DS make-up writing: March 2012 Archives

Does watching violent movies and playing aggressive video games increase the likelihood of a child to be more angry and aggressive?

My analysis concludes that it may make children more aggressive with the child being completely incompetent in understanding the change. The child believes they are completely normal but they are being taught how violence and aggression is okay subliminally. The shows they watch slowly desensitize them. The desensitization allows the child to look at an issue more abstractly and less morally because some of the basic moral foundations such as the treatment of others and equality has been shaken. I come to this understanding by looking at the rate of crimes and murders that come from children under the age of 18. Juveniles have had a clear increase in deviance across the board and I believe a major contribution is the desensitization of the built in morals we as humans try to instill. Children soak in so much at a younger age why should they be soaking in violence and anger? These two concepts become deeply ingrained and outweigh other concepts because those other concepts are not as relevant in children's shows. The goal we need to set is to make sure that our children have morals that are built on love, equality and friendship so that as they get older and get in power they are perverted by wrong thinking that will not benefit us as a nation.

I've researched a few forms of animal communication and happened upon some very interesting and unexpected forms of communication between animals. The most shocking to me is that ants communicate using chemicals. Depending on the species, ants can release between 10 and 20 different chemicals from different glands on their bodies. The chemicals released can mean a variety of different things: signaling danger and even signaling that a fellow ant is dead. This is by far the strangest form of animal communication I have come across. I was also surprised to learn that lions have a roar to locate one another. This roar is softer than the one used as a warning to other animals.

Although I believe that animals can communicate in their own way, I don't believe these forms of communication are a language. I believe that language is the spoken word with meaning given to individual units of speech. Just because different species of animals can communicate and understand their own form of communication does not mean that they are using a language. The languages we use as humans are simply a form of communication spoken among our own species. In my opinion there is no such thing as animal language, but there is definitely animal communication. I refuse to believe that animals communicate through language until I hear words (other than a bark) come out of a dog's mouth.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/15/health/air-pollution-stroke-heart-attack-risk/index.html?hpt=he_c2
In this article Health.com is claiming that the increase in traffic related air pollution may be increasing strokes and heart attacks in individuals. They derived this from comparing almost 2,000 stroke cases to the day to day levels of air pollution. Health.com states in the article on CNN, that the chance of having a stroke is 34% higher after a day spent in moderate air quality, rather than good. I believe that this claim lacks the support of one or more of the six principles of scientific thinking. One major scientific thinking principle that should have been considered in this claim is the ruling out rival hypotheses. The article is giving readers one explanation; therefore, many are automatically assuming it is correct. Many readers need to realize there are other possible explanations or causes for these strokes and heart attacks. The article did state that they looked at the medical records of the patients in the stroke cases they evaluated. This was done before this claim was stated, but there are other explanations that would also fit these findings that may not be on individual's medical records. There could be causes that were never tested in those individuals or explanations that have not yet been thought of.
Another scientific thinking principle that does not support this claim is the Occam's Razor. When looking at other explanations of heart attacks and strokes like the blockage of an artery or the burst of a blood vessel, they seem like much simpler explanations. These explanations not only seem simpler, but also do a better job of accounting for the result of a stroke.