Activity III fun with facebook

I have not really taken any Facebook tests so I had my little brother check this and he said it was ok.


Part I: Tim Baker


Hemp Necklace Pound of Worms

Solar Panel Composting Toilet

Plastic necklace

Harness for Beached Whales

Fuel Cell car (Honda FCX Clarity)

Voucher for the perfect nature hike

Extra pair of walking shoes to save gas Organic Jelly Beans for Easter

A Whole 33,000 Organic Dairy Farm

Limited Edition:
Go Green (and White) / Save the Endangered Huskies T-shirt 




Part II: Which World War dictator are you most like?

Question 1:
Do you handle criticism well?
Yes [] No []

Question 2:
Do you have facial hair?
Yes [] No []

Question 3:
Have you attended college?
Yes [] No []

Question 4:
Are you an accomplished poet?
Yes [] No []

Question 5:
Have you edited a newspaper?
Yes [] No []

Question 6:
Are you a vegetarian?
Yes [] No []

Question 7:
Are you often considered to be short?
Yes [] No []

Question 8:
Have you served time as a school teacher?
Yes [] No []

If you answered yes to Question 1 good for you, but unfortunately none of these dictators took criticism very well and in fact all set up either mass death camps or prosecuted huge ethnic and/or political killing sprees. The most well know is of course, Hitler’s answer to “the Jewish Problem” which we all know as the Holocaust.

If you answered yes to Question 2 then put a point for Hitler and Stalin. Both had mustaches during the height of their political careers. Hitler’s was the oddest and most recognizable.

If you answered yes to Question 3 then put a point for both Stalin and Mao. Stalin attended a Georgian Orthodox Seminary on scholarship for several years. He was kicked out before he took his finals because his poor family was unable to pay the bills. Mao lasted in school much longer, attending the University of Peking.

If you answered yes to Question 4 give yourself 2 points for Mao. He was a very well respected poet, and would have been even without his high political office. He concerned himself mainly with the classic Chinese ci and shi forms of poetry. He also wrote in the traditional Chinese form and was considered a romantic. During his lifetime he was also a widely acclaimed master of calligraphy.

If you answered yes to Question 5 then give yourself a point for Stalin and Mussolini. Stalin started the most famous of all Bolshevik newspapers, Pravda, in 1912. Mussolini also started his party’s newspaper and edited it, but he had training as a classical journalist and had traveled abroad as a journalist.

If you answered yes to Question 6 then give yourself 2 points for Hitler. Hitler was an extreme vegetarian, who even disapproved of his lover Eva Braun wearing makeup because the animal testing involved.

If you answered yes to Question 7 then give yourself 2 points for Stalin. His actual height is unknown, which is less surprising when you understand the extent of the personality cult that was built around him. Experts have guessed his height to be between 5’5” and 5’6”. All of his statues instead portray him as closer to 6’ or 7’ tall.

If you answered yes to Question 8 give yourself 2 points for Mussolini. Although he never went to college his boarding school diploma qualified him to teach elementary school, which he did for at least one year after graduation.

Interview and pictures

Irag and the Media; How the Bush administration lost the publicity war.


Complete Show Length in minutes: 5 minutes

Episode 1: Topic ____Initial Bush Policy ______________________________________
Intro Music Clip: Title: __Tell me a Lie Janie Fricke_____ Minutes: ___20 seconds____
Intro: _____Lies, Lies and more Lies_______________Minutes:__1 minute________
______Just about everyone now knows that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction when the
United States invaded Irag. The real shocker comes when we discover just what led us to believe
That there were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Irag. Two non-profit groups, the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism conducted a study of the Bush administration’s references
to Iraq having Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The statistics are shocking for what we know to be blatant lies, Iraq was stated to either have WMDs, be trying to acquire WMDs, or have links with Al Qaida 532 separate times in the two years after 9/11. All of which were lies. That is no way to fight a war, and when people eventually find out about all of the lies that they have been told there is bound to be a negative response, as the former president discovered.


Segment Music Clip: Title: ___Imperial March (Vader’s Theme Song)_John Williams__ Minutes: __20 seconds
Segment: _____How did such a popular war become so unpopular so quickly?___ _Minutes:___2 ______
______From hearing people talk, most were in favor of the invasion when it began in 2003. The president’s approval rating in all polls had only been higher immediately after the 9/11 attacks. The rating was fairly stable at an average of 70%. Within just three years only 38% of the population would support the war destined to become the third longest in the history of the United States. What happened in that time? What could make so many people change their minds in such a short period of time? For one thing, the official reports started to trickle in that there weren’t actually any WMDs in Iraq. I have found an article on the Fox News website from October 7 2004, that reported Charles Duelfer, the head of the government’s Iraq Survey Group, submitted a 1,500 page report to the Senate Armed Services Committee that stated there was no evidence of Saddam Hussein stock piling WMDs, producing WMDs after 1991 or passing those WMDs to Al Qaida. He reported that the capabilities were still in place, but that at the time of the invasion there was no immediate threat to the United States. That report was not the only one. When taken as a whole I guess it is not so surprising why the public turned on the President so quickly.

End Segment Music Clip: Title: __National Anthem of the Soviet Union__ Minutes: ___20 seconds_____
Ending: __Democracy is the voice of the people, right?_______Minutes:___50 seconds_______
The person I choose to interview was the Media Analysis Teacher at my high school, Mrs. Kara Clayton. I originally wrote the interview questions assuming that the interviewee would have supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which she did not. This threw me for a loop until she explained to me that her husband is a civilian contractor for the United States Army. With all of his connections she was much better informed than the average. This makes me even more worried, if the army knew what was going on and the people, didn’t. That sounds more like a fascist state than a democracy.

Ending Music Clip: Title: _____Funeral Dirge by Baby Dayliner_______ Minutes: __30 seconds_____
(Also run Credits) :
Sources
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/media/2008/0122falsestate.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,134625,00.html
http://z.about.com/d/uspolitics/1/0/z/D/bush_total_1may_umn.png
Special thanks to Mrs. Clayton

Shape poems

I chose to arrange my poem in the shape of an American Flag because it is a very recognizable symbol of America. The poem is all about what America is and why the country is not what it should be. I figured that the best symbol of America could be the American flag. Well, maybe not the best symbol, but definitely the easiest to make out of words.

I wrote my extra credit poem as a short little love song. The lack of details on what was expected encouraged me to experiment more than I usually would. I used an unnatural pattern, and did not worry to much about the syllables. Of course, I tried to make each rhyming line have close to thee same number, but I liked the words that I was able to use when it was less regimented. Also, I was writing and thought that I could easily change it so that the voice was actually a tree. This is the reason that I choose the tree shape.

Corrections to the Draft

I enjoyed posting my paper and receiving feed back from so many different people. The major feed back that I received was my udder lack of any sort of actual conclusion. The conclusion is always the part that gives me the most trouble, so I usually leave it and review the rest of my paper before actually writing the conclusion. This strategy works well unless I forget to go back and actually write it. After the feedback was posted I thought of a nice way to tie it all together. The whole conclusion paragraph is brand new. I think it did a really nice job summarizing why the articles were a part of the essay, maybe not doing a good job of summarizing the articles.
The other major factor that I changed was the spelling, punctuation and other basic house cleaning for the essay. There was not that much I had to do for this task, I just looked at it again and some of the reviewers mentioned that some might have gotten through the cracks. My father was especially helpful in pointing out exactly what was wrong.
I tried to restructure it a little but was not sure if it really needed it so I left it basically the same as the draft. In the third paragraph I discovered that I used claims to much so I cut a few sentences with claims in them and I changed a few of the words to something other than claims.

Draft

Democratization and Trade

As a student on a political science track I chose to research democratization and trade. All three articles were connected in that they explored the relationship between the two, but all were different articles entirely. Each explored the topic in different amounts of detail and depth.
The first article I researched dealt with democratization and trade liberalization. Daniel Yunichi Kono tackles the issue of whether or not democratization is actually the best answer for trade issues. He used a lot of graphs and mathematic ideas. The main basis of his argument is the thesis by Mayer (1984) that the determination of trade policy is the median voter. If the median voter has a greater proportion of capital to labor then the nation should have more liberal trade policies with labor rich countries. This can help explain why several aristocratic European countries built huge overseas empires in the 19th century; they felt the need to develop labor and resource areas as well as markets for their own capital intensive goods. Democratization has the opposite effect. Giving the vote to more people lowers the wealth of the median voter in a country. This lowering of the capital to labor ratio would lead to more liberalized trade with richer countries who export capital goods. On the flip side is that newly democratized countries will increase trade barriers with countries that are not as rich. This response to democratization can severely restrict trade between neighboring countries in developing areas in the world. Kono compares such a model as being more like a central hub with spokes coming out of it rather than a trading web, with trade being limited between the spokes. His general thesis was that simply spreading democratization is not enough to ensure trade health. It is certainly a large step but should not be the only consideration.
It was interesting to see the hub and spoke model of the first article mentioned indirectly in the second article by Amos A. Jordan and Jane Khaana. The main topic was about the emergence of Natural Economic Territories (NETs) in the Pacific. It was not nearly as abstract or number intensive as the first article. It was mainly an overview of what an NET is and which one of the top nine has the greatest chance of success. An NET is a geographically close association of areas in the Pacific that are not politically aligned but are working together to increase trade and wealth. It is a little hard to grasp what the true definition is since several different models exist and some have extremely ironic connections. This includes the fact that the most successful NETs are associations of border provinces that are breaking away from the policies of their respective central governments, with the blessings of those same central governments. The example I mentioned at the start of the paragraph is the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle. Singapore is a large city with heavy capital reserve where as the Johor region of Malaysia and the Riau Islands of Indonesia are both very poor. The text reads, “Given that the strongest links in this NET are between Singapore-Johor and Singapore-Riau, some argue that it is not a triangle but a corridor managed by Singapore, …” This is the hub and spoke model without using the name. It was nice to see a real life example instead of just seeing a mathematic thesis. The main thesis was that greater decentralization led to greater trade in the Pacific.
The last article was interesting as it came to close to the same conclusion, but from a different direction. Janet Dine claims that greater globalization of trade was actually de-democratic. She claimed to prove that greater democratization in individual countries led to liberalized trade policies. Then she went on to say that these liberal trade policies were de-democratic since it allowed multi-national corporations to run wild. She claims that free trade issues are just politicians’ ways of claiming profit over morals. She wrote as if multi-national corporations were the worst things to ever happen to the human race and that they are off springs of basic institutional corruption. As it was printed in the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies it was mainly concerned that those same multi-national corporations are using the lack of international laws to use unfair labor practices and other unethical practices in there attempts to single mindedly pursue profits. Instead of free trade, she promotes the Fair Trade movement and others like it as alternatives. The Fair Trade movement was in its beginning stages when the article was written so she clearly admitted that it was not close to really being effective, but she did claim it was better than free trade. So her thesis ended up being that liberalized trade agreements hurt democratization, instead of democratization and liberalization hurting trade.
It was interesting to see how different each article was on the same basic topic and keywords.

Project 1

Timothy Baker Reflection

This project is not exactly what I wanted to end up producing. Originally I had wanted to create a 30-second flash animation. I bought the software for animating various types of media just for fun and designing my own pet projects. When I went to use it this week I had trouble, and found out that I was not registering my account and that I could only access a fraction of the features. This was really frustrating and forced me to use the Power Point format. Also I wanted to use my own photos from the North American International Auto Show but I lost the camera and could not use them.
I worked to make the most of with what I had to work. I choose Power Point because it was the medium I was most comfortable with for this first project. In later projects I will see what other forms I can branch out in.
I am a little concerned with the lack of color in the presentation. I was not completely sure how to get the most out of Power Point 2003, as I usually use 2007 and 2008. There was no place that I saw that really stood out to me as needing color in the wording but I did notice how much color was added by the pictures.
I tried to use as much of the techniques mentioned in the book as I could. I tried to use Arial fonts for the titles of all the screens. I also tried to load all of the pictures or fancier texts in the top left corner of the screens. Originally I placed the pictures on the right but then decided to use the books suggestions and I think that it worked better since not everyone is drawn immediately to text. The techniques were new too me. I had learned about putting everything in a left to right and top to bottom order in my Programming class, but other techniques like sameness creates contrast were wholly new to me in creating any type of media. Another that I found extremely intriguing was idea of using all of one style or similar style texts. I am pretty sure that I did a satisfactory job of using extended viewing fonts versus quick view fonts, but I am not positive since I had not even heard of those categories before starting this project. It was harder to use the text book’s plan of asking for audience feed back. It would have been nice and I agree with it most of the time but in this instance it was much too hard.
I am not sure how the citations are supposed to work since this is the first assignment. I also added two pages to the assignment but did not think that would be much of a problem since the two were an opening and then a citation page.
Altogether I think that I did a pretty good job on the assignment. It was definitely a learning experience and I hope that some of the techniques demonstrated will be of use to me when I make other projects.

Proposal for first module project

In my first module piece I would like to advocate greater support and awareness of full sized electric vehicles. I will be choosing to use a 30 second flash animation, hopefully with an animation studio that I will be buying in the next week. If that does not work I will probably just write a power point¸ which is not nearly as exciting.
I am trying to narrow down the list of main topics to at the most three. One that I know I will use is that electric was one of the original power plants for cars. This is an interesting historic fact that is not really well known, and I love history so it intrigues me as well. The point I would try to make with that piece of information is that for a long time electric vehicles were more reliable than gasoline, and gasoline won the right to be the most widely used form of drive system because of the wide spread growth of refueling stations. With new plug in hybrids and plug in electric cars gasoline’s only advantage has been swept away. I also would like to have a few comments on all of the electric cars on display at the North American International Auto Show. There are several high powered vehicles that could turn heads¸ and they are said to be the greatest portion of this year’s show.

Screen Shot

At first, when I took the screen shot I thought the assignment was a little strange. I mean, come on, what is a simple picture going to do that will teach me anything about writing? It’s the exact same image that I have been staring at for the last hour. When I wrote this reflection though, my whole view changed.

Composing in a digital age is very different from any time before. I know that I personally see my work as much more variable then I had before. Looking at just the image on the screen and having no control over what it looks like or what it says was really eye opening. With Microsoft Word, I can type a huge essay and print it out. Then if I feel that it needs to be changed I can just start the program up again and fix it. When that new and improved version is saved that original work is erased from the memory, and the new is left in its place. With actual physical writing or even typing on a type writer, any attempt to just go back and fix the original copy would have left a smudged and ugly mess. That plain physical caused any single draft to be unique. This really changed my view of digital composing.

In this digital age any type of composing can be quicker and much more variable. The author has access to so many different methods of communicating now then in the past. I think that an interesting way to better understand digital composing would be to do the exact same project as both a hard copy and a digital copy in a different medium. Talk about the exact same topic, maybe even use the same words but see what new and exciting thing you could do to change the digital copy.