Friday, March 20, 2009

Podcast Script and Pictures








___________________Poverty vs. Luxury________ Name of Show


Complete Show Length in minutes: ____6 1/2____________

Episode 1: Topic Poverty vs Luxury: The Dominican Republic ______________________________________________________________________
Intro Music Clip: Title: _Paradise: Vanessa Carlton________________________________________________ Minutes: ______1__
Intro: ____________________Minutes:___3_______
_______Hello! My name is and in this pod cast I will discuss the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is an island nation in the Caribbean. It is a beautiful tropical country, making it an attractive tourist spot. However, many people going to the Dominican for a vacation know nothing of the country other than its beauty. Economically, it is a low to middle income developing country and 30% of the people there live below the poverty line. Many people have little access to schooling, and many of those who do have access to not obtain a high school diploma. This is because many families are so poor the children have to work to help financially. Illnesses such as malaria, AIDS and Dengue, sicknesses we in the United States know little about, kill many people in the Dominican Republic. Crime such as drug cartels and prostitution (which is legal there) is increasing, especially in impoverished areas and among children. A friend of mine, Emily Storck, went to the Dominican Republic on a mission trip in February, and spent most of her time in poverty stricken areas helping out at 3 different orphanages. Seeing all of the commercials lately advertising cruises to the Dominican Republic angers her, saying “Almost every day on the way to the orphanages we would pass a port with a cruise ship, and so many people don’t know of the poverty”. _______________________________________________________________________
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Segment Music Clip: Title: ___Lean on me: Vanessa Carlton___________________________________________ Minutes: ___1_____
Segment: __1__________________Minutes:______3____ _Missionaries go to poor countries and spread the word of God and bring things to help the poor people. Impoverished areas often have poor health care, and as a result many children are left homeless and parentless. Therefore, orphanages are founded. Orphanages are institutions centered on the care of parentless, poor children. There are many of these in the Dominican Republic, and on her trip Emily visited three of these. Emily attends a Catholic high school in Michigan, and went on the trip with some classmates and other Catholic members of her church. She learned about this trip through a presentation given by a man who volunteers to go to the Dominican Republic and build these orphanages several times a year. Emily and her group visited these orphanages, bringing clothing, toys, and crafts to the kids living there. She says the kids “didn’t expect gifts, they just wanted someone to play with”. The children were happy with what little they had, because “they didn’t know any differently…they didn’t know they were poor, the orphanage was all they knew”. The trip made her more aware of the poverty of countries like the Dominican Republic, and this awareness is why she is so angered by the advertisements for luxury vacatiEnd Segment Music Clip: Title: _____Aretha Franklin: Respect______________________________________ Minutes: _15 seconds_______
Ending: ____________________Minutes:_____30 sec_____
Going on a mission trip is extraordinary, and takes an extraordinary person. People in thriving societies often forget that there are countries of the world not so well off. Many people are so focused on their own lives that they don’t think twice about the countries they are visiting when they go on luxury cruises and vacations. The importance of this pod cast is not to make people feel guilty about taking a vacation, but to inform them and encourage them to be aware of the poverty of others. It is to encourage a special person to consider taking a mission trip to a country like the Dominican Republic and helping some orphans and donating the an orphanage instead of taking a cruise. Hopefully this experience will encourage you to think twice!
Goodbye!



Ending Music Clip: Title: ______Paradise-Vanessa Carlton__________________________________________ Minutes: ____20 seconds___






Monday, February 23, 2009

Activity 2-Shape Poem



Elizabeth Barret Browning



How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use. In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.

I chose this poem by Elizabeth Barret Browning because I think it is an amazing poem and it is familiar to many people, so I thought it would be easy to understand. I did not want to choose a basic shape like a heart, because I felt that it was too easy and did not express the poem accurately. The poem does mention the sun and candle-light, so in the most basic way this represents a small part of the poem. However, the poem also talks about faith, grace, God, purity, etc, and I feel that since a candle is to many people a religious symbol, I thought that it fit the poem. I got the candle image from Microsoft word and I formatted the words over the candle image, changing the sizes and fonts and spacing to curve the words around the image. I then colored the font of the words to that of the candle, and after I was finished I moved the actual candle away from the words. I placed them side by side. I had to take a screen capture because I was having a really hard time getting it to save correctly and then putting it on here without completely messing up the shape poem.





Friday, February 20, 2009

Project 2 Revised

I have made a lot of changed from my rough draft to my final. The only thing that I did not change was my topic, which was Holocaust and genocide. I used two of the same articles from my draft, but I also chose one more. The first two from my draft were on the Jewish Holocaustand my third was about a little known Holocaust in the Ukraine in the two decades leading up to the second world war. I included more detail in my final, using who, what, when, where, why and how. I also used quotes and statistics. I included the author's name and a works cited page. I changed the order of the paragraphs. In my draft, the Nazi policy paragraph came second, but in my final it was first. The first article in my draft became my second, and I added a third. I used the same basics in my intro, but I edited it some. My first draft was very informal. My final was much more formal with better grammar and better formatting.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Project 2 Draft

I have so far only found two articles that I really liked and wanted to use for my project. Therefore, this draft is only based on those two articles. Also, I did not cite the articles correctly yet, but I got both from the library research center and ProQuest. I want to see if I can find another article that is related to the others, but maybe takes a different approach. The articles I have found are both interesting and factual, but do not have a lot of points that were totally unfamiliar to me as a reader, and I don't know how unfamiliar they would be to another reader. I'd like to find one that tells an unknown story, or a fact that most people would find totally surprising.

I am a history major, and therefore I looked for academic historical articles. I had originally wanted to use European historical articles since that it what I am most interested in, but they were difficult to find. My grandpa fought in World War 2, so I decided to go there next. I came across these articles about the Holocaust and genocide. Last semester in Comp 105 we spent a few days discussing and reading about genocide cases, and had to read an article about genocide currently happening in the world, since many people think the Holocaust is the only example there is.

The first article is about the Holocaust in Hungary. It explains that the affects of the Holocaust did not reach Hungary until later in the war. For the majority of the war, there were only laws restricting the Jewish people. However, near the end, Hitler began pressuring the Hungarian government to deport the Jewish population to concentration camps. The author of this article, Stark, uses a lot of statistics and debates a lot of the commonly assumed statistics of the war.

The second article is about the Nazi policy. It explains that the Nazis were attempting to justify the genocide of the Jewish people by claiming they were trying to obtain justice. Also, many "good" German people supported Hitler and his race purification policies. Hitler did not rise to power originally as a dictator; he has the support of the people at the beginning. Also, the concentration camps began as work camps, and eventually progressed into basic extermination camps. The pace of this depended on the population of the area, meaning in areas where there was more resistance to the Holocaust and the capture of the Jewish people, this process was slower.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Visual Composition

I decided to use a slideshow presentation because I felt that it could really show how bad diseases can get, but what great things can come out of finding vaccinations for them. It was a fun visual with a lot of color that grabs the attention. The captions I chose were the most basic things I could think of that would really get the point across, while leaving out excess information that would distract the viewer from the pictures.

Project 1



There are many things in life that humans have the ability to control. Illness however, is usually not one of them. Disease has been a part of human reality since the beginning of time. Although diseases have faded and developed over the years, it is a worry that bonds everyone together. Humans of today have amazing technology and science is making things possible that most people never would have dreamed of. One of these things that science has created that is recent in terms of human history is vaccinations. Vaccination is the administration of antigenic material to produce immunity to a disease (Wikipedia.com).






Although vaccines do not cure disease, they have a very high rate of success in preventing them. In the thousands of years before the creation and use of vaccines, a disease could wipe out hundreds of thousands of people in a short time, and there was nothing that could be done about it. For example, in the 14th century the bubonic plague became a pandemic and claimed the lives of nearly a third of the world population (williamshakespear.com). In the early 20th century, a polio epidemic maimed over 27,000 people and killed over 6,000 in the U.S alone (Wikipedia.com). However, since these times, these diseases are not seen as threatening. This lack of concern is due to the increasing success of vaccinations.








Unfortunately, this lack of concern is mostly just in the Western world. In third world countries such as Africa, these diseases are very much a part of everyday life. Neglected tropical diseases such as hookworm and trachoma kill and handicap thousands, causing blindness and malnutrition (globalnetwork.org). What many people fail to realize is that these diseases are usually 100% preventable. However, most of these countries cannot afford the research to find cures and vaccinations for prevention. They are overlooked by those of the Western world. Recently, it has been argued that vaccinations are useless and dangerous. The danger lies in this thinking, and not in the vaccinations.
When a vaccine is taken, the immune system of the body produces antibodies that weaken and destroy disease causing bacteria. It builds up a bodies’ resistance to the disease, so if later in life a person comes into contact with the bacteria the body already knows how to fight it (Farlex dictionary). Since almost all children in the West nowadays are vaccinated, diseases are nearly unheard of. However, if some people stop being vaccinated, there are gaps in this system. The more gaps there are, the more people are less immune and more susceptible to harmful, life threatening diseases. The diseases did not cease to exist; they still exist in our modern world, just not where we live. The fact that they are still in existence means that as soon as resistance goes down, people can be infected. Diseases that are seemingly gone can again spread and run rapid, killing thousands. This is why it is important that all children be vaccinated, and that there is increased funding for disease research, prevention, and vaccination creation.

The Vaccines for Children program is a United States federally funded program that provides free vaccinations to children whose parents could otherwise not afford to vaccinate them. It is a part of each state’s Medicaid plan (cdc.gov). Programs like this are important to stop the spread of disease world wide. Increased funding for these programs and research is necessary. A country’s job is to protect its’ people. This is not just in the form of physical protection, but also in the way of preventing illness that could affect everyone. Programs such as this and vaccine research funding is about saving human life. I chose to advocate this program because human life is very important to me.





Saturday, January 24, 2009

Project One Proposal

I have decided to advocate the continuation and increase of government funding for the research and distribution of vaccinations. I chose this project because while writing a paper for comp 105 I did a lot of research similar to this topic and it became very important to me. Through my research I realized the importance of vaccinations and how the availability of them has changed history and the course of human life. Many epidemics that used to kill thousands have been nearly wiped out; some of these diseases are virtually unknown to us. Even less serious illnesses that our parents got as children are ones we have never experienced due to vaccinations. My grandmother had polio when she was 5, and if the vaccine for it had been available sooner she might not have spent every summer until she was 13 in the hospital getting surgery done on her legs, and walking might not have been such a struggle for her all her life. Diseases such as these may seem foreign to us, but they still exist elsewhere in the world, which means if vaccines are stopped or are less common the diseases CAN still spread again. They can run rapid and become epidemics again, and today's generation has no natural resistance except for the vaccinations they had as children. If funding for research stops or slows, new diseases can develop and spread wildly, with no resitance and no cure. The result could be the death or maiming of millions of people worldwide. A country's job is to take care of its people, and this includes not just health care but health prevention. This is why the increased and continued funing for vaccination research is so important.