Urvashi Vaid

Before attending this event I really didn't have any expectations. I didn't look into it much or know what was going to be talked about. I just figured she may talk about an LGBT issue. I thought the presenter did a wonderful job of giving information. She incorporated personal stories along with facts to get her point across. I also felt this helped the audience understand and kept them very engaged. One thing I didn't like was how when she talked about people's opposition to gay marriage I felt she used extreme examples. Even though people use that i feel like the majority are more rational. Obviously, she was biased on the topic so it is understandable why she used this technique. I thought the point she made about because the movement has won same sex marriage doesn't mean it is over. Just because the LGBT community has received this right does not mean society views them equally. Even now the African- American population still struggles with this. I felt that Urvashi Vaid had authority on this topic for multiple reasons. She has written three books on LGBT topics, she is a lawyer, and has been apart of the LGBT movement for many many years. I don't know if I can specifically use this presentation in my alternative viewpoints paper but I did learn a lot of things and it did help me understand the topic a lot better.

Intellectual Property

My definition of intellectual property is the ownership of a person's own ideas. After searching the term on Google I came across a good expert definition on The United States Patent and Trademark Office's website. They defined intellectual property as imagination made real. It is ownership of dream, idea, an improvement, an emotion that we can touch, see, hear, or feel. It is an asset just like your home, your car, or your bank account. There are multiple examples of this in academic and everyday life. In everyday life a person may come up with a funny joke then a few days later their friend uses the same joke. A person may find themselves claiming the joke is theirs after their friend uses it. In academic life a person may create a hypothesis about something, they then can create an experiment to test it. This whole process is their academic property because they came up with the idea and tested it. When intellectual property is shared or manipulated I think that it becomes less personal. The person who originally came up with the idea can feel less ownership of it, especially when they are not given credit.

Google 101

I learned a lot of new things during Google 101. I will list all of the things I learned during the demonstration.
1. ~
2. related:
3. + or -
4. Using ends of websites like .gov or edu
5. The Google Art Project
6. Searching by a picture instead of words
7. Google translator

Learning all this changed my opinion because before I thought there wasn't a lot of ways to refine a search on Google. Now I know there are multiple ways to do this. It will help a lot when I using it for other projects because I do have some trouble with narrowing down results or finding what I want. I think I will use these tools for school work more than everyday life. In everyday life I usually just use Google to look up a quick stat, fact, or picture. When I am doing school work I can use the - or ~ to narrow results or expand them. I also can use .gov or .edu to help find specific things. Overall, I think Google 101 helped a lot and I look forward to using the new tricks.

Semester Research Assignment Questions

After reviewing the semester research assignment questions I found that I can answer most of the questions. Question 4, which asks, what are some of the challenges this group faces in mainstream society? I think I have bits of information here and there for this question but I could look more into it so I can learn some specific challenges. I also think I could work on question 6 a little bit. The question is, Whare are the challenges that people have in doing library research and original research on this human population? I don't think this question has to much research that needs to be done to answer it. I just need to take some time and evaluate it. Overall, for most of the questions I just need to sit down and organized my information and see where I am missing things.

Blog Evaluation

Before taking this class I didn't have much experience with blogs. I was first introduced to in when going to a presentation about obesiety oppression and the blogosphere. When I went to this I realized that there were a lot of people who are using blogs. That is all the experience I have had though.

I think blogs can be useful. They can be good when researching different opinions. Some blogs can be good for research and some can't be, it just depends.

For my topic I used a blog titled "The Homeless Guy". The author has posts from many years ago. The main purpose of the blog was to raise awareness for homelessness and get people to suppport  it. There was a lot of interesting posts just on general information and how you can help a homeless person.

The one I found most interesting was titled Why do people become homeless. The link is below.
http://thehomelessguy.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-do-people-become-homeless.html
The author talks about different ways people become homeless and he stresses the difference beteween "why" and "how". This post was good for general information and helping people understand and syphathize with a homeless person. I thought it was more of his own definition of why. Based on what I have learned I thought some facts were left out about how they become homeless. They could lose their house from natural disaster or war and he fails to mention that. Overall, I thought the post was informative but it lacked some information.

The Homeless Guy. (2012 March 12). [web log comment]. Retrieved from http://thehomelessguy.blogspot.com/