HW#30 Speech Two on Animation

Today I attended a second speech for Keene States Citizenship Symposium. Like the first speech it was located in the Main threatre of the Redfern Arts Center. This speech was called "Animation as Political and Socail Constructions." But unlike the first speech, it had multiple speakers. First was Jiwon Ahn who is a Keene State College instructor of film studies. Sander Lee was second to speak and he is a KSC professor of philosophy. Last to speak was Mark Timney who is an associate professor of Journalism. These three people all spoke about the same topic but all had many different ways of going about it. First of Ahn spoke about actual Anime art and drawing. She spoke about how Anime artist protray what they see in the media into their drawings of women. An example of an Anime that shows a women/young girl, in nature bond to a tree. This demenstrates how Anime "challenges everyday life" as Ahn mentioned in her speech. This type of Animation is called Japenese Punk art and it is the most successful anime out there. Sander the second speaker of the night talked about how a disney propergander cartoon and another cartoon effect how people during WWII were brainwashed into thinking a certian way. The first example is of Donald duck, who is working in a factory making weapons for Nazis' in Germany. This cartoon's sybolizes that even a duck with a temper will easily comply to Hitler and his armies. In the end of this short cartooon, it shows Donald waking up from a dream and all around him is American flags and symbols. He states that he is glad to be in the United States of America. This shows that only American can stop the rise of Hitler. This is encouaraging people to give up their liberty to make sure that Hitler is brought down from power. The other short cartoon was of Bugs Bunny who was caught by a Nazi. He was brought to Hitler and just as they were going to look in the bag to see the wonderful American rabbit, out pops Joeseph Stalin. Hitler and the Nazi jump back in fear this shows that the USA is not the only country that can confront Hitler. It shows Hitler as a person who can easily be defeated. The last speaker Mark Tiney talked about the Comedy Central show South Park and how it is an example of Model citizens. As soon as Mark stated that I had to laugh, for south park and model citizens in the same sentence just sounded appauling to me but once you going lookin for the model citizens in the show you do find very good examples. South park incourporates satire into the show. "Satire is the use of ridicule or scorn often in a humerous or witty way to expose vices and follies" said Mark. These three speeches showed how people can be expressed, brainwashed and model citizens. I found this speech much better than the first one because it allowed me to learn that animation truely effects and presents our views and the world around us.

HW#30 Speech One on Voting and Fairness!

Today in Keene State College's Citizenship Symposium, I attended a speech in the Main theatre. This speech was called: Voting Theory and the Question of Fairness it was presented by Vincent Ferlini. Ferlini is the assocate professor of Mathematics here at Keene. It was a very formal, and educational speech. It focused on the different methods of voting and how it is and is not fair. There are many political and fun ways of voting such as presidential campaign and American Idol or Surivior. Voting is a way of allowing the majority to help make decisions for a certain campaign. There was a brief history that Ferlini mentioned, such as that during the 509 BCE in Greece they developed the voting tactics that are stilled used today. There were many methods mentioned in Vincent's speech. One was the plurality method where the canidate with the most number of first place votes is the winner of the campaign. Another method is the Majority method which the most used and most known method. The Borda method was developed by Jean-Charles de Borda during the 18th century. This method relies on a number scale, the candiadate with the most votes receives four points, second three, third two and etc. "The Method of Pairwise comparision determines to what extent each candidate is or isn't preferred over each of the other candidates." An interesting fact that I learned during the speech was that in order to win the election 270 votes are needed from the Electoral College. The conclusions that were made from this speech are that different methods develop different results. Also that each method exhibits characteristics associated with fairness and unfairness of a voting method.