"Top Ten Interesting 'Stuff and Things'"

1. A young woman buying a Louis Vuitton Murakami Cherry Blossom bag at a street-vendor booth. A bag that retails for about $1,500, she is likely to pay around $25.
2. “Reagan pronounced: ’Government is not the solution, government is the problem’.”
3. Four key reasons why transformations led to more cheating, New Pressures, Bigger Rewards for Winning, Temptation, and Trickle-down Corruption.
4. “If morality represents the way we would like the world to work and economics represents how it actually does work, then the story on Feldman’s bagel business lies at the very intersection of morality and economics”.
5. “In 1963 a national study determined that 81 percent of college students had engaged in some form of dishonest academic behavior; in 1993 the percentage was 83 percent”.
6. “Wealth has its privileges”.
7. Elizabeth Paige Laurie, 23, paid her roommate Elena Martinez a total of $20,000 to write her papers and help her prepare for tests.
8. “Pushed by pressures to succeed and armed with the latest technology, a growing number of today’s students seem to feel less and less reluctant to borrow rather than create”.
9. Downloading from the internet is the most common form of cheating today.
10. Teachers now look for student with one arm on the desk and one arm under it, using their cell phones.

Research Question...

How do communication disorders affect children?

Summary "You're 16, You're Beautiful and You're a Voter"

By: Anya Kamenetz, a staff writer for fast Company, is the author of "Generation Debt."

Legal age limits should never stand alone. They should always be flexible and paired with educational and cognitive requirements to decide the legal maturity. Driving laws show the best model for combining early beginnings and mandatory education. Many states already have a successful gradual phase in the driving rights of 16-year-olds, starting with their learners permit.

Like the driving laws 16-year-olds who would like to start voting should be able to obtain an “early voting permit” from their high school upon passing a simple civics course, which is similar to the citizenship test.

Sixteen is a good starting point for phasing in adult rights and responsibilities, from voting to drinking to marriage. The law ought to allow the young people decide this openly. “Surveys show that teenagers who drink at home with their families go on to drink less than those who sneak beers with friends.” Could you imagine 16-year-olds being able to receive a drinking permit after passing a mandatory alcoholism course? But it would only allow it at family gatherings or school functions for two years or until you graduated or moved out.

Also, the phasing of credit cards at 16 could work with firm restrictions. They would include a parental co-signer until the applicants have made one year of on-time payments and passing a mandatory financial literacy test, which would include questions such as defining compound interest, correctly deciphering the fine print on a credit card agreement and arguing with a customer service representative about an unnecessary fee.

“The more we treat teenagers as adults, the more they rise to our expectations.” Trying adult rights to cognitive requirements may also smooth out the bigger problems with age related social problems. We need to be able to test all Americans to make sure they are still qualified to drive and to avoid financial scammers. “From the public health point of view, the silver tsunami poses more of a threat than marauding teenagers ever did.”

Summary "Can Computers Change the Way We Think"

Everyone that answered the question about “Can computers change the way we think” believe that they do change us. Many people say that they change us by how we generate things in a much faster pace and we seem to use them for the simplest things, such as talking to people. The most important part of the computer is the internet and without it many people would feel lost. The internet makes the world available to people at their fingertips.

Lessons of 1992 (Summary)

The people are starting to feel like it is 1992 again because of the presidency and the economy. So let’s review the sad tale, starting with the politics. Whatever hopes people might have had that Mr. Clinton would usher in a new era of national unity were quickly dashed. Instead, from Day 1 they faced an all-out assault from conservatives determined to use any means at hand to discredit a Democratic president.

No accusation was considered too outlandish: a group supported by Jerry Falwell put out a film suggesting that the Clintons had arranged for the murder of an associate, and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page repeatedly hinted that Bill Clinton might have been in cahoots with a drug smuggler. Meanwhile, though Mr. Clinton may not have run as postpartisan a campaign as legend has it; he did avoid some conflict by being strategically vague about policy. In particular, he promised health care reform, but left the business of producing an actual plan until after the election.

The failure of health care reform, in turn, doomed the Clinton presidency to second-rank status. The government was well run (something we’ve learned to appreciate now that we’ve seen what a badly run government looks like), but as Mr. Obama correctly says there was no change in the country’s fundamental trajectory. So what are the lessons for today’s Democrats? Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.

Second, the policy proposals candidates run on matter. Mr. Obama’s rejection of health insurance mandates, which are an essential element of any workable plan for universal coverage, doesn’t really matter, because by the time health care reform gets through Congress it will be very different from the president’s initial proposal anyway. If the next president doesn’t arrive with a plan that is a broadly workable outline, by the time the things get fixed the window of opportunity may well have passed. What the Democrats should do is get back to talking about issues, a focus on issues has been the great contribution of John Edwards to this campaign, and about who is best prepared to push their agenda forward.

page 218 #3: Write a blog post cataloging the sites you visit when you log onto your computer. What is your homepage? Have you personalized you homepage? What do you check first? Do you follow a pattern?



My homepage is MSN.com. It is personalized with the background color being orange, wider view on the screen, and the text is larger. When I log onto my computer I do, like most people, have certain sites that I view. First my MSN messenger will log me in automatically and if I have e-mail in my hotmail account it will pop up, so if I have e-mail in that account I will look at that. Then I will go to Facebook, MySpace, WKU, and on Western's website I look at my e-mail account then Blackboard. From there I will check out various sites depending on what I plan on doing later on that day or something new that I am waiting, such as a new purse, jacket, shoes.