Analysis of Articles

For my final blog, I will be conducting a rhetorical analysis of my previous few journal blogs using Swale's Genre Model as a reference. Here we go.

For the past few weeks, I have been reading academic articles from my major, courtesy of Civil Engineering, The Magazine for the American Society of Engineers, and have tried to convert the technical data of the article in to a form that my target audience (you fine readers) can comprehend and appreciate.

In the first paragraph of my blogs, I would establish a territory and make some topic generalizations. I would usually put in what or where the building was or where it was located, and then continue to give some background information and imagry to get my readers familiar with the building before proceeding to the meat of the article. Since the buildings were typically large scale construction projects, I would typically provide dimentsions or illustrations to compare the buildings size to similar or regocnizable structures instead of dwelving on how many meters talll or thousands of cubic yards of concrete were in the building, because that is not a unit of measure the average citizen is familiar with. I always included the monetary value of the building or the project, so that the reader would understand and visualize how vast a project it was due to its price tag.

The second paragraph or so would be comprised of establishing a niche, or simply continue to portray the development of the building project in the article in a more in depth and technical detail since hopefully the reader was getting more and more exposure to the project. Major design features of a slightly more technical nature were discussed and portratyed, as well as possible design flaws that were incorporated into the design of the building.

I would then continue for the rest of the article to occuy this niche, and either build upon the technical data I had discussed in the previous few paragraphs, or continue onwards with new points and build upon them as I went. I tried to focus on the purpose of my article, which was to discuss design and construction methods used on the project without getting too involved in the technical details. I tened to cover many topics that are in the popular media, such as sustainable energy and effiecent or innovative building design to keep the audience intrigued and give them a slight base on which they could use to comprehend the reading. I felt this to be a more effective method of discussion than to simply list the different types of varous new widgets and how they are being made, being that the audience would not have a clue or reference point as to what I was talking about.

Overall, I feel that I was able to clearly, and effectively discuss technical building details and methods with my intended audience as was my goal with this blogging assignment, and hope that they took a little information away from this that perhaps can help them in the future.

Out with the Old, In with the New

Out with the Old, In with the New...who knew that this old catch phrase could be utalized in the design of a historic art and music showroom in Turkey. The building designers wanted to keep the classic stone facade and perimeter steel support, while entirely gutting the interior of the building.

  

 Doing this ment designing an interior support structure that both held together the outside and provided suppor to the new floors. The designers, GAD Architecture, utalized hollow steel tubes filled with concrete to provide the sole support for the building and overhead floors.

 The tubes are all angled at varying angles to provide a more aesthetic appeal and increased earthquake protection since the building is located in an area that is prone to severe siesmic activity. The angle of the tubes provides a substantial increase in horizontal and vibaratory deformation, that typically causes buildings to collapse during earthquakes.

  

 These ingenuous columns serve as not only a structural milestone, but as an example of how to utalize structural design to enhance the artistic appeal and atmosphere of a client's building, which is typically the goal of any design team.

Onions to the Rescue!

Gills Onions, the largest onion processor in the US was the focus article of the October 2010 issue of Civil Engineering Magazine. They are the only facility in the world who use anarobic digestion to convert onion water into methane, which is then used to power fuel cells.

The company processes, cuts, and peels roughly one million pounds of onions per day, thus leaving mountains of waste material. The company decided to use the waste to fuel their new $9.5 million Advanced Energy Recovery System (AERS) to convert that waste into useable energy. They have determined that disposing of 200,000 lbs of waste a day was costing the company $400,000 per year and now they are being used to pay off the system in only six years.

The process starts by collecting the onion peels and waste and placing them in a tank to be juiced. Lime is added to increase juice yield and the waste material is ground into pulp and then run through strainers to extract the juice. The juicing process generates roughly 20,000 galons of onion juice per day that is then poured into large equilazation tanks which serves as a preliminary fermenter or acidifier to increase the bolatile fatty acids and decrease the pH of the juice.

 When the juice is acified, it yields a higher methane production. The juice is then allowed to ferment in a reactor which collects the escaping gas and transports it to bio-fuel cells that are used to provide power to the facility and reduce power costs.

All in all this is a prime example of how ingenuity can produce monetary results in a green, energy effiecent way.

Considered the largest privately funded construction in the United States, the CityCenter Development in Las Vegas, Nevada, was designed by some of the worlds most renowned architects and engineers. This new "city within a city" has also scored highly with environmental accreditation programs such as the LEED system.


Built in under 4 years, this project covered nearly 18 million square feet and cost roughly $8.5 billion dollars. The project was funded by MGM Resorts International. Located on a 67-acre site bordering the Bellagio, Monte Carlo, and Las Vegas Boulevard, it is the prime strip of real estate on the Vegas Strip and will provide nearly 12,000 new jobs for the city.

The main portion of LEED credentials were earned for this project due to the fact that when the existing building on the site, the Boardwalk Hotel and Casino was demolished, 80% of the materials from the earlier building were either recycled for the new project or sent elsewhere for reuse.

Another large factor in its environmental sustainability included an 8.5 MW natural gas power plant that was built on site to provide 10% of the required energy and 100% of the heated water for the building.

Overall, this building is a colossus of building construction and the utilization of environmentally friendly technologies on large scale construction projects. The CityCenter will continue to be an engineering and environmental master achievement.

Stairway to Heaven....Not Just a Great Song.

In an article featured in the March 2010 edition of Civil Engineering, The Magazine for the American Society of Engineers, they had a center piece on the structural design and details of one of worlds tallest skyscrapers, the Burj Khalifa located in Dubai. This tower is 2,717 ft high, which is nearly twice the height of the Empire State Building. It was built for mainly residential and office use, but it also contains several retail stores and a Giorgio Armani hotel.

The buildings architectural inspiration is based on an organic form with triaxial geometry and spiraling growth. It also draws heavily from traditional Islamic forms to enrich the towers design and to provide a reference to the cultural history of the surrounding region.

The building is unique in the sense that it was designed using a Y shaped building footprint, that causes the building to "spiral" the higher the building progresses. This spiraling motion as well as the Y shape has multiple advantages structurally as well as aesthetically.

The Y shape allows for additional structural security as well as support. Since the wind loads at such a height can be difficult to counter, this Y shape allows for additional wind deflection and adds an additional safety layer of reinforcement for the structure.

The building was designed and developed using nearly 73,500 different design models on the ETABS v. 8.4 design program which utilizes 3D models to consisting mostly of reinforced concrete walls as supports. The buildings foundation consists of a solid reinforced concrete pad that is 12.5 feet deep and utilizes nearly 12,500 cubic meters of concrete (more than 3 Death Valley's filled with concrete).

This project stands as a masterpiece of concrete construction in both size and innovation and is justifiably the centerpiece of a $20 billion dollar development effort.

Wiki Wizard

I apologize this is late but for some reason my original blog post I submitted last night did not make it to my blog when I checked it this morning. Not sure how it happened, but hopefully it finds its way through cyberspace back home. Until then, here is a replacement blog about what I was talking about last night. Sorry for the delay, but hope you enjoy.

 Last night, I was slightly bored, and after some blog reading, realized I had not posted a comment on the Keen-Wales debate. That gave me an excuse to burn an hour and watch the debate again to refresh on what had been previously discussed in class and after watching it, I got to thinking about the points that Andrew Keen made against sites such as Wikipedia that allow any user to post articles or just throw in their 2 cents.

Although I do agree with him slightly that there needs to be some disgression with simply allowing any Tom, Dick, or Harry to post or alter any article they please, I feel that people are smart enought to know what they are getting into and to check their sources if something they read on Wikipedia seems a little fishy.

 Even talkshow host Stephen Colbert poked fun at this point, when he encouraged his viewers to edit Wikipedia to claim that the African elephant population has tripled in the past six months.

On the whole, I feel Wikipedia is a good source of information that is fast and effiecent as calling a friend to ask them a question about a topic.....but it never hurts to check that your friend is telling you facts and not fibs.

On a lighter note, I found it slightly ironic that Andrew Keen has his own article on Wikipedia....as seen below.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Keen

......well done Mr. Wales.

Remember, Remember the 5th of November.

With the discussion of smart mobs, I find myself thinking about their presence in society today. From high gas prices to email/letter writing campaigns, smart mobs utilize technology to send mass communication to assemble and achieve their goals. Although they do not have a true leader, it only takes one person or action to stir the group into action and set the wheels rolling.

One of my favorite examples is in the movie V for Vendetta, where V, stirs the population of England into action a year in advance of their final mob assembly. Although he sets actions in motion, he truly does not control the group after that first initial push in the right direction.

 The citizens of London grow more and more agitated by the government and finally meet at the prearranged point a year later without any input from V himself. Although it is up for debate I think the assembly at the end of the movie is a prime example of a smart mob because people just start showing up, and then their friends catch on and their friends catch on, and before you know it, there is an enormous crowd all with white masks filling the screen.

Needless to say, they achieved their objective through forming ideas quickly, high connectivity, and mass communication and internal coordination without much if any input from the originator of the movement......

..........because he was busy blowing up parliment with a subway car.

Power to the people.

Its Not How You Say, Its What You Say It.......Or Something Like That

After reading Carolyn Miller's essay, "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing," I really began thinking about the importance of presentation and writing skills in the working world outside of the classroom.

As an engineer, presentation is everything when it comes to putting your work on the market for potential clients to buy into. It is even more important when you are presenting your preliminary design for a client's approval as I recently learned in my Capstone Design Class.

After the many hours of design and Auto CAD work, I had to put together a proposal to sell my design idea to a perspective "client" who had hired me for the job. I had to show all the features that were requested and if necessary explain why I did not include some due to technical reasons.

The most important portion of the presentation was the oral section, because when you are presenting in front of a live audience, there is no spell check, word count, or edit-undo ability you can call upon when you make a mistake like these people did......

The How to Write a How To

Currently I have been struggling with creating a set of instructions to teach  someone how to perform a specific task that they do not currently know how to do. This has been quite a challenge, first off by thinking of some function that is original, yet not too complex to perform, and secondly by putting the document together in a concise fashion so as not to have the reader spinning in circles.

 Being an engineer, I tend to lean towards the spinning in circles mode when it comes to writing technical "how to" data. I find it curious how easy it seems to follow a given set of directions without thinking about how difficult it probably was to create them in the first place.

After my first draft, I found that as hard as I tried, I still managed to fill the instructions with as much technical details to make it into a textbook. My girlfriend can attest to this as she was my first subject to not succeed in understanding the procedure, and even after 25 minutes of explaining, I dove too deep into "civil world" as she tends to call it.

This was both frustrating and positive advice, because I realized I had to address a specific audience for the task and not the entire world......simple, I wrote it for younger engineers whom my techno babble would at least make some sense in theoretical terms. To further challenge myself I also chose to address it to persons in the field who would most likely benefit having a quick summary guide to the topic.

After reducing many syllables and inserting a good many pictures, I was finially satisfied that I had the proper balance of technical background and ease of use found in the common instructions....although I doubt that anyone will ever perform a slump test in their free time or unless they are sweathing on the side of the road.

All this leaves me wondering how on earth those poor souls at LEGO design their complicated instructions to put the thousands of colored blocks together to make a suitable car, tank or airplane....for kids, using pictures only. My hat is off to them.


I mean seriously, how do you design a instructions guide for this......

Non-Instructive Instructions and Burning iPods

So my computer crashed last week, and I lost all my iTunes. Great. Even better is the fact that when I try to plug my iPod into my computer to charge it, the iTunes tries to sync my iPod, further erasing any music I had left on the device itself. Luckily I was able to pull the plug before I lost any music. After struggling for over an hour with various online "do-it-yourself" websites telling my various ways to replace my lost songs on my computer with the ones on my iPod, I realized just how true todays lecture was on the value of writing instructions.

Many of the sites I visited were for a much more technically adept person than myself, meaning they could most likely recode their iPod or hack into it. This experience gave me some insight to being a secondary audience and having to figure out what the primary audience already knows in order to complete the task. I obviously had to understand a great deal of technical computer jargon or have various programs at my disposal to complete the task, and the knowledge of how to utalize them without setting my pc on fire. Luckily for me, I finially stumbled across a site that had simple instructions at a level that I could comprehend and follow. Thank goodness someone managed to put together a set of steps with a target audience, me, in mind. Who knew a day in lecture could be related to a discombobulation of events that thankfully resulted in me getting my Satchmo back in one piece.

BYAHHHH!!!! - A Rhetorical Situation

While Reading "A Rhetorical Situation" by Lloyd Blitzer, I couldnt help but laughing at a portion of text in the first few pages of his essay. He mentions the fact that "each reader probably can recall a specific time and place when there was an opportunity to speak on some urgent matter, and after the opportunity was gone he created in private thought the speech he should have uttered earlier in the situation." When I read this I couldnt help but point out that there have been many times in history that the reader had probibially wished he had not said something when he did, and as a result it formed a negative rhetoric that was used against him either deliberately or unintentionally.

The best example I recalled was during the 2004 Democratic Presidential Nomination, when Howard Dean was speaking at a rally about the future of his campaign and in a moment of over-enthusiasm, he uttered a gutteral "BYAHHH!!!!" on live television. This 30 second clip served as the end of his campaign as the audience simply could not take him seriously after the endless press storm surrounding the event. He eventually lost the nomination, but gratefully provided a terrific example of rhetorical backfiring. Blitzer hit the nail on the head when he stated that  "every audience at any moment is capable of being changed in some way by speech," and it truely does occur wither intentional or not on the speakers part.

Aristotle's Riddle of Rhetoric

Although I was told reading Aristotle's Rhetoric was as confusing as reading it in the original Attic Greek, I found it to be no more difficult than any other really technical writing I have encountered. Aristotle made some very good points about rhetoric and its uses in the political, forensic, and ceremonial contexts. He also made a pretty observation that all men use rhetoric to discuss statements, maintain them, and defend or attack them when provoked.

I found it pretty funny that he referenced a court in Areopagus that did not allow talk pertaining to "non-essentials," namely things that would cause a judge to make a ruling on his emotions as opposed to facts. Its slightly ironic that the ancient Greeks foresaw this problem, because today it seems that is the main tool that lawyers use to persuade juries to give out the verdicts they desire for their clients. Aristotle was point on when he said that "it is of great moment that well-drawn laws should themselves define all the points they possibly can and leave as few as many to be to the decision of the judges." I fully agree with this statement, due to the fact today, even laws as explicitly defined as murder can be twisted and altered in a courtroom to be portrayed as something it is not, or into something less than it appears to the normal viewer.

Almost borrowing from the phrase "the pen is mightier than the sword," Aristotle put in a very witty comment on how he thinks it is absurd that a man should be ashamed of being unable to defend himself physically, but not to be ashamed if he cannot defend himself with speach and reason. He even points out that the ability to use rational speech is one of the things that defines us as humans as opposed to being just another animal in the food chain. I find it a little ironic that Aristotle's puple Alexander the Great, did not seem to heed the words of his tutor, and proceeded to conquer nearly the entire known world.

Overall the reading went by pretty well with my cup of morning coffee. I enjoyed listening to and contemplating the thoughts of a man who has been studied and critiqued since before the time of Christ. It stuns me to think of how many other generations of men have read his works and have been spurred to think more about the uses of rhetoric and language as a form of offensive and defensive prose, instead of merely shooting the breeze.