Online Communications

  On Putin and Poutine If you want to start a discussion or an argument, using a colorful photo is a great place to start so I will start my blog with the original post's picture as well.  This small business owner managed to start a bit of a tussle posting on Reddit which resulted in 174 posts some of which were removed and ultimately the post was locked by moderators.  Apparently, a couple of days ago, a struggling food cart owner in Portland, OR by name of u/cucumberconundrum  arrived at work to find their window broken and graffitied. Out of frustration, they began the conversation with the following title.   "You’re not wrong, but I’m just not sure how breaking the window of a small business is supposed to help." u/cucumberconundrum's  first mistake was posting in haste which the author regretted soon after and tried to back-peddle by apologizing to their community with the graphic details of what a rotten few months they have been having....

 The Toulmin Method for the Argumentatively Impaired.   If you are like me and arguing or persuading someone to do anything is pretty much the last thing you would ever do leading to no experience with argumentation, leading to a lack of skills in doing it, and then around back to really hating to do it.  And if you, like me, prefer a live and let live mentality to let people that believe differently than you do just say whatever they want without feeling the need to critique them, you may benefit from learning the Toulmin Method.   In Steven Toulmin's 1958 book The Uses of Argument , Toulmin put forth his thoughts and methods about argumentation and the critique of arguments.  A summation of the method includes analyzing the claim, then analyzing the reasons and evidence, checking for and examining the warrants and noting any rebuttals (Green 2022 325).  In more detail this translates into figure out exactly what it is that the author is arguing ...

Alan Alda and Robin Dunbar discuss Dunbar's number  Can you count your friends and sort them into which circle they belong to is it your closest 1.5 friend(s), your 5 besties, the 15 people you spend the most time with, the 50 people you are close to, 150 in your wider circle of friends, your 500 acquaintances, the 1500 people you can name, or the 5000 people you might recognize if you see?  If so, you are grouping them according to Dunbar's number. Alan Alda had a conversation with Robin Dunbar about his magic numbers and what they might mean both on and off of an online platform.  Dunbar states that there are limits on the number of friends and family that you can have.  Different species of animals have different numbers which correlates with the size of frontal cortex.  His claim that humans can only have 150 friends fits with the frontal cortex correlation.  The number is an average, not everyone will have 150 in their social network. for instance...

Photo of  Tanya Berger-Wolf on the University of Illinois at Chicago.  The power of  persuasion Many people can have a great idea, or important insight, or strong persuasive personality.  In order to bring that idea to the world, there is no match for the power of social media.  Let's say that you are a scientist that is promoting a unique project you've been working on such as Tanya Berger-Wolf who along with her team at  Translational Data Analytics Institute which she founded,   combines the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence, wildlife biology, and social sciences (including social media) to create a project that tracks wildlife through people's uploaded online wildlife pictures and videos.  You could write numerous scientific papers about all the research leading up to this discovery and you can speak at various conferences and have your papers recognized  like this one  (Tantipathananandh et al. 2007) This will...

  Ah, the day job  Welcome to  Everybody's Brewing   where I make my day to day living three days a week most weeks of the year.  The picture is some of my favorite coworkers standing on the line during a bit of a lull.  I'm working the cold side this particular night, so I'm doing all the frying tasks and assembling gyros, making salads and that sort of thing.  On other days I might work the hot or middle stations, or prep food, wash dishes, or a combination of all three.  We can get wicked busy doing $14,000+ on a given day sometimes with people waiting more than an hour for a table, not to mention all the takeout.  Translation: those of us in the back have to MOVE! Our online presence helps Everybody's stand out in our town.  Not only do we have a great webpage, but we make updates and announcements on Instagram and Facebook, and we are linked into lots of other professional organizations' online presence.      ...