Week 2

Overview

This week focuses on two things:

1. Survival strategies for naming and managing documents.
2. Understanding how to make scientific arguments and seeing “the other side”.

THERE WILL BE NO IN-CLASS SESSION THIS WEEK.

Dr. Haendel will be available asynchronously all week to assist with your assignments, it is expected that you interact with Dr. Haendel on Slack with your questions.

Assignments

• Complete the exercise Survival strategies for managing documents in shared locations

• Accept your invitation to the Tox-team on the Tislab Github organization. You should have received an email, or you can go to your home page in Github and note the insignificant blue banner at the top.

• Debate! In Canvas, you have been assigned a debate partner. The assignment for this week is document your debate, using Google Drive and Github. Please do the following:

  1. Make a folder for your debate in the class Google drive for your debate. Name it well! In this folder, you can organize your debate as you find most useful to you and your partner.
  2. The two of you must choose a topic to debate upon. Each person must choose a “side”, and argue the case for that side. Please post your topic on Slack for feedback from Dr. Haendel before you begin. Effective persuasion requires credible and quality supporting evidence, which may include a mix of facts, statistics, expert quotations, studies, polls; but it may also be real-life examples, anecdotes, analogies, and personal experience. Skim this resource as a guide to debating. Note that this document is intended to aid oral debating, but it can give you some ideas about how to plan your responses.
  3. At least two postings from each side are expected, though more are welcome. Please use proper citations, link where relevant, and use figures pasted in. To conclude the debate, please work together to post a resolution that you both agree upon. This can be the suggestion for a new policy or law, an organizational or contextual agreement, or simply personal compromise. It can be one side or the other, or some compromise. The goal here is to follow the data and information trail for any given controversy. How do we know what we know? If a policy was changed or a scientific conclusion drawn and made public to the lay public, was it done so based upon sufficient evidence? Where is the data? Can you actually access the data and assess the conclusions for yourself?
  4. Following the debate conclusion, each student should comment on one of the other student’s debate topics that other students have debated - whether they agree with the resolution or not.

Example debate topics

• Bisphenol A (BPA) causes cancer.
• Organophosphates cause neurotoxic effects and developmental abnormalities.
• The biggest source of flame retardant exposure is your furniture.
• Big Ag and other private companies are required to get new chemicals approved as per the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act (PRIA). The fees for doing so seem fairly insignificant, is it reasonable for the taxpayers to cover the majority of the expense of getting new chemicals to market? Who should pay for the review and licensing of new chemicals?
• Just smelling barbecue can expose you to signficant levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) at levels that impose a health risk.

Grading

Note that the grading will not reflect who “won” but rather the evidence as it pertains to information presented and the level of participation (unlike an official debate where a winner is usually declared).

The debates will conclude at midnight Sunday April 14th, leaving until Wednesday, April 17th at 5pm to make final comments on other’s debates. Late entries will be accepted for one week following the same schedule, but will be at 50% points.

5 points for two effective posts on each debate side, 3 points for resolution, and 2 points for commenting on another debate.

Course assignment for later weeks:

Read “Reader, Come Home” by Maryanne Wolf

We will discuss the first four chapters during class, one in each of Dr. Curtis’ four lectures in sequence:

• Week 4 (4/17) Deep thinking part 1
• Week 5 (5/1) Deep thinking part 2
• Week 6 (5/8) Deep thinking part 3
• Week 7 (5/15) Deep thinking part 4

There will be a 5 minute quiz at the beginning of each class from the chapter of the day. Please let Dr. Haendel know if you need a copy of the text (~10 copies have been distributed). Each quiz + participation will be worth 10 pts (40pts total).