Monthly Archives: September 2012

Recently I’ve been doing my research by watching documentaries and related videos on the Kyoto protocol. This is a new approach for me and I am mostly doing it to familiarize myself with the scientific terms related and better understand the topic as a whole. This will help me understand what narrow questions to ask the search engines in my further research. In several videos it was mentioned that many economists believe that costs of maintaining this protocol outweigh the possible economic benefits. This point could be interesting to look into however, the cost on healthy environment is very hard to determine. I’m focusing on politicians’ statements and interviews from mostly last 5 years.  This is a good alternative to reading the same interviews; personally I can understand the issue much better when I can see a person talking about it.

So last week Baruch college sigma alpha delta society held a oxford debate on gun control. The two debaters were Shaina Harrison from New Yorkers Against Gun Violence (NYAGV) and Darin Goens fron National Rifle Association (NRA). The debate was not intense, but Mr Goens from the NRA clearly won the debate. Shaina Harrison was very unprofessional did not have counter arguments and was very rude and mean. This is not the way professional guest acts. Darin Goens on the other hand quality in formation where h stated 2.5 million guns in the US have saved other people from being killed also how Chicago has gun laws for  ten years and after they were taken away gun violence had stopped in the city.

Shaina Hirrison stated a good point a gun makes you feel more powerful. If some one is coming to rob your house and you have gun most likly you will use the gun and not call the police. She also stated we shoud do back round checks. DarinGoens ended up winning the debate. After this debate my thoughts  have changed and I feel it is alright for peopel to have guns.

Hello class,

I have narrowed down my research question into “im studying Kyoto agreement because i want to find out about the economic and political reasons behind the US decision regarding this agreement in order to make teach people about what effect the green house emissions will have on the wellbeing of people in the future.”

I know that this need polishing but I am having  a hard time putting finding the correct wording for it. I am planning to explain the reasons based on the articles and interview records i find on the topic. After, analyze those findings and come to conclusion about why would this be a logical decision for our government.  I decided not to compare US emissions with other first world countries because that would complicate the point of the paper too much. Instead, I can go in depths into policies which is actually better for the public affairs paper.

What does everyone think about my question and next step?

Any interesting sources would be appreciated

So as many of you know I have been having an incredibly hard time trying to decide on a topic. There are so many issues that are important to consider, but choosing just one has become so difficult for me. A 30 page paper needs one to be passionate about one’s topic,  and the death penalty, while indeed interesting, wasn’t really doing it for me.

While I was on Facebook I came across a status that I had posted suggesting that perhaps federal money should be invested in Anti-bullying campaigns . It was a response to an article that I had read on The Huffington Post. I feel like this is a wide spread social issue that I really know very little about. I dont know if the  government should be involved or not. Questions come to mind, such as would govt. intervention be effective, efficient? etc.

I am planning to focus on:

physical and mental  bullying

cyberbullying

the effects on individuals who are bullied

motivational factors of the bully

Government intervention ( What are they doing now, what should be done ?)

Parental intervention

I am still trying to compose a question though, any thoughts?

Hello everyone hope you had a good weekend. I just want to know is anybody still having trouble forming a question because it’s kind of hard for me right now. I know what I want to research and what my question is, but putting it in a nice simple format is mind boggling. Currently I am playing around with my first question should guns be illegal or not? and trying to put in a simple format.

Also the reason why I named this post research freezes because I am currently  at a stop point on my research. There are so many scholarly articles on gun control. They have a variety of information to which is hard to choose from. Another problem is some of them are really long with great information, but at certain points it gets boring. I want solid and good information and not reading a long article hoping it might have facts for my paper.

I have chosen to concentrate on effective practices that promote college readiness among high school students but as result of further research, I have encountered two additional topic areas that I am currently considering. One would focus on addressing how work-based learning in the community college environment would impact college persistence and completion, given that past research has demonstrated a correlation between experiential learning and graduation rates among high school students. For example, in a concerted effort to understand the high school drop out crisis from the student’s perspective the Gates Foundation surveyed young people ages 16-25 who identified themselves as high school dropouts in 25 different locations in the U.S., including New York. According to the survey 81% of the respondents said, “that if schools provided opportunities for real-world learning (internships, service-learning, and other opportunities), it would have improved their chances of graduating from high school.” Thus, engaging students and making school more relevant to their lives not only helps reduce high school attrition but also aligns with students needs towards improving their chances of academic and professional success. I would like to take this topic and explore how this may impact retention within community colleges, where retention rates are significantly lower in comparison to four-year colleges.
In addition, a recently came across a report titled “Improving Undergraduate Learning: Finding and Policy Recommendations from the SSRC-CLA Longitudinal Project” for one of my classes and there have been some interesting questions that have raised with regards to quality of higher education and how it works to instill critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication. According to the report, “over four years, only 50 percent of students reported that they had taken five or fewer courses that required 20 pages of writing over the course of the semester”, which demonstrates reduced rigor in academic coursework and may signal the effects of oversized classrooms and how quality of instruction may have seen itself affected by the pressure of student’s demands and teacher evaluations. I would like to further examine how the quality of higher education has changed and the factors that have caused a change in academic rigor and expectations.

Hi All,

When last we met, I was debating whether to approach the policy of Stop and Frisk from a historical perspective, or to question its validity by comparing it to cities with similar and dissimilar policies.  From there, I would compare New York’s crime rates to those cities, in an effort to understand whether Stop and Frisk poses a true benefit for the police force and the people it watches over.

I have an stronger interest in looking at the relationship between the police and underprivileged people of color, and the historical tensions that leads to controversy and uproar when a policy like Stop and Frisk is proposed.  However, I am unsure as to how to approach this question, as there are so many underlying questions, such as which groups should I focus on, which cities, and how crime is perceived by both parties.  All while trying to contain my bias against the police force.

I have done some preliminary research; most scholarly sources seem to point to the constitutional implications of a law like Stop and Frisk.  A few articles, such as C.R. Sridhar’s “Broken Windows and Zero Tolerance,” explore the controversy surrounding heavy policing for minor offenses in an attempt to prevent larger offenses.  Although this does not directly address Stop and Frisk, it does address the complications associated with random policing.

I hope to find more articles that directly relate to my topic, but I may have to look into tweaking my question to get more hits.

-Celeste

Hey guys,

So like I said in class, I decided to drop my voter ID topic. It would have been such a torture to research and write about something that I’ve worked on before. I had then decided that I would go into child abuse, specifically, increasing the penalties for parents that abuse their children. The decision to move along with this topic was more of a personal choice.

During the last legislative session working in Albany, I met a child who was abused by his father. Here is a link to an article about www.wgrz.com/news/article/167444/1/Jay-Js-Law-Gets-Big-Push-From-Senate-Majority-Leader . Basically, the JJ was abused by his father as a baby and his family, as well as their supporters, believe that the punishment was too lenient. This year, JJ’s family, with the support of legislative leaders from both the Assembly and Senate, attempted to introduce into law harsher punishment for first time offenders as well as repeat offenders. Unfortunately, it did not pass.

This of course is an isolated case that has motivated the attempt to prevent child abuse and recidivism through legal means. But although isolated, child abuse is a widespread problem. According to  the Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse, in New York in 2005, there were 42,000 proven child abuse cases. But the truly alarming statistic is the fact that in 14.1% of the cases, within 6 months, the children were abused once again.

Although the direction of the paper has not been fully organized, it must be mentioned the psychological state of the abusers. Were they abused themselves as children? Was physical abuse other family members also present in their childhood? And if abuse was present, were there signs in their adulthood, which if were noticed, would have prevented the abuse of their children? There will be more questions that need to be asked as research increases, but for now these are the only ones that have come to mind.

Salome