Response to "Ha ha," he said. "Ha ha."

Chuck Klosterman's article '"Ha ha," he said. "Ha ha."' is a small examination of laugh tracks on sitcoms. Klosterman provides some observations on how laugh tracks control how the viewer is supposed to react to certain situations on the television show and how people provide their own laugh track in everyday life. I have to agree with the author's point of view that the absence of laugh tracks on certain comedy's such as 30 Rock and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia are perceived to be more edgy and hip. You have to be aware of a lot of pop culture to "get" some of the jokes on those shows. But it also helps these shows to not have a laugh track like Klosterman observes with 30 Rock. When a stupid joke that Liz Lemon says is a total bust, the absence of any laughter just makes it more funny because yet another one of her jokes has failed. This dynamic makes the choice of not using a laugh track aids in the hilarity of a show, instead of hurting it; which would be contrary to what most people would think.

Annotation of a Recommended Article

Adams, Gordan and Matthew Leatherman. “How to Cut the Pentagon’s Budget While Improving Its Preformance.” Foreign Affairs. Council on Foreign Relations, Jan/Feb 2011. Web. 7 February 2011.

This online publication deals with American foreign policy and international affairs and is published buy the non-partisan and non-profit group Council on Foreign Relations. This source is interesting in that it is somewhere in between a scholarly journal and magazine and a subscription is necessary to view the full articles. The article is very data rich and the authors provide figures to back up their arguments of how cutting out many programs and even a whole command (Joint Forces Command) and two Pentagon bureaucracies will lead to a more streamlined and sustainable defense program. With the amount of empirical data and the amount of specific identification of what can be done to cut the budget of the Pentagon, this article is a very good source of information on this topic.

Response to "Attached to Technology.."

In the article, "Attached to Technology and Paying a Price" written by Matt Richtel, Richtel tells the story of Kord Campbell and his family, who are all addicted to technology. While the case of the Campbell's is very severe (missing meetings, burning cookies, spending hours ignoring the family, all while playing with their gadgets) its still an issue that many of us experience on a daily basis with the amount of gadgets and technology we use. The most interesting part of the article is the debunking of the notion that our brains stop developing at a certain point, and having a lot of research actually suggest that our brain rewires itself. Our brains now are rewiring to deal with the large amount of information we see and how was multitask around the information. One of the other interesting things in the article is about the lower-brain functions that once alerted us of danger around us (the sensory of danger) like a lion approaching and taking us off a project such as building something is the same brain function that makes us stop working on a research paper to answer the 'ding' or message of an email coming in. I am very big proponent of technology and the information that is now very accessible and the ease of communication that is available. But you still have to know when to unplug and interact with human beings and not let you life be consumed by technology.

An Introduction

Hello Blogging World. My name is Greg and I am currently a student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. While this is not my first attempt at a blog, it is the one I will not give up on because it is a requirement for a Research Writing course I am enrolled in. If you happen to read my blog, I hope that there may be some post that you find interesting. I also welcome any comments in response to the posts, the responses are always interesting to read and in the case of a disagreement with something I write about, it becomes a learning experience. Be on the lookout for post in the future as they are assigned and I also might put a few things up that aren’t assigned. Thanks for reading.