Latex or Baby?

Joseph Spears and Samantha Parks, HOPE(Healthy Outreach through Peer Education) leaders are set up and promoting safe sex at Teen Mom's, Maci Bookout's speech. The table is lined with brochures and pamphlets as well as free condoms and a safe sex game-board! The backstage UPB workers swipe in students, a growing crowd of mostly females, as they filter in to listen to the speaker of the night, Maci Bookout. Young lady of the hour, Maci Bookout, 20, begins to talk to the crowd about her journey as not only a teen mom, but also how it was in the spotlight. Maci allowed a portion of her time with SRU to be dedicated to questions, she said nothing was off limits. So students, even one guy, lined up for question time.

"It's In The Game"

Mr. Prevention....

Condoms: 

rubbers, love gloves, sheaths, raincoat, jimmy hat, and numerous other, sometimes more vulgar, terms.

The Controversy:
On one hand people believe that young adults should be educated in sex. Where to buy condoms. how to properly put them on....
Then there are others who believe that it's a sign of encouragement for young adults to engage in sex.....


Lets take the show 16 and Pregnant for instance. This show is about young ladies who have gotten pregnant in their teenage lives. Some of them drop out of high school while some struggle through it. They tell the story of how their lives are officially over, no more hanging out, loss of friends, and how some of the fathers aren't pulling their weight. The show was designed to show how hard it is for the young women after having a baby. But is it working?


A spin off of the show came later with Teen Mom 2. This show stars the cast of the second season of 16 and Pregnant. It shows the struggles of being a young mother, marriage, relationships, adoption, finances, graduating high school, college, independence. These two shows are supposed to show the struggle and hardships that come with being a young mother and the challenges that lay around every corner.


Their underlying message is practice safe sex, right?

"Of 100 typical users who start out the year
employing a given method of contraception,
the number who will be pregnant by the end
of that year will be _________."



So asking whether access to condoms prevent teen pregnancy is a bad question... In some cases it does. In others obviously not, we have shows about teen moms.

Monkey See, Monkey Do....

Great Apes Trust is a science center dedicated to studying the intelligence and behavior or great apes. Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, joined the Great Apes trust in 2005, she's the executive director of the center has dedicated her time to teaching apes how to communicate. She has taught these animals how to complete computer tasks, use symbols, type on keyboards, decode structures and learn concepts of quantity and numbers. Who said we didn't evolve from the same ancestors as apes?  Savage - Rumbaugh asked the question, "What is a bonobo?" She then asked the question, "What is a human?" Her journey began with those two simple questions to discover the difference or if there is a difference between how an ape learns and communicates to how a human learns and communicates. In her mind there isn't much of a difference, but for apes it may be a little harder and take a little longer. Overall a young ape learns like that of a human child. The first question I would ask her would have to be, Do you believe we evolved from the same ancestors as apes? 




Sue Savage - Rumbaugh first success story was an ape named Kanzi.

My sources that I found most valuable and reliable were:


1. Great Apes Trust - This is the centers main site hosting a lot of videos of apes doing some amazing things as well as discussing more of what they do and how they do it. They introduce the scientists teaching the apes how to communicate similar to the way humans do.


2. Time Magazine - I found Time magazine to be another valuable source because Savage-Rumbaugh was named by them one of the world's 100 top most influential people. The article discusses in more detail about Kanzi, then a 29 year old male ape, and a little of Savage-Rambaugh's work with him.


3. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development (1993) - Some of her work on Language Comprehension in Ape and Child was published in this journal. Kanzi was the first ape to learn in the same manner as children do. By reading  her work in great detail I learned the tools used to teach specifically Kanzi, but other apes that followed as well. 


4. The My Hero Project - This site gives statistics on bonobos, considered to be one of the most intelligent apes of all. They are considered to be our closest living relatives. The site tells the story of just how Savage - Rumbaugh came across Kanzi and her quest to discover his and other apes intelligence.


5. On the Human - a project of the National Humanities Center. Because she believes humans and apes learn similarly, Savage - Rumbaugh does a forum on human language and human consciousness, comparing and contrasting learning capabilities and how human infants and ape infants develop.

Sue Savage - Rumbaugh

“We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.” 

― E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind

Let's Talk About Me.....

I am not a blogger. I like to read blogs and I think it's a good way to talk about what you like and find interesting as well as keep up with society. Hopefully this whole blogging thing goes well, I'm excited.

Hi. My name is Shiara. Pronounced Shy-ra. My friends call me Shy. I am a Junior at Slippery Rock University. If all goes as planned I'll be graduating from the Slimy Pebble with BS in Communication/Journalism December 2012. On top of being a student, I work. I am a sales associate at Country Fair, which is a convenient store/gas station. I've been working for the company for five years, talk about dedication. I love to write poetry, draw, and read novels. Instead of going into the creative writing field, I chose journalism. I'm not even sure why. I will say it is definitely a fun and interesting form of writing, but will I make it a career?

Initially I took New-Media Journalism because I needed another journalism course. Then I discovered what we would be partaking in and the excitement kicked in. Twitter and Facebook are good ways of saying what you want and reading other people's post but here's a way to say more and learn more. News is traveling faster online than newpapers these days. I look at The Washington Post online a lot. Thanks to Advance Reporting and Broadcast Journalism I have to keep up on news. I like the thought of being a blogger and sharing what I consider news, but I'm not sure if I'll be that good. Hopefully this class will continue to be interesting and I will take on the world of blogging with a vengeance. I've learned different ways of journalism, so blogging won't be too different, right?

I hope this class will keep me up on all the news and ways of the world. Now days everything is so fast paced, I just want to stay as caught up and close as possible.