Cla4085's Weblog

Final, Can’t Wait!

cla4085 — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:50:31 +0000

This coming Monday will be our last day of class, how sad. We will be taking our final written exam, which should cover everything we discussed the second half of the semester such as, advanced searching within databases, censorship, copright notes, and other miscellaneous material. I not exactly sure how to study for this test, but I’ll try and just review all our notes and powerpoint presentations from our last mid-term till now. Also, due on Monday by midnight is our annotated bibliography, which I have yet to truely start. I’ve done one before and am confident that I can knock it out this weekend, but they are pretty time consuming, especially when you have to do all those citations. The timing of project is a little inconvinent with the work of all my other classes starting to come down on me all at once, but thats what exams are all about, crunch time.

Overall this has been a pretty good class and I have enjoyed it for he most part. At times it was pretty demanding, because I would put things off and then have a ton of things to do all at once. And for some parts of the class were definetly more challenging for me than for other people probably, because of my illiteracy with computers and software. This course has taught me a lot about libraries and using the resources they offer to the fullest; how to search databases, find scholarly journals and articles, and find various other credible sources.

Copyright

cla4085 — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:16:21 +0000

Today in our last formal class we discussing the issues of copyright laws and the many gray areas that are associated those laws. In one example we discussed the case between the hip-hop group 2live crew and their paradoxical remake of Roy Orbison’s song, “Pretty Woman”. The case involved the copyright laws that guarded Orbison’s original piece and the freedom of speech the group was using to recreate the song. In the end the court decided in favor of the constitution and free speech. This was a landmark case for many artists and influenced the styles of others, such as Weird Al Yancovich who style relies completely on making a parody of other artists songs. Another situation we looked was a use of a four second Simpsons clip that was going to be used in the background of a movie maker’s shot, but since FOX had a copyright with all rights reserved(A.R.R.) they requested 10,000 dollars for the use of a four second clip. That’s petty f-ing ridiculous.

I feel like copyrights are necessary, becausepeople should have exclusive rights to the materials they create, and should be able to elaborate on those materials as needed. But there are so many gray areas with copyright, and I like the idea of fair use that allows the use of copy-written material as long it is not used for profit and the manner in which the material is used is appropriate.

Google-The good and the bad!

cla4085 — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:49:02 +0000

Today in class we discussed the good and bad traits of the search engine Google. It is a revolutionary search engine with multiple search options and search links. What I found particularly scary was when I typed in my parents phone number the search returned with my parent’s names, address, and map to get to their house. So if any serial killers out there wanted to find out where to find me and my family all they would have to do is Google it! I did not know to the extent of information that Google knows about you when using their search engine. It keeps a record of all the searches you’ve done in the past two years and if you have a Google e-mail account all your e-mails are screened and kept in their database forever. With the e-mail accounts I definitely don’t think that its right that there all screened especially without the third party’s consent.

After learning all that today in class I don’t it’s going to make me stop using Google because after all it is a great search engine that always returns pretty relavent results. But it will definitely make me think twice about what I’m searching before I type it in, and who I talk to and what I say.

Media Bullstuff!

cla4085 — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:14:52 +0000

Today in class we had an enlightening discussion about media ownership and censorship. We talked about major media mogul companies such as, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, and General Electric. We used a website through Maryland University that showed exactly who owns what, and how many little satellite media companies these giant corporations own like, radio stations, newspapers, and television stations. It was pretty ridiculous how many little companies are out-rightly owned or partially owned by these media tycoons. When talking about all those smaller media companies we discussed how the news got filtered or censored as it was relayed from the top to the smaller news stations before it released to the public.

Towards the end of class we watched a short news clip that detailed a case down in Florida where a pair of news reporters were fired for refusing to censor a story regarding cows being injected with hormones to increase milk production. The news reporters were given sufficient, credible material against the hormone rBGH, and how it can have long term health affects. Prior to them airing the story the news station received a letter from its media owner asking them to censor and essentially take out all slander and criticism about the company Monsanto who was the only company producing the rBGH hormone. When refusing to censor the article both news anchors were fired. The anchors are currently filling a law suit against the Monsanto company. I thought this video clip was interesting and gave an interesting look at how the big media companies censor material and only publish or air what they want you to see or hear.

Presentation Day, Yeah!

cla4085 — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:32:05 +0000

Today in class we presented our group database projects. My partner Eliot and I were assigned the ScienceDirect database because we are both have science related majors. Eliot and I have gotten together the past few days and worked on getting our presentation organized. Last night we created our handout that was part of out presentation. It was not anything fancy, but contained the required material, which was basically the top ten things you should know for our database. I was pretty impressed with everyone elses presentations, some people definitely went the extra mile creating detailed power-point presentations about their databases. Eliot and I decided not to do a powerpoint, but to just run through the database and explain things as we went along. Out of the eight groups that were to present today I think only six made it through their presentations, and unfortunately Eliot and I were not able to go, too bad. Instead, we are just going to have to present Monday when we get into class. I kind of wish we could have gone today just to go ahead and get it over with, but the extra time will give me a chance to revise my speech as well as the material I am presenting.

Monday Class

cla4085 — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:27:51 +0000

We began class on Monday by discussing our final, which is creating a ten source annotated bibliography. We have to choose one of the topics that we discussed in class to write about, such as plagiarism, censorship, databases, and several more. I wrote an annotated bibliography sophomore year for English 201 class, but unfortunately it was not on any of the topics for this class. My annotated bibliography was on medicinal marijuana so at least the subject matter was interesting, I have a feeling that I’m going to struggle getting ten different sources on something like searching databases, but we’ll see. Next, we got together with our group partners and briefly discussed our database projects. My partner is Eliot Garner, who is a little slow, but I could have gotten stuck with worse. We got assigned the Science-Direct database, which is good because we both frequently use that database. We finished most of the written work and just need to create a handout for class on Wednesday. The rest of the class we discussed critical thinking and information cycling. We went to a few very interesting websites that we full of phony information, like malepregnacy.com and stopfakenews.org. Both sites detailed the use of “fake” news and research and how it gets cycled through the media.

Reno Article

cla4085 — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 21:44:17 +0000

A recent article was published on-line at msnbc that dealt with a college professor being charged with plagiarism and misappropriation of funds. In Reno, Nevada, professor Hussein S. Hussein was accused of these violations in 2005. Hussein is a renowned animal nutritionist at the College of Agriculture in Reno and has been doing animal research in that area for years. Hussein is being charged with failing to credit his graduate students for their work in research papers and to give a required portion of his research funds to the university for indirect costs. Last week was the first session of the hearing and they went through three days of testimony. Several school representatives of the university have presented evidence that they say substantiates the allegations against Hussein.

You would figure that such an educated and well respected professor would not have use the work of his graduate students, but even if he did you would figure he’d be smart enough to at least cited their work. This would be a good example of direct and indirect plagiarism, because I’m sure he does the majority of his own work, but probably uses some of the numerical data collected by his students in his research. Even though it is his words filling in the pages those numbers that back his statements were created by someone other than himself;therefore, he must properly cited and give sufficient credit to those whose work it is. I hope he rots in jail for this horrific act!

Mid-Term!

cla4085 — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:51:09 +0000

Today, February 27, we took our Lib 103 mid-term. It was a little more difficult than I thought, but did not cover anything that we had not gone over in class in detail. I think I did alright with the matching, and thought I got most of the multiple choice questions correct as well. I think I might have run into a little trouble putting the call numbers of those seven books in order of which they are found on the shelf. I remembered that the letters such as, QE, QD, and QF help to subdivide the books, but could not remember if the actual call numbers increased or decreased as they went down the shelves. I was confident that I identified the proper citation for an Internet source, because one was obviously wrong with all the unnecessary web jargon, and also included the volume and issue abbreviation which was not needed. The last section of the exam where we had to put together a search string using Boolean operators, I thought I did alright on. I think I organized the correct words together, but don’t know if I truncated all the correct words. Hopefully, I did o.k. but now I need to start getting ready for spring break, because I leave for Puerto Rico in a few days, so I need to dig out my sunscreen and warm clothes!

Plagiarism:Big No-No!

cla4085 — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:10:52 +0000

Last Monday we discussed plagiarism in class, and we’re required to read a short essay by Leslie F. Stebbins on properly citing sources to avoid plagiarism. When beginning a research paper start with proper note taking, accidental plagiarism often starts with poor or sloppy note taking. When cutting and pasting from online sources remember to cut and paste all the needed citation information as well. When writing or typing your research paper to make it easier to distinguish your work from the work of other sources maybe highlight or put in brackets direct quotes or other information pulled directly from those sources. The essay also discusses the benefits to paraphrasing properly and how it helps the reader understand what he/she is writing about. But it also states that if you paraphrase too closely to what the author originally put then it is considered “indirect plagiarism”. “Direct plagiarism”, would be using the author’s exact words and failing to cite them at the end of the paper. The essay continues to describe several different types of plagiarism and how each kind can be avoided.

At the end of class we closed by taking an online quiz through the University of Indiana on various types of plagiarism. It was useful in identifying the different forms of plagiarism, like direct, indirect, and paraphrasing. Unfortunately, it took me much longer than the rest of the class to finish, because of my confusion between indirect and paraphrasing plagiarism. Eventually, Ms. Radom told me as long as I got the gist of plagiarism I could go. So I got up and peaced out!

Education Tour!

cla4085 — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:33:41 +0000

Today on Wednesday, February 13, our class meet in the Watson Education building for class and a brief tour of the Curriculum Materials Center. For the majority of class we focused on proper searching techniques using the library catalog. First, we illustrated how searching the catalog can turn out various results depending on the field under which you searched. For example, when searching Edgar Allan Poe to find works that we wrote you would have to search under author for Poe, Edgar. A more general search could be a keyword search of Edgar Allen Poe, which would return with numerous works some of which he did and many that other people did about him. Next, we did several searches using the catalog where we incorporated “and” and “or” in our search phrases. When using “and” it would search both the words together, while “or” would search either of the two words independently. For example, Chinese or agriculture would search Chinese “or” agriculture, while Chinese “and” agriculture would search both Chinese and agriculture. At the end of class we went on a brief tour of the Curriculum Materials Center and saw all the different types of curriculum books and learning kits they had available for students. A tutoring room is set in the back where younger children come to get tutored, all these materials and learning kits are made available for tutoring as well.