This is Slavery

A Story, A Life

 People wonder what can "we" do to stop or change Human Trafficking? Like I said before there are main types of Human Trafficking such as Sex Trafficking and the Labor Trafficking. Both of these are horrible, but what will put an end to this? Humans (Victims) are tricking into thinking that they will finally be able to go to America or where that wish to go but are made into slaves that are forced to work way below the minimum wage. Also yes, it does happen in other places besides the United States. It happens mainly in Eurasia and according to research it does not have a high rate of happening in the US but that does not mean that it does not happen at all.

Hope, they take their hope and twist it. The Slave Traders take the Victims “Hope” of supporting their family, actually getting out of their home and twist into a promise that will never come true. The Slave Traders say “If you come with me I’ll take you to “blank” and all you need to do is work for me for a while.” That “while” will never end and the Victims and never meet their dreams. Their dreams will never come true, they will continue to work unless someone helps them. But how can that person help if they do not know where to help. The victims cannot call out for help because they are trapped, trapped as a slave in a foreign country. “They are largely silent, they have no voice, no hope, that’s the impact.”  

Here is a story that one of my fathers suggested to me, it talks about prostitution in Spain. Have you ever wondered where Human Trafficking Victims come from?

What could stop this or who? For example if this was happening in Pennsylvania, who could stop it? Many may think the president but President Obama can’t do anything. It is actually the local officials, such as Police. The problem is getting the police to actually get up and do something. Right now Police are lazy some are not. If the police investigated more into Human, Sex and Labor Trafficking, they could find a Slave Trading Route or a building where it takes place.

Now to make the Police in other countries to get up and do something. The President whether it is a he or she could definitely affect the Police and get them to do something. But maybe it is a problem with the Police, the Policemen or Policewomen could not be willing or wanting to help. No matter how hard people may try, it is almost impossible to stop men and women from having or thinking about coitus.

The Time to Act is Now, People of The World End This Crisis!

Hello readers! My name is Amy Farrell and this is my third post on the topic of testing on animals. If you wish to read  my first 2 posts, click here for post 1 and here for post 2. In post 1, I gave an overview of what animal testing is all about, and included an informative video on the topic. In post 2, it was more about my opinion and other research I have found. In this post, this is my plan for change. This is the last part of the project, so this will be my last blog post.  

The final question we all have is:

What can we do to help?

There are many things you as a reader can do to help. First, view this list of companies that do test on animals (Below) , and make sure you do NOT buy their products. Here is an easy way to find brands that do and do not test on animals.  If enough people boycott companies that use animals for testing, they will run out of business OR decide to change their testing methods. 

Here is a petition that you can sign that says you will not buy products from companies that test on animals. After signing this, a letter is sent to one of the companies saying you are boycotting their products. 

My Plan / Original Content 

I sent an email with this link to the freshman class at Science Leadership Academy. So far, I’ve gotten over 40+ people to sign it. By sending this link to people, it will spread awareness. Also, after you sign the form, it asks you to send it to a friend. By sending it to a friend, more and more people will be aware of this happening. Even after this project is done, I still plan on using products that do not test on animals, and I will continue spreading awareness. 

Acknowledgments:

I’d like to thank Mrs Dunn, Emma Hersh, Max Amar-Olkus, and RubyJane Anderson for helping me complete these 3 posts. 

If you want to do more, you could contact the companies by yourself and tell them why you aren’t going to buy their products. If many people do this, they will realize they need to change. Here is a list of companies that still test on animals. It may be shocking to see some of your favorite brands listed, but it is the truth. As I stated earlier, you can contact these companies yourself and tell them what you think about this. Change always starts with one person, and that person could be you.

Also, if you wish to join PETA’S Action Team to help animals, click here for more information. 

If you wish to see my bibliography, click here.

Who wouldn't want to see more animals being healthy and happy? 

I find these results very interesting. The majority of the survey takers feel that they are very familiar with technology; another landslide majority are not comfortable with humanoid robots as an integral part of life.  

At the same time, nearly half of the group have thought about or want robotic parts as a component of their own bodies. 

And everyone, save for two, have used some sort of modern appliance.  

Though that may not seem like a glaring problem, it is never a good thing when people fall into a rhythm without knowing what it is they are getting in to. To help remedy this I made a short video that will hopefully pique the publics interest and inspire them to find out more about technology that is still in development. 

The first picture is the intro text to the games made by an artificial intelligence named Angelina. 'She' factors in playability and creates the sprites, background, and gameplay without outside input. The following montage of pictures shows robots in the media and the real world. The last, and perhaps the most profound, is the 50's ad spoof for about a violent house bot. 

This video will be spread through Youtube, this blog post, and several social networking sites in an effort to have people become interested.

The evolution of robotics and programming is not a bad thing. Despite this, there are plenty of regulations that humans as a whole should hammer out. The definition of a person, for one, and how that applies to artificial intelligence. It would be a terrible thing if we created these amazing thinking beings but end up oppressing them. 

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For further reading my sources can be found HERE.

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As a bonus for scrolling down this far, this is a conversation between me and Cleverbot. Can you identify the Bot? 

The United States continues to drop globally in education, this was established in my last blog post. But why?

Some would argue that its spending, that the US doesn't spend enough on education. This is simply not true. The US ranks among the highest in spending, yet among the lowest in achievement. This chart illustrates that countries that spent moderate amounts of money on education score the highest. This shows that the problem is not something easy, like not enough spending, but something bigger.

That something bigger is the entire system itself. The model used in most classrooms today is based on Horace Mann's philosophy on education. Mann believed in a primary education for all. His education philosophy was that students of different ages should be separated by age. Each grade had certain requirements, and those who didn't meet those requirements were not promoted to the next grade. Students were also to have summers off, mostly due to how hot it would be in the school year. Mann believed that education should be decided federally, rather then locally. Most classes were taught using lecture.

One problem with this is that Manns education system is mainly fact based. Mann emphasized the memorization of facts. Now that we have the internet, memorizing Abraham Lincolns birthday or the location of the Czech Republic is not very important. What schools should be teaching instead is how to apply these facts to the real world. Memorizing facts and spitting them back out does not require any form or original thought. What should be emphasized more in schools is critical thinking.

Another problem with this is that curricula are set by the state rather then locally. If teachers had more freedom to write their curricula, then they could tailor them to the needs of individual students and incorporate all learning styles.

Our education system is incredibly outdated. It was designed during the industrial revolution to give as many students the most uniform education as possible. But education is not "one size fits all". It needs to be tailored to the individual student to fit his or her needs, and our system does basically the opposite of that. To improve how public education in the US works, we need to scrap the old system and design a new one.



Here is an interesting TED Talk by Ken Robinson, an education activist. 


Sources

Hello readers! My name is Amy Farrell and this is my second blog post about an issue I care very deeply about, testing on animals. If you wish to read my first post, click here

Since my last post, I have found several new websites with useful information on them. Also, I have found things you could replace animal testing with. Before, when a woman had a pregnancy test done, the laboratory procedure involved killing a rabbit. Now, you can buy a home pregnancy test over the counter with no harm to animals. Instead of dissecting real frogs or animals for a science classroom, there are many online  alternatives such as this. For some skin tests, scientists have developed a synthetic skin that can be used in place of animal skin. If the test is not that dangerous, they will do it on human volunteers under serious supervision. Some people argue that these methods cost more, but in reality they cost less. The scientists do not have to keep buying and breeding and cleaning up after animals anymore. The question is, why don’t they just stick to alternative methods? 

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I believe they don’t use the alternates  because they are afraid. If the test goes wrong they could get into a lot of trouble. What many people don’t realize, is that a little less than half of the tests that are conducted are inaccurate. For example, some companies test mascara on rabbits. One brand caused the rabbit to go blind, but they still sold it to customers anyway. 

By doing this project, I have discovered the many sides of animal testing. Some feel it is the worst possible thing that could happen, while others feel that it’s the only option they have. I hope that by reading my blog posts, it will help everyone become more educated and learn more about this topic.

PETA is an organization for the protection of all animals. They try to spread awareness of what's really happening to animals that the public do not know about. Through their work, thousands of animals are saved every year. To learn more about PETA, click here

Click here for my bibliography. 

Hi, if you have not read my first blog post, my name is Lisa Kang and I’m doing a project on bullying. If you want to find out more about the project in general and want to see my first blog post then click here. In this blog post, I will be talking about some more information that I found out after posting the first blog and it will explain what research I’m planning on doing by myself so that I can compare and contrast it to actual results that other people got.

In my first blog post I mainly talked about the victim of bullying and now I will explain more on the effects it has on other people. When someone thinks about people who are involved in bullying, they usually think about the bully and the person being bullied but it can also have an effect on parents. Some parents of the students are not aware of what is happening to their childs in school. I think that if parents step up and try to check up on how their children are doing in school then more of them would be aware. Also I learned that children act a certain way because of their parents. For example sometimes, parents are also bullying their children but they are not aware of what they are doing because they might think that pushing their children that way will make them do better in school. I think that there are better ways for parents to approach the way they treat and talk to the kids.

After researching more about bullying, I decided to do my own research so that I can see what people around me think about this issue. For my own research, I decided to make a survey and let people fill it out. In this survey there are a few questions, some are multiple choice and some that allow people to explain their thoughts. If you would like to fill out the survey, please click here. You will remain anonymous, and so please just take a minute or two to answer these questions. It would be great if I had a different range of age so that I can see how different people thinks. The final results of my findings will be in the next blog post.

This helps me have a better understanding on bullying because it shows that all the people who took the survey thought that bullying was wrong. Also in the survey, there were a few response who clearly showed that they did not take it seriously because even though they said that bullying was wrong, I could tell that they lied about their age and that showed that they thought it was a joke. Overall, I’m waiting for more results and I would like to see how different people of different ages think about it.

This is the link to my sources.

This is my results so far for my survey.

This is a picture of an actual chart on bullying in different grades.

This is a poem on bullying.

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      Hi are you sitting at home wondering what you want to do for the rest of your life? Just graduated college and don’t know what you want to do next? Well I definitely know how you feel. Hi my name is Jordyn Randall and Im in the 9^th grade. I’ve been thinking a lot about what job I would want to have now, my future and what I want to do after high school and even college. But I found out that its not easy to find a job and that there are 13.9 million people unemployed.

 

       In The major worker groups, the unemployment for adult men ( 7.5%), adult women ( 7.4%), teenagers ( 24.9%), whites ( 7.4%), and Hispanics ( 10.3%) showed hardly any change in April, although the rate for blacks ( 13.0%) declined over a month. The unemployment rate for Asians was 5.2% in April. This information hasn’t been shocking but considering that my race is the highest unemployed is disappointing but makes me want to strive to not be in this category.

 

I believe that some of this unemployment has something to do with taxation. Businesses pay more taxes in the U.S. than any where in the world. Many businesses are being truly crushed by this, which is also chasing businesses out of the country. Barack Obama has just proposed  a boost in unemployment taxes. I feel that this is going to make businesses not want to hire more employees.

There is a such thing as unemployment benefits though. Unemployment benefits are payments made by the state to unemployed people. Depending on the authority and the status of the person. The amount of money may be small, covering only central needs, also known as welfare. In some countries a proportion of unemployment benefits are divided by labor unions.

 After doing all this research I feel copying more money will get rid of all our problems because if people have more money they will buy more things and businesses will have more money. I also feel that we should just keep the prices of everything the same instead of raising the prices of things every year. I don’t think we should do both because that wouldn’t be to good for businesses.

 

 

 

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This is the you in the world project, and it is to help put a dent in homelessness. It is blog two, and is about opinions and more research. The research I did really helped me understand homelessness, and how it can affect anyone. Homelessness is defined as not having a set place to sleep in the nighttime. When I think of homelessness, I think of sleeping on the streets, and under overpasses. That is exactly what homelessness is. 

     Homelessness is in all parts of the city, and all neighborhoods. There were volunteers that went out yesterday, May 17 and counted 583 people in the nighttime were homeless. There were 50 volunteers, and they counted the homeless. That was just yesterday, but on any given day people can become homeless. I feel as though the citizens of Philadelphia could help the shelters, so that we can prevent some people from being homeless or becoming homeless. 

     My opinion on homelessness is that it can be prevented, or that the city can help some of these people. The only people or organizations that are helping the homeless are groups like Project HOME, SREHUP, the Office of Supportive Housing, and all homeless shelters. There are people who give the homeless food, and I applaud that, but the homeless need safe places to rest at night. I feel that all these abandoned building that are big enough can be turned into shelters, and places that are affordable for homeless people. 

     One thing that I didn’t like was the ban against feeding the homeless. Mayor Nutter was wrong for doing that, because everyone has the right to eat wherever they want. I am not homeless, but I can eat in public. So why is it that if you are homeless you only can get food from a shelter. That makes no sense to me. I feel that people should be able to share with anyone, even if they don’t have a home of their own. The reason there are so many homeless people alive, is because how generous other people are. So why would the Mayor make people, not help out others in need.

     Homelessness can affect anyone, men, women, children, and families. It doesn’t just happen to the lower class, it can happen to anyone. Now people can complain about homelessness, or the citizens can take action. Me personally, I am going to take action. I am going to help people in need not because it is the right thing to do, but because I would want someone to do the same for me. Homelessness is defined as not having a set place to sleep in the nighttime.

Click here for my bibliography.