My Dialect


Through out my life I have been exposed to many kinds of dialects from around the nation. I was born in Mexico then my father's job moved us to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when I was five. I learned how to speak english there and spent most of my elementary school years their till I moved to Asheville, North Carolina. Now that I think about it I never really heard anyone say anything about the way I speak. People would assume since I moved from the North to the South I would hear a lot about a northern accent. Asheville is a very unusual place, it is a mix of hippies, mountaineers and rednecks but it is full of culture. Asheville is unlike another place I have ever been too in my whole entire life. I think since there are so many different type of people in Asheville everyone has their own kind of accent or dialect. It wasn't till I moved to Dallas, Texas my senior year that I really started hearing about the way I talk. Everyone assumed that people from North Carolina were a little like northerners with a northern accent or something. But when people heard me talk, they always told me it sounded like I had a mix of both. They said that I would say and pronounce some words with some sort of a norther accent and some others with a southern. It never really bothered me at all, I actually thought it was kinda cool. It made proud of where I had been and grew up. I feel like everyone should feel the same way. Watching those videos made me realize how interesting it is to see where people are from and how the use their language there. There are many stereotypes about how language is used in certain regions but when you actually talk to someone from that part you actually may hear something completely different.

BRAIN INJURIES IN SPORTS

Tonight at 8:00 pm the CNN network will be premiering a show called "Dr. Sanjay Gupta Reports: Big Hits, Broken Dreams". Dr Sanjay has been following the 2011 season of a North Carolina high school football team and will take a closer look at the health and safety issues on the playing field. I just read an article about a 17 year old high school student. His is name is Nathan Stiles he is a straight-A senior who is the star running back at his high school. It just turned out that his final game of his senior year would be  the last one he plays in his life. He took at hard hit to the head during the game that killed him. He died of second-impact syndrome, when a player is hit again before the brain has had a chance to heal for an initial concussion. Earlier he was complaining of head aches that lead him to go to the doctor. He had a CT scan and was told to sit out for 3 weeks. When they returned to the doctors office for the final check up Connie (Nathan's mom) remembers her sun asking "Now,Mom, are you OK with this?" She didn't want him to get back on the field but it was harder for her to say no. Many organizations are working hard to prevent tragedies like this happen. They are working to make rules on injuries in sports more strict and making it harder for doctors to clear athletes to play who had been injured. Rules of games have changed such as in football and lacrosse, hits above the neck are illegal. Many doctors are looking into the brain injuries and are looking for ways to find warnings to save lives before it is too late.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was passed of 2001 was signed into law on January 8th 2002. It was proposed by the George W. Bush administration immediately after he took office. NCLB supports a standard-based education reform that pretty just means that by setting high standards and reachable goals they can improve individual outcomes in education. The act requires states that receive federal funding to develop assessments in basic skills for all students. Funding for this act has increased from $286 million to $1.2 billion. Though the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) says in a survey done in July of 2005 that students have significantly improved their test scores in reading and math in the last five years than in the previous 28 years combined. Many argue that the statistics are misleading. They compare 2000 to 2005, when NCLB didn’t take effect till 2003. If you compare 2000 to 2003 and 2003 to 2005 the increase is about the same. Each year the schools are required to make a certain amount of progress in test scores so by 2014 there will be no achievement gap. Not everyone learns at the same rate the problem with NCLB’s standardized test is that they are putting pressure on teachers to pretty cramming all the information that they are told to be on the test in order for the children to pass. That’s not right because the children who do understand the material when it presented to them will be left behind because the teacher has to continue so he/she makes sure she covers all the material before the test. From experience it was at times hard to learn and understand what was being taught to us because our teacher didn’t have enough time to deeply cover the topic so many of us students were left with many unanswered questions. I don’t think a test should determine the future of any student and school. NCLB requires most schools to turn in an Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) it’s broken down into 37 categories. If any one of those categories does not make improvement then the school is labeled a failure, I don't think this is the right approach to fix a problem that is caused by the system.

STOP SOPA AND PIPA


Members of the Congress are trying to put an end to counterfeiters and pirates. In order to do that they are voting on bills called SOPA and PIPA. The problem with these bills are that they could order the blocking of sites that would censor the internet. Search engines could be forced to delete entire websites from their search results. 41 human rights organizations and 110 prominent law professors have petitioned against the bills. Internet companies would have to monitor everything users link to or upload or face the risk of litigation. Internet companies such as AOL, EBay, Facebook, Google, Linkedln, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga wrote a letter to Congress saying these bills "pose a serious risk to our industry's continued track record of innovation and job-creation". 55 of America's most successful venture capitalists spoke out stating that PIPA "would stifle investment in Internet services, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness. More than 204 entrepreneurs told Congress that PIPA and SOPA would "hurt economic growth and chill innovation". I agree that PIPA and SOPA isn't the right way to stop the counterfeiters and pirates, the censorship regulations wont shut down pirate sites. All they have to do is change their addresses while other companies that obey the law will suffer high penalties for breaches they can't control. Censoring will only take the freedom from the internet. The internet is an important driver of American economic growth and job creation, limiting it will only hurt economic growth. Wikipedia shut its website down for 24 hours in order to protest against SOPA and PIPA. The blackout started at midnight on Wednesday and wont be available till midnight on Thursday. Google is offering a petition against PIPA and SOPA, over 4 million people have signed it including me. I encourage everyone to sign it. The vote on these bills will start January 24th.

Music's Healing Powers

     Music is a really big part of my life. As a child I would fall asleep listening to music or just listen to sooth my mood. Even now I wake up listening to music and go to bed listening to music, its almost like a medicine to me. I just read an article in the Los Angeles Times called The hope of music's healing powers by Melissa Healy about how music is starting to play a roll in modern medicine. Music is said to be healing by music therapist but now neuroscientist are looking to uncover the scientific basis for music's healing powers. They are looking to understand how music can help rewire the brain affected by illness or injury. Pitch, harmony, melody, rhythm and emotion all components of music engage different regions of the brain. Most of those regions are important with speech and social interaction. "Music might provide an alternative entry point" to the brain, because it can unlock so many different doors into an injured or ill brain, said Dr. Gottfried Schlaugh, a Harvard University neurologist. If disease or trauma has disabled a brain region music can be used as a remedy. For about 1 in 5 patients who suffer a stroke, asphasia which is difficulty with speech is an effect. Schlaug and other researchers have found that practicing to express themselves with a simple form of singing significantly improved the fluency of their speech compared with patients whose speech therapy did not include singing. I found this article to be interesting because it amazes me how far medicine and technology have come. Hopefully within next few years we will start seeing music become more popular within the medical field to cure patients.