Podcasts

I have iTunes at home, and I never even knew that you could shop for podcasts, I thought you had to make your own. Browsing the Podcast Directory was okay, they didn't have much selection. I think it's cool that you can download stuff and upload it to your iPod. I chose VH1 Best Week Ever because sometimes I watch it on TV. I couldn't find anything better than that either since there wasn't much to choose from. It might be because I'm not looking hard enough.

Family Blog 2

Most of the time, my parents are working whenever I get home, so it's mostly my sister, my brother, and my little puppy. I would say a unique characteristic about my family would be that we explore and try everything. Whenever My dad and I go to the city he always makes detours and says "I want to check this out" or, "Oh this place is new let's go see", I don't mind either because he always ends up at some cool place. My dad is the comedian in the house, which is why my sister and I always hang around the house with him. My mom, well she does pretty much everything for us such as: chores, pays bills, buys food, cooks dinner, and all that stuff. My little brother is just annoying, I don't know a single person that hasn't said their young sister or brother is annoying. It's not all the time that he's annoying, sometimes he's good. My little puppy, he's just a hyper case, but he's still a cool dog. We sometimes have family nights, we do random stuff, board games maybe, it depends. I especially like our family gatherings on the holidays. Every holiday is celebrated at my house, all my relatives come over and we have a BBQ and just hang out.

Earth Day

Earth Day was a day that always made me think about how I contribute to the destruction of the environment and what I can do to help. Earth Day is mainly celebrated throughout elementary schools . It's a day that gives people awareness of our environment. Gaylord Nelson, who is the founder of Earth Day, believed that education was the key to changing people's attitudes about the environment and he devoted much of his time towards that challenge. I agree with Nelson because I never really cared until I learned about all these little things we could do to help and how our environment could drastically change.

Copyright

What is Copyright? Why do we have copyrighting?

Copyright is the law that protects someone’s work from being used without the author’s permission. We have it so the original person who created the idea or object gets credit for it and the money they deserve instead of someone ripping off their idea and selling it.

Compare the two songs in this copyright case. Do you think the following songs are targeted at different audiences?

The newer version is targeted to the younger audience.

Rap or Rock? Can you tell the difference? Go to the following website to play clips of Vanilla Ice and Queen / David
Vanilla Ice’s song is rap and Queen/David Bowie’s song is rock.

What does copyright law protect?
Copyright protects the original authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture.

Why are there copyright laws?
There are copyright laws because it protects some one's original idea from being copied and used unfairly.

What is fair use?
Fair use is using a limited amount of the work for educational purpose. Also, if it's non-profit, then it is okay.

Does fair use completely cover whatever she wants to do or are there limits to what is fair?
There are limits to the amount of use of some one's work that you can use.

Why can’t copyrighted materials be put on a school website?
People other than the students have access to that information.

How much stuff on the web is copyrighted? (Not much, a quarter, about half, etc?)
Almost everything is copyrighted on the web.

What is Creative Commons? What does it mean?
Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a "some rights reserved" copyright.

Fuzzy Logic

Fuzzy logic is reasoning that is more of a guess than exact information. I think fuzzy logic can be useful. I have no idea why they would want computers to think like humans because computers are smarter, and they give accurate information. Fuzzy Logic can have a huge affect on my life because machines such as a microwave will determine on its own on how long something should be heated. Other things like a washing machine can vary its speed and water levels, depending on the size of the load and how dirty the clothes are.

Family Blog

Family is the people you live with or people you are related to by blood. Family can also be someone who you care about. Most people consider their best friends as part of their family. My family circle would be my mom, my dad, my sister, my brother, and my dog because those are the people/animal I live with. My family can be great but sometimes really annoying. My little brother is just plain annoying 24/7 and my sister is mean almost all the time. My dad is the fun one around the house and he let's us get away with a lot of things. There is a huge variety in my circle of family because we all have different personalities. My mom is serious, my dad is funny and laid back, my brother is hyper and annoying, my sister is boring, and I have no idea what I would be classified as. The quote about families that says, "Families evolve from a patchwork of possibilities" can have multiple meanings. I think it means that family generations overtime will change in a variety of ways.

What I learned

I learned from other people's projects that the Nintendo Wii is more popular than any other system out. I thought that the PS3 would've been the most popular but it turns out in every project I heard or saw, PS3 was the least favorable. I think that is because of the high cost for the PS3. From my own project, I learned what others thought about immigration and that the people that immigrate to the US come here for a better life or to feed their families.

Final Day of Project

My partner and I presented today and overall, I think it went well. As we played our podcast, people laughed at some of the things that were said about the issues of immigration and that just goes to show how serious this topic is and knowledge needs to be spread about these kinds of things. Mr Hinman even said, if you are making fun of immigrants, you are offending your ancestors or someone close to you. I think the project, although short, got people to think that immigration is no joke, these people are just trying to feed their families and live a better life. We exposed how our peers think about immigration. Hopefully, after today, everyone that listened to our podcast got something out of it because it wasn't meant as a joke and shouldn't be taken as one. What I enjoyed from this project was creating the podcast, it was fun to make edits and interview people. I just wish I would've put in music...