Social Issues Part Two

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Hello and good afternoon

 

This week we are still on the social issues of college students. The issue that I will be talking on for the next few weeks is the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) community and some of the pressures and issue that might arise. It seems to me that even though there will always be cultures and religions that will frown on same sex couples, I believe that the LGBT community has made huge leaps and bounds towards equality and full social acceptance. It seems like it wasn’t that long ago that it was taboo to even speak of the subject and now we have legalized same sex marriage in all 50 states.

Many of my friends, coworkers, fellow student, and a couple relatives are gay. It has never been anything that has bothered me, nor that I felt was out of the ordinary. I have never understood the hatred that is shown to anyone because of race, religion or sexual preference.

I will say that after a short search I found that the LGBT is thriving in Ventura County. There are more events for the community then one can ever attend. BBQ’s, parties, bowling, dance club events, you name it. I found that there is a LBGT clubs on both CSUCI and Ventura College campuses both that are full of events to attend.

There is no shortage of blogs that have to do with LBGT and for all ages. There is support for those that might be having a hard time with certain issue, all the way to finding housing. As I dig deeper into this community I will be sure to share with everyone else. Below are a few links of some of the ones I liked.

Remember to have a FANTASTIC day, smile, make someone else laugh out loud, and the glass is always half full.

CDR

 

 

Think Progress

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/issue/

Top 10 Blogs on Transgender, Bisexual, Lesbian, and Gay Rights

http://civilliberty.about.com/od/gendersexuality/tp/blogs_lgbt.htm

Gay Teens

http://gayteenss.tumblr.com/lgbtblogs

Refugee Crisis

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The way I’ve been trying to conduct my research is around credible websites that can provide myself and the ones around me good viewpoints and stats. Over the past month or so, each day on my way to work I learn about the newest information that is going on in Europe. I believe staying informed rather than learning about it from someone else is a great way of knowing what to do to help the situation.
The search engines I like to use are NPR. This website is one that I recommend to all since it has great articles of this particular topic along with many current events throughout the world. Seems unbiased when it comes to the information and really seeks to get the perspectives of these refugees for example.

Another great resource was Duck Duck Go. This is an awesome search engine that provides a lot of insightful and controversial articles. Learning about the refugee camps through here made my understanding of the crisis much easier. I had never used this search engine until this particular search and quite frankly I wish I would have knew about it sooner. My experience with Duck Duck go was a positive one that will be remembered the next time I need to research a certain topic or event.

This world event is something I wish we were all equally informed of since it will eventually reach your home if the number of migrants and refugees continue to rise like it has.

Refugee Crisis

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I chose to research the global issue of the refugee crisis.  The thing that got me initially intrigued about this topic was the sadness I felt when I saw the picture of the three year old Syrian boy whose body washed up on shore in Turkey after her had drowned trying to flee the country of Syria with his family.  The only person who survived in that family was the father who no longer wanted to live after reaching shore because he stated he had nothing to live for anymore.  This broke my heart.  I could not fathom the fact that people were denying to help other out in the world.  Everyone on the face of the earth is a human being, how can we be so cruel to our own kind?  Researching this topic and fining articles with so many different views opened my mind to the political side of it, but I still don’t completely agree with letting people suffer and die.  I tried the different search engines to read articles and some seemed more reliable than others.  Reading about the crap detection helped me weed out those articles that would not have been as helpful. Now that I can use these tools to help me get the right articles I can help inform others about this issue of the world the right way, with the right information.

LGBTQ Equality

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One of my top, if not my top, social issues is equality for the LGBTQ community. I have chosen to research this topic because its an unnecessary issue. I have witnessed the unfair inequality not only out in society and personally, being a bisexual male. My big issue is the discrimination toward the community, for being who they are. Inequality for the community is not only an issue here in the United States but worldwide in other countries.

Upon my research on this topic. A came upon thousands of results. Many of the sites were non-profits. All sites are different in their content but have LGBTQ at the center of their topic. Most were information on inequality of the community. Others were news and articles on the latest issues or changes on this topic. There are definitely plenty of places I could dig into to find information. But are they reliable? I still don’t know. I have to dig a little deeper to find more information on these sites. There were a few that I think I could rely on but I am not a hundred percent sure. One of the sites I want to go through a little more is the Human Rights Campaign. It seem reliable and links to other topics relatable or thing that affect the LGBT community.

So far I am satisfied with what I have found but will do more searching to find reliable sources. The internet is a big place and I know I will find the information I need.

Facts and ADveRTISeMENTS

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Remember when we thought everything we found on the internet was true. The challenge is to determine fact from fake while getting information on a topic. So that’s what I hope I did. I did as directed and searched engines Google, yahoo, and duck duck go.  I found my search results quite interesting….

I first searched Google for college affordability and found it came up with facts and facts mixed with analysis.  Some sites however only contained facts for certain universities while other sites compared costs based on what type of university for instance it compared public, private, and public nonprofit. But everything isn’t always as it should be.

I then searched Yahoo and found a load of crap. My first full page of results were advertisements. Advertisement after advertisement. It showed online schools, information/ ads for lowering your college costs, and how costs are extraordinarily high that you might as well go to a convenient cost effective online college. On yahoo an over exaggeration of higher education costs and opinions can be found. It makes you feel as if you’re on facebook with all the eye catching ad/posts to click on only to find out its fake and you wasted your time even going to the site. Yahoo was useless in my opinion while searching on the topic.

I finally searched duck duck go which is filled with facts and articles based on actual information. No ADS or Empty facts. When it states something it explains the fact and goes in-depth. It would put a smile on your face to see all the information.

 

 

 

 

Beginning Health Care Reasearch

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I started searching my topic the day after we met for class. There is so much information on this broad topic that made it difficult to narrow it down. Nevertheless I was able to search many sub topics within our topic Healthcare. First, I was interested in some more common issues being abortion; immigrant’s receiving healthcare, and the different healthcare options one would receive depending if they worked full time or part time. When searching for these topics I used multiple different search engines. I definitely found that some worked better than others. For example safari was fairly poor due to the specific words you need to type in order to get what you were actually searching for. Google is my ultimate favorite especially after learning how to parenthesize a word to get a more specific search. I used Google chrome to find most of my blog sources on health care.

Next, I tried using our school online library source to find more specific articles that still relate to healthcare and how it is offered. I was intrigued to find out how different the benefits were when being a part time or a full time worker. I also learned that it is much more difficult to acquire a full time position than it is to obtain a part time one. And workers all over America are turning to having multiple part time jobs as opposed to getting a full time job due to the competitive side of getting a full time job. Full time jobs are hard to come by and you want that good healthcare program and it is important to you one should plan on going to college to put themselves one step ahead of everyone else.

Social Issues

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Heart Healthy Advice to your mobile device

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getting-text-while-smoking

Heart Healthy Text Messages

We do everything on our phones, expect what they were originally meant for, talk. Texting is quick and easy but could improve your health. A study, posted in Journal of American Medical Association, looked to see if semi-personal text messages could reduce LDL, BMI, blood pressure and even smoking status. The participants in the intervention group received 4 texts a week from an automated service and the other group received regular care. In the end, the intervention group, saw a reduction in BMI, blood pressure, LDL and even smoking status. Although this was a fairly small study of 700 participants for only 6 months, I think there is some reliability.

Text messages are seen as personal and a useful form of communication. Texts also allow an automated service to send out messages to a large number of people. It shows increased interest in the patient’s health and can hold them more accountable.  I think an additional benefit would be an option to respond to the text messages and get feed back about food choices, exercise ideas and possible list of resources in the community for additional resources.

Healthcare will be forced to keep up with digital communication age and I think texting can make health care information more accessible and convenient for everyone with a cell phone.

 

Smith, S. (2015, September 22). How Weekly Motivational Texts Could Help Improve Heart Health. Retrieved September 22, 2015.

Chow, C, et al. Effect of Lifestyle-Focused Text Messaging on Risk Factor Modification in Patients With Coronary Heart Disease. JAMA. 2015.

Gathering information

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As a young member in the academic community it is imperative that students like myself immerse ourselves in the social issues that surround us. At any given time across the U.S their are several social issues that need to be addressed and it is up to my generation and I to educate ourselves in them in order to change them for the better.

For this week’s assignment my group and I were tasked with navigating the web in search of credible sources for our topic of HealthCare. As a psychology major I wished to focus more on mental healthcare or the lack there of.

While searching for credible sources we needed to make sure the websites passed a “crap test’ in which all of the sources I posted on Google Docs passed. However, as I searched I found that many websites that claim to help you find healthcare information are just bombarded with third party advertisements that make the website look more like a billboard than any respectable medical site. The moment any of these websites opened up to a pop up of some random new pill I knew I needed to leave that site alone.

To diversify the kinds of sources that was coming up I used three different search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Duck Duck Go. Out of the three Google usually had the more relevant since it is the most popular, I felt that Yahoo was a utter failure since it went to more promotions than actual informative sources, and Duck Duck Go was useful because it also included blogs and essays written by other students.

Out of the sources I posted to our Google Docs page,a source that really popped out to me in my search for information on mental health was an article published in Time magazine about a father who lost his son to suicide. The father was a local science and medical writer for the local paper and even with his knowledge of the medical field he lacked the resources to properly care for his son. The article continues to talk about how this incident is just one of many that Americans have to deal with because our government continues to cut funding for mental healthcare causing millions of people with mental problems to go untreated.

challenge 3 post 1

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Our assignment was to do research on one of the following topics we were assigned to do. I decided to do my research on refugee crisis because I wanted to learn more about then what I wanted to know. Also, using what i learned in the crap detection will help me figure out if the website was credible or not. so the first search engine I used was Google. I typed in Refugee Crisis and it gave me a  good amount of news articles and even tweets for refugee crisis.  It gave me some credible sources like Fox News and CNN that were uploaded 6 hours ago. The next search engine I used was bing. I never really use bing because I’m so used to just using Google. When I typed in refugee crisis in bing I got some credible sites and some that were crap. On this one website I found it looked unprofessional and had a lot of pop ups that I had to exit. I thought I was going to get a virus or something just for opening this website. The third search engine I used was doggrel. I never heard of it but i wanted to give it a try and see what I could find. I found a lot of websites that looked phony and still gave me ads and it looked like they just uploaded a while ago. The only one that gave me valid site would have to be google.