Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Blog 18:

In the passage The $2 Camisole: How cheap is ruining our lives by Mary Elizabeth Williams the author explains how super sales for merchandise at low amounts of money end up selling cheap materialed products. Advertisements for cheap products like $2 camisoles and $139 dollar kindle seem to draw attention to buyers, but buying cheap products is costly. Merchandise such as Phones, sunglasses, cabinets do not seem to last long. Throwing bought items with short periods of time become more common as if all products come with an experation date of a couple of months instead of years.


My thesis: I agree with the author

Reason 1: Many sales in stores or even specific sales days due to holidays.
Example: Black friday is the day after after thanks giving the day of the year that has the most sales out of the year. People believe that black friday is meant for people to save but you end up wasting more money at the end of the day on cheap products dont last.

Reason 2:
Example:

Friday, November 19, 2010

Ninth Lab/Blog 17: Reflection on Blogging

1. How blogging has helped you improve your writing
Blogging has allowed me to be more aware, having my work for everyone to see becomes more of a pressure to do my best. It also allows me to view my work consistently to improve or correct anything i don't like.

2. What you could have done more or differently?
Everything, I haven't been in school in so long i had forgotten how to structure an essay properly, but this becomes a journey or new beginning to learning. I  had forgotten how to look for the main point and the authors thesis while i was reading, it wasn't as bad, but I happen to think that was the least of my problems, when it came to structuring an essay it was more when i needed to come up with idea to write that essay. Now i know i stick my opinion with things i have read, watched or experienced.  

Blog 16: The new Industrial Migrants

       I`n the article The New Industrial Migrants (Part 1)  Eric Schlosser explains there are a large amount of immigrants that come from Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia that travel to Colorado and land in meatpacking jobs with poor work conditions. According to Eric " The average worker quite or was fired every three months." the meatpacking industry has a 400 percent turnover which allows new hires to fill in the space to the large amount of jobs available.The owners to these type of jobs treat people as if there were disposable, the job requires them to lift heavy animal parts, use sharp knives in order to butcher the meat, use heavy machinery, etc. These type of job can cause injury to the employee's, but unfortunately because these companies insist to save money to make more money "Health insurance is offered to workers after six months on the job; and vacation pay, after a year." Majority of the workers in the beef plant in Greeley cannot speak English which implies that two-thirds of the workers at Greeley are immigrants. These people don't know any better and they choose to work hard to live. I know if at the end of the day i need to eat, and needed to find a place to live I'll work for the $9.25 an hour they offer their workers, simply because its more than minimum wage for another company.                                 

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Blog 14: Ideas for Improving My Performance in the CATW

1. Identifying you examples or details in your reading.
2.Annotate your main points.
3. Identify your ideas and create a development for those ideas
4. Get the main ides first and then exclude the minor details.
5. Use your hour and half to make sure your essay is complete.
6. number your main ideas to go in order.
7. Check for grammar, punctuations, and spelling.
identify your development to your response:
* Summary of the passage.
* Your personal response (thesis) to your over all summary of the passage.
* Write one or more ideas you want to develop in your response. ( map thesis)
*  Start with a personal experience that helps you develop your response.
* Then write your conclusion or lesson toward that personal experience you just developed.
* Make more than one paragraph continuing development


Transition words:
Furthermore,
first, .... second,....etc.
equally important,
at the same time,
etc.....

CATW # 5

          In the article " How to do One Thing at a Time" by Nancy Jones in Women's health magazine, the author begins to explain that a large amount of evidence shows that our minds process better doing single-tasks rather than doing things simultaneously. A group project proved that students who were asked to spend a certain amount of time doing a music play list, chatting, and write a short essay either as a single tasker or multi-tasker showed that a single-tasker did better.

        I agree with this article because multi-tasking can be a losing proposition and/or a great disadvantage to your learning process. It becomes difficult to realize that so many individuals decide to talk or text while driving, knowing that it's a bad idea, so many people do anyways. Many individuals have caused car accidents which caused harm or death to adults and children due to this bad idea. It becomes a question of are we addicted to technology or is it already a force of habit to respond to our phones? A prof at M.I.T. Sherry Turkle mentioned we started to see phones advance more than ever toward the time of 9/11, a time where thousands of people died due to a terrorist attack in NYC. Our society became worried of not knowing where their loved ones were, which caused good parents to buy their children cell phones. Since the time parents allowed young teenagers to have a cell phone, text messages seemed to be more of the source of communication for teens. To these young adults it was less of an aquard silence moment through a phone conversation which allowed short phone conversation become long text conversations. For instance when i text i can have a conversation for hours but if i were to have that exact conversation on the phone it'll be at least half an hour. In another aspect to extensive technology use sometimes our focus is more on one thing rather than the other. Many children get infuriated with the lack of attention they get from their parents, a parent can get on a phone, like a blackberry which is more of a business type phone, and last on it for hours. Children need a lot of physical attention they need to know a parent is physically there to support them, not trapped in a world of technology.

          Multi-tasking can cause us to loose our strength in learning. In the article Jones quoted clifford nass " A tremendous amount of evidence shows that the brain does better when it's performing tasks in a sequence rather than all at once."  An experiment at Stanford Brown university proved it was true. Two groups of students were asked to perform three tasks, Music play list, chatting, and writing a short essay, after all is done they were given a memory test. One group was asked to do their tasks as single taskers taking 10 Min's on each project. The other group was told do everything simultaneously taking 30 Min's to do every thing at the same time. According to the article " The single-taskers did significantly better than their multi-tasking peers." In my own experience I cant study and listen to music and watch TV all at once, my full concentration would not be there. There are people who leave everything behind in order to do what they need to do like write a book or a script. In many cases people rent out cabins for a extensive period of time to be able to do there work and have nothing but the clothing they brought with them. It gives them nothing more than time to think and not anytime to think about the world or technology  of any sort. We as individuals need to learn how to balance our lives without our cell phones, websites like facebook, twitter and myspace or any type of technology in general.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Blog 12:


Reading Michael Pollan's advice on how to eat healthier really gives me the opportunity to think twice about what i put into my mouth. Many of the products that pollan had mentioned I’ve have tried or eat, never thought about eatting something that wasn't so processed. For instance like cereals, protein water, and go-gurts, go-gurts are something that are always around my nephew makes me think twice about buying it for him. If our generation is taught to eat nothing but processed food what can we teach our children and our children’s children when we grow older, being more aware of the problem now and help us change our life style of eating.
      When walking into a super market we usually already  know what we are going to buy, which I'm sure are the wrong things to eat. The author Michael pollan suggested we walk around the perimeter of the super market for the less processed foods “Most supermarkets are laid out the same way: processed foods in the center, fresh food on the walls.” that is a fantastic suggestion you never really think about how a super market is set up. The only difficult part about being able to shop in super market is actually taking your time to read what is on the labels and knowing if it’s bad for you or not, I live such a fast paced life it’s hard to take your time to read labels.  

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

BLOG 11::CATW # 4

In “let them eat fat”, Critser discusses Fast-food and National restaurants are targeting poor-inner-city communities .  It was the poor communities that empowered the development of so many fast food restaurants, by the need of cheap meals. Not to mention that fast-food places offer super-size for meals that are with a large caloric content. The amount of calories consumptions made in one meal is the amount of calories that are almost consumed in a day on a normal diet. These restaurants are place where African Americans and Latin Americans live.
                The most interesting idea of this article is that the fast food industry likes to target poor-inner-city communities like African Americans and Latin Americans because of large calorie consumptions, cheaper meals due to lack of money and time. Critser said “One of every four hamburgers sold by the good folks of McDonalds, for example, is now purchased by inner-city consumers who, disproportionately, are young black men.” Living in NYC has shown me that fast food places are common, just in my area in queens there are three McDonalds, two Burger Kings, One Wendy’s, four subways, and two taco bells. That’s just in one area of New York. I can only imagine how many more Fast food restaurants there are in New York alone.
                Large calorie consumptions are made all the time especially when so many cheap fast food restaurants are made.  When going into McDonalds, For example, the meals vary from 680 calories to 1,340 calories or more.  Meals offered in McDonalds such as Chicken Nuggets in which most people believe is healthier than a burger and truth would be it’s not, Big Macs, Angus Burgers, ETC. these are all meals that contain too many calories for one person to eat every day. Critser had mentioned “according to the very generous U.S. dietary guidelines, 1,340 calories represent more than half of a teenager’s recommended daily consumption”. There are many High school and college students that go to fast food restaurants like McDonalds to get a snack that contain a large amount of calories, this is why a large percentage of our society remains over weight.
                Although these Fast-food restaurants are very unhealthy many Americans don’t have time or money to be able to have a sit-down dinner. Especially in poor-inner-city communities that work harder than the white man. African Americans and Latino Americans are in areas where fast food restaurants are right around the corner. I live in an area where a lot of Latin men stand outside waiting for a job to come a long, so when they get hungry they have a place like Dunken donuts or McDonalds, ETC. to get a quick cheap meal. That goes for many Americans with no time, whether it’s because of work or schools maybe even both. Our poor communities are being served with the bad end of the stick, our health’s are always at risk because of the food we eat, and to save a quick buck or even to save some time.

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