This week, I decided to use my website, jgkeegan.com, to make some extra money. For the last eleven years, my graduate research papers and, recently, my master’s work have been freely available for download in PDF format. Much of my work was downloaded consistently. Many of my papers were downloaded over sixty times in a week over several months. With that amount of interest, I thought if I charged a reasonable price, people would pay it. I set up a PayPal account, designed a new webpages to sell my work in PDF format, and charged $2.00 per PDF. My most popular paper during the free download period was Cholera: The Work of William Farr and John Snow, so it is the first item offered in pay per download. The second item is a project Decolonization and Indo-China. For $2.00 customers receive by email a zip file containing PDF of the paper, the in-class PowerPoint presentation, and the presentation handout. Neither item has sold yet.
Graduate level papers are not going to sell like hotcakes, but based on available data, I hoped to make at least one sale week. Is there anything I can do to improve my chances?
Does the writing process end? Is an author ever really satisfied with the end product of all his labor, or is that product just what could be produced in the time available? I started researching my masters thesis on the aftermath of Pearl Harbor in May 2008. I thought it would take no more than six months to research and write, but I just submitted my Committee draft eight days ago. So much for researching and writing in six months, and my thesis committee, which consists of three history professors from Millersville University, will most likely require that more editing be done before the final draft will be accepted by the University. When will it end?
I was told some time ago by one of my professors that the entire process would take a year or more. She was right, but I did not believe her. The research and initial writing took a total of about nine months on and off. At the end of August 2008, I had written a preliminary prospectus and put research aside to concentrate on classwork. By January 2009, I was eager to continue research, and in March, I was prepared to investigate primary sources available at the National Archives in Washington, DC. The trip to the National Archives was an exciting and unique experience, which has been one of the highlights of my research. I reluctantly submitted a short paper to the Phi Alpha Theta Conference in April. I was not happy with the paper or my presentation to the conference, but the paper did have some positive aspects, which formed the spine of my thesis.
My presentation was lackluster at best, so I did not receive the feedback I had hoped. However, I sent the paper to three of my friends and their constructive criticism was extremely helpful. By mid July, I completed the first half of the rough draft of my thesis, and submitted a completed draft to my thesis advisor by mid September. After incorporating his suggestions and some other editing, a draft was submitted to my thesis committee on October 1, 2009. The process sounds simple now, but each stage had its own unique difficulties.
The overarching difficulty was and is novelty; I have never attempted a project on such a scale before. Although I have written a previous article “United States, Japan, and Pearl Harbor,” it did not undergo the level of editing and rewriting that my thesis has and will continue to undergo before I complete it. The constructive criticism I have received has improved the work, and I am indebted to my friends and my thesis advisor for their assistance. In addition to novelty, starting was also difficult. Not in the sense that I did not know where and how to begin, or I did not have a general direction, but I lacked a clear and interesting path connecting the topics I wanted to discuss. Hopefully, the Committee draft has solved that problem. I will know by next Friday night. I knew what I wanted to discussing in my thesis by the time I completed the conference paper, which was probably one of the reasons my thesis advisor suggested I participate in the conference.
The next difficulty was constructing an argument. Fortunately, the aftermath of Pearl Harbor provided ample historiography to analyze. At the center of the historiographical debate was whether the Navy and the United States government treated, the officer in command of the Pacific Fleet on December 7, 1941, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, unjustly. Seeking an answer to whether Kimmel was unjustly treated, historians have mined the testimony, exhibits, and conclusions of the nine official investigations into the attack, as well as other sources. Based on that analysis, there are those who assert that Kimmel as Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet could have done more with the resources available to him. Therefore, relief and retirement at the rank of Rear Admiral was fair. Furthermore, posthumous advancement on the retirement list is unwarranted. Conversely, there are others who maintain that Kimmel was made a scapegoat and unjustly punished. Therefore, to correct the injustice of the Roberts Commission charge of dereliction of duty; they argue that Kimmel should be advanced on the retirement list to the rank of Admiral under the Officer Personnel Act of 1947.
It seemed simple enough; all I had to do was determine what aspects of each argument failed to explain what happened in the in the aftermath of the attack and then offer an argument that was in between the two extremes. So, borrowing the main concept of Richard Godbeer’s Sexual Revolution in Early America that contemporary knowledge and belief must be set aside in order to understand historical events in their proper context, I found that the argument that Kimmel could have done more with the resources available to him relied on such contemporary knowledge. However, explaining that failing was extremely difficult and led to the construction of the most difficult paragraph to write. I hope the paragraph clearly explains the concept.
I am nearing the end of the process and the well is running dry. I do not know how much more rewriting I can do. I will find out how much rewriting I will have to do next Friday afternoon. My thesis is at the point where there is not much more I can do with it. I am certain it can be improved, but I am not sure how. Now every time I reread a paragraph or a section with the idea of making some changes, I leave it alone. Is it because once on the page is good, or am I just tired and running out of ideas? I do not know which is probably why there it is a thesis committee in the first place. Two sets of fresh eyes and one set that is familiar with the work (my thesis advisor) will help in its improvement.
I chose to write a thesis as part of my masters degree program because I wanted to learn more about the process of writing history. It has taught me that there is a time in every writing project when the author simply runs of steam and that is when the writing process truly ends.
Last weekend while working on a particularly important paper, Office 2007 spell check stopped working. After repairing and reinstalling Word 2007, and still not solving the problem. I search for a solution and found the following:
1. Go to start menu|Run
2. Click OK, then the following will appear
3. Backup the registry: file|export
Exported to a folder that is easy to locate and save backup with the date in the file name
4. Make your way down until you see the following at the bottom of the window:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\SharedTools\
ProofingTools\1.0\Override\en-US
5. There should be at least two files in the folder in addition to the default shown. Delete all files except the default, which cannot be deleted
Thankfully, this has never happened to me. What kind of a system is it when high-school teachers have to take gifts they received to a lab for forensic analysis before they can accept them?
Lenski’s experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists, notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events,” he says. “That’s just what creationists say can’t happen.”
Ben is quoted in the Expelled Leader’s Guide stating the following “In today’s world, at least in America, an Einstein, or a Newton, or a Galileo would probably not be allowed to receive grants to study or to publish his research” (2). The assertion that the work of these scientists would be suppressed in today’s world, for Europe has not embraced Intelligent Design either, takes their achievements out of context and distorts their scientific significance. Someone as intelligent as Albert Einstein could probably publish at least three scientific papers while holding down a job, which is what Einstein did in 1905. According to Stephen Hawking in his book, The Universe in a Nutshell, Einstein held a minor position at the Swiss patent office and during that time “he wrote three papers that both established him as one of the world’s leading scientists and started two conceptual revolutions, revolutions that changed our understanding of time, space, and reality itself.” That suggests that Einstein demonstrated the kind of independence and initiative that American society rewards. However, Hawking makes clear that by 1921 the Theory of Relativity was considered too controversial and was not completely accepted by the scientific community, and now it is completely accepted by the scientific community. Additionally, the predictions of the Theory of Relativity “have been verified in countless applications.” Alas, the same cannot be said for Intelligent Design, but then, it is not a scientific theory.
As for anyone achieving anything comparable to what Isaac Newton achieved, the first physicist that comes to mind is Stephen Hawking. He, like Newton, is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Newton was elected to the position in 1669 and his Principia Mathematica was published in 1687. Thus, he continued to publish scientific work while he held that position. The Principia Mathematica is probably the single most important work ever in the physical sciences. As Newton said, “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be.” That statement does not support irreducible complexity; it merely draws a distinction between scientific physics and metaphysics, which is in line with the principle of economy. An intelligent designer is not part of the Theory of Gravity, for his actions cannot be observed. Therefore, they should not be part of any scientific theory of the universe. Similarly, in A Brief History of Time, Hawking also adhered to the principle of economy, for he argued that any actions taken by God before the big bang (the beginning of the universe) would have no observable consequences, thus they should not be part of any model of the universe.
Galileo was only arrested after the Catholic Church bent over backwards not to. According to James Burke in his series The Day the Universe Changed in the program “Infinitely Reasonable,” the view of the universe was based on Aristotle’s 2000 year-old observations which placed the earth at the center of the universe, and the Moon, the sun, the planets, and the stars in orbit around the earth. It was a kind of straightforward as he saw it view. Later, Claudius Ptolemy constructed a complete cosmological model about 1210.
The above model was predominant for well over 400 years then in the 1500s, to correct problems with the calendar; a Polish priest Nicholas Copernicus examined the heavens at the request of the Catholic Church. Copernicus discovered that a sun centered system agreed with his observations. Thus, the earth became a moving planet rather than the stationary center of the universe. Copernicus’s manuscript was not published until 1543 after his death. His Heliocentric Theory could have upset the prevailing Aristotelian view of the universe had it been taken seriously. However from the Church’s point of view, the Copernican Theory was a brilliantly convenient mathematical fiction, for everyone knew that the heavens really did behave the way Aristotle and the Bible had predicted.
Nearly a century passed before the theory was taken seriously. Then two astronomers Kepler and Galileo publicly supported the theory. Kepler proved the accuracy of the Copernican Theory. Additionally, Kepler found the planets were not moving in circular, but in elliptical orbits around the sun. Galileo’s observations provided further proof that the planets did move away the Copernican Theory predicted. Moreover, Galileo observed that Jupiter had moons in orbit around it, our moon had mountains like the Earth, and the Sun had spots. In 1632, Galileo published A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. In it, he defended the Copernican Theory, and argued for the separation of science from the Church. He was arrested and the Copernican Theory was band, but only after Galileo refused to compromise.
Set in the proper context the significance of their work is clear, and so is the importance of publication of findings to the process of discovery. From Ptolemy to Einstein and Einstein to Hawking, each has verified, modified, or disproved the work of his predecessors that is the process of the scientific method. The problem with Intelligent Design is that it makes no verifiable predictions that can be tested by experiment. To claim that the work of the supporters of Intelligent Design is being suppressed like the work of Galileo misrepresents Galileo’s work. The fundamental difference between the work of Galileo and the claims of the supporters of Intelligent Design is that Galileo had evidence that verified the Copernican Theory and disproved the Ptolemaic Theory.
The supporters of Intelligent Design have found no evidence that disproves the Theory of Evolution. Expelled Exposed answers the film’s claims of suppression almost point for point, the fact is that Intelligent Design as produced no research to suppress, and the claim that researchers are being dismissed from their positions because of their support for Intelligent Design is also refuted. In fact, Expelled Exposed presents a compelling argument that each situation was distorted to fit the story line of the film. Additionally, supporters like the Discovery Institute produced a list of scientists that claim to have doubts about Evolutionary Theory. However, as the video below demonstrates the claim is dubious. List of Scientists Rejecting Evolution- Do they really?
The Discovery Institute boasts that over 700 scientists “are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.” Like Einstein’s reply to a book titled 100 Authors against Einstein, written after the Nazis took power in Germany, ” Why 100? If I were wrong, one would have been enough.” I ask why 700 scientists? If Evolutionary Theory were wrong one would be enough.
Does the writing process end? Is an author ever really satisfied with the end product of all his labor, or is that product just what could be produced in the time available? I started researching my masters thesis on the aftermath of Pearl Harbor in May 2008. I thought it would take no more than six months to research and write, but I just submitted my Committee draft eight days ago. So much for researching and writing in six months, and my thesis committee, which consists of three history professors from Millersville University, will most likely require that more editing be done before the final draft will be accepted by the University. When will it end?
I am nearing the end of the process and the well is running dry. I do not know how much more rewriting I can do. I will find out how much rewriting I will have to do next Friday afternoon. My thesis is at the point where there is not much more I can do with it. I am certain it can be improved, but I am not sure how. Now every time I reread a paragraph or a section with the idea of making some changes, I leave it alone. Is it because once on the page is good, or am I just tired and running out of ideas? I do not know which is probably why there it is a thesis committee in the first place. Two sets of fresh eyes and one set that is familiar with the work (my thesis advisor) will help in its improvement.
John Keegan
From WebProNews: Who Owns Blog Comments?
June 17, 2008 · Leave a Comment
An interesting question, Jason Lee Miller has some thoughts.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Intellectual Property
Tagged: Blog Comments, Intellectual Property, Jason Lee Miller, Ownership, WebProNews