PLN 16

I did my PLN 16 on the Gov. Rod Blagojevich, he was asked to step down and the High Court relieved him of his powers. He was accused of selling Barak Obama’s chair in the Senate, and he got busted for it. This matters to me because it’s not right to be selling that kind of stuff for a profit, and that just irritates me because to hear about the people leading our country, doing something that stupid kind of makes me feel unsafe, because what if something threatening comes up in the country, and someone makes a stupid decision, and it effects everyone in the nation.

PLN 15: Ice Storm

For my PLN 15 I read an article about the ice storm that hit New Hampshire. It knocked out power for 1.25 million people, from Maine to Pennsylvania, it closed schools, and damaged property everywhere. This could matter to my life, living in Colorado, my mom always told me that anything can happen in Colorado, so I could potentially be in danger if this storm ever came to Colorado. It just makes me wonder what I would do with me cars, and windows and stuff.

PLN 14: Dog Freezes to sidewalk

In the article I read off of AOL, I read about another cruel person that left his dog outside in single digit temperatures, and it froze to the sidewalk. Luckily the dog was “morbidly obese” says the Sheboygan County Humane Society, or it would have frozen to death. The 59 year old owner was arrested for suspision of animal neglect, the owner said that she tried to get the dog inside but couldn’t and she kept checking every few hours. To me that sounds rediculous and total “B.S” but she was let off according to the article with only getting arrested, personally I think she should have been charged. This could relate to my life because, this article tells me how I might see some weird stuff in life, and that I need to keep my eyes open for stuff like that, because some people are just too cruel to do easy things, how hard is it to let the dog in? It’s really not that hard at all, and even if it is hard, she should have gone to get the dog anyways.

PLN 13: Impeach Bush Ornament

The reason why I read this article about the women who was asked to paint an ornament for the White House’s Christmas tree, was because we had just talked about it in class, and I found it on AOL. According to this article a women from Seattle (Washington) was asked by the First Lady to paint a holiday ornament for the Christmas tree in the White house. When the ornament arrived there, it was decorative, but not in a way that was expected. It said how we should impeach Bush all over it. Merry Christmas. NOT. I think that this article just shows how rude some people can be, and it teaches you that you will meet people in life that will be completely oblivious to what everyone else cares about, and you might run into it, and you will have to deal with it.

PLN 12: Depression

In the news article I read about the Depression and Working Moms, these people did a survey on, obviously working moms, but how the economy, and where they are financially really effect their stress levels. The article said 91% of working moms, have felt symtoms of depression. That’s incredible, moms already are stressed out because they have to work to make money, and they have to watch their kids, or wonder where they are all the time, pick them up from school, etc. I think that this could, or in the past, already has affected my life, because my mom has a huge impact in my life, and when shes depressed she takes it out on us, because she needs to let go of things, I believe that’s called regression, but I’m not a psychology whiz. But if my mom isn’t having a good day, as soon as I get home, I know exactly what kind of day she is having, and she hasn’t been too happy lately. So I can relate this article to my life because I think that my mom has/is being impacted by the economy, and again financially, and I think that’s its affecting her emotions, and the way she acts towards her everyday life.

PLN 11: Black Friday

In the Article I read about Black Friday, a man in Garden City, New York, was standing in line waiting for a Wal-Mart to open, just like the rest of the USA does on the day after Thanksgiving. The article went on to say that as soon as the door opens to let the buying customers in, the crowd all ran forward, and the man was trampled to death. The man's family filed a lawsuit against Wal-Mart for this instance. I think that this might affect my life, because I was one of the millions of people in this country that woke up at 2 in the morning to get the good deals. The reason that this article has changed the anxiety for me is because there always is a chance that I might get trampled. But last Thanksgiving (Thanksgiving 2008) I went with my neighbor to Best Buy, and I ended up spending $780 on a whole Xbox 360 package, and I figured out the I saved over $300.

PLN 10: Bill & John

First of all, I’m going to start with saying that this video was pretty darn funny. This video features Bill O’Reilley, and John Stewart, and they debated about how Bill kept saying that he was scared about what Obama is going to do, because he doesn’t know what he’s going to do. This matters to me and the world for that matter because, if we are about to elect a new president into office, wouldn’t you want to know what he’s planning on doing? Another issue with Obama was that his statistics changed every single time he discussed over an interview, what his policies were explaining. Bush put this country way down financially, of course because of the war, and oil prices and global warming this stuff all ties into one another. The people were a little confused, and yet a little scared at first like Bill said, that Obama kept manipulating his policies every time he looked into a camera. 

PLN: 9 Obama's Victory Speech

In Barak Obama’s victory speech, the United States being one people mattered most. He talked about how “we are not just red states and blue states… We are the united states of America!” I was one of those people who wanted McCain to win, and after that speech my thoughts about him changed. He also incorporated part of President Lincoln’s speech into his, which again, talked about how we are all one people, and we are going to get through everything that will take place in the next 4 years together. This affects my life, because after hoping that McCain would take the election from Obama, it was a relief to me, and probably other people too, to hear how well he spoke in Chicago that night.

PLN 8: Economic debt

In the video U.S. Economy and Financial System Bankrupt --What's next?, submitted by singletreefilms, it talked about how we are bankrupt, because we spend to much money everyday, and our competing countries are paying their workers 75% to 95% less money for the same work that they do. In simpler terms, that’s called cheap overproduction. To fix this problem, we tried moving some of our biggest money making facilities to different parts of the world. For example, last year we moved a Chrysler dealership to Mexico. Yet the economic results weren’t too high still. So we took the factory apart and moved it to China. We made some money. The point of this is, is that if we started globalizing more businesses; we might start making some money to get rid of our debt. I think that this affects my life because, even know we don’t think about it, but our country is in some serious debt, and when we start voting against raising or lowering taxes, we need to stop to think about what’s best for the country. We didn’t get where we are today because of one person, we got here because we are a nation of people, and we decided what was best for everyone, and not one person/ourselves in particular.

PLN 7: OPEC's Oil Prices

In this video about OPEC’s Oil prices, money matter most to them. In the video, it was saying how OPEC decided to cut 1.8 million barrels of oil that the sell, because there isn’t as high of a demand for oil, and their theory is that it will eventually get more people to buy oil, and then there will be a larger demand for it again, and then they will raise prices again, and end up making the money that they want. This affects my life because, oil prices are going down, and this will save my parents money, and we will be able to do more fun things as a family, because we have saved money. It will also save money for the whole economy, so we might be seeing a more booming economy, because more and more people now have money to spend.

PLN 6: Global Warming

In the video Global Warming 101 from National Geographic, saving energy and reducing the use of fossil fuels matters to the earth. This video talked about how global warming has evolved over time, and how/what we can do to slow the processes of the greenhouse effects. Global warming started during the Industrial Revolution, and that was a time of huge industrialization, and lots of CO2 and methane were being produced, which eventually made its way to the atmosphere, and got trapped. This causes heat to be trapped under the atmosphere, and the earth just basically bakes, and examples of that, would be, all of the ice around the world that’s melting, and more droughts in hotter places, like deserts, and Africa. Global warming is a problem that we can do something about. How can you do your part to help our home?

PLN 5: LIVING TOMORROW

In the video Living Tomorrow by FORBES, I think that making things better, and making life easier to live matters to FORBES corporation. This video talked about a new product that you could buy later on, for probably a large amount of money, big and better things do cost money, but basically it was a bathroom mirror. This was no ordinary mirror, you can watch television on it. It even times you while you are brushing your teeth, and when the time is up, it scans your teeth checking if you did a good job, and if you didn’t, it will show you where you need to brush harder to get all of them clean. Technology these days is getting better and better, but in the end its going to cost you more than you could imagine.

PLN 4: Pay Attention

“How do students learn? Are they impersonal, logical, spatial, intrapersonal, musical, Linguistic, Naturalist, or Bodily-Kinesthetic learners?” In the video Pay Attention by an unknown publisher, technology matters to both a child and a teen’s education. This video explained how now a day’s people are digital learners, and how we got that way is from all of the new technology that has come out, and everyone is familiarizing themselves with. For example, today’s college graduates have/had spent ten thousand hours playing video games, over ten thousand hours talking on their cell phones, and roughly twenty thousand hours watching television. As digital learners we send two hundred thousand emails and instant messages by the time they graduate college. Schools around the world should respect the fact that people now days learn better when they are focused on a certain type of technology, such as iPods, podcasts might impact millions of people, and some people would learn better from that type of thing. Who knows, we might someday be totally computerized, and we might not ever need to go to school again.

PLN 3: Education Today

In the video Education Today by Tom Woodward, technology matters to education, and they way people learn. Kids today learn better by using technology, and technology is getting more and more sophisticated. People are depending more and more on technology, and we are learning things from our own inventions. The average student today will have 10 to 14 jobs in a lifetime, and more than half of them, if not all of them, will deal with new technology. So why not learn about technology, and then let the technology teach us.

PLN 2: Did you know??

In Karl Fisch’s video “Did you know”, I learned that a more things happen in a day then you can ever imagine, and things around the world are improving day by day. For example, approximately every 8 seconds, 34 babies are born, that many new lives into the world in one day. About 230,000 people or more signed up for MySpace in a day. More than 3,000 books are published in a day. Many of the majors in college today didn’t exist long 20 or so years ago. Six hundred million internet devices were made in 2006. So I guess you could say that tons of things happen in such little time.

Machines are Using Us!

In Michael Weschs video "Machines are using us" he talked about how machines are getting far more complex, and are getting easier to use, and how every time we click on something we are teaching the machine. For example, when you click on a link to something on the Internet, it saves every click to a folder called "History", and "Cookies" and also passwords and some other private information. With that being said, this can also lead to Viruses, if your computer ends up saving something harmful, another machine can sometimes go in and steal that information. The computer saves everything, and "learns" from what we learn. Is the Machine Us? Of course there's no limit to what some machines can do, most computers are capable of, email, Microsoft products or any other writing program for that matter, Internet, and Instant Messenger. His video explained into more depth how written text is linear, and how text on a machine can be way more flexible, and is more efficient to use. Machines also make it easier for contacting other people, like E-mail, and Instant Messenger etc. Also, the Internet can search for 1 million or more results for something you are trying to research in less than a second. It is also, a lot easier to keep in touch with people, and its way faster then sending a message through the mail, and it takes about a fraction of the time to write it too. With that, you don't have to spend time erasing, and spending money on new pencils and what not, because there's a great thing called the "backspace" key or "Delete" key. It’s also very neat, and can be very organized, that's great for people who can't do anything neatly, and for people who can't spell (like myself). Machines are always getting smarter, and pretty soon the world might be totally computerized, and everything will be all the way around easier to use.