Wardenm's Weblog

Unsafe Behaviors‏

wardenm — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:22:24 +0000

Our team has decided to focus on unsafe behaviors that students today are facing and taking a part in. We are exploring such areas as prescription drug use, risks of tanning, stress induced alcohol abuse, as well as broader categories of long-term unsafe behaviors and short-term unsafe behaviors. We have all decided to compile our work into a miniature multimedia magazine, which will include links to other useful information, and a pdf-format for online use. Our magazine will be able to inform students of important risks of certain college lifestyles whether they were aware of them before or not.

Our group consists of four individuals, all from very different backgrounds. This has helped us to construct a piece of work coming from four very different angles. Matt Warden has decided to take on the subject of prescription drug use among college students, more specifically the use of ADD medication because of his knowledge on the subject. Warden is a Senior NMC student who enjoys airplanes and playing the guitar. Yessenia Alarcon, an avid tanner, has decided to write about tanning and its effects. Alarcon is also an NMC student with a focus in advertising. Rick Chandler, an NMC student, is taking on the long-term effects and short-term effects of unsafe behavior, such as driving while distracted and smoking and drinking. Chandler wanted to make sure that these topics were covered. Natalie Moser will be looking at stress among students today and what they are resorting to because of it and what they can do about it. Moser, like the others is an NMC, who definitely understands stress.

Final Project Journal 5

wardenm — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:19:02 +0000

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-15-college-drug-use_N.htm

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSN0335757320080303?feedType=RSS&feedName=healthNews&sp=true

http://media.www.diamondbackonline.com/media/storage/paper873/news/2007/03/06/News/Young.People.Taking.Prescription.Drug.Abuse.To.College-2758956.shtml

Final Project Journal 4

wardenm — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:58:06 +0000

These are some of the questions I asked during my interview with Dr. Johnson at Student Health Services:

What’s your take on students selling or giving their peers prescription drugs?

Do you hear about many cases of this on our own campus?

Could you compare the seriousness of prescription drug abuse to that of other substances?

Finally, here’s some of the questions I posed to a student diagnosed with ADD:

Which medication do you take?

How would you describe yourself on and off the stimulant?

What are your thoughts on non-diagnosed people taking the medication?

Final Project Journal 3

wardenm — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:53:29 +0000

Just got part of my final interview complete regarding ADD. I will complete this interview early tomorrow in time to add to my article.

Final Project Journal 2

wardenm — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:50:38 +0000

I finally got my interview with Dr. Johnson at Student Health Services regarding student prescription drug use… Almost home.

Final Project Journal

wardenm — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:30:26 +0000

We met as a group tonight to discuss the page layout for our stories, along with possible titles for each of the pieces. The plan is to present everything in a mini magazine. I’ll need to work on more Photoshop elements tomorrow to wrap this up.

Beat Journal 6

wardenm — Mon, 26 May 2008 22:37:55 +0000

After focusing on the dangers of MySpace identity theft for most of these journals, I found this article on the Macworld site that addresses the ridiculous behavior we end up taking part of within the personal info fields that we fill in on Facebook. If we don’t end up avoiding some of the questions the site asks and we naively fill it all in, we end up posting our birthday, our phone number, e-mail, instant messaging screen name, and probably most stupid of all, we’ve volunteered our actual home address. Most of this stuff as the article points out is information that we wouldn’t disclose to a stranger on the street, yet we’re more than willing to post everything in the world about ourselves online. I feel the issue once again has to do with the friendly environment that these networking sites ‘for friends’ offer to their members. I think Facebook in a way creates more of a false sense of security compared to MySpace because (providing you haven’t set your profile to private) strangers are able to browse your profile as long as their in your network (school or town), thus making you think of everyone that has closer proximity to you as less of a stranger than someone on the other side of the globe, but we have to remember a stranger is a stranger.

Reader Response 6

wardenm — Mon, 26 May 2008 09:04:56 +0000

The situation at Reed College seems so bizarre to me. I’m not exactly sure how they’re able to maintain this lifestyle on campus but it seems so destructive. You would think a death on campus would spell the end for the school’s current drug policy but as was mentioned by someone from the student population, this tragedy is seen as an acceptable loss. This article makes it seems as if the academic prestige allows the students to get away with murder. Though I consider myself a fairly liberal person I’ve never seen a need to use drugs and I’m certainly not a genius. This is why I’m so confused when I hear about bright minds expanding themselves with mind altering substances. I could never imagine being able to work at an optimum level under the influence of anything, much less something that could also kill me! I remember a suite mate I had my freshman year that was able to pull 18 credits a term and smoke pot everyday… I always asked myself how he was able to do it and maintain I high grade point average. I guess I need to figure if you’re a certified genius you can allow yourself to come down a couple of pegs to above average and still get by… But it still seems crazy to me.

Beat Journal 5

wardenm — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:54:27 +0000

I spent some time visiting the help section of MySpace to determine what they do to aid victims of identity theft, and they have an interesting method to verify a member’s identity. They ask for people to send a ‘salute’. This means you can send their tech people an image of yourself holding a handwritten sign with the word ‘MySpace.com’ and your Friend ID (your Friend ID number appears immediately after “friendID=” in the web address/URL when viewing your profile). They can then remove the profile that uses your identity without your permission. It’s also said that if the profile is an extremely obvious attempt to be cruel/false, you probably won’t need to send a salute, however it will help expedite things.

They also have answers to FAQ’s such as:
Someone is pretending to be my band, what do I do?
How do we remove an imposter profile for a teacher/faculty member?
I think someone compromised my account, I can’t log in, and things look different!
Bulletins are being posted through my account that I didn’t post!
Someone is using my email address without my permission – what can I do?
How do I remove my child’s profile from MySpace.com?
Where do I report underage users?

I recently remembered that my friend’s band Brightwood had their music stolen on their profile and another band from the East Coast reposted these songs claiming them to be their own. Luckily someone messaged the band wondering who the true artist was. Brightwood happened to have recorded all of the music on their own computer so they had all of the original files to prove them to be the actual creators of the material but needless to say they felt violated. MySpace was nice enough follow suit and remove the imposter band’s profile

http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.faq&Category=10&Question=48

Reader Response 5

wardenm — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:52:23 +0000

NewsTrust is interesting because it acts as a quality filter for what the staff deems as good journalism; this basically acts as a hub and sends you all over the web to other news sources such as articles or blogs.

The site features a daily feed of quality news and opinions from mainstream and independent sources, based on ratings from their reviewers. The staff simply rate the news based on quality. The site also enables their members to evaluate fairness, evidence, sourcing and other core journalistic principles in order to act as a watchdog over the media.

I think this is a great idea because it keeps a critical eye on Bloggers as well as the Professional Journalist. After recent media controversies, the public is understandably concerned with the quality of the information they read and now there are sites like these ones that take the time to find truth or faults within stories and most interesting to me; the blogs are analyzed as well.

The site also contains its own blog within the website and NewsTrust claims to have a staff of Republicans, Independents, and Democrats which aide in a bipartisan non political agenda.

This is definitely a site that’s worth getting high praise with if you’re a writer for a news outlet.