HW 42 3rd podcast

http://www.archive.org/details/PodCast3_778

Here it is!

HW 36: Podcasting # 1

http://www.archive.org/details/PodcastNumber1_770

Here it is

HW 34: Iraq's family Values

As I was reading Riverbend’s “Baghdad Burning”, October 9th through 29th, I came across of the tea tradition in Iraq. The tea is served to the entire family at once while sitting in the living room together. The making of the tea is something different though, who the tea is served to and the serving time is not. Tea is served in many ways depending on the family but there is a basic 3-step process that tea is made. The water is boiled then tealeaves are added and then finally it is all put in to a different kettle and heated until the leaves rise to the surface of the kettle and allowed to settle again (Riverbend 108-109). Tea is never served by a tea bag. Which I thought it was very interesting because a lot of the people I know, including myself, use tea bags. But in fact, in Iraq, it is considered an insult to Iraqi’s due to their expertise of tea and the way it is served. The drinking of tea together is their family’s way to have conversation and enjoy each other’s company. In my house when I was little we did that when we sat down for dinner. The conversations they have range from the current political situation of Iraq to what each of their days consisted of, they do this but free will and often look forward to their evening tea as a family. Then when Riverbend went on to say “Unlike the typical family conversation around the world ‘How was your day dear?’ doesn’t get at typical answer in Iraq.”(Riverbend 109), I thought was very interesting because that is a typical in the US.

HW 33 Podcast and Iraqi Children

I watched the podcast “Iraqi Teens Work to Help Their Families” which was part of the Alive in Baghdad series. The link to it is http://aliveinbaghdad.org/2007/10/15/iraqi-teens-work-to-help-their-families/. This podcast was published on October 15th, 2007. After watching it, it is quite obvious that the message that’s trying to get a crossed was simply that most teens in Iraq must help their families with the work because the unemployment rate in Iraq is over half of the population. There is only a handful who could help there families. Throughout the podcast three children are shown talking about their lives in helping out their families. The first is Hussein Kamal who is only fifteen years old. He says that he helps his father with carpentry during the holidays. He states that his brother taught him how to paint furniture. The next child is only fourteen and is in sixth grade. His name is Mustafa Malek Fathullah Ali. He informs us that he has worked with his father in carpentry since he was a child. He says that the security situation is difficult and no one can protect themselves. He is currently helping his uncle at his house. The final child that they show us is named Yousif. Yousif does not help his family with work. He is enrolled in the College of Agriculture in Abu Ghraib. Yousif is currently unemployed. He also suffers from a birth defect. He lets us know that a habit he has developed is just sitting at the computer. Anyone who watches this podcast might feel a sense of pity towards the Iraqi people who were once able to live normal lives, but since the war are forced to be more cautious with their daily. The most memorable thing I find about this podcast are the boys ending statements to the Arab people telling them to stop supporting terrorism because we obviously are trying to stop terrorism too.

HW 32: Summarizing Aquila Al-Hashimi

I thought I would summarize Aquila Al-Hashimi. Saturday September 27, Aqila Al-Hashimi was buried in the south of Iraq after being murdered by an unknown attacker. There are suspicions as to who was behind it, nothing is official. One of the accused is Al-Chalabi, who was also accused of the attack on the Jordanian Embassy; however Al-Chalabi rerouted his accusation to Saddam. Riverbend believes this is sort of a cop out. Al-Hashimi was said to be made an ambassadress to the UN for Iraq. It is now kind of ironic. Since her death the UN is pulling out its staff to do “security reasons” (Riverbend pages 84-85). “…the UN is pulling out…we’re getting bombed” (Riverbend page 85). This is how she tells everyone about the political situations in Iraq, if the UN is in its going good, and if their out it’s going badly.

HW 31. Helping Moja

After reading the post “Turning Tables” by Riverbend in Baghdad Burning, The story that really stood out to me, having family members who fought over seas, was that of “Moja” a soldier fighting in Iraq. I had to go online and look up something interesting about her. The URL address for the blog “Turning Tables” is http://turningtables.blogspot.com. The blog is written by a soldier that is fighting in Iraq. Her blog made me emotional and it made me angry. After reading the blog, I realized how hard life is for the soldiers over there and I felt horrible for anyone who has to go over and deal with it. They go through so much in just trying to help the people over there. Reading this blog gave me the urge to want to help the soldiers over there anyway I could. I obviously want all of our solders to come back home to their families and friends, but I don’t think that its time yet. I feel that the Iraqis need to start stepping up so we can start bringing our troops home.

30 B Very offended!

After attending the lectures of Jiwan Ahn, Sander Lee and Mark Timney’s “Animations as Political and Social Constructions” a lecture from the Citizenship Symposium done by Keene State College, I was greatly offended! Thursday, the day of the lecture and also that of kristelnacht or holocaust remembrance day, I feel that Jiwans was not only very inappropriate but also I didn't understand what it had to do with blogging or technology at all. I feel that she was a good speaker but I just didn’t like her topic. Mr. Timney’s was not only offence to people but also he needed to take consideration that it was kristelnacht. I had one of my friends come with me to keep me company, she also was greatly offended. Showing a video of “Hitler” and “the Nazis” was not only rude but I had to leave. I feel that he needed to change for the day. If it was another day, I think is presentation would work. Not on holocaust remembrance day.

HW 30 Voting and blogging??

After attending the lecture by Dr. Vincent Ferlini who has a BS in math from Notre Dame, MS in math from the University of Oregon, Prof at Keene State College, I have learned a great deal about different voting systems. “The earliest voting system came from Greece in 509 BCD” states Ferlini. His lecture entitled “Get Out the Vote” i have learned many ideas such as to educate people on voting, opportunities educate people on voting my select groups, educate people on the many voting systems such as plurality, Borda, Plurality with elimination, Pair wise comparison, and to Educate people on fairness conditions such as majority criterion, Condorcet criterion and independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA). The interesting information I found was that of Approval voting which only list candidates approved of. Also of run off which involves more then one election. I thought his lecture was very interesting but I didn’t understand what it has to do with blogging.

HW: 27 Annotated Baghdad

Riverbend, “Baghdad Burning: girl blog from Iraq”. New York, NY: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2005. This blog is a diary of a twenty four year old, Iraqi, girl who needs a place to rant about the war. She talks about political issues, what everyday life is when there is a war going on in country, and information that Americans do not know about what is going on in Iraq. The twenty four year old girl doesn’t go by here real name but she goes by Riverbend and she talks about issues of the war that she is tired of. It is nice to have a first hand view of what is really going on in the war. People like reading her blog because she gives more information that the government doesn’t want the American citizen to know. Riverbend needs to be careful because she is telling bloggers and or people who like to read this information, that her government or the United States government probably would not want to be disclosed. This is a great resource for anyone who wants to know what really is going on in the war.

HW 25: Baghdad

After reading the foreword and introduction to “Baghdad Burning” by Ahdaf Souief and James Ridgeway, I found it very interesting about what was really going on in Iraq today. The forward, written by Ahdaf Soueif, was a very brief description of the blog written by “Baghdad Burning” by Riverbend. Soueif tell us what we can expect when reading the book Riverbend’s blog talks about how she feels about living in Iraq and how it has impacted her. It also states the effect it has on her family, war has on her country as well as her daily life. In the introduction Ridgeway tells us facts about what is happening in the war and how Iraq has advanced over the years. Ridgeway speaks about the background of Riverbend's culture, as well as telling us about the struggle Iraq was going through since the Gulf War up until the war that is currently going on. Reading the introduction and foreword to the book really helped me to understand the Iraqi war in an view that I won’t be able to view first hand. I had can never a picture or even think about what I would do if there was a war in my neighborhood. I am looking forward to reading this book because I want to know if this war really was worth it.

HW: 21 Danny

Dear Danny,

Since you are my best friend and you are in the same class that I had, I guess I will help you out. Chapter one is hard to understand at first and I am still not to sure but I will try to explain what I thought it meant. Virginia uses words to express and describe her feelings. I think she starts off by explaining that women need two things, Money and a room to work in. Virginia talks about women authors. Virginia also tries to change people’s opinions that women have become inferior to men. She touches on different author’s histories. That’s all I really got out of the chapter. I wish I could have helped you more but I hope this still helps you. If you ever need anything else please feel free to e-mail me anytime.

Your buddy,

Tim

HW 19 Media and the truth?

After reading “Web of Influence” by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell I found out about what the blogosphere represents and what it does to the media. I think the second paragraph seemed to be really interesting because in March of 2003, Salam Pax, a blogger from Baghdad, was the lead story on the blogosphere when on the TV the lead story was the death of Saddam Hussein’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid. Reading this paragraph made me think that their must really be two different kinds of media. I think the main problem that the world faces in any media today is the unknown. A person can believe in what ever the news tells them but is it actually true? I feel that the saying “You have to see it to believe it” is the best saying because it’s the actual truth. I feel that certain things on the news is completely true, I just feel like the media says things to “juice” up the story. I feel that most media is the truth but I still would like to the story personally.

HW: 18. Raped 4-5 times!

After looking through Jezebel, I would have to say that the article that disgusted me the most was entitled “How to Rape 100 (Cute, Educated, Upper Middle-Class) Woman and Get Away with It” I feel that the Philadelphia jury needs to be helped because if they can’t call him a rapist after he was charged ten times with rape and possibly hundreds more, then where is the world coming to? It all has to do with Social Networking. All the girls that Jeffery M. Marsalis met on line came from Match.com. People who use Match.com and other dating services need to be careful because this is a possibility that happens more often then one thinks.
After reading the article, I read some of the comments that people posted and I feel the same way. Some people said they felt sick after reading it, and others confessed that they too were raped. This one person’s comment said they were raped 4 to 5 times and never reported it. I feel that if a person who has been raped should tell the police so that other people would not get raped. If this guy gets off the hook, then the world would have another criminal on the loose.

HW: 17b Politics Stink!

After reading this weeks assignment I would have to pick “Blogging the Presidency: An Interview with Markos Moulitsas Zuniga” because not being in any real party (not Democratic or Republican) I feel that because Zuniga spoke to the millions of people and they got Senator Trent Lott to resign is just sad on not only his part, but on everyone’s. On the other hand I think that if anyone who makes $48,000 per month in ad revenue is really smart. I think that politics is really stupid and it just makes the world argue. I think after September 11, 2001, or the days right after, I felt that Republicans, and Democrats came together and wanted to get the people who where responsible for those horrific attacks. Now, just over six years after, they went back to criticizing President Bush. I think Bush did the right thing and sent troops over. It has come to a point where I do say we should start to pull SOME troops out but we still need to find the terrorists. I do not like it when people bash our president so I would vote for Republican party again.

HW: 16-B, Pillars

After reading “Blogs: Humanizing the Face of Corporate America” an interview with Robert Scoble, the five pillars of conversational software. He say that RSS (which means “really simple syndication”) “is a teache’s way of saying it allows a blogger to offr his weblog for people to subscribe to, as well as to integrate links and news from other websites.” His five pillars include: one, is the “ease of Publishing” meaning it would be really easy to publish integrated links and news from other websites and post them onto your blog. Two, which is “discoverability” allows you to personalize and customized a blog for a companies own site (http://feedster.com/corporate/). Third is “cross-sire conversations” which allows a person to see who linked theirselfs to trackbacks. Fourth would be “permalinking” which is just allowing a person to isolate a website that will directly link you to a post. Finally the fifth is “syndication” which just means that everything just joins together. It is kind of hard to understand what Scoble means but once you learn RSS, its not that difficult.

HW 13: Business

After reading “Blogs Will Change Your Business” by Stephen baker and Heather Green (Kline and Burstein), I believe that the impact of blogging on business is more important then the impact of blogging on business. I feel that Blogging is not only a great idea for the business owners but as well as the workers. More and more workers could work from home. That would stop the pollution of the cars and would save on gas. The only thing is that people have to be careful of what the put on it. “..a programmer names Mark Jen started blogging about his first days in the goggleplex….two weeks later Goggle fired Jen”( Kline and Burstein 224-225).

HW 11: Nuclear Weapons...We'll Listen

After reading "Making Global Voices Heard: An Interview with Rebecca MacKinnon," (Kline and Burstein) I chose to talk about the North Korea Zone (http://nkzone.org/nkzone/). One entry from this blog, titled “Much ado about Missiles”, talks about how Syria and North Korea Missile scare is not nuclear at all. I feel that the writer of this blog, Timothy Savage, feels like the government is trying to hide something. “Washington insider Chris Nelson claims to have ‘absolutely solid information that the Israeli bombing raid on Syria was aimed at...and took out...missiles and/or weapons parts. Period.’ "(http://www.nkzone.org/nkzone/entry/2007/09/20/much_ado_about.php)". Wall St Journal’s John Bolton is the only one who thinks that there is something going on. When Rebecca started the NKZone in 2004, I feel that she really started a new part of her life. I feel that her main goal when she started this to now has remained. I think that Rebecca did the right thing by leaving CNN because the world is changing and some day there will be no TV but all blogs.

HW 9: Blogging is my Hero

After reading “A Weblog Saved My Life Last Night”, an interview of Ayelet Waldman, I think Mrs. Waldman is mistaken when she says “Some woman on the infertility blogs express a level of immense pain which is followed by an outpouring of love and support in the community. Maybe I’m reading the wrong men’s blogs but I don’t see that on any of them” (Kline, Burstein 312) because she overlooks men have the same feelings as woman but we share them in a different way. I know I can’t just come and say what is on my mind and share my feelings but we feel the same way. I agree when she says “...I imagine there is a certain level of education on the web” (Kline, Burstein 314), because my experience of doing research papers and other online activities confirms it. I think that when people read the blogs they should be careful on what they put in it. The fact that Mrs. Waldman put a suicide note on the blog, really made her think of all the things the people have read. I think she won’t be writing on the blog anytime soon.

HW 7: Leave Kids Alone!

I feel that if a parent monitors everything that is online, then I don’t think that a child will be free to write what on his or her mind because all that they are thinking is that they have to make their parents happy. For a parent has to monitor the child then I don’t think that right. Growing up as a child to a teen to a young adult and now finally an adult, I think that kids should have the same laws as everyone else. In her article, “My So-Called Blog,” Emily Nussbaum states that “a significant number of writers treat their journals as actual diaries, toting up detailed accounts of their day” (Kline and Burstein 354). I think that if a child wants to write something personal, then why should parents need to monitor that? I understand that parents are only trying to look after their kids but there is a time when a parent could abuse that privilege and I think looking and or monitoring their online Journals or other online sources is wrong.

HW 5b: The age of Technology

“I blog, Therefore I Am” is a chapter which I do not agree with at all. It starts off with cartoonist Stephan Pastis talking about the relationship between comic strips and news papers. Then it goes on to talk about emphasizes that “we confront the possibility that a new communications and publishing technology- in this case blogging- will endanger massive change in our society, most especially in the role and power of the traditional mainstream media” (Kline 238). I disagree with this at all. I do not think that this will endanger massive change in our society. I feel that the new technology is a small step in a much bigger picture. I feel if we can now go on the web and look up some really interesting information about certain things then I feel we can help even save live. Technology can be a good thing and a bad thing. I like the idea of Netspeak. Netspeak is “a method of conveying texts, thoughts, and even emotions in the shortest form. Even the panel of experts at a recent Washington symposium on the language on the internet thinks it is doing more good then harm. Everything has its ups and its downs. “..Any school teacher can attest, the more kids write …. The more educated and successful they will surely be in later life” (Kline 251). I have to say that the new way of technology and the old way of books and old fashion research are two ways that the old way will never go away but the new age is coming and coming quick.

HW 6: Semester-long Project

Thinking of something to do for my semester-long research and writing project was easy. The social computing technologies that I am most interested in would have to be instant messaging for one. I love people and I love talking to them. Now that I am at college and I am away from all of my high school friends that are still in high school, it is just so easy to communicate with them. Another great example of computing technologies that I am interested in would be social networking services. I love to go on facebook just to see how all of my friends are doing. Some people just like to write down something with out a response right away and I feel that it is also an easy way to communicate with love ones. Finally I use to like to play online games like online card games. Virtual worlds are a topic that would be interesting to learn more about. The three kinds of empowerment of marginalized groups that I am interested in and would like to find more about would have to be Issues of learning disabilities because I do have a learning disability and would like to find more information about it. I would love to also find out the rights and empowerment of people who have cancer. I have known and I know people who have died or who is dieing of cancer and I want to see if they still have the same rights as we do. The last one I want to find more information about would have to be overcoming racism because I want to know why people can not accept someone. We are all human and we should all be treated equal. The geographical areas that I would like to start to look in would be North America and the United States in General.

HW: 4 orbit gum

When I walked in the door into my dorm, the first thing I saw was my orbit gum. I went on their website, http://www.wrigley.com/wrigley/products/products_orbit.asp , and saw that their promise was “For a Good Clean Feeling, No Matter what”. I believe this saying is not completely true because if I eat a flowerpot full of dirt and then I put a piece of the gum in, I would not feel clean. I would still feel like there would be dirt in my mouth. I also feel that when they say "just brushed clean” is not an accurate saying because the gum does not kill all the germs that brushing can kill. On the other side of the debate, gum can improve some oral health. When I went to http://www.gumisgood.com/oral_health.html and I read about the oral health I found out that “Chewing gum stimulates the most important natural defense against tooth decay - saliva.” After reviewing both sides of the debate to figure out if orbit gum’s motto is correct, I found out that it is still irrelevant but needless to say, I will still enjoy it.

HW 2: Politics and Blogging

"Our Government is being robbed"(Kline 3) is just the opening to a very exiting debate between two bloggers, Chris M. Fick and Jerry Hurtubise. In discussion of our government between the two, Fick suggests that we are being robbed and we don’t even know about it. He says that the media is owned by the right wing. On the other hand Hurtubise, A right winged, says that the right winged party’s movement is bigger than anything that the left party has ever done. I found a very interesting is that being extremely shortsighted to get rid of the huge influence that bloggers are just starting to have upon the American political scene. In the 2004 presidential elections, 28 million readers went to all different political blogging cites. Liberal blog DailyKos drew 7 million alone. Six months after it still drew 11 million visits a month. After reading on, I found this blogger to be very interesting. “One blogger’s suggestion resulted in 115,632 handwritten letters being sent from the candidate’s supporters to eligible voters in the upcoming Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire.” (Kline 16). At the end, looking back on the debates and thinking about how politics and blogging work together, I read about how Frank Barnako, from CBS, and he says “no one reads blogs” (Kline 4). He then states “At least [Wall Street] traders read blogs, then, and act on what they read…Political blogging is like Ralph Nader, Nobody pays attention.” After reading about blogging and politics, I wonder what blogging will incorporate next.

HW 1: Going Global!

After reading Dan Burstein's 12 key ideas from "From Cave Painting to Wonkette”, I would have to agree when he states that Blogging is going global. “It is not just us wild ‘n crazy, uninhibited, populist Americans who like to rant” (Burstein xxiii). After reading this, it reminded me of one of my friends who moved to England and she had really no way to communicate to us. She started a blog and told us all her new stories. We have not lost contact because of it. When searching for a blogger online I came across all sort of different languages. I found Japanese, Hindu and much more. I know that with today’s uprising in new technology, more and more people are turning to internet sources to communicate to people. People in Iraq (especially our soldiers) should have a place where they can write down thoughts. They have been writing down thoughts all over the globe for thousands of years but now with new technology, we can do it with a little more pizzazz. Where ever you are in the world you will find someone who is blogging and writing down their thoughts.