4A -(Monday, December 3, 2012
The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com
4A - Monday, December 3, 2012 The Michigan Daily - michigandailycom
Edited and managed by students at
the University of Michigan since 1890.
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Ann Arbor, MI 48109
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TIMOTHY RABB
JOSEPH LICHTERMAN and ADRIENNE ROBERTS ANDREW WEINER
EDITOR IN CHIEF EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS MANAGING EDITOR
Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily's editorial board.
All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.
FROM TE DAILY
Pure tourism
State should capitalize on natural resources
Michigan is well known for unique Great Lakes geography
and the abundance of outdoor activities that come with
being encircled by such a large expanse of fresh water.
This November, Gov. Rick Snyder has been reviewing a report aimed
at diversifying and expanding Michigan's "trails, outdoor adventure
sports, nature observation, eco-tourism, motorized and non-motor-
ized water sports, cultural events and festivals." The expansion of
environmental and seasonal tourism is fairly inexpensive to advocate
and will improve Michigan's economy. Our state should capitalize
on its natural resources and existing parks and trails to promote and
further reap the benefits of Michigan's tourism industry.
NOTABLE QUOTABLE
I just got to Bahrain! OMG can I live here
please? Prettiest place on earth."
- Kim Kardashian tweeted on Saturday after arriving in Bahrain to promote Millions of Milkshakes,
a chain restaurant. Protests erupted in the capital, Manama, after Kardashiant's arrival.
Not so secret
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In light of the new report, Michigan's land
trails - which are necessary for transport-
ing non-motorized water vehicles - could
be expanded to become the most extensive
trails in the country. While Michigan already
boasts many miles of trails for transporting
non-motorized boats, the expansion could
make Michigan a top tourist destination for
many who spend the summer months specifi-
cally seeking these tracks and extensive parks.
Tourists who travel the country for safe and
easy canoeing and kayaking destinations would
have a special interest in Michigan. In.this way,
the proposed report outlines an underdevel-
oped market. With new tourists coming for the
boating and trails in Michigan, profits would
stay local.
Furthermore, the proposed funding for the
growth of the state parks in the report has the
possibility to revitalize big cities like Detroit.
With the creation of four to five new "signa-
ture" parks, cities around the state would have
focal points and must-see destinations, further
helping to bring in more tourism. The report
uses Chicago's Millennium Park and Provi-
dence, Rhode Island's WaterFire Park as exam-
ples for similar urban expansion and economic
opportunity to mimic in Detroit and elsewhere
in Michigan. With special tourist destinations
that offer family fun and a unique experience,
these sites could bring much needed business
traffic to Michigan's cities.
Since parks, trails and other nature obser-
vation sites are permanent fixtures in the
Michigan landscape, they present a perfect
opportunity for long-lasting economic prosper-
ity. The Pure Michigan advertising campaign
has already been successful in bringing in $605
million for the state since its inception in 2006.
With the suggested improvements, Pure Mich-
igan would have even more to advertise about
despite its budget cuts. The profit can only con-
tinue to grow as Michigan expands its parks
and recreational areas.
This proposal helps Michigan's economy
and preserves the state's natural resources and
beauty. By expanding upon parks and natural
areas, the project preserves habitats for Michi-
gan's extensive biodiversity. More specifically,
preserved land means cleaner water and a
healthier environment for Michigan's residents
and the entire Great Lakes region. The proposal
should pass to promote the environment and
under-developed market.
We've all done it.
In the middle of class,
you receive a text mes-
sage. You don't
want to be seen
reading your
phone when
you're supposed
to be listening
attentively, so
you slide it out
of your pocket DANIEL
slowly, subtly.
Keeping the CHARDELL
phone at your
hip, below the
shadows of the desk, you one-hand-
edly type your reply and send it off.
Your eyes are lowered, but you keep
your head up the whole time to give
the impression that you're listening.
Or this: as lecture winds down,
you feel the urge to check Face-
book. Most of your friends are in
class, so there's probably noth-
ing too exciting happening online
at the moment. But still, you can't
resist. Perhaps you're sitting in the
front of the auditorium, so you look
up every so often at your lecturer as
you comment on your friend's sta-
tus - that way it looks like you're
simply taking notes.
It's easy to get away with, right?
Wrong.
Before you get upset with me for
exposing these secret rituals of ours,
let me tell you something: they're
not so secret. We're not as clever as
we think. If you're giving a lecture,
or if you're leading a discussion, it's
extremely easy to distinguish the
focused student from the texting
student. One is an alert student who
engages class material. The other,
is a dead-in-the-eyes student who
inexplicably keeps his/her eyes
downturned for minutes on end.
Students who text or use Face-
book during class give themselves
away. In the poker sense of the
word, they have certain "tells."
The most obvious tell is this: a stu-
dent reads something hilarious on
Facebook, so he reflexively smiles.
Unless he happened to smile at the
exact moment that his professor
cracked a joke, the student's out-of-
the-blue smile is a telltale giveaway
of the,"I'm obviously on Facebook"
syndrome. This can be especially
awkward if the subject of the lec-
ture is far from funny.
I'm not telling you this so that
you can devise new, better, more
self-aware strategies to get away
with texting or using Facebook in
class. Instead, I'm telling you this
because it's a losing habit for every-
one: you don't learn, you distract
your classmates, you look irrespon-
sible in the eyes of your instructors,
and you insult their teaching. That
is the brutal truth.
The best learning environments
that I've experienced are ones that
are distraction-free and where
everyone is not only encouraged,
but excited to participate. In this
regard, of course, much relies on
the quality of instruction: students
will have less motivation to seek out
distractions if they find themselves
absorbed in the course material.
I'm but a lowly undergraduate, yet
I humbly remind any professors or
graduate student instructors that
it's your responsibility to teach us
with passion and to expectthe most
of us.
The classroom
is affected by
our addiction to
technology.
But this doesn't mean that stu-
dents are off the hook, either.
After all, whether you text your
friends or check your Facebook is
ultimately your choice to make. So
consider this a friendly message
from a concerned peer.
I know it's tempting to abuse the
many electronic distractions at our
fingertips. Like I said, we've all done
it. But, as one of my professors once
put it, our inclination to habitually
- even involuntarily - check our
phones or Facebook pages is fright-
eningly evocative of addiction.
Addiction is defined as insur-
mountable dependence on a cer-
tain substance or activity. If you
want to prove that you're not an
addict to these social technologies,
refrain from using them when you
know you shouldn't be: ina univer-
sity classroom.
-Daniel Chardell can be
reached at chardell@umich.edu
BARRY BELMONT I|VIEWPOINT
Keep science secular
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
Kaan Avdan, Sharik Bashir, Barry Belmont, Eli Cahan, Jesse Klein, Melanie Kruvelis,
Patrick Maillet, Jasmine McNenny, Harsha Nahata, Timothy Rabb, Adrienne Roberts,
Vanessa Rychlinski, Paul Sherman, Sarah Skaluba, Michael Spaeth, Gus Turner, Derek Wolfe
BAYAN FOUNAS I VIEWPOINT
Unfounded claims
4
A recent viewpoint in The Michigan Daily
("Israel acted in defense," 11/18/12) claimed
that Hamas initiated the recent violence
between the Gaza and Israel "without jus-
tifiable provocation." This claim, however,
is misleading and feeds University students
false information. According to Reuters on
Nov. 8, Israeli military forces crossed the
border into the Gaza Strip in an apparent
incursion, prompting retaliatory fire - at the
Israeli force, not into Israel - from the Popu-
lar Resistance Committees, a militant group
in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces returned
fire, killing a 12-year-old Palestinian boy in
the process. This incident ended a two-week
standstill in violence between the two parties.
On Nov. 14, Israel launched "Operation Pil-
lar of Defense," which resulted in the death of
170 Palestinians and the injury of 1,220 more,
most of whom were civilians. The people of
Gaza faced relentless bombardment from
the air and sea, with any semblance of calm
quickly interrupted by the buzz of a drone or
roar of an F16.
The viewpoint also states that Israel
withdrew from Gaza in 2005 with "hope
for peace," but IDF only repositioned their
forces on the periphery of Gaza. The block-
ade imposed on Gaza has been equally - if
not more - abusive and oppressive on Gazans
than the pre-2005 Israeli occupation there.
The Gaza Strip is one of the world's most
densely populated regions, with its 1.6 mil-
lion residents living in what has been deemed
the world's largest open-air prison.
Amnesty International reports that more
than 70 percent of Gazans depend on humani-
tarian aid for survival. They also report that
"Israeli authorities hindered or prevented hun-
dreds of patients from leaving Gaza to obtain
medical treatment," as well as workers and
students from pursuing their jobs and educa-
tion, respectively: And, as we now know from
a recent Ha'aretz report, food consumption
in Gaza has been restricted - by calculating a
minimum number of calories per person - so
as to keep Gazans on the brink of starvation.
The policy can be summed up by the following
quote from Dov Weisglass, an adviser to former
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: "The idea
is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to
make them die of hunger." Thus, the collective
punishment of the Palestinian people, in this
case via starvation, has been a part of Israel's
"defense" strategy, in clear violation of interna-
tional laws and covenants on human rights.
The viewpoint mentions the dropping of
warning leaflets in the Gaza Strip during
Operation Cast Lead in Dec. 2008, a three-
week Israeli offensive. But given the inescap-
ability of the besieged Gaza Strip, these leaflets
functioned more as death sentences than well-
intentioned warnings. The three-week assault
resulted in more than 1,400 Palestinians
killed and more than 5,300 wounded, as well
as more than 10 Israelis killed and more than
500 wounded. Of the 1,400 Palestinians killed,
more than 900 were civilians. The killing of
almost 1,000 civilians is not collateral damage
as the authors state - it is a massacre.
Israel's recent onslaught on Gaza's civil-
ian neighborhoods is part of a pattern that
reemerged again a few weeks ago during
Operation Pillar of Defense, the death toll
consisting mostly of Palestinian civilians.
This operation included a strike that killed
three generations of the same family, which
resulted in nine total fatalities, including four
children agedbetween land 7. The Dalou fam-
ily has no affiliation with any militant group,
yet Israel has yet to issue anything resembling
an apologyto any of the victims.
Moreover, a ceasefire was mediated last
Wednesday by Egypt to halt this recent escala-
tion, which Israel has repeatedly broken over
the week by shooting civilians near the border
fence for protesting. About 19 people have been
wounded and 20 year old Anwar Qudaih was
shot dead.
Israel cannot claim self-defense as long as
it occupies, annexes and destroys Palestinian
land, while collectively punishing an entire
population for resisting that occupation. This
punishment includes restrictions on movement
and essential goods, kidnapping and torture,
the destructionofhomes and theft ofresources.
As long as Israel's brutal occupation continues,
so too will the resistance from Palestinians,
until their genuine cries for freedom are heard
and recognized.
Bayan Founas is an LSA junior.
Sandra Harding and I wouldn't
get along. ,I suppose I've known
this for a while now, having fol-
lowed the professor's work on the
philosophy of science for a few
years without finding anything to
agree with her about. Still, I saw
her lecture last Tuesday, in which
she asked whether "real sciences"
had tobe secular, as something that
could bridge the separate worlds of
religion and science. "Of course sci-
entific methods must be secular," I
thought to myself. "Surely she will
agree." But I suppose you already
know how this story ends: Sandra
Harding and I didn't get along.
She began by claiming that
there's a certain unwarranted resis-
tance to. "indigenous knowledge
systems" - systems of knowledge
derived by local communities gen-
erally as part of a cosmology and
expressed through laws, oral tradi-
tions and rituals - by proponents of
"Western science." By discounting
these apparatuses of knowledge,
Western science does itself a dis-
service by disqualifying modes of
thinking and ways of understanding
to both itself as a methodology and
to the universe as a whole. Further-
more, Harding claims that these
indigenous knowledge systems have
allowed people to thrive and sur-
vive and accomplish great feats in
their lives and therefore should be
permitted entry into realms of sci-
ence as valid forms of reasoning. In
fact, she claims thatto do otherwise
is intolerant and prejudicial.
One of the main reasons Harding
gives for the existence of such oppo-
sition by "the West" - a term that's
more an abstract idea than a real
"thing" - is that the West has built
itself up for millennia by declaring
certain dichotomies between itself
and the "other" civilization. Such
binaries include freedom vs. bond-
age, progress vs. retreat, universal-
ity vs. particularity and reason vs.
dogma. Harding claims that what
underlies each of these choices is the
fundamental opposition of secular-
ism and religion, legitimized by the.
West's massive scientific enterprise.
If the sciences were to allow reli-
giously derived indigenous knowl-
edge systems into their ranks, the
West would be unable to justify their
exclusion anywhere else in its'infra-
structure. Hence, all of the progress
the West has made would be undone.'
Thus the reticence.
Or at least so far as Harding would
have us believe.
The actual reason is less romantic,
less conspiratorial than all of that.
These indigenous knowledge sys-
tems are usually just plain wrong. It's
actually quite a simple point Harding
herself not only neglected to address
in her lecture but also failed to
answer adequately when questioned
by the audience. When asked, "If
there aren't fairies in the garden, why
should scientists care that some cul-
ture believes and acts like there is?"
She retorted that we should accept
their worldview because "it works."
She then lamented the grammar of
the question, saying that it comes
from a Protestant Christian type
of secularism embedded in notions
such as "beliefs" which have no bear-
ing on other cultures, going so far
as to say that indigenous knowledge
systems "are not interested in the
truth or falsity of their beliefs."
But that fallacy obviates any pos-
sible scientific discussion. Scientific
methods are about establishing the
truth or falsity of claims about the
universe using evidence and logic
to attain these ends. If a knowledge
system has no concern for whether
or not what it says is true, I suppose
that's allwell and good, but it doesn't
qualify as science. It cannot. It is for
this reason that religious knowledge
was excluded from scientific meth-
ods so very long ago, as it is neither
held up by evidence nor held down
by the lack of it. The truth or fal-
sity of a religious or spiritual tenet
is generally not near the top of the
"List of Things Religious or Spiri-
tual People Care About." Usually,
these belief systems are focused on
ritual, community and understand-
ing oneself and one's place in the
cosmos, and whether any of these
religious beliefs are true or false is
beside the point to a believer.
To a scientist, however, the truth
of a claim is all that matters. The
way the world is matters. Using the
best tools we'can - evidence, reason,
logic, deduction and experimenta-
tion - we're able to paint finer and
finer pictures of our cosmos. Our
cosmic picture's colors get more
accurate, the positions of all the facts
more precise, the canvas expanded
nearer to its proper proportions. That
someone else may draw a pretty pic-
ture of the same universe is nice and
wonderful and spectacular and can
be deeply moving to both themselves
and others - it can be many things,
but "science" isn't one of them.
This isn't to say that we can't
learn from others' new techniques
or ways to visualize our existence,
but rather to declare that science
can only be concerned with giv-
ing us the most correct picture it
can, not the prettiest, not the most
meaningful. The world we live in is
the way it is, and it's the job of sci-
entists to find that out as best they
can. If there aren't actually any fair-
ies in the garden, then there are no
grounds to include them in science's
cosmic canvas, no matter how much
we may wish they were real.
Barry Belmont is an
Engineering graduate student.
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