Lecture Summary

Tonight I attended a lecture that was presented over a book called Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. Its was presented by the authors of the book, Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak. The book was talking about the benefits of organic farming, and why this is so much better than conventional farming. Along with the benefits, there were also a few issues that came with having organic farms just like any other type of farming.
Some of the main issues that came with both organic and conventional farms is the weather. There is a huge need for fresh water throughout the world, and that number is increasing while the supply of water is decreasing. As of now 67% of the water being used goes towards agriculture and farmers just planted their billionth acre of crops so only more is going to be needed. Another weather issue that is effecting the crop is global warming and not having all the proper conditions needed to grow suitable crops for consumers.
As i was sitting in this lecture listening to it, I thought what was going on was very interesting to me. I was never really aware of the issues of growing crops, or that there was a big difference in organic crops and conventional crops. One of the big differences is the amount of pesticides used on the crops. Organic uses 97% less than conventional. I think that the since the speakers had a PowerPoint that was full of graphs and pictures that it was another reason that it kept me so in tuned to what they were talking about. Although I thought the lecture was interesting, I am not sure that I would really enjoy reading the book. I think that to me it might get kind of boring. I would be one to recommend the lecture to someone though if they came back to ISU to talk about it again. I did think it was captivating enough that others would enjoy it too.

Facebook Project

As I was looking through a friend's profile on Facebook, I easily found many different things about her. As I was looking through 'Kaylee's' profile, the first thing I noticed was that the page was mainly intended for friends. The purpose of her profile was to keep in touch with her friends, put up many different pictures, and find out about herself. I could tell she wanted to find things out about herself because she had many applications that were things such as: "find out which personality you have" and "Which celebrity do you look most like?"
Kaylee's profile had many things that had to do with her boyfriend, such as pictures and status about him. This is one way that was easy to see that she was just looking for friendships and to keep in touch with friends as she went to college and moved away from home. Another way that was easy to know that she liked to stay in touch with her friends, is that in her profile she had many quotes. The quotes were not inspirational quotes though, they were usually a conversation between her and her friends. Kaylee seems like the type of person that tries to be funny and wants everyone to like her.
Kaylee seems to have a lot of friends on her profile, and talks to many different people on her wall. One thing that Kaylee lacks though is her spelling. She has a lot of misspelled words on her profile and I'm not sure if that is because she don't know they are wrong, or because she just doesn't care. She also has a lot of pictures tagged to her, along with tagging herself in a lot of her own pictures that she puts up. Many of the pictures that she puts up involve her boyfriend, or a certain dog. She talks about her boyfriend and dog the most in her profile so it is quite obvious who she cares the most about. From her profile you can also see that as she cares some, she often doesn't care what people think about her. From the quotes mentioned earlier, she has a little attitude in them that shoes she does what she wants. She also uses bad language sometimes and talks about dirty things in her profile. So as one can tell, there are many things that can be figured out just from one's Facebook profile. So if you don't want everyone to know something about you, it may be a good idea to not put it on the Internet that is easy to access.

Partner Interview

During our interview in the class, I interviewed a guy named Oscar. He grew up in South America with a large family. There were seven kids in his family, and he was the youngest. As I was interviewing Oscar, I found that there were many interesting things  about him. There are more than one things that I found about him that were interesting, but some surprised me more than others.

I think the biggest thing that surprised me that I thought was very cool was that he was the first one in his family to go to college. The reason I thought this was so interesting was simply because of that fact that his family was so big that I would have figured someone else in his family would have gone. I think the reason for this was because although he was originally from South America, he later moved to the United States and lived in Des Moines. Once there he got scholarship offers to play soccer at some community colleges but since he liked to be around more people he decided that he would take his other academic offers and come to a bigger school like Iowa State University.

Some other things that I found out about Oscar that I thought were interesting was that as a kid, he was more the type to sit around and play video games and watch TV. As he grew up though he got into soccer and found a real interest or that also. He enjoyed it so much that he played that all the way through high school and ended up getting offers to play in college. Another thing that surprised me was that he was seven years apart from his next oldest brother. So those were just a few of the things that surprised me about Oscar, but as I interviewed him, there were many other things along with those. 

The world of Blogging.

1. A blog is "a log of thoughts and writing posted publicly on the world wide web." Blog is a combination of the words web and log. There are many reasons that make a blog unique from any other types of writing such as: there is no need for retroactive editing and you can add hyperlinks to multiple sites and sources.
2. Sullivan compares a blog to many different things. A few examples that he refers to are: A ship's log, a book, daily writing vs hourly writing, a diary, and 'The New Republic'.
3. An advantage that a blog offers is that it can be published instantly. Another advantage to having a blog is that you can write about whatever you want and are not limited to any certain subject. One more advantage would be that it is completely free to do, and anyone can start their own blog.
4. Along with advantages, there are also disadvantages or consequences to blogging. Some of the consequences to blogging would be things like anyone being able to comment on your posts whether they are good or bad things; and if someone lies on their blog, it can be easily caught by using hyperlinks.
5. It could also be a good idea to use a blog in a writing class. The reason for this being that you have to express yourself the way you feel right then and once you post it, it's there for everyone to read it. You can then look back on it later and experience how you really felt at that time. Another good reason these are good for a writing class is because of the fact that people can comment on them. They can give you feed back and tell you what they think about it.