Immigrants In Canadian School Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Immigrants In Canadian School - Research Paper Example The research conducted by Ladky and Peterson (2008) has highlighted that there are successful school practices for both formal and informal immigrant parent involvement in their children’s school learning and academic performance, for communicating with immigrant parents and also for learning more about the languages and culture of their students and their families. Their research has suggested that there is a gap between the language of home and school and it remains to be a barrier to successful communication partnership. Parents, teachers, and principals should find ways to utilize mother tongue in ways that can support student’s English learning. Almost all of the interviewed new immigrant parents had very clear expectations that regular homework should be assigned by their child’s teacher as they value homework as means of understanding whether their child is accomplishing the targets in the school days (Ladky and Peterson, 2008, p. 85). In conclusion, the first generation immigrants are relatively less performing whereas the second generation is better performing than the native peers. Canada is a country built on multiculturalism ideology and therefore everyone in Canada has rights to believe in any religious, take pride of it, celebrate events etc, and same is the case with the school as well. Even though there are instances of misunderstanding between parents and teachers, the majority of immigrant parents are highly involved in school events in order to facilitate better communication.

Who Should Be Responsible For Policing The Internet Essay

Who Should Be Responsible For Policing The Internet - Essay Example Even an innocent research in search engines can turn out to be an accidental sexual offense. Aggressive marketing ploys of many pornography websites trick online users to visiting porn sites using hot links, pop ups with lewd photographs, or trapping users by bouncing them from porn site to porn site, making it hard to leave. The chat rooms are also favourite hangouts of determined paedophiles. These online predators share information with other paedophiles usually in a network, on how to seduce or â€Å"groom† a victim. They constantly roam chat rooms for possible victims. Online predators use social networking sites such as Myspace or Tagged as a way to meet potential victims. Paedophiles also frequent Usenet newsgroups to post and exchange illicit materials and even to discuss various approaches to victimize. The internet is safe haven for many computer child molesters because of the internet’s accessibility, affordability and user anonymity. Several research studies have underlined harm exposure to pornography among children poses. Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University presented a theory on sexual deviance in his 1986 book Lovemaps. According to Dr. Money, â€Å"sexual deviance can be traced to experiences in childhood (Laaser, 2000, quoted in Cothran, 2004, p.34).† Many clinical psychologists support that pornography causes violence among children. They point to the possibility of desensitization of children. It is general fact that children model what they often see and hear. Exposure to obscene materials may result to children â€Å"accepting and carrying such sexual preferences to adulthood (Laaser, 2000, quoted in Cothran, 2004, p. 34).† Sexual addiction also causes alarm. Sex as an addiction almost always begins with viewing soft-porn material and gradually shifts to hard-core. Laaser (2000, quoted in Cothran p. 35) says that â€Å"for substance or activity to be addictive it must create a chemical tolerance.

Web 2.0 and web 1.0 Applications

Web 2.0 and web 1.0 Applications 1. WEB 2.0 1.1 THE SOCIAL READ/WRITE WEB AN INTRODUCTION We live in age of information where flow of information is constant and internet plays an important role in this flow of information sharing and exchange. The world is on figure tips due to the advancement in technologies. All this become possible due to World Wide Web which cause to made globe as community. Technology and information become obsolete so quickly. Now we are in era of web 2.0 According to Tim Orielly Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an architecture of participation, and going beyond the page metaphor of Web1.0 to deliver rich user experiences (Orielly, 2004). According to Alan smith 2.0 does not show any specific increment in web version its only the way the use of web change (Smith, 2009). Murugesan define Web 2.0 as second phase in the Webs evolution, which attract IT professionals, businesses, and Web users. Further more he writes that Web 2.0 is wisdom Web, people-centric Web, participative Web, and read/write Web (Murugesan, 2007). Web 2.0 is people Power web shows the blogging success, user review, photo sharing (Anderson, 2006) and observe called it gift culture due to users contribution as participation (Mason Rennie, 2007). In learning and teaching process effective evolution of technology, importance of active participation, critical thinking, social presence, collaboration and two way communications are also important (Beldarrin, 2006). Web2.0 provides more effective interaction and collaboration, investigation for the ways of using blogs effectively, wikis, podcasts and social network which also used in education. The main characteristic of these tools called Web 2.0, which shows active participation from user in the content of creation process (Usluel Mazman, 2009). Web 2.0 social networking applications, allows users not only to find out information about others, but also to connect with others through linking to their profiles, joining and creating group, and ability to send public and private messages to their friends for example Face book, MySpace, and sharing with them their happy moments as on Picasa and flicker. It has changed the static information to more active, dynamic and responsive participation, creation and sharing of contents. On the biases of Orielly definition Markus Angermeier created a mind map for web 2.0 which explain the key concepts. These important concepts of Web 2.0 include Usability, Standardization, Design, Remixability, Economy, participation and convergence. Usability is one of the key factors of web 2.0. According to Lewis Web 2.0 applications tend to look more like desktop applications than Web pages: they have simple interfaces with plain colours and no busy patterns, logos, or animation. They provide a richness of Interaction previously found only in desktop applications (Lewis, 2006). He further write about the dynamic content of web 2.0 and information gathering and assembling of information on a single page. The source of information is blogs which are like online diaries, resource sharing which allow users to share their favourite web links and other resource like tags (Lewis, 2006). Example systems include del.icio.us and bibsonomy.org. Web 2.0 fulfils the standardization requirements of (W3C) for applications development and content generation. Design provide rich look and feel with practical user-interface, eye catching appearance and ease of use. Remixability is the facility that Web 2.0 offers where an application can be remixed with different set of other minor applications together to form a new and more interactive application. The introduction of Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX breaks this fixed page based model in several ways. Traditional web sites depend on a page update model where each interaction results in an entire page refresh Web 2.0 applications allow part page updates (Pilgrim, 2008). For example, Google Maps do not require an entire page to be refreshed when the user selects a preferred view. Google system gets the data that lies outside of the edge of the map in frame with out refreshing whole page and allow user to grab the map and drag it without any interruption (Zucker, 2007). Gmail also uses AJAX technology in similar fashion to update the little portion of page when new email arrives (Pilgrim, 2008). 1.2 WEB 1.0 VS WEB 2.0 According to Musser and OReilly (2006) Web 2.0 is a set of economic, social, and technology trends that collectively form the basis for the next generation of the Internetà ¢Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¡Ã‚ ¬a more mature, distinctive medium characterised by user participation, openness, and network effects. The main difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is creation and presentation of content. In Web 1.0 the majority of users acting as consumers of content, while in Web 2.0 user can actively participate in content creation and sharing and there are various technologies available to create the content to its maximum potential. The free nature of Web 2.0 allow users to create exchange and share contents of any kind (text, audio, video) and tag, comment, and link Pages within group or outside the group. A popular improvement in Web 2.0 is mashups, which combine or make content in fresh forms (Cormode Krishnamurthy, 2008). For example, street addresses are linked with a map Web site to visualize the locations. This type of site linkage provides facility to create additional link between records of any database with other database. In web 1.0 people implicitly put links of interesting resources to their personal home pages. HTML form tags spread across entire web with no facility of tag base browsing, search engines were using this text as source of web page to improve the quality of search, it limits the tagging in web 1.0 and which restrict collaborative interaction and collective intelligence of community (Brine Page, 1998). While web 2.0 every one can participate in tagging as it become very easy task and become the key characteristic of portals. Due to the large scale of the tagging community, portals like del.icio.us have accumulated decent annotations in the form of tags for numerous resources. These tags are used for search and navigation and Google AdSenseform easy-to-read summaries for the described resources (Kinsella, et al., 2008) Tim OReilly in his Article What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, 2005 describe the difference of web1.0 and web2.0 as follows: Web1.0 Web2.0 DoubleClick Google AdSense Ofoto Flickr Akamai BitTorrent mp3.com Napster Britannica Online Wikipedia personal websites blogging Evite upcoming.org and EVDB domain name speculatio search engine optimization page views cost per click screen scraping Web services publishing participation content management systems wikis directories (taxonomy) tagging (folksonomy) stickiness syndication (Table 1.0 What is Web 2.0: OReilly, 2005) According to Gibson dynamic updates is one of the important characteristic of web2.0 and this is adopted through AJAX technology (Gibson, 2007). Web2.0 websites respond user request such as email checking or instant chatting. Web2.0 applications also provide automatic updates such as stock quotes, sports scores and other information (Gibson, 2007). Mostly news sites like BBC, Sky Newsetc. continuously updating providing instant information. Web2.0 encourages the active participation from the users to access content and interaction with each other on the Web (Pilgrim, 2008). The content of Web 1.0 was read-only and static. Whereas the transformation of web to changed the read-only web to read-write web enabled user active and collaborative participation. The above graph shows that how persistent growth in internet usage according to the facts provided by Internet World Stats with in a decade its usage rise from 361 million to 1650 million users world wide. At the early stages content of web were static in their nature and they are publish for reading purpose there were no interaction between users and user generated content are at ignorable scale. As the number of users raise it change the way of content presentation and publication on internet and users start active participation and involvement in the content and collective intelligence increased through this social read/write web. The change brought by Web 2.0 in content publishing and consumption evidently shows the divergence between static web (web1.0) and dynamic web (web2.0). Web 2.0 provides pages with dynamic content which not only can be read by browsers or readers but with the capability of writing, collaborating and sharing knowledge at the same time. 1.3 WEB 2.0 ACTIVITIES AND SERVICES There are a number of Web 2.0 services and applications available which provide the foundation of Read/Write web. These tools allow users to create, edit and modify the content of information with collaboration. Web 2.0-based communities occupy virtual spaces that are open, self-organizing, adaptive, agile, readily accessible, and easy to use (Sabina Leone, 2009). A Web 2.0 platform has shared design of services to support a collaborative and distributed environment in which users can connect, share, comment and create new content or software tools (Sabina Leone, 2009). Services offered within the Web 2.0 framework offers evolutionary services of the Internet history. To be active on internet firms have no choice but to find out an appropriate role using web2.0. Most major firms, including BMW, IBM, Google, and many others, are positioning them-selves to find their strategic place, appropriate place and fit within these developments (Wigand, Benjamin Birkland, 2008). In todays web we find different type of content. According to Paul Anderson (2007) These include blogs, wikis, multimedia sharing services, content syndication, podcasting and content tagging services. Many of these applications of Web technology are relatively mature, having been in use for a number of years, although new features and capabilities are being added on a regular basis It is worth noting that many of these newer technologies are concatenations, i.e. they make use of existing services. In this section I will discusses about some of the important activities Web 2.0 activities, these are Blogging, Folksonomy and Social Bookmarking, Multimedia Sharing, Social Networking, Podcasting. 1.3.1 BLOGGING The term web-log, or blog, was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997 and refers to a simple webpage consisting of brief paragraphs of opinion, information, personal diary entries, or links, called posts, arranged chronologically with the most recent first, in the style of an online journal (Doctorow et al., 2002). Blogs are also called online diaries which enable users, without requirement of any technical skill, to create, publish and organize their own web pages that contain dated content, entries, comments, discussion etc. in sequential order (Alexander, 2006; Castenade, 2007). People can publish information which they collect from various resources and establish relation between them in blogs. Additionally RSS and the possibility to post comments make blogs also a collaborative and social-interactive software application (Petter et al., 2005). San Murugesan defines blogs a two- way web-base communication tool. Simply it is a website which is used to share thoughts and ideas to leave suggestions and comments. An entry in blog might contain text, image, or link to other blogs and web pages, and possibly the other media related to the topic. Blogs have ability to generate machine readable RSS and Atom feeds it means they could be use to distribute machine readable summaries of contents and provide the facility of searching similar information from different sources (Cayzer, 2004), (Anderson, 2007). Huge number of internet users involved in blogging and they are operating in their own environment. As technology has become more sophisticated, bloggers have begun to incorporate multimedia into their blogs and there are now photo-blogs, video blogs (vlogs), and, increasingly, bloggers can upload material directly from their mobile phones (Anderson, 2007).There are different types and categories of blogs. Such as Arts, Business, Computers and Technology, Education, Entertainment, Food, History, Law, Libraries, Music, Personal, Political, Regional, Sports and finally Web. Blogging software allows three levels of privacy password-protected most private blog; users blog service listed blog most public blog and will be easily found by search engines. An unlisted blog neither fully private nor fully public. Unlisted blog cannot be found without knowing the URL. It could be public only if it contain a link and someone eventually click that link this way these blogs picked by search engines. Since most blogs contain links that anyone might click on, unlisted blogs are not secure, although they may remain relatively invisible if they link to sites that few people access and if the links are not activated (Nardi et al., 2004). Blogging is well known activity which used for online debate and discussions, shared editing, personal communication and networking. In terms of groups, it allows various authors or writers to communicate with others to present their views, opinions and to write for teams, groups and group work. 1.3.2 FOLKSONOMY/TAGGING AND SOCIAL BOOKMARKING A tag is a keyword that is added to a digital object (e.g. a website, picture or video clip) to describe it, but not as part of a formal classification system. One of the first large-scale applications of tagging was seen with the introduction of Joshua Schacters del.icio.us website, which launched the social bookmarking phenomenon (Anderson, 2007). In web 2.0 Folksonomy as a social web service provide facility to users to save and organise online their bookmarks with social annotations or tags. These are high quality descriptors of web pages topics and good indicators of web users interests (Xu, et al., 2004). Social book marking systems share number of common features (Millen et al., 2005), they also provide the facility of tagging these bookmarks and unlike traditional browser-base bookmarks they can be belong more that one category. Tagging is far more beyond then web site bookmarking. Services like Flicker (photos), YouTube (video) and Odeo (podcasts) allow a variety of digital artefacts to be socially tagged (Anderson, 2007). Users contribute not only in posts and articles but also in from of tags which form the metadata of the content which provide valuable information in content search. It also brings benefits of semantic web to current websites which create collaborative tagging or Folksonomy. Del.icio.us is good example of widely accepted and collaboratively created tags, contend creation and blogging (Subramanya Liu, 2008). Social bookmarking systems provide a clear incentive for users to participate (Farrell et al., 2007). The idea of tagging has been expanded to include what are called tag clouds: groups of tags (tag sets) from a number of different users of a tagging service, which collates information about the frequency with which particular tags are used (Anderson, 2007). 1.3.3 MULTIMEDIA SHARING According to Paul Anderson (2007) multimedia sharing is one of the biggest growth areas amongst services. Well known examples are YouTube which provide video storage and sharing Flicker for photographs and Odeo for Podcasts. These services provide writable facility which at the same time makes users as a consumers and initiate active participation and production of web contents. There are million of people participating in sharing and exchange of these types of media by producing their own podcasts, videos and photos. This development was made possible thorough widespread adoption of high quality and low cost media technology. Such as mobile devices which provide high quality video capturing and photography facility, camcorders with huge storage capability. Refrences 1 Usluel, Y.K. Mazman, S.G. 2009, Adoption of Web 2.0 tools in distance education, Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 818-823. 2 Mason, R. Rennie, F. 2007, Using Web 2.0 for learning in the community, The Internet and Higher Education, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 196-203. 3 Beldarrain, Y. 2006, Distance Education Trends. Distance Education 27(2), 139-153. 4 Murugesan, S. 2007, Understanding Web 2.0. IT Pro. Vol. July/August 2007. P. 34-41. 5 Usluel, Y.K. Mazman, S.G. 2009, Adoption of Web 2.0 tools in distance education, Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 818-823. 6 OReilly, T. 2005, Web 2.0: Compact Definition? Published by OReilly Radar Author: Tim O Reilly: Available online at: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/web_20_compact_definition.html 7 Smith, A. 2009, Web 2.0 and Official Statistics: The UK Perspective: Available online at: http://www.statssa.gov.za/isi2009/ScientificProgramme/IPMS/0146.pdf 8 Lewis, D. 2006, What is web 2.0?. Crossroads 13, 1 (Sep. 2006), 3-3. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1217666.1217669 9 Zucker, D. F. 2007, What Does AJAX Mean for You?, ACM Interactions, Sept-Oct, 2007, pp: 10-12. 10 Pilgrim, C. J. 2008, Improving the usability of web 2.0 applications. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Pittsburgh, PA, USA, June 19 21, 2008). HT 08. ACM, New York, NY, 239-240. Available online at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1379092.1379144 11 Cormode, G. Krishnamurthy, B. 2008, Key Differences between Web1.0 and Web2.0: Available online at: http://www2.research.att.com/~bala/papers/web1v2.pdf 12 Brin, S. Page, L.1998, The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. Comput. Netw. ISDN Syst., 30(1-7):107-117. 13 Kinsella, S., Budura, A., Skobeltsyn, G., Michel, S., Breslin, J. G., and Aberer, K. 2008, From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and back -: how did your grandma use to tag?. In Proceeding of the 10th ACM Workshop on Web information and Data Management (Napa Valley, California, USA, October 30 30, 2008). WIDM 08. ACM, New York, NY, 79-86. Available online at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1458502.1458516 14 Gibson, B. 2007. Enabling an accessible web 2.0. In Proceedings of the 2007 international Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4a) (Banff, Canada, May 07 08, 2007). W4A 07, vol. 225. ACM, New York, NY, 1-6. Available online at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1243441.1243442 15 Adebanjo, D. Michaelides, R. 2009. Analysis of Web 2.0 enabled e-clusters: A case study, Technovation, vol. In Press, Corrected Proof. 16 Sabin, M. and Leone, J. 2009. IT education 2.0. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Sig-information Technology Education (Fairfax, Virginia, USA, October 22 24, 2009). SIGITE 09. ACM, New York, NY, 91-99. Available online at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1631728.1631756 17 Wigand, R. T., Benjamin, R. I., and Birkland, J. L. 2008. Web 2.0 and beyond: implications for electronic commerce. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on Electronic Commerce (Innsbruck, Austria, August 19 22, 2008). ICEC 08, vol. 342. ACM, New York, NY, 1-5. Available online at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409540.1409550 18 CAYZER, S. 2004. Semantic Blogging and Decentralized knowledge Management. Communications of the ACM. Vol. 47, No. 12, Dec 2004, pp. 47-52. ACM Press. 19 Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., and Gumbrecht, M. 2004. Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary?. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Chicago, Illinois, USA, November 06 10, 2004). CSCW 04. ACM, New York, NY, 222-231. Available online at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1031607.1031643 20 Anderson 21 Murugesan 22 Xu, S., Bao, S., Fei, B., Su, Z., and Yu, Y. 2008. Exploring folksonomy for personalized search. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in information Retrieval (Singapore, Singapore, July 20 24, 2008). SIGIR 08. ACM, New York, NY, 155-162. Available online at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1390334.1390363 23 Subramanya, S. B. and Liu, H. 2008. Socialtagger collaborative tagging for blogs in the long tail. In Proceeding of the 2008 ACM Workshop on Search in Social Media (Napa Valley, California, USA, October 30 30, 2008). SSM 08. ACM, New York, NY, 19-26. Available online at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1458583.1458588 24 Farrell, S., Lau, T., Nusser, S., Wilcox, E., and Muller, M. 2007. Socially augmenting employee profiles with people-tagging. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Newport, Rhode Island, USA, October 07 10, 2007). UIST 07. ACM, New York, NY, 91-100. Available online at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1294211.1294228 25 Siersdorfer, S. and Sizov, S. 2009. Social recommender systems for web 2.0 folksonomies. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Torino, Italy, June 29 July 01, 2009). HT 09. ACM, New York, NY, 261-270. Available online at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1557914.1557959 26 MILLEN, D., FEINBERG, J., KERR, B. 2005. Social Bookmarking in the enterprise. ACM Queue, Nov 2005. Available online at: http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Contentpa=showpagepid=344 [last accessed 2/02/10]. Apendix 1.0 DATE NUMBER OF USERS % WORLD POPULATION INFORMATION SOURCE December, 1995 16 millions 0.40% IDC December, 1996 36 millions 0.90% IDC December, 1997 70 millions 1.70% IDC December, 1998 147 millions 3.60% C.I.Almanac December, 1999 248 millions 4.10% Nua Ltd. March, 2000 304 millions 5.00% Nua Ltd. July, 2000 359 millions 5.90% Nua Ltd. December, 2000 361 millions 5.80% Internet World Stats March, 2001 458 millions 7.60% Nua Ltd. June, 2001 479 millions 7.90% Nua Ltd. August, 2001 513 millions 8.60% Nua Ltd. April, 2002 558 millions 8.60% Internet World Stats July, 2002 569 millions 9.10% Internet World Stats September, 2002 587 millions 9.40% Internet World Stats March, 2003 608 millions 9.70% Internet World Stats September, 2003 677 millions 10.60% Internet World Stats October, 2003 682 millions 10.70% Internet World Stats December, 2003 719 millions 11.10% Internet World Stats February, 2004 745 millions 11.50% Internet World Stats May, 2004 757 millions 11.70% Internet World Stats October, 2004 812 millions 12.70% Internet World Stats December, 2004 817 millions 12.70% Internet World Stats March, 2005 888 millions 13.90% Internet World Stats July, 2005 939 millions 14.60% Internet World Stats September, 2005 957 millions 14.90% Internet World Stats November, 2005 972 millions 15.20% Internet World Stats December, 2005 1,018 millions 15.70% Internet World Stats March, 2006 1,022 millions 15.70% Internet World Stats June, 2006 1,043 millions 16.00% Internet World Stats September, 2006 1,066 millions 16.40% Internet World Stats December, 2006 1,093 millions 16.70% Internet World Stats March, 2007 1,129 millions 17.20% Internet World Stats June, 2007 1,173 millions 17.80% Internet World Stats Sept, 2007 1,245 millions 18.90% Internet World Stats Dec, 2007 1,319 millions 20.00% Internet World Stats March, 2008 1,407 millions 21.10% Internet World Stats June, 2008 1,463 millions 21.90% Internet World Stats December, 2008 1,574 millions 23.50% Internet World Stats March, 2009 1,596 millions 23.80% Internet World Stats June, 2009

The History of the Panama Canal :: American America History

The History of the Panama Canal The Panama Canal has been called the big ditch, the bridge between two continents, and the greatest shortcut in the world. When it was finally finished in 1914, the 51-mile waterway cut off over 7,900 miles of the distance between New York and San Francisco, and changed the face of the industrialized world ("Panama Canal"). This Canal is not the longest, the widest, the deepest, or the oldest canal in the world, but it is the only canal to connect two oceans, and still today is the greatest man-made waterway in the world ("Panama Canal Connects). Ferdinand de Lesseps, who played a large role in building the Suez Canal in 1869 (Jones), was the director of the Compagnie Universelle Du Canal Interoceanique de Panama ("Historical Overview"). At first De Lesseps seemed to be "the perfect choice for the Panama task." Though as time went on De Lesseps was found to be "anything but the ideal" (Dolan). As soon as de Lesseps' company took over the canal it was doomed (Jones). De Lesseps was a 74-year-old man who was stubborn, vain, and very opinionated (Considine). Because of his experience with the Suez waterway, De Lesseps thought he was smarter than all the engineers beneath his command (Dolan). De Lesseps overrode all opposition of his sea-level canal due to his very popular reputation. He was sold on the idea of a sea-level canal and would not listen to the ideas of others such as French engineer, Adolphe Godin de Lepinary. De Lepinary's idea was to create two large lakes on either side of the mountains. In order to do this they w ould have to dam the Chagres River on the Atlantic side and the Rio Grande River on the pacific side (Considine). Although as time went on more than just a poor director held back the finalization of the canal. Disease, death, and rough terrain slowed down the completion of the canal. "The Terrain at the Isthmus was something they had never experienced and had not put a serious study of it, a very grave error" ("Panama Canal Connects"). Mosquitoes were responsible for many deaths. Illnesses such as yellow fever and malaria made "many of the work forces go to the hospitals or in some cases die" ("Panama Canal"). Mosquitoes carried the diseases and when a person got bit he would give a disease to the mosquito and the mosquito would pass it on to the next victim ("Historical Overview").

Loss of Biodiversity

Meaning The definition of biodiversity encompasses the degree of variations in organisms and/ or species within an ecosystem. The loss of biodeversity would be the diminishing of dfferent species within that ecosystem. For example, a lake may be the home to many types of fish. A change in the lake's temperature or chemistry may affect a food source for a certain type of fish. This type of fish may die out and leave the lake with one less species in it. The loss of one fish or food source may impact other populations and furthe diminish species diversity. CauseInvasive Species – plants or animals which have moved to a habitat where they were not naturally found and are more successful than local species. Habitat loss – Agriculture, housing and industry are destroying the habitats of many plants, animals and microbes. Our development means we must destory or decrease the natural ecosystems. Many animals have a certain range that they must maintain in order to live. If the y do not have access to this area, their lives are significantly altered. Pollution – Our oceans, rivers, lakes and lands have become rubbish bins for society's industrial and organic waste.Plastic in our garbage causes enormous problems. It kills or injures many marine animals and birds either through accidental entanglement or ingestion of the material in the mistaken belief that the plastic is food. For example, sometimes bags are misidentified as jellyfish. Climate Change – Many plant and animal species are unlikely to survive climate change. For some species there will no longer be anywhere to live. Exploitation – We have drastically reduced some fish populations, hunted some whales to the verge of extinction and destroyed whole forests and their ecosystems.Blast fishing is another practise which reduces the coral reefs in the sea. It is practiced in many areas. This is the process whereby dynamite is placed into an area in order to catch a large quantity o f fish. Coral reefs especially are devastated by this activity. It is most prominent in undeveloped countries where this practice has existed for years. Effect The ecosystems deteriorate to an unsustainable level, at which the results would be incredibly expensive to reverse (ex. in Bangladesh and India, the over-logging of trees and forests makes floods during the monsoon seasons deadly. environmental changes – Loss of one species may cause a chain reaction, resulting in a change to the ecosystem itself. gives us less choice as humans – If certain species are lost, they are no longer available to us either as food, as enjoyment, or as resources for things we may not even know about yet. For example, if we deplete all the yellowfin tuna in the ocean, we no longer have this species available for our consumption. If we are divers or underwater explorers, we no longer can see this fish in its own environment and receive pleasure from this act.Solution Stop climate change from running out of control. In order to tackle climate change world needs international climate deal that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions on global level. Stop deforestation. Tropical rainforests are the areas of the richest biodiversity in our planet, providing living environment for millions of different species. Reduce environmental pollution. Pollution is not only happening in land but also in our oceans having very negative impact on marine biodiversity. Animals and plants can't thrive in polluted environment.Education and the Media Through educating people about the severity of this issue, there will be (hopefully) less exploitations of resources, pollution, and habitat losses. In addition, the media could be used to spread these types of thoughts and again, emphasize the importance of biodiversity, the detrimental effects it has on ecosystems, and how it impacts us. Biodiversity also needs to be more studied in order to give us the necessary knowledge needed to protect animal and plant species from going extinct.

Physical Education and Nutrition Legislation Essay

In order to make the younger generation capable enough to face the upcoming challenges in sports and physical involvement in extra curricular activities, there is a need to think seriously about the growing trend of eating disorders due to obesity and lack of physical education. Measures have been taken, steps forwarded but still obesity is the main cause for which over 15 percent adolescents aged 12 to 19 and at present 10 percent of kids aged 2 to 6 have been found overweight or underweight. According to NASBE (National Association of State Boards of Education) learning must be based upon healthy environment and surrounding for which school cafeterias, sports programs and community involvement is responsible. Parents’ Concern about being â€Å"Overweight† Surveys that try to gauge the level of parental concern about childhood obesity reveal a mixed picture about the degree to which parents are concerned about their kids’ weight. Concern certainly exists, but many parents simply do not consider weight among the top challenges facing kids. When asked from the parents, â€Å"How concerned are you about your child’s weight? † 15 percent of the 1,500 parents in a nationwide survey in 2000 said â€Å"very† while 15 percent said â€Å"somewhat†. Because nearly 30 percent of children are overweight or at risk for it, the concern of these parents roughly matches the reported national prevalence of overweight children. What’s more, those who answered â€Å"very† or â€Å"somewhat† spanned all income levels; nearly 40 percent earned less than $30,000 annually, 46 percent were middle-income earners, and 14 percent earned above $75,000. Yet all parents especially low-income viewed other risks to their child’s long-term health and quality of life as more pressing. Only 5 percent of the people in the same survey identified being overweight as the greatest risk to their child’s health and quality of life. How Children view their weight Teenagers perceive their weight inaccurately as well even more so than their parents do. A national study in 2000 involving more than 15,000 adolescents looked at the accuracy of teen and parental reports of obesity. It found that 44 percent of the overweight teenage children and their parents did not accurately report them to be overweight. Only 20 percent of both the teens and parents accurately reported that the teen was overweight while 30 percent of the parents, but not their teenage child, accurately recognized the teen as overweight. In the same study it was revealed that among adolescents with obesity, 47 percent reported that they were overweight. (Dalton, 2004, p. 34) As for younger children, plenty of evidence shows that they are aware of social standards for size and shape by age three or four. Many already judge body size as good or bad in kindergarten, whether a child applies these notions of â€Å"good† and â€Å"bad† to his or her own body size that early is questionable. When friendships begin to form, body size may be a factor, like other characteristics that distinguish one child from another as reasons for friendship or for discrimination. But above all, it is the â€Å"overweight† and careless attitude towards obesity which causes many diseases even in children like cholesterol, eating disorders, diabetes, depression etc. Causes Overeating, irregular meals, lack of physical movement and short of having proper sports activity is a major cause of the obesity epidemic. Teaching overweight children to eat less and work more therefore is essential. But modifying behavior is no simple task, and eating too much is not the sole cause of obesity. Other factors play a role and must be well understood in order to reverse the epidemic and produce a healthier generation of children. Children are sensitive enough to feel the difference between regular meals and daily timings. The daily schedules usually determine what time we consume these meals each day, and we learn to associate the eating experience with that particular time. If mealtime is earlier or later than usual, some of our body functions that depend on circadian rhythms can be temporarily disturbed and cause irritability or fatigue, as in the state known as â€Å"jet lag†. For a kindergarten child whose biologic clock has taught him that school lunch is always served at 11:48 A. M. , a delay of 45 minutes can be catastrophic. (Smith, 1999, p. 40) The government and medical community have minimized the possible differences by establishing guidelines to indicate when a child is â€Å"overweight† and when an adult is â€Å"obese†, however the main notion is to classify and consider obesity as a disease among children in America. If it were a disease, then almost everyone would agree that finding a cure for a disease affecting one out of three children should be a national priority. Yet there is heated controversy over its status that depicts various positions of several key agencies and groups which are summarized below. National Institutes of Health: Obesity is a disease with enormous negative effects on health and survival; also, health-care costs for treating diseases caused by obesity are estimated at $100 billion a year. American Obesity Association: Obesity is a disease; insurance plans should cover weight management services and tax deductions should be given for the costs of obesity treatments, as they are allowed for smoking cessation treatments. American Dietetic Association: Obesity should be classified as a disease; it is a significant risk factor for poor health. The goal of obesity interventions is health improvement that should be measured in terms of heart and lung performance, rates of admission to hospitals, and reduction in medication use. (Dausch, 2001) National Association for Acceptance of Fat People: It is not necessary that fat people always suffer from a disease as it is not their weight that causes problems, but society’s discrimination against fat people. They can do the same jobs and have the same abilities as thin people despite pervasive stereotypes to the contrary. (Solovay, 2000) Physical activity Matters! Young children who see their parents engaging in physical labor or regular exercise programs are likely to follow their examples. According to study children who are fostered by active parents (engaged in physical exercise) are 5. – 6 times more active than if both parents were inactive, but the dilemma is that generations are getting inactive. So there is no concept of â€Å"active parents†. Some children, particularly those in low-income families, have less opportunity for physical activity; therefore there is still a need for the Government must to take appropriate measures for such children. Children living in unsafe or unreliable neighborhoods, for example, may not be able to play outside after they come home from school. (Smith, 1999, p. 71) As children get older, they become much less likely to engage in regular and vigorous exercise for reasons including increased academic, work, and social commitments or school situations such as lack of physical education classes due to insufficient funds or substitution of nonphysical activities (for example, classroom or study hall sessions) for physical ones. Schools also may place greater emphasis on academic achievement than on physical activity or fitness, and may delegate responsibility for physical development to families. But just like food concern, often parents do not realize the importance of physical exercise to their children’s well-being, as well as to their own. Other families may recognize the value of regular exercise, but feel helpless to create community or school programs that guarantee it. While there is some evidence that pilot studies in schools can make a small difference in children’s activity levels, there have been few reports of widespread adoption of health education curricula by school districts to extend the benefits of physical activity to all who are enrolled. In this context schools have often been a victim of critique which Hiatt & Klerman (2002) quotes in the following words: â€Å"On the one hand, healthy living habits may be taught in the classroom, while at the same time students are served fat-laden meals or placed in physical education programs which may stress competitive sports rather than participation based on the student’s developmental stage†. (Hiatt & Klerman, 2002, p. 6) In some U. S. chools emphasis is placed on winning at games rather than on the physical development of all students, therefore, only those who are the best at physical activities are selected for sports competition, leaving the rest of the average students behind. School Meals Initiative The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) which was established in 1946 by the National School Lunch Act (NSLA) requires from the U. S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service (USDA-FNS) to review each state regularly in context with the nutritional content of food served by each School Food Authority (SFA) as part of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). The legislation is intended to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities and other food, thereby working along the U. S government and providing help in granting-in-aids and all other means. The legislation is also aimed at providing adequate supply of fresh foods including vegetables and fruits for maintaining and operating nonprofit school lunch programs. (NSLP, 2007a) Through subsequent amendments and increased funding, the program has expanded to 95,000 public and private schools and residential child care institutions. More than 26 million children receive free or reduced-price lunches every day and according to a rough estimation 92 percent of schoolchildren in the United States are in schools with lunch programs, and about 58 percent participate in the program on an average school day. NSLP has helped in working in collaboration of legislation, thereby protecting and safeguarding the health and well-being of the Nation’s children, (NSLP, 2007b) since 1996, when the program’s nutritional focus was on broad food groups and total calories. In those fifty years, the nutritional status of Americans and scientific understanding of proper nutrition and a balanced diet both changed. These changes were reflected in a series of Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) beginning in 1980 and most recently in 1995. The 1990 DGA and the Food Pyramid that was developed to publicize them reflected significant changes in the content of the guidelines which were more positive; more goal oriented towards the total diet, and provided more specific information regarding food selection, particularly among young school generation. 1992 was the year when School Nutrition Dietary Assessment (SNDA) started a concern about the content of school meals and their role in promoting the nutrition of children by initiating school meals research. Therefore it was revealed on SNDA that many school meals did not meet the then-current 1990 DGA. The study showed that the average school lunch had 27 percent more calories from fat, twice as much as sodium, and 50 percent more calories from saturated fat than the recommendations. In addition, SNDA found that children who ate local school lunch bought from cafeterias were consuming significantly higher numbers of calories from fat than children who obtained their lunches from other sources like home. (Hiatt & Klerman, 2002, p. 3) Legislation Enacted Recently, Arkansas in context with the legislative overview (2005) created a comprehensive program to combat childhood obesity, thereby increasing awareness among nutritional foods and factors. The provisions included conducting and maintaining regular annual BMI screenings for all public school children with results directly reported to the parents so that the results could be discussed in context with the advisory committees in parent teacher meetings. The provision also imposed restriction on any king of vending in elementary schools along with the disclosure of contracts with local food companies. Beverages (like cold drinks) were also banned other than milk, juice or water. The provision therefore aimed at establishing a Child Health Advisory Committee to update the parents’ and local bodies about the nutrition standards for elementary schools. (James, 2005) The NSLP authorizing legislation proposed computerized nutrient analysis to verify that the proposed menu was in compliance with the DGA. If trial menus were not in compliance, SFAs could iteratively make adjustments to the trial menu until it was in compliance. The proposed rule recognized that not all SFAs would have the capability to do nutrient analysis and therefore provided for a variation on this system. That variation, called Assisted NuMenus, allowed the SFA to have a third party perform the nutrient analysis. Finally, the proposed regulation required the state agencies to assess the nutrient analyses being performed by the SFAs and to take appropriate actions if either the analyses were not being performed correctly or the meals were not in compliance with the DGA. Thus, through NuMenus or Assisted NuMenus, the proposed rule included a mechanism through which school meals could plausibly be expected to be in compliance with the DGA by the 1998–1999 school year. However, before the rule could be finalized, PL 103-448, the Healthy Meals for Healthy Americans Act of 1994, was passed. (Hiatt & Klerman, 2002, p. 5) Responding to widespread complaints about the burden of nutrient analysis, the legislation instructed USDA to allow SFAs to continue using a food-based system of menu planning, in addition to NuMenus or Assisted NuMenus. The legislation also required that school meals be in compliance with the nutrient requirements by the 1996–1997 school year (two years earlier than under the proposed rule), however, since the legislation allowed menu planning systems that did not automatically involve nutrient analysis, there was no direct mechanism through which food-based SFAs could be expected to verify that their meals were indeed in compliance with the DGA. On January 27, 1995, USDA published a revised proposed rule which supplemented the June 10, 1994 proposed rule. It incorporated the shorter timeline and the inclusion of food-based menu planning systems from PL 103-448. In the January rule, USDA proposed a food-based system, called Enhanced Food-Based menu planning, that was very similar to the previous food-based system. However, the only difference between the two was the inclusion of more fruits and vegetables to school meals. To implement the requirement that NLSP meals meet the DGA, but in the absence of a requirement that every SFA perform a computerized nutrient analysis for every menu, the revised proposed regulation required each State Agency to monitor those SFAs using food-based systems. That monitoring was to consist of a nutrient analysis of each SFA at least every five years. (Hiatt & Klerman, 2002, p. 6) In May 1996, Congress enacted the Healthy Meals for Children Act (PL 104-149), which added two additional menu planning systems the system that had been in place since 1946 (Traditional Food-Based) and another called â€Å"Any Reasonable Approach†. (Smith, 1999, p. 65) Under the latter option, states could develop their own menu planning system as long as it met the requirements laid out by FNS for school meals and nutrition. Since the final regulations allowed for five different menu planning systems, several of which did not include having the SFA perform nutrient analysis, it required much more work for the State Agency than the June 1994 version of the rule would have. While the final rule and the mandates under the Healthy Meals for Children Act allowed the SFAs more flexibility, they also gave the SFAs the opportunity to choose menu planning systems that did not require them to perform their own analyses. Therefore, the states were required to put a system in place that would allow state staff or contractors to perform the analyses. Therefore, in 2004 Illinois started conducting analyses along with the contribution of State Department of Health to conduct mandatory health exam for students. In 2005 legislation was officially followed by West Virginia, Tennessee, and New York enacted legislation requiring student BMI reports. (July 11, 2005) Still there is lot of involvement required by the government at elementary schooling level which may directly or indirectly help prevent obesity. In this context governments can provide funds for obesity related research and education, can present facts about obesity to the public through publications and other media initiatives, can better recognize the proper development of American youth by placing increased emphasis on school physical education programs, and can help create incentives for the private sector, such as the food industry, to use the Dietary Guidelines and thus contribute to the better health of Americans. Above all government can help legislation to reshape the guidelines to help with our newer generation.