English 102 at Ashland

 I have read a lot of your papers concerning same-sex marriage, but one consideration never got mentioned. Down through history, one strong reason for marriage was prevention of disease. If you have a population who only have sex with their own spouse and remain faithful, STDs do not spread. If you have a population which has a lot of random sexual partners, there is a lot more opportunity for STDs to become epidemic. It would be an interesting project to trace what happened with HIV/AIDS after the legalization of same-sex marriage. The gay community was pretty much decimated in the 1980s; how are things today? (These statistics should be fairly easy to track down.)

We will have two more times this semester when an in-class event counts for points and you lose out if you are absent: Midterm and Final. Both of these present problems because athletic teams have a habit of hitting the road several days before midterm and being out of town during Finals Week. As I have previously said, we will deal with these problems by scheduling the writing events through the University Testing Service for people who must be away on University business. Dealing with SOAR The official way to deal with those missed writing assignments is for you to make an appointment with the Ashland University Testing Service , after which they would request a copy of the assignment from me, so that when you show up it is waiting there for you. The problem is that all of this communication goes through the SOAR network, which I almost never touch. About the only use for the thing is for students to schedule office visits, and it is much more natural and convenient for a student t...

Politicians often spout numbers and statistics—sometimes invented on the spot—in attempts to sway voters, and because we will be coming into the election cycle very soon, it might be interesting to follow up on some of these issues. Listeners in the crowd do not have the time or facilities to track down the real numbers, but you do. How expensive are the different sources of electricity? In the USA, the three main contenders are hydroelectric power, coal-fired steam generators, and wind power. In a strictly dollars-and-cents analysis, which is the winner? Related to the previous: Wind power receives a lot of political criticism, but how important are the issues politicians raise? How much noise do wind turbines cause? Does the noise cause cancer? How many birds do wind turbines kill? (And how many birds die from causes such as flying into skyscrapers?) If the wind dies down, do the lights go out? How many illegal voters? We often hear about enormous numbers of non-citizens floodi...

The best research papers are the ones which come out of your heart—the ones you have some personal attraction to. Here are some random ideas from my own recent reading (and I assume I will come up with more). You are welcome to use any of them. Studebaker-Packard: Two independent automobile manufacturers you haven’t heard of. Following WWII, they were small, but cutting-edge in technology, with very good products and devoted customers. Neither had enough dealers of their own, so they merged, then went bankrupt. Why? Compass Coffee: This was a Washington DC area company which had dozens of locations, a plan to replace Starbucks (at least in the DC metro area) and multi-million dollar financial backing. Now it is bankrupt and the two guys who started it are suing each other. How did that happen? Artificial Intelligence and Bitcoin: Both take absolutely enormous amounts of electricity and water (for cooling the servers). How much? And what do they do to the environment? ...

 I tracked down that Argument Pyramid illustration and provided a link to its source. As a bonus, the article it came from is a great discussion of general argument principles. Pro Tip: Your computer stores web page files for small pages such as this one (to speed things up if you return again), so if you already read the article, you need to find the little image of a circular arrow chasing itself ("Reload this page") to see the new material.