Sunday, December 6, 2009

Global Warming: HOT Topic

Fahrenthold, David A., and Juliet Eilperin. “Science of global warming debated hotly in e-mails.” Daily Herald. 6 December 2009.

SUMMARY:

Apparently scientists are hiding their findings in hopes to trick the public in believing more in global warming. “It began with an anonymous Internet posting, and a link to a wonky set of e-mails and files,” stolen files that contained flaws in their own data that seemingly were to “muzzle their critics.” Scientists were releasing invalid information to the public, and they were caught. This scheme is called “Climate-gate,” it’s a scandal that has brought much public attention on the science of a warming planet. Although the hidden e-mails don’t prove that human-caused climate change isn’t true, they raise many questions. They are trying to control what the public hears and understands. There are more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents that were all stolen from servers at the University of East Anglia in Britain.

RESPONSE:

So global warming is a hot topic… But hot enough to lie about? No. In fact it’s really not even that hot. The earth hasn’t warmed as predicted over the past ten years. But what does the media want to hear? The media wants to show something dramatic and in turn have the public respond in a dramatic way. Stressing that global warming is influential makes the media be able to make a turn to be eco-friendly and encourage low fuel emissions and good habits for the environment. It’s amazing that scientists will lie about their findings or try to “hide” them so they can release what they want to release, but the truth is always exposed or found in this case. This is proof to me that we as citizens need to find out for ourselves, rather believing everything that the media tells us. For scientists to break from using the scientific method when publishing their findings makes you wonder what other inaccurate information has been released. This is so inappropriate for anyone to do, especially a scientist.


Daily Diet: Five Hours of Television

Stelter, Brian. “In American’s Daily Diet: Nearly Five Hours of Television.” Media Decoder. 10 November 2009. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/

SUMMARY:

The New York Times reported that the average American spent almost five hours a day in front of the TV. Television viewings have increased. Not only do most Americans spend this much time dedicated to the TV, but also most TVs are actually turned on for eight hours and twenty-one minutes each day. This article was pretty short, but got the point a crossed that television views are steadily increasing. It is said that only one-fifth as much time is spent on the Internet as watching TV. “People may be spending time watching video online, downloading torrents, playing video games, and whatever else, but they’re continuing to watch more TV on average as well.” Compared to ten years ago the viewings have gone up twenty percent.

RESPONSE:

It’s remarkable how much television one person can consume. I realize that people get addicted to a certain show and feel like they can’t miss an episode or find a need to get “caught-up” in watching every previous episode they missed before their addiction started, but five hours a day is amazing! (In a sort of bad way – yet amusing). I don’t understand where people find time in their lives to watch this much television. I myself don’t watch that much television, but do find how it could get addicting when I spend time with my younger brother eagerly watching How It’s Made, the Discovery Channel, and of course the Disney Channel. But these numbers are unbelievable; it seems like everyone is always very busy and involved in the community and work, so this truly doesn’t make sense to me. I hope that this average contains very few yet extreme outliers that influence the average. Yet TV has more to offer. There are now more entertaining and educational shows. You can find football games, even high school football games, as well as church programs and educational shows on the TV, so the increase may be justifiable, but not necessary.