Write Stripes

I found a very interesting article this morning. It concerns the affects of consumer spending in relation to rising gas prices. Apparently, consumer spending has decreased in certain areas, but not in others. For example, trips to restaurants and other places that require a lot of traveling have decreased, thus resulting in decreased sales. However, consumer trips to drugstores and local convenience stores have increased as gas prices have risen. Shoppers are willing to make frequent trips to the local grocery store or drug store more often because it requires less gas. Also, the trend shows that shoppers are spending more money at these places as they shop. Shoppers are also buying more "meal solution" meals such as frozen pizzas, TV dinners, etc.--thus solving the problem associated with dining out. This article suggests that marketers should design new advertising that coincides with the fluctuations of gas prices. A link to the article is listed below...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061003/us_nm/manufacturing_consumer_gasoline_dc_1

The article I found today regarding immigration issues comes from The Washington Times (Thursday, October 12). The focus of the article was mostly on Bush's approval of the building of a 698 mile long wall along the U.S. - Mexican border. Sensors and cameras will be set up to watch the border. Bush's viewpoint is that you cannot put a fence on the entire border, but you can use a combination of fencing and technology so that Border Security can enforce the border. Bush also strongly supports a guest-worker program, which allows some workers to come into the country through legal entry points. The new fencing bill will cost about $1.2 million.

Some people feel that this action will send the wrong message to our southern neighbors, in that many could be killed trying to cross the new fence. Yet, some feel that illegal immigration is a huge threat to American safety. Many lawmakers are concerned, because the vote in the House was 238-131, meaning many Americans are not supporting this bill. Bush stands by his idea that if guest-worker laws are enforced, then the people that have been cleared to work here temporarily can do so without fear, and gradually these immigrants can become legal.

Find this article at http://washingtontimes.com/national/20061012-124422-1595r.htm

Michaela and myself are about 50% done with our project. We're confident in the work we have cut out for the future, but what's left is actually finishing putting everything into action. We have our ideas and are working to complete them. We have a good start on our website which will by far be the most challenging. The web page is the most effective because it is the most informative form of media. Most college students probably have a predetermined standpoint on the issue of immigration, so a little piece of paper doesn't hold enough evidence to persuade them. The website is where we will present as much data as we can without being overwhelming. This presentation of data will allow them to make an educated decision! Our biggest roadblock right now is figuring out all the little details about putting together the website and figuring out how to present everything we want to present with out seeming biased. It's such an emotional issue for people to see the face of America changing, so it's hard to make our factual arguments unbiased. However, we're doing our best to present the data in an effective and unbiased way. Hopefully by sticking to the data aspect we can appear to be neutral. Our plan for usability testing is to use a webcounter on our website! The posters and handouts will point people to the website to receive more information. The webcounter will prove whether or not our media is effective. If the poster/handouts aren't successful, then the webcounter will reflect this and we will see that our usability isn't very good. We're fairly confident though that people will take the time to investigate more information on the changing face of their country and the continuation of the luxuries they enjoy so much. As long as we can persuade them of the importance of those things, they will surely continue on to the website to learn lots more! :)

Our group is approximately 70% finished with all of our materials. We decided to go ahead and create a small website with the information we found and links to good websites that might interest college students, and we need to have people fill out our questionnaires we created before we distribute our media. We feel that the car flyers will be most effective because people will have to pick them up to get them off their cars, and they will most likely at least glance at the pictures, and then hopefully read the content. A roadblock will definitely be deciding how we will judge the effectiveness of our flyers, but we will possibly put a tracker on our website to see how many hits it is getting. We will have to decide if we need to make a new survey or questionnaire to pass out after people have seen our media.

sam, kandace, courtney

Meredith and Candice: Health Care Reform

- 50% complete

- Effectivness:
flyers- shock factor, grab interest
Brochure and website- informational

Biggestest roadblock:
getting the brochure and website finished and getting premission to use images

plan for testing:
- get 6-10 people to read brochure and fill out survey
- get 2-3 people to look at website and fill out questions

Stem Cell Research Group- We are probably about 65% finished. The flier that we have done is most likely the most effective part so far. The biggest roadblock presently, is compiling all of the information that we have and putting it into the website. Our plan for usablility testing is to make a couple of the table tents and watch people who read them, and possibly ask them about their feelings on the table tents. The bathroom fliers are more difficult and slightly awkward to observe people reading, so we will just ask our roomates for their reactions on the bathroom fliers. To see if anyone has actually taken the time to come to our website, we will install a counter on the website. Also, we will ask our friends for their opinons on the website content and layout.

Staus Update:
We are 75% done with creating the materials, but have not yet started "testing" the impact. At this point, our Spy vs Spy t-shirt design is most effective and creative, however the website is in progress. The biggest roadblocks to the project currently are testing the materials and the costs of making the t-shirts. The plan for usability testing is to put a survey on the website asking people what they thought before and after reading the website. Also, we are looking into using focus groups for further research.

Andrew, Russell, Katie

I found an article today from the Reuters online news service stating that because of falling oil prices ($57.22 a barrel on Thursday, down from an all time high of $78.40 in July), the OPEC countries are deciding on whether or not to reduce their supply in order to stabilize the world price for oil (the OPEC countries control 1/3 of the world’s oil supply). By doing this, they could increase their profits by the price of oil going back up or leveling out, and they could possibly start having some oil in reserve in case there are future supply problems. Apparently, the demand had fallen off this fall because of a decrease in consumption of oil and lower than expected orders for winter natural gas and oil from the US. However, China (the second largest importer of oil), continues demand more and more oil as it continues to industrialize.

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=reutersEdge&storyID=2006-10-12T165348Z_01_L12887757_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENERGY-OPEC-PRICE.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc=NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage3

A commentary that appeared in the October 10 Financial Times (“Google and the Myth of an Open Net”) brought up the point that what helped launch Google would have been outlawed if there was statutory net neutrality. Furthermore, the article talked about how Google’s recent announcement to buy YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars would be quite questionable under the proposed net neutrality legislation.

Google did not take off until May, 2002, when its search engine was licensed to AOL (an ISP). In order to get a box saying “Search Powered by Google” on every page, Google gave “AOL a very large financial guarantee.” Another way of phrasing this is that an ISP was paid to favor a search engine – a violation of the net neutrality that Google wants so badly to guarantee.

The author (Thomas Hazlett), the director of the Information Economy Project of the National Center for Technology and Law and a professor of economics and law at George Mason University, contends in the article that net neutrality will potentially stifle development of new resources because as a catalyst for innovation there needs to be the potential for financial gain, which comes in the form of exclusive deals or “selling-out.”

The article can be found here.

In the article “Bush Pushes Consumer Driven Health Care” by Deb Riechmann, Bush’s plans for health care reform as of February 2006 are addressed. Bush argues that the United States requires a health care system involving more direct payment by patients. He believes that this will lead patients to “shop” for their health care, creating competition and lowering medical costs. Bush wants to encourage people to open health savings accounts by increasing tax advantages. Democrats argue that this will not solve the problem of the many Americans currently uninsured. Yet, the plan does address the issue of rising medical costs, which is a great concern with the current health care system.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/16/AR2006021601422.html

As I was searching for an article about net neutrality I again was having problem finding something recent. I did, however, find an article from about a month ago that I thought gave a good image of how net neutrality could affect people that I think anyone can understand. The article starts out saying 'How would you like it if you went to gas up your Ford Escape and the pump would deliver only a quart per minute? You'd inquire, only to discover that your brand of gas had struck a deal with General Motors to pump gas at the full rate only into GM cars. But if you wanted to pay extra, you could have it at the full flow rate.' I feel that this illustration was a good picture of how net neutrality legislation could affect us all since we always want information faster, but we could potentially have to pay more to get that speed or an equal speed of what we have now. The article also made some good points concerning how the telecommunication companies say they are not making a profit and need to be able to charge companies to use their backbones, even though companies have to pay for the bandwidth that is used to retrieve data. If you want to read the article it can be found here.

I found an article on CNN.com published not long ago that was focused on the possible benefits of stem cell research. I chose to read it because I have been reading a lot of articles concerned with the controversy and political happenings surrounding stem cells and stem cell research, and this article was just a different and more positive way of looking at it than the others approached the subject from. It had a little section at the end rehashing some of the things I already knew regarding the controversy over stem cells (i.e. basically explaining the differing viewpoints and federal funding issues).

The article listed the few different kinds of stem cells and how they are being used to treat a host of different afflictions. Stem cells are described in this article as a kind of natural repair mechanism. They are used in treatment by applying them directly in the body, or to grow replacement tissue in a lab. I thought that was interesting because I think it describes perfectly what they are used for and how they are applied, but in simple terms you don't have to be a scientist to understand. The article went on to list some things scientists believe stem cells can be used to treat: strokes, heart disease, cancer, birth defects, diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. These are all pretty standard news to me, I have read all those before. But the article went on to give some new findings that I had not heard of in conjunction with stem cells, such as the ability to replace cartilage, repair damage to the nervous system (with stem cells from the noses of the patients-cool!), repairing bone, and the ability to help heart patients. One patient had a heart attack and was told he had two and a half months to live. He had stem cell treatment taken from bone marrow and today is healthy and happy. Another story told of a man that used stem cells to restore sight in one of his eyes.

Like I mentioned earlier, I am not necessarily "for" stem cell research, but this article was defiantly a good thing for me to see and take in concerning the benefits and the real human lives that have been touched by the promise of stem cell research.

Chevron drilled in the Gulf of Mexico and found an oil reserve. The oil that analysts say could be in the Gulf of Mexico will provide a quarter of U.S. output. This reserve produces 6,000 barrels of crude oil per day. Chevron officials have estimated the Gulf of Mexico reserves to hold up to 15 billion barrels of oil. This discovery is U.S.’s biggest source of oil since the Alaska’s North Slope.

The article I read by Tyler Cowen, "Poor US Scores in Health Care Don't Measure Nobels and Innovation,"was in the New York Times.This article discusses the gap between the money spent on health care and biomedical research in the United States and the resulting health of our citizens compared to Europe. The United States spends more money on health care than other industralized nations, but are average lifespan is lower than the other countries. We spend more money researching medical innovations than European countries, but we are not seeing the results. Cowen says most of the gap between our technology and the health of the US people is due to the lifestyle differences between US citizens and Europeans.People in the US walk less and don't eat as healthy as Europeans. Also, US citizens spend more money on drugs, procedures and speciality doctors. People in the US tend to connect spending lots of money on health care to good health.

In the October 9th Edition of Newsweek there is a well-written article (“Celebrating a Web That's Free”) presenting the argument for new legislation to ensure net neutrality. The article was nice in that it presented both sides of the issue and the potential flaws in both arguments. The article also contained some useful hints as to where to look for more information, particularly a flawed survey conducted by Verizon on the public’s opinion of net neutrality.

The article was framed around a breakfast the author had with the founder of craigslist.com and the founder of OneWebDay (Earth Day for the internet, occurred 9/22) about OneWebDay. Another aspect the article indirectly exposed was the difficulty both sides have with raising awareness of the issue – I do not know of anyone who was aware of OneWebDay.

The article can be found online here.

I found an article on FoxNews.com about how President Bush just recently vetoed a bill that wanted to provide for more federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The House then failed to override the veto, failing to send it on to the Senate for consideration.

The veto was a big deal for Bush, as it was his first in his five and a half year tenure. Bush said he made the decision to veto the bill to "uphold the values on human life". There is still a debate raging on this issue. Many of the people the writer quoted for the article were literally divided down the middle. Some felt Bush is doing the right thing by putting an end to what many Americans feel is murder. Others accused the President of doing just that, by putting an end to research that could save the lives of many afflicted with diseases stem cell research has promise to cure.

I think the most important part of this article was that the decision to veto and the inability to override. Those decisions are not reflected (therefore supported) by the public opinion polls the article cited. According to the author, a May Gallup poll showed that 61% of the people surveyed think research of human embryo stem cells morally acceptable.

Recently in the New York Times, there was an article about stem cell research, and its plans for beginning to be funded by the state of California. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine was given $3 billion by the voters of the state to finance stem cell research. They recently released how the money was to be spent: $823 million on basic stem cell research, $899 million on applied/pre-clinical research, and $656 million on taking new treatments though clinical trials. There was also $273 million for universities to build buildings which do not contain any equipment or were not partially paid for by the NIH, so the rules on federal government money for stem cell research. Although there is significant controversy, as in any case over the allocation of the funds, the lack of targeting of specific diseases, and the long time frames predicted for the knowledge to become useable, this article does not mention any complaints from opponents of stem cell research at all; either meaning that the controversy has quieted down significantly (in California at least), or the article is slightly slanted favoring the use of stem cell research and opposing the current administrations vetoes of bills supporting funding for it.

I found a second article that might be helpful for our collaborative project. In the article by Harvard Law professor and bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren, she discusses a study they did involving health care costs and bankruptcy in the United States. This was actually the first large-scale study of medical bankruptcy, and it was quite surprising. As part of the study, they interviewed 1,771 Americans in bankruptcy courts throughout the country, and half said that medical bills had driven them to bankruptcy! So, each year, approximately two million people will go through the bankruptcy system due to medical costs. An even greater surprise was that three-quarters of the medically bankrupt individuals had health insurance. Her message: “Nobody’s safe”. This is the message we need to get across to college students. They need to be prepared for everything, including health care, and one day, it might be one of those college students making the crucial changes needed to improve our health care system. Her final lines were very convincing: “Every 30 seconds in the United States, someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem. Time is running out. A broken health care system is bankrupting families across this country.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9447-2005Feb8.html