Uncategorized – Page 10 – Online Reporting, Research & Writing

Tracking Solar Activities

I found this cool data base site that allows one to track solar radiation and other cosmic activities thats free for the public use. This site allows one to stay up to date on whats taking place above them which can helps one to avoid, and or prepare for dangerous solar radiation and or other cosmic events.

We all have seen the many different weather upheavels lately, and some has been caused by solar radiation and other solar activities which has aided towards the floods, droughts, meteorites and etc. Its very benificial to be able to have a reliable data base accessible for the publics use for information on current solar events and activities.

The National Solar Radiation Data (NSRD), provides comprehensive information for the United States and other international locations. This site is also growing daily to stay up to date and informative which makes it a lot more easier to stay informed.

Washington Post’s The Age of Walls

The Washington Post did an incredible job with their interactive news story about borders with barriers across the globe.

The project takes the audience through a series of episodes that have one concentration and allows them to read, analyze maps, and watch videos all at once. The reason this project was so engaging was because of its organization and uniqueness. The videos they included every so often in the piece were short snippets that got straight to the point and were in black in white in order for them to have a specific effect on the audience.

blog pic 3 — This is a screenshot of the story’s page, giving useful visual aids.

I was moved by this project because here I am, living a comfortable life and I constantly forget that there are people like these refugees that can’t escape to a warm home like me. That’s what’s great about news stories like this, they remind you.

I’m ashamed however at the world in general. The fact that so many countries closed their doors to so many refugees makes me unsure of what to think. Is accepting refugees bad? What if that was us and the tables were turned? The situation in all is very complicated as the authors had mentioned at the end of the article. There’s no straight forward answer.

On one hand I think, these people don’t have food or shelter we must help them. But then I watch the next video in the news project and I see Austria’s struggle to control the population when so many refugees are let into the country- no questions asked. I think to myself, what would I do in a refugee and/or a president’s position? That’s a hard question to even think about.

Internet anonymity and you

Many of us have been told ‘be safe on the internet, don’t let anyone know who you are’, but how many of us actually know how to do that? Sure don’t give away your full name or address to people online, but what about the things you don’t have control over like your data uploads and downloads. How do you protect that? Thats where TOR comes in.

TOR stands for ‘The Onion Router’ and what it does is bounce your data between randomly selected predetermined nodes so that data can never be tracked directly back to you. When the data is bounced each node can only see the previous node the data came from and the next node the data is going to so no node knows the complete path the data took.

But why is it important to hide your digital footprint? With TOR individuals can access news sites, chat rooms, or other websites that are blocked by their internet service provider. Journalists can use it to safely connect to whistleblowers when other methods of contact would be to risky. On TOR’s own website they even claim that certain branches of the U.S. Navy uses TOR for open source intelligence gathering.

So next time you need to hide your personal data check out TOR for a secure connection.

Mrs. D’s corner

Calling all Special needs teachers!

If you are a special education teacher you need to read this blog. This is my first time reading a blog o writing blogs.

There are many great tips, crafts, and ideas for teachers to look up too for support. It gives me the extra support and lets me know that I am not the only crazy one in the world to teach in a special needs preschool. Many say I am crazy for my career choice, but I love every second of it!

Mrs.D’s Corner Blog!

The Age Of Walls

I have watched the interactive project from The Washington Post, and I have found it to be very interesting and really liked it. Something I loved about this was how the episodes are laid out and it’s like watching a story on the internet with examples of videos and pictures as you go. There are three different episodes, which makes you want to keep watching.

I really liked the first episode the most where they talk about the world’s border barriers and how they made history, and how these border barriers increased globalization. In the first episode it talks about how putting up barriers has increased because there are 63 border walls that have walls and fences separating countries that are right next to each other and the increase started after World War II. The episodes shows a map of all the countries that have walls on their borders and also shows a statistics graph of the numbers changing through out the years.

There are two videos where Bores Johnson talks about how “as a country we should take control” and also Donald Trump’s saying in a press release chanting “Build that wall!” He wanted to build a wall to divide Americans, and build a border fence between the U.S. and Mexico and it worried of migrants in that region. A lot of people did not want this to happened and got angry when Donald Trump continued to pursue it. They had a survey and studies show that younger generations are less likely to favor the wall and non- Hispanic whites are twice as likely to favor it as black or Hispanics. They believe that the fences being put up has made thousands of Mexicans and Americans to take risky routes, A man from Mexico in the video talked about what his opinion was about the fences being put up was “No they are not going to stop us.”

The Post series showed about how the people around the world are being affected by the border barriers. The videos are truly heartbreaking. One 18 year old boy named Issad Zakaria, was searching for job opportunities in Germany and he attempted to cross the border near Idomeni and was infested with criminal gangs and patrolled by police. There are many disputes going on around the whole world with these different countries and I have learned from reading about this that it does affect a person when watching all of these people’s videos and interviews on how they are living their life in fear is really heartbreaking. This was one of the greatest stories I have read on the internet and it really kept me interested throughout out the while story, definitely a story worth watching.