Archival Research

I've decided to do my second research paper on Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla and their rivalry between electricity. I chose this topic mainly because my dad said it would be really interesting. You see, my dad is a huge history buff, unlike myself. So I called upon him for help and guidance on this topic. He gave me a lot of good background information and it was between this and the Space Race. So, I chose this instead because it was either having a topic on science and history or just history. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this yet or what argument I'm going to have or really anything about the paper yet. Once I start the research, hopefully something will just pop up and I'll have a steady argument for my paper.

Artifacts

So, I wasn't in class Monday and didn't know about bringing artifacts to class. So I'm just going to talk about the pictures and documents shown in class from the video. These were shown from the early 1920's (I think. I can't really remember honestly). It was about electricity being brought into a home where electricity wasn't popular and not many people had. This was important because the men in the family were trying to better their lives and make it easier to survive. I'm honestly not really sure what kind of argument can be made about this because I'm not really sure how to do that quite yet. But this was a big step in the 1920's for this particular family, especially since the parts that were needed weren't around and the father had to find other ways of creating these parts. It was somewhat interesting to listen to, but history really isn't my thing so I think I'm really going to have a hard time with this paper. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what I actually do my paper on.

TED

I find the TED website to be very intriguing and really funny and even enlightening in some ways. After reading about the worksheet in class, though, not everyone thinks the same way as I do. Which is completely okay, of course! But I really do not agree with what they are saying about it. They are saying that TED is commercializing products and ideas and making them not as genuine as the speakers claim the ideas are. Yet, how are else are you going to get ideas out there if you don't have a big audience and the internet to help? Honestly, you really can't. And also, ideas are spread everywhere to everyone. For new products to come about, you need to communicate with the people around you and really get ideas out in the open. You know Apple didn't come about from keeping ideas secret. They had to get together and communicate how to effectively market their ideas. I don't see TED as a bad idea. I really like the idea of conventions held to produce ideas and spread wisdom and enlightenment upon others. It's really neat, actually.