |
| Theo Sulton | YES | YES | YES | YES |
Here’s the link to the Preview Survey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3RCGGX2
If you haven’t texted me yet:
Text your NAME and C2 SP18 to: (856) 979-6653
Step 1. Your topic is too broad. Almost certainly. And because it’s too broad, you won’t be able to write anything surprising, insightful, or new about it. Too many commentators have already made broad general comments about:
Obviously, you can’t just gather a bunch of material about concussions in football under the title “Concussions in Football” and call it a research paper. A topic that broad would require at the very least a full book, with chapters devoted to:
Any one of those narrower topics might still be too broad for a 3000-word essay. So:
Step 2. Narrow your topic by limiting the range of your terms, and by adding elements that focus your attention to specific aspects of your topic.
You’ve decided to concentrate on the relationship between helmet design and concussions—a significant narrowing of your topic—but we still don’t know how the two are related. So:
Step 3. Create a logical relationship among the elements of your increasingly complicated topic description.
So far, so good. But “the effect” is so vague that it has no real meaning. If I say, “Lighting a fire in the corner had an effect on the temperature in the room,” I’m going out of my way to avoid the very obvious logical connection: The fire raised the temperature in the room. So:
Step 4. Write a complete sentence that makes a bold, clear claim by clarifying the logical relationship between the specific elements in your narrow topic.
Now you’re making claims. Your narrowed topic has focused our attention on specific elements: NFL players, helmet-to-helmet blows, design improvements, reduced numbers of concussions. Let’s test it.
Step 5. Share your claim with several classmates. Do they all agree? Will readers automatically concur that your claim is logical, reasonable? If so, your thesis is entirely intuitive, and therefore probably too obvious. Perhaps trivial. Most likely, it’s already been demonstrated by other authors. If not, it will be soon.
This is where the real work begins. Rise to the challenge. Question the essence of the specific claim you have made.
This may look like a step back, but it’s actually a shift to a different perspective. It questions what seemed like a natural and obvious conclusion.
Step 6. Apply counterintuitive thinking to find the unexpected angle.
It’s a radical hypothesis that may be impossible to prove, but it can certainly be researched. And it makes for a surprising and innovative argument much more likely than the alternatives to result in a rewarding semester of study.
More or Fewer Steps. Your own process may require more than 6 steps, but never fewer. If you start the process with a bold, clear claim that creates a logical relationship among specific elements in an already narrow topic, you’re starting at Step 4. (You didn’t skip the steps; you took them without noticing.)
The Real Work. The most important work begins at Step 5, when you’ve crafted what you think sounds like a good thesis. Further scrutinizing that thesis is painful but essential. We don’t want to abandon our comfortable thesis that seems so provable. But we learn more when we stop trying to prove something and instead research to learn something.
We Research to Test, not to Prove. In the early stages of your research, you’ll search for evidence to prove or disprove the counterintuitive claim you make in Step 6, which is merely a Hypothesis you’ll measure against the academic sources you discover. Almost certainly, you’ll alter your Hypothesis, perhaps several times, during the writing/research process, narrowing or redirecting your claim as you figure out what you can persuasively argue.
The Payoff. A research project that results in a Thesis radically different than your first Hypothesis is doubly rewarding. It indicates that you found a Thesis to prove; more importantly, it demonstrates that you’ve grown academically throughout the course by learning something unexpected.
Anne Frank, the Jewish girl whose diary and death in a Nazi concentration camp made her a symbol of the Holocaust, was allegedly baptized posthumously Saturday by a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to whistleblower Helen Radkey, a former member of the church. The ritual was conducted in a Mormon temple in the Dominican Republic, according to Radkey, a Salt Lake City researcher who investigates such incidents, which violate a 2010 pact between the Mormon Church and Jewish leaders.
Radkey discovered that Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank, who died at Bergen Belsen death camp in 1945 at age 15, was baptized by proxy on Saturday. Mormons have submitted versions of her name at least a dozen times for proxy rites and carried out the ritual at least nine times from 1989 to 1999. This time, Frank’s name was discovered in a database that can be used for proxy baptism — a separate process, according to a spokesman for the church. The database is open only to Mormons.
A screen shot of the database shows a page for Frank stating “completed” next to categories labeled “Baptism” and “Confirmation,” with the date Feb. 18, 2012, and the name of the Santo Domingo Dominican Republic Temple.
Mormon posthumous proxy baptisms for Holocaust victims or Jews who are not direct descendants of Mormons has continued, despite church vows to stop such practices. Negotiations between Mormon and Jewish leaders led to a 1995 agreement for the church to stop the posthumous baptism of all Jews, except in the case of direct ancestors of Mormons, but some Mormons have failed to adhere to the agreement.
The name of Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel was recently submitted to the restricted genealogy website as “ready” for posthumous proxy baptism, though the church says the rite is reserved for the deceased, and Wiesel is alive. Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, was among a group of Jewish leaders who campaigned against the practice and prompted the 2010 pact by which the Mormon Church promises to at least prevent proxy baptism requests for Holocaust victims.
Wiesel last week called on Republican presidential candidate and Mormon Mitt Romney, a former Mormon bishop who has donated millions to the church, to speak out about the practice. The Romney campaign did not immediately reply. The Frank case follows closely on an apology from the Mormon Church last week for recent posthumous baptisms of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal’s parents.
The latest baptism of Frank by proxy is especially egregious because she was an unmarried teenager who left no descendants. Mormon officials have stressed that in accordance with the agreements, church members are supposed to submit only the names of their own ancestors.
“The security of the names submissions process for posthumous rites must be questioned, in view of the rash of prominent Jewish Holocaust names that have recently appeared on Mormon temple rolls,” Radkey said about her latest find. “This one sailed straight through, with Anne’s correct name in their ‘secure’ database.”
Radkey said she expects, once word gets out, that church officials will scrub the records as they did with Wiesel and Weisenthal’s parents. The Mormon Church responded later Tuesday in a statement: “The Church keeps its word and is absolutely firm in its commitment to not accept the names of Holocaust victims for proxy baptism. While no system is foolproof in preventing the handful of individuals who are determined to falsify submissions we are committed to taking action against individual abusers who willfully violate the Church’s policy. Ritual baptism should be understood to be an offering based on love and respect; we regret when it becomes a source of contention.”
In the Reply field below this post, write your strongest Opening Paragraph.
Your paragraph must contain a thesis sentence that clearly and boldly proclaims the claim you promise readers you will prove.
In addition, your Opening Paragraph:
Well, maybe it won’t accomplish all 7 goals, but the more the better!
You have until the end of the period to write your best first draft.
Rowan Counterintuitive 