Checkin dem answers..

All we did today was correct our FactBook answers and talk about some of the answers that were given. One big topic that we talked is that, which is actually sort of sad is that United States is ranked number 13 in HIV/AIDS deaths. The reason this is so sad and surprising is that America, has so many protections for men and women that are so easily to purchase,(like you can get one from a grocery store) therefore we should really be at the bottom of the worldwide list. We didn't really go into that much, because we didn't want to offend anybody's beliefs (beliefs like same sex marriage, and having sex after your married etc.) That was all we really did today, it did seem like the class went by quickly. Also I think tomorrow or at least this week we finally get our test back (hallelujah), because the 2 people who missed it are finally taking it...

FactBook

 The World FactBook Answers: 

1)What is the population of the United States?
 316,668,567

2)What are the 5 largest countries in the world, by population?
 China, India, United States and Indonesia, Brazil

3)What is the population of Pakistan?
 193,238,868

4)What kind of government does the United States have?
 Constitution-based federal republic; strong democratic tradition

5)What is the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe?
  95%

6)What is the largest country in world by area?
 Russia

7) What country has the third greatest number of airports?
Mexico

8)What country has the greatest number of exports?
 China

9)What country imports more oil than any other?
 Saudi Arabia 

10)What country has the 2nd proved reserves of crude oil in the world?
 United States 

11)What country has the 2nd largest proved reserves of crude oil in the world?
 Venezuela

12)Can women serve in combat roles in China's military?
 Yes

13.What is GDP?
 GDP - This entry gives the gross domestic product (GDP) or value of all final goods and services produced within a nation in a given year

14.What country has the highest GDP per capita and how much is it?
  Qatar - $103,900

15)Is the US in the top 10 for GDP per capita?
 NO

16)Most of the countries with the highest birth rate is in what continent?
 Africa

17) 11 of the 12 countries with the highest number of deaths from HIV/AIDS can be found in which continent?
 Africa

18)What other country is in the top 10?
 India

19) Where does the US rank in HIV/AIDS deaths?
 18

20)Is the US rank number 1 in cellular phones?
 No, were are number 3 behind China and India 

21)What percentage of the US is Roman Catholic?
 23.9%

22)What percentage in Mexico is Roman Catholic?
 82.7%

23)What is Net Migration Rate?
 The difference between the number is persons and leaving a country during the year 1,000 persons (based on midyear population). An excess of persons entering the country is referred to as net migration (e.g. 356 migrants/ 1,000 population) an excess of persons leaving the country as net migration as net emigration (e.g. -9.26 migrants/1,000 population)

24)Does the US have the highest Net Migration Rate in the world?
 NO, #26 

25)According to the FactBook, what is the current population in the entire world?
 7,095,217,980

More measurements by population

In class today we continued to talk a little bit about the population, but we moved into immigration. Apparently there is another type of immigration, and that is emigration. Emigration is actually the opposite of immigration, because while immigration means people entering the country, emigration means the people that are leaving the country. A fun fact that is that there is less people from Mexico, immigrating to United States, but why did they immigrate in the first place? Well there are 2 factors,  and those are called the push and pull forces. Push forces can be situations that are happening in their country like civil war, unemployment and religious or ethnic persecution etc. The pull factors, would be the country that people would immigrate to for better economic opportunity, better health service and religious and political freedom. Then the conversation turned awkward... well not too awkward. We started to talk about the total fertility rate (hopefully you can sort of see why this might of been awkward) and how for a population to remain the same the TFR, which is the average number of children per woman, has to be 2.1.  But when we looked at America's TFR, we noticed that it was under the TFR, so why is America's population going down? Well the answer of that is because of immigration. The other two countries that we looked at is Africa and Japan. Africa is way above the TFR, but the reason it's not really doing much of an effect is because if a woman were to have 5 kids, most likely only 2 would survive beyond the age of 1 years of old, and they know that, which is sad. Japan is also below the TFR, because there are a lot old people that live in Japan and they are really concerned about that because they cant find enough young people to do hard, physical jobs and there isn't much of a new population coming.

Population and Immigration unit

Well we finished our test today, which wasn't too bad. Then we started to get into population and immigration topics. There was a lot of definitions in the power point, but 2 of them were crude birth rate and crude death rate. What these words mean is that one estimates the births of children per 1,000 people per year and the other one, obviously, is the estimate of deaths out per 1,000 people per year. Another topic that was touched on was that why women lived longer than men? A couple of reasons is that not many women, go into the army and fight for country, also we are more concerned about our health, last of all you don’t see a women doing the job of a lumber jack, therefore women don’t do many dangerous jobs. What was also related to this topic was that, America is 50^th in the placing for the life expectancy for people. The top one is Monaco, a very nice wealthy place, where health insurance is a lot easier to get than other countries. The surprising thing is that you would think America would at least be top 10… 

Test Day!!

Yesterday was our first test!! It wasn't to bad, it had 10 multiple choice questions and we had to write 3 paragraphs on the questions that Mr. Schick gave us. Well everything was going pretty, until we had a fire alarm drill, it was pretty cool I guess, but I mean it was just a simple fire drill. After everyone got over the surprise of having a fire drill, we went out of the classroom quietly and went to the football field. It was actually sort of funny, because the field was getting watered, so everyone was just crossing their fingers hoping that they wouldn't get wet. Then the students started to get in single file lines and the teachers were in the progress of counting their class. Finally, after everyone was situated and counted, we got back inside the school; luckily it wasn't cold outside like the first time we had a fire drill, so it was nice to get a breath of fresh air. The unfortunate part was that the fire drill took a lot of time away from us, so not all of us were able to finish our tests. Thankfully we get Monday to finish the rest of our test.

Power Point Presentations

Well nothing ‘really” exciting happened today, except for the fact it was hump day and that we did our wonderful power point presentations. All we did was go up in groups to talk about our information that we gathered, to help us study for the test on Friday and just to know a little bit more about globalization. I think the group that I learned the most from is Grace's group. Even though it was a tad bit lengthy, it still had a lot of useful information. Then Arri’s group came next, which was also presented very well and last of all was our group, which I think did a pretty good job at presenting. We had a 2 mod human geography, so in our last mod we started reviewing what would be on the test, which was very nice, because it’s pretty nice to know what’s coming up on your first test in human geography. J  

Behind the Swoosh- let's just sink that in....

Well we didn't do that much today, but we did talk about what Nike has been doing after the protests against them, because of Indonesia's sweat shops. Mr. Schick showed us a business website that he found that summarizes and shows Nike changes during the years. Nike, undoubtedly, did some changes, but the one that was most significant was changing the minimum wage. What Nike has done to the minimum wage was change it from $1.00 to $3.70. Yes, they changed it, but it still isn't enough to live a "healthy life." What is most amazing is that Nike is a multimillionaire company, and they still pay hard working sweat shop workers $3.70, just to save an average of $50,000 a day. For me it's sort of ridiculous, because they pay athletes like, Tiger Woods thousands of dollars a day just for wearing their clothes. After we stopped talking about the issue about Nike, we went into our groups just to finish up in our power points towards the end of class.

Nike- Behind the Swoosh

Behind the Swoosh is were things tend to get a little ugly and somewhat sad. Today in class we learned that not everything about globalization is positive. An example of that is Nike. Nike, as you know, is a huge sporting company,that produces millions and millions of dollars. Sometimes they ask to celebrity athletes, to wear their products, and guess what, those athletes gain millions of dollars in minutes, but wait where does Nike get all those shoes and t shirts without getting bankrupt? Well the answer is minimum wage and that's were things go down hill for people. Before I get started with all the information about the minimum wage problems, I need to tell you a little about how I got this information. Mr. Schick showed us a video on a great athlete, called Jim who was offered to be the coach of St.John, one of the best catholic colleges  in the  country at the time. Jim was about to take the job, and could of have lots of money and lived like a king, but that wasn't the case. When Jim was offered to take the position, they told him that him and the whole soccer corporation would wear Nike. Jim was about to take the offer, but he started to look into what Nike did and what they believed and after what Jim discovered, he was completely opposed in using Nike clothes etc. What Jim discovered was that people all over the world, that are working for Nike are only getting a minimum wage of $1.25, which is the money they live off of. Jim was shocked and tried to communicate with others about this issues, but others said to him to just let it go. However, Jim wasn't satisfied, so he and another woman, named Leslie, went to Indonesia to see the living conditions that the workers of Nike were living in. After being there for a week, they were lives were being drastically changed; you could barely get any of your necessary needs, there was barely any space to live in and the the conditions there were terrible. After experiencing the living conditions, they wanted to get into a Nike sweat shop, but they weren't allowed and it even lead them to be surrounded by security guards when they asked permission. Even though they were unable to get inside the sweat shops, they had experience enough. After their trip, they wanted to talk to the CEO of Nike,Phil  Knight, but he did not want to talk to them about the situation. Therefore, Jim and Leslie, were traveling to colleges to spread the news about Nike's sweat shops and they still continue to do that today. This issues is major, because sometimes we think that globalization is great, but there is a lot of people like the Nike workers, who aren't thinking the same thing.

Wikipedia is not THAT bad

We continued to talk about globalization and how it effects our world. Then we went on to talk about Wikipedia! Apparently Wikipedia, has some good things to it. Some of the good things of Wikipedia, is that it has so much reliable information. People say that random people can write things into the articles, therefore the articles would be messed up, but we learned that Wikipedia has people to check if those things happen, so the articles would be fine if anybody would go to find information needed. Another thing, is that it cites all the other information that they got from other sites, so if you liked what you read from the article you can go to site. The last thing is that it highlight key words in the articles, therefore, if you don't know what the word means Wiki takes you right to another article that they wrote. All and all Wiki isn't as bad as people say at least that was Mr. Schick says. After, we did that we went into groups to do a power point on globalization. 

Continuation on Globalization

We continued the conversation on globalization. We talked about how other factors such as language and exchange are also connected to globalization. Language is connected to globalization because more than one language is becoming more and more common, as the process of globalization brings culture into more direct contact. An example of this Mandarin and English, because they are gaining millions of speakers a day. Exchange is also connected to the act of interconnection, which is another word for globalization, because products are being sent and delivered all over the world in different ways. The last few things that we talked about is that the united States are trying to talk through problems not fight through problems. Therefore, this causes less violence in the united States and other places all over the world. Another hot topic that was touched was that, shouldn't America just border everything and not let people enter the country, with their problems?   The answer is no. If we do that everything would seem like the end of the world over night; gas prices would get higher, no more traveling to places outside of the country, not as much food etc. Well that pretty much sums up what we learned in class today...

Globalization

"Americanization." It's a word that is often associated with globalization, because the meaning of "Americanization" means the exporting of American brands and consumer goods. What we mean when we talk about exporting American things, we not only talk about the brands and the consumer goods we sell, but how things that were established in America, are now resulting to be seen in places like China etc. The reason China is a great example of this is, is because back then China was always known for their people to be healthy consumers, that were eating fish, rice, and vegetables etc. Therefore, you would never see a McDonald's or a KFC. However, that has changed. When you go to China you are most likely to see a McDonald's or KFC somewhere in the city or town. This is quite amazing because sometimes you don't even realize that America can have that of an impact on other places, especially China. We also talked about how globalization isn't something that is new, it is actually something as old as civilization! For example, the Silk Road, which was a collection of trade routes connecting markets of Asia with Arabia, is an example of globalization. Last of all, we learned (a little) that religious faith also has a impact far beyond their areas of origin.

Google Docs

Today was the 50th anniversary of John Carroll!! I wasn't there at the assembly, but apparently Father Rose talked about the Socratic Method. We also learned this new cool thing called Google Docs. Well that's all, because I wasn't in class to be part of this amazing Google Docs...

The fast changing world

It was crazy. We watched a video on how our world is changing constantly and the conditions that are all over the world. One of the crazy facts is that India has more honor kids then America has kids!! In a way that sounds terrible, but there is always two sides of a coin. The one side is sort of sad for our case, because so many people in the world think of us as being so great, but if we are, I don't think that should be the case. The other side, though is that India is suffering a lot more in poverty, because they aren't as wealthy as us. So at the end it is sort of a complicated situation. Towards the end of the class, after we watched the video, Mr.Schick told us how when he was young the way to listen to music was to have one of those old records, but if someone told him that one day we were going to have iPods to listen to all that music, he would of thought they were going crazy. What he was trying to tell us was that our world is always changing and thinking of new ideas, like for example, maybe one day when we are born we will have a micro chip that will be implanted in us for us to listen to music, so if we wanted a friend to listen to music you are listening to all we would have to do is stare at their eyes. This might seem crazy, but inventions like this is already being created. Mr. Schick gave us an example that this guy got a micro chip in his heart (I think) and when his heart is having problems, a warning would be sent to his doctor. As you can see, inventions like theses and many more are being invented, so sometimes even the impossible might be possible.

Socrates death

Today was a very different day. We continued to talk about Socrates death (the painting), but we all started to have our opinions, like it wasn't really a painting it was a real life event etc. After we concluded that debate, we learned that hemlock was actually a very painful death that could last up to 45 minutes. You had to drink it, then start walking to get it throughout your body. Couple of minutes after that you wouldn't be able to walk, so you had to lay down. Slowly after laying down, your system started to lock down, which is very excruciating. This ties to Socrates, because he chose to drink the hemlock, but in the painting he didn't seem afraid, he looked brave,accepting his consequences. He actually was very sassy in his defense, because he said what he believed. Socrates could have easily not have faced the terrible trial, but because he didn't say sorry, he faced his death. Towards to the end of class we started to talk about Syria and the United States, but I seriously got very little of what was said.

Today's Conversation

Today we talked about Socrates. We talked how Socrates was a great philosopher and that if Mr. Schick, could go back to any time period, it would the time during when Socrates was alive. He even said that he would put Socrates above Jesus! :). Socrates was known for the Socrates' method, a method which lead him to be executed. Socrates was executed, because he was criticizing Critias, the tyrant of Athens. Therefore, Critias did not like Socrates criticizing him, so he gave Socrates the option to either drink the poisonous hemlock, which was a terrible way to die, or to be executed. Socrates chose to drink the hemlock, because he wanted to show his final lesson to his students. Towards the end of the of the class we talked about how in the painting of Socrates' Death, Socrates was shown to be mighty, like Superman 50 years later, but Socrates in reality was ugly and old.

Definitions

Agora- is the center of the city states in Greek where sports, politics, and spiritual events happened

Arete – is something that means inner excellence, a purpose that makes you want to be better

Polis - is the same as the city states of Greece

Socrates- was an ancient Greek philosopher he is known to help in the field of ethics and logic things that we still use today.

The Socrates’ method – was a method that was named after Socrates, this method was used to stir up critical thinking where you talk by asking and answering questions. This might lead someone to contradict himself or herself.  Socrates used this method to find false hypothesis etc.

The death of Socrates – was a painting that was done on oil canvas in 1787 by Jacques – Louis David. This painting shows the execution of Socrates, because he was proving the tyrant of Athens, wrong. Therefore, he had to either drink the poisonous hemlock or execution. Socrates chose hemlock, because he thought it might be a good final lesson for his students.

What the Greeks meant if they called you an idiot – The Greeks meant that you were a person “lacking professional skill” or a “private person”. They also usually called you this if you were selfish, only concerning about yourself not the public events 

508 BC - many events occurred such as the war between Rome Clusium, war between Clusium and Aricia, a new office in Rome and Cleinsthenes reorganizes Athens. 

A message to Garcia

A message to Garcia, was a letter that was written in 1899, that was sent to Garcia in Cuba. This message was a rant that was spread all over the world, such as places like Japan and Russia etc. This message was given during the time when Spain and the United States were fighting. Back then generals had to communicate with each other by telegraph or letter, but general Garcia was unable to be reached  by either of them. Everyone said to the President of Spain, if they needed a man to deliver the message they should pick Rowan. Therefore, the President picked Rowan and sure enough after being in the jungle for 3 weeks, Rowan was able to deliver the message to Garcia. What was so amazing though, is that he didn't ask any questions or complained about anything, he just did it. Finally, after being shown how a clerk would complain about getting encyclopedia,but Rowan doesn't even complain about delivering a message, it tells us to live our lives radiantly and with the highest of expectations.

5 point action plan

My five point action plan, to have a successful freshman year at John Carroll is to stay organized, to be involved, to make new friends, to have good communication with teachers and to have fun. All these things are sort of connected with each other, because if I stay organized, by writing down my homework and things that I have to do, I might be able to be involved in a lot of things. If I am involved in those things then I can meet new friends and have some fun. The good communication with teachers is also tied with organization, because if I am going to be absent or late, telling the teacher of ahead of time will save me a lot of stress at the end. Last of all is to have fun, if I don't have fun, high school might seem like torture me, but if I am able to do all these things that are listed above, I am sure that my freshman year will be enjoyable.