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      <title>Assignment 1 | Alexander McWilliams by </title>
      <link>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3</link>
      <description>Pseudoscience and Paranormal | Alexander McWilliams</description>
      <language>en-us</language>
      <pubDate>2020-09-06 16:34:03 UTC</pubDate>
      <lastBuildDate>2020-09-12 18:36:36 UTC</lastBuildDate>
      <webMaster>hello@padlet.com</webMaster>
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         <title>Post #1 Title: Assignment 1</title>
         <author>alexander_mcwilliams</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723477936</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div>Made by Alexander McWilliams, working individually </div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="" />
         <pubDate>2020-09-06 16:35:15 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723477936</guid>
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         <title>Post #2 Red Flag: Confirmation Bias</title>
         <author>alexander_mcwilliams</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723478018</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div><strong>Definition: </strong><br>Confirmation Bias is essentially when someone is presented with evidence that supports their view, however if evidence that is either given or created by them that disproves their belief is presented to the person then they are inclined to not believe the opposing evidence.<br><br><strong>Connection:<br></strong>Within this video is a small excerpt from the documentary named Behind the Curve that displays the confirmation bias that the Flat Earth believers have where they spend massive amounts of funds to prove that they are right, yet they create evidence themselves that disproves their belief but decide it's just a failed experiment and continue onto another experiment.  No matter the amount of times they do it, they come up with theories of methods they can use to prove their belief, but never actually prove their false belief. <br><br>And its connection from there is clear. These people, blinded by a simple explanation for their disbelief that the horizon is bent, their actions to try and prove their point only make their fanaticism stronger every time they disprove themselves. </div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="https://youtu.be/7vrP8EplfP0" />
         <pubDate>2020-09-06 16:35:22 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723478018</guid>
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         <title>Post #3 Red Flag: Confusion of Causation and Correlation</title>
         <author>alexander_mcwilliams</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723482756</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div><strong>Definition:<br></strong>Causation and Correlation in its essence is mistaking a normal circumstance, such as playing video games, and believing that to be the cause of a bad trait, such as violence in teens or younger. The average person may be inclined to believe this if something they are going through is similar to a case relating to this red flag, or it has happened to them on occasion, but only notice it happening after or during when they are experiencing a moment with something like the moon, or the event of something making a loud noise.<br><br><strong>Connection:</strong><br>Featured in this newscast is one of the many examples of larger media corporation using the topic of <strong>video games cause violence </strong>for the spontaneous and heinous crime of a shooting in Virgina in 2007. Jack Thomson uses the moments he has on air to strengthen the argument that video games cause violence among teens, specifically using Counter Strike, a first person shooter, to practice their shooting skills in a virtual space. Yet even at that point in time, leading experts had debunked similar circumstance to not being the result of young playing violent video games.<br><br>This topic has always been a hot one for its perceived connection to shootings in common areas, especially by younger folk, yet its always been a false story to say the cause of such a heinous act was the result of the individual owning a video game that featured firearms or weaponry in general.</div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="https://youtu.be/9Uc06vevb_4" />
         <pubDate>2020-09-06 16:43:21 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723482756</guid>
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         <title>Post #4 Red Flag: Red Herrings</title>
         <author>alexander_mcwilliams</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723501332</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div><strong>Definition:</strong><br>Red Herrings are items of information meant to deceive and or mislead a person from the truth of the matter or run the opposing side in a monotonous roundabout to dissuade a debate to debunk. People who utilize and execute flawlessly of Red Herrings tend to gather a crowd to their size due to seemingly always win their altercations with those attempting to debunk them.<br><br><strong>Connection:<br></strong>Miles Power, a certified chemist, took a visit from his home of Britain to America, and during his visit he took a trip to Ground Zero to interview the activists and while doing his interviews, the people he spoke to, kept running Miles about in trying to explain their conspiracy theory or just backpedaling to try and catch him out. <br>And its connections to being a Red Herring-filled video is based solely on the individuals questioned deflecting with non-answers to try and mislead Miles from a straight answer, instead taking him on side-roads into alternative answers or falsehoods.</div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="https://youtu.be/nN3qUXJp7l0" />
         <pubDate>2020-09-06 17:14:33 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723501332</guid>
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         <title>Post #5 Red Flag: Proof by Verbosity</title>
         <author>alexander_mcwilliams</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723510032</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div><strong>Definition:</strong><br>The use of buzz words and scientific wording to promote or sell a product or point on a matter not approved by official sources. Often an individual will use smaller arguments to overwhelm the opposing party in a way to mislead or dissuade from the issue at hand.<br>Similar to a Red Herring, this one works with actual facts, or perceived, but are made up of smaller nothing-statements meant to confuse an audience and make it appear that they are winning a debate or argument.<br><br><strong>Connection:<br></strong>This video demonstrates(approx. 28mins in) <strong>Proof by Verbosity </strong>by displaying a method used by a current US President, a Gish Debate. Falwell and Gish argue over Evolution and Creation, where when it gets to Gish, he rambles out multiple different reasons and refutes against Evolution by disproving with remarks about the fault of being unable to witness in a method to conclude a hypothesis, in such a volume, that even to the listener, the way he speaks seems to be the easiest way to explain the mystery of both, and as such the public that listens to the argument is inclined to believe him.<br>But it's connection, what is it? The connection I draw is the overwhelming and simplicity in the claims Gish makes, especially due to the roots of Catholicism making the average person's upbringing willing to accept the explanation of an ethereal entity to be the cause for life in our reality. </div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="https://youtu.be/aOfenEX_8o8" />
         <pubDate>2020-09-06 17:29:30 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723510032</guid>
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         <title>Post #6 Red Flag: Appeal to Authority</title>
         <author>alexander_mcwilliams</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723539410</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div><strong>Definition:</strong><br>Instances of a celebrity or someone who appears to be knowledgeable through authoritative imagery such as certifications or faulty awards or just an appearance that makes the product and/or person look more professional than what they are, and people gravitate to the person dressed cleanly with a professional-looking set up, setting their mind at ease to think this person knows what they are thinking.<br><br><strong>Connection:<br></strong>It shouldn't be much of a secret nowadays that weight-loss supplements are an unwise thing to invest in and are most times a scam, and normally people are good to call it out, however within this video it is explained and shown that Dr.Oz, during one of his spiels about his Green Coffee Bean Extracts he uses his Status of being a celebrity at the time to push unapproved-by-the-FTC weight-loss supplements to his vulnerable fans, of which are normally people who rarely leave their homes and have built up a bad kind of weight. <br>In this instance, Dr. Oz has clearly used his appeal to the public to try and peddle his scam of a product, and in the past he has done the same. He isn't alone in this act either, as in the past, to boost the sales of produce or average products, standard news stations would hold interviews with products they endorse to push more of the product to influential individuals that blindly trust what they consume.</div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoYgpuG87lQ" />
         <pubDate>2020-09-06 18:20:30 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723539410</guid>
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         <title>Post #7 Reason for Belief: Unexplained</title>
         <author>alexander_mcwilliams</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723569412</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div><strong>Definition:</strong><br>This deals greatly with 'What ifs' when confronted with something the human mind <strong>cannot explain, </strong>such as stuff like UFOs or odd trinkets found in the pyramids, thus the human mind develops its own explanation for what it had seen.<br><br><strong>Connection:</strong><br>Although debunked in recent history to have been a paddle attached to a toy submarine, during its popularity of attracting people to The Loch Ness, it was largely speculated to have been a water-faring Pleisiosaur, as is described in the article attached.<br>People who had taken the idea of this creature and expanded on it, during its days of mystery, gave it an appearance, just as a UFO had, just based on the blurred shape of it. People knew the shape and wanted desperately for it to be real, and some still do as The Loch Ness still gets tourists and monster hunters who are either there for the experience or just have a confirmation bias much healthier than a UFO enthusiast. </div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Loch-Ness-monster-legendary-creature" />
         <pubDate>2020-09-06 19:10:50 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723569412</guid>
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         <title>Post #8 Reason for Belief: Agenticity</title>
         <author>alexander_mcwilliams</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723599894</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div><strong>Description:</strong><br>People sometimes have difficulty in explaining a situation and sometimes they attribute the cause of the situation to be something like a monster or beast, when in reality it is just the wind and no agent seeking you. <br><br><strong>Connection:</strong><br>As a young lad, I was told that atop my shoulders there is an Angel and a Devil where one is the influence for good and the other for evil, where one yells for you to resist the urge while the other encourages you to do it, as seen below.  Essentially drawing a reason for the actions of a person, as is very present in media for acts the average person may not take, but only in specific circumstances that do not involve a physical force for what the do.</div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcT6vQx9QxZzac75E7MZ8BQREGUABelEnBthIQ&amp;usqp=CAU" />
         <pubDate>2020-09-06 19:59:49 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723599894</guid>
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         <title>Post #9 Reasons for Belief: Patternicity</title>
         <author>alexander_mcwilliams</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723613783</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div><strong>Description:</strong><br>The perception of seeing a face or creature in an object or landscape that does not exist, but your brain recognizes it being there.<br><strong><br>Connection:</strong><br>As seen below, the designs of some vehicles seem to have a kind of face, and even without the visual aid you could look outside now and see that your local truck or car might look like a sly business man or a cartoon jock just by the design of the front of a car, and sometimes the backside of a car as well.</div>]]></description>
         <enclosure url="https://i.imgur.com/XITqMAV.png" />
         <pubDate>2020-09-06 20:18:44 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723613783</guid>
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         <title>Post #10 Critical Thinking Process Responses</title>
         <author>alexander_mcwilliams</author>
         <link>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723627316</link>
         <description><![CDATA[<div>My choice that I shall dig deeper into is <mark>Jack Thompson Blames V-Tech Massacre on Counterstrike</mark> from my 3rd post about <strong>Causation and Correlation</strong></div><div><br><strong>Define the Problem:</strong></div><div>Was the cause of this massacre video-games? Well, no.<br><br><strong>Gather Information:  </strong><br>During my analysis of this video, I found other articles that went further in-depth, where one provided a police report on the search of his home, and due to games being physical copies at the time, even on the platform of steam; the report found no games, not even the claim of Counterstrike, being there.  Now, this is a smaller case, so I've went further and went to what would normally be an untrustworthy source, a mommy-blog, where even there they presented rather sound evidence to say that this type of behavior is the cause of other issues within and outside of the home, possibly bullying from either source instead of video games.</div><div>What was said in the video, and its headline, was that the game Counterstrike was the cause for the shooting in 2007, and both the 'expert' and the host strengthen the narrative of games cause violence that escalates to the murder of others, but this couldn't be further from the truth. <br><br><strong>Evaluate Evidence:</strong><br>As stated, the police report of the incident found no games in his home where the police inspected, gaining entry to anything that might have had it. But even then, could the individual have deleted the game? Sure, but even if he had done such, the logs of something with that name or game ID number would have been detected by a simple search into the meta data, which back then</div><div><br></div><div><strong>Recognize Assumptions, Emotions, Biases:  <br></strong>Within the media, past and present, the aspect of games depicting violence is rampant less now than it was back before 2010s as it was the newest fad that the older generation did not want to adopt due to the habit of avoiding physical activities. This was a valid reason, but in the purpose of the news cast, the yellow-journalism that took place to demonize the games and play into the fears of the public is unmistakable, even through the police report was available at the time of the newscast, and even if it was, I found no evidence to support the news network went back on their word.</div><div><br></div><div><strong>Synthesize Evidence, Identify Alternatives:<br></strong>Alternative Solution 1: Videogames cause violence in younger minds that are subjected to them, mostly to those below the age of 19, with sources being the larger media corporations and politicians using it as a puppet to give meaning for heinous crimes.<br>Alternative Solution 2: Videogames do not cause violence, and it is instead the result of bad parenting to not notice the signs in their child and catch it before something bad happens, being complacent to let their local school system notice it first before they act. This is supported by numerous studies that have explored the child and teen psyche and the influence from videogames, of which the findings found that although there is a rise in adrenaline and competitive tendencies, there is also the presence in anger due to frustration in the individual's ability to play, but never to the extent that the child becomes psychotic <br><br></div><div><strong>Select Best Alternative:<br></strong>I have concluded that videogames, despite the larger media's viewpoint, do not cause the levels of aggression they claim they do, as although there may be some, it does not elevate to the point of the need to harm others, and as such the best ways to do it is to moderate a child's time playing to give them a sense of a reasonable time to play the games they enjoy.</div>]]></description>
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         <pubDate>2020-09-06 20:44:44 UTC</pubDate>
         <guid>https://padlet.com/alexander_mcwilliams/b6km8v5mn2guisy3/wish/723627316</guid>
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