http://smartmouthspodcast.com/

So I listen to this amazing show called Smart Mouths in which they discuss current events and such which I believe is what we do in class sometimes. I thought it would be awesome to review:

This excellent podcast covers a wide variety of topics in every single episode. Each episode has “the round-up”, where they discuss for about 15 minutes the past weeks news with insightful comments. The round-up is an excellent way to stay in touch with what is happening in our world and you might even gain another side of the story. Although the podcasters are Americans, they prove themselves to know quite a bit about the world around them. Next segment is the pop culture part of the show where they discuss movies, music, celebrities. This part of the show is also interesting as they give reviews of new films or even CD’s. There are some good discussions on music with their last music discussion being on Green Day’s new CD. The main segment of the show is split in two, a discussion about world events and another on American events. These segments cover everything from gay marriages to racial discrimination to Obama. With these discussions, you are educated about the current moral, ethical and political problems of the world very well. After these long discussions, they move onto some funnier segments such as WTF news or 2 truths, 1 lie. These segments really round up the show on a high end.

In conclusion, Smart Mouths podcast is a wonderful show filled with in depth discussions, comedy and a good chemistry with all of the hosts. I give this podcast 4.5 out of 5.

The boy who lived... yes a blog post about Harry Potter

In 1990, J. K. Rowling was on a delayed train from Manchester to London when the idea for Harry suddenly "fell into her head". Nineteen years later, she is one of the most well known authors in the world. She has received many awards and has even had her books adapted into films. Many people praise her for making reading “cool” again and bringing a whole generation into the world of books. In this journal I will discuss who J. K. Rowling changed our society and culture.

Rowling is credited mainly for bringing all generations back into reading. In a pre-harry potter world, many kids and teenagers alike believed that books were not for enjoyment but for school. However, Rowling made reading enjoyable and fun for all ages. This increases literacy among many people.

What I believe Rowling contributed the most to our society and culture is the remaking of an old idea into the internet age: a fandom. All these Harry Potter fans can now connect via the internet. This new and improved fandom had it all: forums and podcasts to discuss, fan fiction to create, fan sites for all your news, conventions, role-playing games such as quidditch, it even had its own genre of music, wizard rock. This community was a culture and society in itself. It brought people from different races and religions into one place where everyone was accepted.

Rowling has forever changed the world with the memorable story of “the boy who lived.”

Swine Flu!

A month ago:

“The Swine Flu is a global emergency” … “Is this the worse epidemic since SARS?” … “Is the whole world going to become infected”… “The swine flu era!”

Present day:

The Bloomberg is reporting : WHO’s Chan Warns Nations Not to Overreact to Swine Flu Pandemic
(http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=a1OeX_3t1Z5c&refer=japan)

I believe that our society has blown the swine flu cases way out of proportions with most of the patients contracting swine flu getting a cough at the least. In the article, it says that: “The new virus has sickened 19,273 people and caused 117 deaths since it was discovered in Mexico and the U.S. in April, WHO said yesterday. Bird flu, which isn’t easily transmitted among people, has killed 262 of the 433 people known to have been infected since 2003.” So is this really something to go crazy about?

No.

Comparing the swine flu, with 0.6% chance of death, to the bird flu, with 60.5% chance of death, is ridiculous. Another point is the fact that the seasonal flu kills 34,000 people each year in the United States alone. Why isn’t there any reports
everyday on that?

It’s because the media loves to blow things out of proportions. I was watching CNN a month ago and they started calling this the swine flu era! That is a great way into comforting your viewers. It’s like our media outlets are actually trying to scare us so we don’t go out of our homes unless we wear hazmat suites.

I would also like to point out the other side of this story. It is true that it is better to be safe than sorry. Maybe the media is just being “safe”. However, lately they seem to be just reporting deaths and not cases of swine flu and I believe that
this is making people believe that there are many deaths, when there really is not.

Thank you media for being… well yourself.

Our society is blind sometimes...

Bipolar is a misunderstood mental disorder that is sometimes looked at in different and bad ways. One of my good friends has this disorder. I find that sometimes it can be hard to put up with it, but that’s because our society doesn’t teach us very much about this disorder and usually we think of them as “psychos”. Is this really a way of treating another human being? I talked to my friend about the issues that she comes across in her life.

One of the main problems, that my friend tells me, is that there is not enough education on the issue and people tend to believe that they are “emo” or just being a teenage girl. Bipolar is really just a disorder in which the person, without their medications, is prone to extreme highs and extreme lows. The mood swings are uncontrollable, unless the medications are taken. My friend and I believe that there should be education and awareness on how to react and take care of a person with bipolar because when people are faced with the problem of a bipolar person they do not know how to react.

Another question that I asked my friend was how do you think society looks at you? She responded with multiple answers saying that the people that knew nothing about bipolar deemed her as “crazy” or that she is faking it whereas even the closest of her friends do not always understand her. She sums it up as that, “the majority of people I know view me negatively most of the time.” So our society isn’t used to the problems of confronting a bipolar individual. Our society has failed to educate the people on this problem and the media does not help either (portrayal of people with mental disorders as crazy lunatics).

Since society has failed my friend, I asked her how she deals with having this mental disorder day to day. She says she does take nine pills (five different kinds) a day to keep her moods in place. She tries to educate the people around her about her problem. Another part of this burden is that there are many lies involved when she gets upset, so that she can mask her true emotions. The only way that she believes calms her down when she did not take the medicine is listening to music which, she says really helps. Maybe if our society knew how she feels they would understand and not call her “crazy”.

In conclusion, I believe that Canada, or the whole world for that matter, needs a better education about people who not only are bipolar but really any other mental disorder because our society is ignoring them and we need to do something about it.

Sicko

Michael Moore’s sicko was an excellent film that portrayed the American health care system “crisis”. He compared the American system to not only ours but also France, England and Cuba. Finding people across America with stories of how their health system failed them. I believe that Moore brought up a good point that for a country to function it needs it s people healthy, so that country should take care of them. Overall, it was a good film.

Well… I had some problems with the fact that he praised the Canadian health care system as perfect. Because as we all know, it really is not. There are some serious problems that need fixing. These problems are that of the long waiting line in emergency rooms when getting medical attention is the most important. Although I can understand Moore was just trying to make the American health care system look bad, he should have made a note on the current issues with our health care system.

In addition, this film made me think about the best country on earth, France. Even though I stayed there for 6 months, nobody really explained to me what their health care system was about. In Sicko, I learned that it has the best health care system in the world! Maybe that’s why their country is one of the only countries in all of Europe to have a population that is increasing instead of declining.

So is there any hope for the American health care system? Well Michael Moore does not answer this question but for all the people that are suffering because of a bad system, I hope that their new president will try his best to fix this problem.

Redifining Aging Article

1. According to this article, what attitude shift is occurring with respect to aging?
The attitude shift that is occurring is the way the baby boomers view aging. This attitude is called conscious aging, where they want us to accept that we are coming to an end in our lives and eliminate the ideas and thoughts of extending our life.

2. Why do some of the experts cited believe this attitude shift is important?
This attitude shift is important because it would get rid of our obsession with youth culture and take into appreciation what the definition of old age is. It would also eliminate stereotypes of old people; instead of believing that we will just be useless and forgetful, they would believe that old people are very wise and intelligent.

Questions from David Foot Article

1. What impact does David Foot believe the aging baby boom generation will have on the health care system in communities such as Toronto?
The Baby Boomers will put major pressure on our hospitals and health services. Hospitals will have to be expanded and new ones built.

2. What solutions does he propose to deal with these issues?
David Foot proposes that we should integrate. He uses the example of using a system that gives people drugs easier, like pharmacists that can prescribe medicine, instead of going to the hospital first to save the health care system time and money.

Hunting

Steph and I did our presentation on the legality of hunting. We brought up different points from each side of the argument and received lots of feedback. We found some videos and images, some graphic, some not, and luckily only Steph was the only one to turn away. I thought that we got the class’ attention with those.

One of the things I would have liked to have been better was maybe a better organized discussion. We seemed to go off topic at times and to be honest some of the students were a bit too passionate about hunting. Also there were some people that didn’t get to talk and I wish they would have spoken up. The other thing that that I wish was better was that the power point presentation could have been longer with the use of case studies. A case study that I would have chose would be that of hunting seals with PETA having an enormous hatred for the hunt.

The positive things that I saw come out of this was that there was quite a bit of discussion to our presentation. Maybe it’s because our world is changing and people are considering other things and not just themselves or on the other side of the spectrum people may be motivated by their history. Whatever it was people really got into hunting.

What I got out of our presentation was that I learned a lot more about hunting and how sometimes it helps and is not all what the media says it is. I believe that we should have the same hunting system that we do now because it really does help other animals and the environment as a whole.

Earth Hour

The annual Earth Hour was held again this year throughout the world with an estimated 1 billion people participating in this climate change awareness event. A sociologist might ask if turning out your lights for an hour will raise enough awareness to change the world. I hope to answer this question in my journal.

People from 80 countries worldwide turned out their lights for about an hour in this event. This message, that turning out your lights for a while or even when not being used, could help against global warming. Having children participate could help condition them to think that by turning of lights could directly help them save the world. Because these children are our world’s next politicians, leaders and governments, they will learn that we have to keep our planet green.

Not only were residential lights turned out, but businesses also committed to turning lights out. A perfect example of this would be at Pearson International Airport. When they committed to turning off a bunch of unused lighting in some of their terminals for an hour last year, they just keep them off now that they aren’t really needed. So Earth Hour jump started this airport’s commitment to our saving our planet.

Earth Hour helped give more power to the “green movement” by arising awareness to people and businesses around the world. Sometimes we just need a huge event to start a new way of living and that’s what Earth Hour did. Hopefully Earth Hour will continue to help the environment by the ways of raising awareness.

French culture

A culture is a very important part of a society and is defined by Edward B. Tylor as: “A complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”. I will attempt to distinguish the main cultural beliefs in French society while comparing it to our society as well. I spent 6 months in France, where I lived with a host family and learned a lot about their culture.

What I couldn’t help but notice while on my exchange was that the French people were closer to each other physically. When they great each other, even strangers, it is with one, two, three, four or even five kisses on the cheek depending on what region you are in. It was quite a surprise to me coming up to people and kissing them because our Canadian culture associates kissing with love and close relationships.

Another important part of the French culture is their education. They spend an average 48 hours per week at school while us in Canada a usual 30 hours. That’s an 18 hour difference! Their classes are much more structured with lecture style courses and less time for creative independent projects. While our system allows a wide variety of ways you can do things, such as one class may do presentations on a certain topic while the other does essays. The French worked really hard in most subjects because the teachers reinforced that if they fail, they basically fail at life.

Of course there are many more topics on French culture but there is only so much room. I am extremely glad to have learned so much about the French culture and met such wonderful people. In reality it is much more than the beret and baguette (even though that is a true stereotype); it is the cuisine, art, language, history and beliefs that bring this amazing culture together.

Why we should study how societies function?

To commence sociology is defined as: “the study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behaviour” (American Sociological Association). We should study this because they are what we are; our past, present, and future. We can observe ourselves and take notice of our previous mistakes, fix them and see which way we are moving in.

Studying other ancient societies such as ancient Rome, the Mayans, the Greeks, etc. could help us by seeing their downfalls and taking note on them and hopefully learn from them. From the prologue of “A Tale of Two Farms”, Jared Diamond says that: “past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting variations on a theme” (p. 6). If we apply what he has said here, we should be able to collect data about past collapses of other societies and use them to help us protect our own society to prevent past mistakes. He also takes examples of other societies that have collapsed (ex: Easter Island, Mangareva and Norse Greenland) and others that have flourished (Highland New Guinea, Japan, Tikopia and Tonga) who have taken action to their problems or did nothing about it. This basic concept proves that Diamond believes that we should study our society to learn from our history and apply it to today’s problems.

In an Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore discusses how climate change is forever changing our world and what we should be doing to stop it. He collects data about our population, the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, the average temperatures around the world, etc; this data shows us how our society is functioning and how it is causing bad effects on our environment. He studied the way our society is functioning and applies it to the problem of global warming (or gwobal waffle, in the terms of a little girl whose only concern is her ice cream). He believes that if we continue to be a society that pollutes and emits harmful things into our planet, we will suffer the consequences through nature’s “fury”. Gore demonstrates how we can apply our knowledge of today’s society and attribute it to our future.

In conclusion, we should study sociology for the reasons that Jared Diamond and Al Gore have mentioned in their works, we learn from our mistakes, apply them to our future and get an idea as to where our society is going.

A comparison between the Leakey family and Franz Boas

Franz Boas and the Leakey family both promoted and advanced the social science of anthropology. Although they studied in the same field, their studies were very different from each other’s work. For this analysis we will need to define anthropology, which is:”the study of comparative cultures and the origin of humans.” We can clearly associate the Leakey family with the study of human origin and Franz Boas with the study of comparative cultures.

The Leakey family is a family that mainly worked on the human origins part of anthropology. But it is worth noting that Louis Leakey did learn much from the Kikuyu tribe of East Africa including their language, culture and ceremonies. Louis Leakey started his life long passion when he found old arrowheads and tools. Three generations later, along with many major anthropological discoveries, his legacy lives on through his family. Their family has been very passionate about this topic. They major discoveries that they made, while in Africa, were: the Proconsul Africanus, Australiopithicus Boisei and Homo Habilis. These discoveries proved that our ancient ancestors came from Africa and that we are a species that evolved many times leading from monkeys. The idea that we came from Africa revolutionized the study of human origin as people in that era believed we originated from Asia. The Leakey family influenced many people, making them more aware of our human origins.

Franz Boas was a man who studied much about culture. He was described as being the “father of Anthropology.” Boas believed that differences among races were a result of particular events in their history. One of his major contributions would be his theory of cultural relativism which states that: “all surviving human groups have evolved equally but in different ways.” Other contributions he made to anthropology would be that culture is learned, he developed the department of anthropology in the United States and that the best way to study a culture is to not observe but participate for themselves. Like the Leakey family he has influenced a number of famous modern anthropologists and has increased the interest of American Indian cultures.

The main similarities between the two anthropologists are that they contributed so much toward anthropology. They both revolutionized their study and set a foundation for future generations of anthropologists to come. The Leakey family and Franz Boas have given the main theories that anthropology rests upon.

In conclusion, the Leakey family studied one side of anthropology and Franz Boas the other but they both made major breakthroughs in their field making them the most recognizable anthropologists of all time.