Context

The context is the situation or setting in which evidence is produced and it is needed in order to assess the credibility of the evidence. Apart from the physical context, it does as well include the historical context (the period of time when it happened), the social context, the linguistic context and the context of questions and answers.

Historical Context 

1. The historical context is useful in order to assess credibility in the evidence since it helps to understand better the setting in which the evidence is produced and clear out doubts.

2. In my opinion the Nazis were to blame for the Reich-stag fire. To begin with the historical context needs to be considered, Hitler had just became Chancellor of Germany and he aimed to remove all the opposition to himself, and furthermore blaming the communists was a method he used in order to make people believe their ideas. On the other hand we can claim that the evidence presented stated that the fire started in many places inside the building therefore is unlikely that just one person acted alone.
3. The social context is important to understand the vested interests of the wider community in order to know their beliefs and opinions at the time of the event.

The Context of Questions and Answers 

Activity 3
The interviews portray clearly why context matters. When the context for an 8 years-old is formal, inadequate for his age, the boy isn’t relaxed, on the contrary he is tense and because of it the interview isn’t as profitable as the second interview, where the boy is relaxed (feeling as equal as the interviewer, having something to eat, accompanied by his best friend) and he gives a full description of the plane, showing clear differences and giving detailed and wider information.

Activity 4
The context affects the answer the people give, therefore this might be shaped according to different aspects we should be aware of in order to asses the credibility of it. In the case presented, each group gave a different answer, this is due to interviewer’s effect and the linguistic context of the question. Since a slightly different question was asked to each group, different answers were expected. People tend to respond in terms of the way they perceive the question.
The linguistic context have a great effect on the evidence. Sometimes the interviewer might ask leading questions, which are worded in different ways in order to direct the witness to a particular answer.

The Edukators

Pink Floyd - The Wall

After watching in class the movie "Pink Floyd - The Wall", the teacher gave us a set of questions I will be answering below:

1. This portrays how society was educated based on equality as what is socially accepted regardless of their identity, where everyone is enclosed to follow a standard stereotype. Masks in both situations represent people as faceless individuals which are part of a machine and are all somehow the same. They were shaped under certain ideals and cannot be set free so as to think by themselves
   
2. The riot scene was all in the boy's mind; he was imagining what it would be like to step aside from that stereotype that everyone was pressured to form part of. The scene begins with the teacher mocking the kid's imagination and creativity, in other words we can say that being different was not accepted. Therefore the kid afterwards begins to imagine what would it be like to break the order and stand out of the stereotype. However, the scene comes back to the class at the end, to show that they are still being under a strict control, and expressing their feeling is not acceptable. 
3. The movie portrays a tough and strict kind of education. We can see how the teacher follow a certain educational structure which should be respected by the children and if they didn't they were punished. Moreover every actitude a student had that showed him different to the rest was considered as a weakness and used to embarrass him.
4. The movie deals with various social institutions which are the government, education and the family. As regards the government we can mention it to be what controls everything by the education. They are who decide what what we should learn in order to grew up following their beliefs. The government’s purpose is to making us follow a same stereotype for they to keep the control of everything, and control means power. Therefore we can say that what the government looks after is power, which is just accessible if they force us to think like them. On the other hand, the family is the other institution portrayed in the movie, we can see how Pink losses his father after the wall and all he has left was his mother, yet she seems not to be present in his life. We can say that family is important for us, it represents who we will become, since parents are who we looked after when we are kids. This can be shown in the scene were he wears with his father uniform imitating him. This is why we can say that the movie presents to us different social institutions which have the same purpose, since these are what will guide us during our childhood to grow up and will determine our future.
   
5. The phrase “We, in Argentina, often rely on education to solve most of our social problems. We blame education, or the lack of it, for many of them” is something that you always listen here, and we constantly repeat too. However, we think that what the film what is trying show us, is that aggressive and repressive style of teaching children, where students are blame of thinking different. 
6. In the movie education is shown as the base for control. It portrays how the society is build from the education teaching the younger generation the way they have to act and think. So if they teach in the institutions a way of behaving and show them what they consider to be good or bad, then in the future everyone would follow the same beliefs and hence they have the control of everyone.
7. In the fresh scene we can appreciate a group of double-hammer marching perfectly in order. This whole metaphoric scene what is trying to teach us is how education control us to be a “perfect” person without any error, and with a same style of life and that the meaning of being different means to be a wrong person. 
   
8. The children falling into the meat grinder is a visual metaphor that represents how education kills every different thought from what the government and schools wants, leaving only a human body, a robot that only express and repeat one idea. What education do to children is burning their brains and every thing that is different. 
9. In the Cambridge dictionary the wall is defined as a structure made of brick or stone that divides different areas. In the Pink Floyd film the wall represents is how society is divided between the good persons and the bad ones, where education is a key point from these division. Another way of seeing this powerful concept this that “we are just another brick in the wall”, where every human being represents a brick in that wall, representing only one thing, the same thing, the same idea, hiding our differences,and making it impossible to us to build our own wall and creating our wall, full of knowledge and diferents ideas.
   

Work done toghether with Tomas Busquets and Sebastian Varisto

Eyewitness Accounts

    An eyewitness, is someone who actually sees some act, occurrence, or event and can give a first hand description of it. Eyewitness accounts are mostly considered by the people as a more reliable and credible source than hearsay accounts. This is due to the fact that for being a first-hand account, meaning that after all the person was there and saw what actually happened, is more trustworthy than second-hand accounts, which often distort the event while this is being told or re-told. 

However, it should be stated that eyewitness accounts can be questioned and often considered unreliable and inaccurate, since the witness might give a wrong story due to many reasons. Observation is based on the five senses, therefore, if one of this is impaired the accuracy would be affected, hence the credibility of an eyewitness will be lessened. Moreover, there are different factors which might affect and eyewitness. Firstly, the context of where and when the observation takes place will affect what people see and hear, for example if its night or day, the weather condition, the distance from the event, if there is any obstruction, etc. Secondly, the perception, expectation and memory would also influence and observer, the memory reconstructs an observation, then this would be based on its pre-existing experience, knowledge, expectation and belief. Thirdly, the point of view of the eyewitness will affect his observation, people are not objective and neutral, consequently their observations would tend to be distorted due to their biased and prejudice view. Lastly, the prior knowledge and expertise will also affected, the more you know about a certain topic or event the better you can shape your account, and so you add more credibility to an account. 

Wrongful conviction and eye witness accounts

Case: MARVIN ANDERSON

In December 2001, Marvin Lamont Anderson became the ninety-ninth person in the United States to be exonerated due to post conviction DNA testing.

Anderson was convicted in 1982 of a rape he didn't commit and sentenced to 210 years in prison. He was released on parole after 15 years, but he continued to fight to overturn his wrongful conviction. It would be five more years before DNA testing obtained with the help of the Innocence Project finally proved his innocence.

The victim was a woman who was raped on July 1982 by a black man. The assailant beat her, threatened her with a gun, raped her, and sodomized her. After she reported the crime, a police officer singled out Marvin Anderson as a suspect because the perpetrator had told the victim that he "had a white girl," and Marvin Anderson was the only black man the officer knew who lived with a white woman. Sine he had no criminal record, the police had to investigate his personal data. Afterwards, they showed the victim many possible pictures of the aggressor; among them, Anderson´s one. The victim identified him between the pictures as well as in in the lineup whose picture was in the original photo array shown to the victim. Anderson’s trial counsel offered an alibi defense including his white girlfriend. Despite the fact of Anderson’s lack of previous conflicts with the law and that from the very beginning the community became aware that it was John Otis Lincoln a more likely suspect, a all-white jury convicted Anderson on all counts, even though the owner of bicycle which was identified to be used by the assailant reported it as robbed by Lincoln some hours before the rape. 

In 1988, John Otis Lincoln came forward and took up the guilt and the following consequences in the hearing held in August, in order to free Anderson from the case. Even so, the judge refused to vacate the conviction, claiming Lincoln to be a liar. 

For Anderson´s luck, fifteen years after his conviction, a DNA test prove his innocence and he was set free.

Expertise and Questioning Expertise

The term "expertise" is frequently used in order to refer to a specialist knowledge and skill in a particular field, and it results from training and experience in that field. Many times an expert's view and opinion giving within their field, is considered by the rest of the society who lack of that knowledge, as a reliable and credible source.

However, we sometimes have the right and possibility to "question the credibility of expert" , we are aloud to believe that their views, judgements and the value of their expertise is not credible at all. This might happen under certain situations. Disagreement between experts, the differing views of experts on the same subject can led people to question them; Incorrect judgements, when an expert, among their expertise field, make a mistake while judging their expertise can be question; Expertise as harmful, sometimes experts make taken-for-granted judgements and this can be question; Changing expertise, due to the fact that the everything (values, knowledge, society, etc) changes, we should always question experts since sometimes they can be based on prejudice rather than sound judgement. 

Items A & B, Medical misdirection

This item criticizes the expert source, which are doctors and the way they are appointing to cure a particular illness in a particular case. Doctors, in this case, are being questioned as harmful due to the fact that instead of focusing on the population, they focus on individuals and divert attention from the real cause of illness.

 Items C & D, Drapetomania & homosexuality as mental illness
Though in both items expert sources can be questioned as "changing expertise", they are related to different, yet similar, cases. On the one hand, Item C is questioning the expert view upon this "new illness" he claims to be present among slaves which consists on their desire to bee free. For that period of time, 1815, where the white race judge themselves superior than the black race, being aloud to own black people this argument might have sounded credible and even rational due to how they lived in those times. However, due to the fact that we have changed as a society, slavery is abolished and so this expertise judgement will questioned and even considered a joke, since we can believe that it is obvious that slaves wanted to escape, and this will be related to a desire as a human being not as a mental health. This is as well the case in item D where the expert claims that having an homosexual desire, being gay, is a mental disorder and they should be exposed to a certain violen treatment in order to cure them. However as society has changed, we would now question this fact as not credible,
and this treatment irrational and not correct.

IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS?

     Whether life exists or not in other planets has been one of the main concerns of humans throughout time. Since ancient times people has questioned themselves about the mystery of the universe and the posibility of not being aloone in it. Though not direct evidence of extraterrestrial life has been discovered, there are many reasons to believe that other forms of life, other than humans, is out there.

       To begin with, one of the main reasons to support that there is life on other planets is the univer´s immensity. Thanks to the work of scientists and the latests improvements in technology we were able to get a closer look tat how huge the universe is. We were able to find the exstence of planets with similar conditions to the Earth, other galaxies and solar systems, and that led the posibilities of finding other kinds of life to a higher  level. Moreover, scientist´s studies have proven that there are species which can survive in radically different conditions than ours, as for example without oxygen. This fact lights up the possibility of some type of life evolving ina a planet with different conditions.

     However many people argue against this possiblility by claiming that it has taken millions of years for life to evolve in the planet Earth and this was the consequence of several conditions which are present in the Earth, for example the impirtant role of the moon which satables the Earth´s axis helping control our climate, or the distance from the Sun. In addition some argue that if there was life outside our planet, then we should have already found proof, so they claim the lack of evidence to be the reason of arguing against this topic.

    To sum up, the fact of whether there is or not life on other planets can have different points of views and will still be a great concern for humans and a n inspiration for scientists to keep maaking research of the universe. Yet, in my opinion, we should keep our minds open for the possibilities since the universe is so huge that wouldn´t it be too selfish to think that life only exists on Earth and that we are alone? 

Abortion

Vested Interest, Tobacco Advertisments

We read material with information about tobacco and their vested interests, we analyze them and answer some questions. Then we search for cigarette advertisements analyze them in relation with their vested interest.

1-  Advertising helps the tobacco because it can disguise a harmful product and alter the evidence so as to  make it seem as something that we need, something essential and beneficial in a certain way.

2-  Cigarettes companies have a vested interest in the profit they gain from the sales of tobacco. Therefore cigarette advertising tend to have distorted the truth, for example regarding the side effects tobacco causes in our health. this is due to the fact that they hide the evidence showing the bad aspects of tobacco effect on us and yet assuring their business.

Tobacco industries have a vested interest in gaining the profit of tobacco sales, so that's why they tend to lie or distort the evidence. In this case they are assuring to the people that this new kind of cigarette has a filter which makes it healthier, and so as to justify their product they say that it is recommended by Dentists, as dentists are professionals, we tend ti believe in their word since they know more than we do in this aspect, and so we will be influenced in believing them and buying their product.             

Vested Interest: Mad Men

We watched a video about part of the episode of Mad Men "Smoking Pitch" in which they are promoting, creating advertising on cigarettes. 

In this episode the business man are debating on advertising ideas so as to rise cigar's sales at the time when it was being judged to be the a lung cancer causing.

Along the episode we can identify some vested interests; the organization has something to gain from promoting and defending a particular point of view, which lead them to lie, select certain evidence and ignore other as well as distorting the evidence so as to benefit themselves.

In the case of the video the cigar company is hiding  the evidence which proves that their cigar affects the health of the people.

There are two ideas for advertising presented. The first one, Peter's idea, suggested to create advertising which confirms that their cigars cause cancer but in a way in which it sounded less harmful, he argued to compare with cars, which are dangerous as well as cigars but that can do nothing and people still buy them. However the other business man disapproved the idea since it showed the truth.

On the other hand there was Don's idea which was approved. He suggests a campaign which says "Luky strike, it's toasted". He argued that the other six Tobacco companies produce the same product they do, however by saying that it is toasted, and hiding the truth (that it is unhealthy) they make the people believe that their Tobacco is healthy and the others are the ones which are bad for us, at least it's healthier. Here don is having a vested interest which leaded him to alter the evidences and hide the truth. However this does not means that Peter didn't have, the difference is in the fact that he neither hide the evidences nor lie.