Wanda Sykes Friday Assignment

For Friday night’s assignment I watched the Wanda Sykes Show from 11:00-11:30 PM. Seeing as how it was at a later time, I expected it to have slightly more adult content than shows on at prime time because more kids would be in bed and I also expected it to have a visible slant because it is hosted by a person who has guests on and they take turns expressing their opinions. On both accounts I turned out right, because on subjects they touched on they went more into the adult side such as their discussion on Tiger Woods where they did not focus on the wrongs he had committed but rather the fact that this should be expected from superstars like him because, as one guest said “he has poontang raining from the sky.” You could also tell that Wanda’s opinion was one of disgust for Tiger, but also for his wife who had, as Wanda said, gone snooping and was going to find something. Even the commercials seemed a lot more slanted towards adult audiences with commercials focusing around telephone dating services and bankruptcy lawyers. After the discussion on Friday regarding different ways of showing a slant it was obvious about the slant in this show.

The Bias of Language

The reading from The Bias of Language was a fairly interesting piece of writing, which examined how words and descriptors can be used to change people’s minds about certain subjects. It went further into depth when it talked about how we view the news as a source of true information, but how even the news uses different styles of words to portray the writers views. The beginning part about how everyone has a different way of telling the same story and their different views on it reminded me of the beginning of the year when we first began discussing truth and how everyone has their own separate truth. Just like there is no absolute truth, there is no absolute version of a story, instead everyone will retell it a different way. Furthermore, I enjoyed the writing about how there are words which are purely descriptive, words, which evaluate a situation, and words which infer something that is unknown. I had never really thought of this before and found it to be something to think about. Overall, though the reading was long and semi-tedious at parts, it was a fairly interesting piece to read.

News From Monday

Last night we had to watch the news for thirty minutes in order to better understand the media and its effect on the people and the government. I decided to watch the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams because, though some may allege that it is slightly left leaning, it is generally fairly unbiased. Throughout the thirty minutes they covered a variety of topics, ranging from the presidents State of the Union address to a Toyota recall of certain cars with sticking accelerators. They also covered the continuing tragedy in Haiti, the revealing of the iPad and the new PETA stance that angered many people. PETA now believes that the ground hog used for the national celebration of Ground Hog Day (Phil) is under stress and should actually be replaced with a robotic ground hog. Throughout this news cast I found no trace of the left leaning attitude people talk about, and in fact they were fairly critical of Obama’s first year, mainly due to the fact that they have to realistically look at his first year and critique him for it.

Inquiry Contract Progress

While I researched Stem Cells today in study hall, I started to learn more about the different levels of potency stem cells can have and what actually defines a stem cell. The two properties, which help to define a stem cell, are the abilities to differentiate into more specialized cells and the ability to go through many cell divisions without becoming differentiated. The potency of stem cells is also categorized into five different levels. The top most is a stem cell which is “totipotent,” meaning the cell can produce most any cell, including becoming an organ. The next level is “pluripotent” which is generally descended from the totipotent cells and can still differentiate into nearly any cell. After pluripotent comes “multipotent,” and this refers to the ability of the cell to divide into several different types of cells, but only those, which are closely related. Next are the “Oligopotent” cells, which are only able to transform into a few new cells, but are still not specialized. Finally are the “unipotent” cells, which can only produce cells of their own type but can actively renew themselves.

Inquiry Contract Progress

Yesterday when I researched about the stem cells i learned more about the differences between the adult stem cell and the embryonic stem cell. The embryonic stem cell is taken from an "inner cell mass" of the blastocytes (thus destroying them) and they can then be used to create any other type of cell. With adults stem cells, however, the stem cells are extracted from adult tissue and, together with a different type of cell which can differentiate (become different types of cells) can be used mainly for repair by replenishing specialized cells. This helps to throw the Stem Cell debate in a new light because, while the adult stem cells may not kill the person it came from, they are not as seemingly useful as the embryonic stem cells. This seems to give more credit to those who are proponents of the embryonic stem cell research but at the same time, the life of the embryo needs to be considered.

IC Progress

Over this weekend, I did not do much in regards to my Inquiry Contract because a distant uncle came and I spent much of my time with him. However, I did ask my uncle, my dad and my mom what their views were on Stem Cell Research. None of them knew an extreme amount about it, but from what they knew they had differing views. My dad believed that, while the end results were good, any other possibility for stem cell harvesting should be taken so that the lives of those embryos were not lost. My mom and uncle, however, believed that Stem Cell research was a good thing, even though it resulted in the death of the embryos. So while I did not do much research, I was able to look into different people’s perspectives on the subject, which was fairly interesting.

Inquiry Contract Progress

Today for work on my inquiry contract, I read a few articles about stem cell research (both embryonic and not) to start to educate myself about it. One of the interesting things I found out was the fact that there is actually research going into adult stem cell extraction, cells of which can be extracted and then used to treat things such as leukemia. Not only have these treatments been successful, but the usage of the stem cells was much less controversial because it came from adults and as such did not destroy a fetus and future life when harvested. I have also seen a relatively interesting argument in which people argued against stem cell research because they pointed out that such advanced scientific research often leads to terrible discoveries, such as the nuclear bomb. Though I did not find a large amount of information tonight, what I did find was interesting and helped shed a little bit of light on the stem cell research debate.