TOW #14 Gillette Safety Razor Ad

This visual text is an advertisement for Gillette brand safety razors. Disposable safety razors were introduced by Gillette in 1901, as a replacement for safety razors that required stropping and honing, a process of sharpening the razor that took considerable time. Before the introduction of this product, straight razors and fixed-blade safety razors dominated the market, though required considerable time to be used properly and safety. Gillette is one of the largest and most successful razor companies in the world, having been established with the introduction of this safety razor in 1901. To attract men to the revolutionary product, Gillette employed ads like this to ensure a more convenient and effective razor. This particular advertisement is most likely directed at men, who require the actual shaving, and women, who most likely buy the shaving products for their partners. The ad employs irony in its image dominated by a baby shaving. It creates an actual representation of the saying "soft as a baby," creating the humorous image of a baby shaving to attain the soft skin it already has. Viewers draw a connection a natural connection to the razor held by the child: that the razor can make anyone's skin baby-soft. The depiction of the baby is also typical of vintage ads, featuring a plump, white child with rosie cheeks. The smile, bonnet, and bib complete the image of the "ideal" baby. While this has little to do with shaving, it certainly associates positivity with the razor. The ad also makes bold claims of "no stropping," and "no honing," very time-consuming and difficult practices required for permanent razors. The word "safety" is also emphasized, sounding much more inviting than the popular straight razors, otherwise known as "cut-throat razors." These claims are backed by the company name below, lending credibility to the organization in charge of the product. The ad is simple to understand, makes clear claims, and is humorous, all of which make for effective marketing.

TOW #13 The Silence of the Lambs Review (Roger Ebert)

This review is written by the late Roger Ebert, one of Hollywood's most renowned film critics. He was the first person to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and is the only critic to have his name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He has written hundreds of reviews, all of which are now compiled on his website. Silence of the Lambs was released in 1991, and details the story of Clarice Starling, an FBI agent who is called to investigate the case of serial killer Buffalo Bill. To do so, she enlists the help of Hannibal Lecter, a man locked in a maximum security prison for brutal cannibalism. Silence of the Lambs was the third film in history to win Academy Awards in all five major categories: Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Needless to say, Roger Ebert lists it with the elite title of "Great Movie." His purpose, as a critic, is to give his opinion of a film and to justify his claims. He either supports to dismantles a movie's standing, and he raves for this particular movie. He structures his review with several comparisons. The first comparisons he draws are to other famous horror movies, already reviewed by Ebert as some of the best in the genre, Psycho and Halloween. These establish his credibility and are hyperlinked to their own reviews on his site, to prove that he knows what he is talking about. To truly prove whether the movie is worth seeing, Ebert sets to work closely analyzing it. He does a point by point comparison of Clarice and Hannibal, to prove the ingenious nature of the screenplay and director Jonathan Demme's ability to draw parallels between two unlikely characters. Ebert, in his positive review, brings the movie to life for his reader, describing the camera as an humanlike entity to emphasize the mastery of the film, "When [Clarice] enters dangerous spaces, it is there waiting for her instead of following her in." Ebert describes the sounds of the movie, and uses a particular syntax to bring them to the reader. He strings together the eerie sounds, "There are exhalations and sighs at many points, as when the cocoon of the gypsy moth is taken from the throat of Bill's first victim." Then he leaves on short fragment by itself for emphasis, and to make sure we imagine it, "Much heavy breathing." Ebert also leans on statistics to support his love of the movie, stating that "Silence" won five Academy Awards 13 months after being released, a rare feat. Having seen Silence of the Lambs and having loved it, I am quite biased when I say his analysis is effective. But Roger Ebert has the unique talent of bringing a movie to life with words, without giving to much away, whilst revealing intricacies of design that even movie veterans miss.

TOW #12 "Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC"

"The previous ATLAS searches in 4.6–4.8 fb⁻¹ of data at  are combined here with new searches for H→ZZ^(⁎)→4ℓ,¹H→γγ and H→WW^(⁎)→eνμν in the 5.8–5.9 fb⁻¹ of pp collision data taken at  between April and June 2012."


A bit out of my league this week. I'm trying to read scientific papers, and found the 2012 document "Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC." This paper, with well over one hundred contributors, is the official identification of the long-searched-for Higgs Boson. It is broken into 10 sections that introduce the concept of the Higgs, the method used to find it, and a long statistical proof of the discovery, all of which intend to report findings and prove that a Higgs Boson was indeed present. The discovery came four years after the completion of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2008. The LHC, located in Switzerland, is the world's highest-power particle accelerator and collider. ATLAS is a particular sensor in the LHC where particle collisions take place, and the resulting data is interpreted to "find" a Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson is a particle that was previously undiscovered, but necessary to complete the Standard Model of the Universe, the simplest organization of physical equations, particles, and forces, to date. Therefore, this discovery, and this paper, are massive contributions to our understanding of particle physics. That being said, this article is obviously written for members of the scientific community involved in this research. One must be very familiar with experimental physics to understand the mechanisms, processes, and results described, as well as a background in statistical analysis. The rhetorical device most obviously present is jargon. The paper, published in one of the preeminent journals of physics, is clearly credible, but it is also obvious from the technical language that the authors have a very thorough understanding of their experiment. Because there is an assumed audience of highly educated scientists, jargon allows for the authors to move on to their discovery, without restating what each concepts mean. For me, this made the article impossible to get through. Should I have know what the symbols and terms meant,  the sequential order of established fact followed by new discovery would have presented logical findings. The paper also made use of a series of images and graphs to present data that would be overwhelming otherwise. Accompanying the sections on data, these concisely represented information. I am clearly not the target audience, so I could not fully grasp the extent of the article's rhetoric, and cannot really comment on its effectiveness.

The data obtained from decaying particles, indicating the presence of a Higgs Boson.