Blog #5

Eli Stiewing 810

I’m writing about the article “Drones Put Spying Eyes in the Sky” by Stephen Omes published in “Science News for Students.” In this article, the author wants to teach the reader about the possibilities of the new technology known as drones. “Drones have enormous potential to change the way many different people work, since aerial robots can collect huge amounts of data in a short time.” As smaller and cheaper drones are developed and become available, people are using them for many different purposes. The author basically explores the facts, without giving any opinion about them. He shares three main different innovations in the use of drones that make a difference in the world.

In the first example, we are introduced to Thomas Snitch, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who is launching drones in South Africa to help stop poachers from killings rhinos. Snitch, “ combines a drone’s view with math and computer software to find and catch poachers before they strike. Jeff Sloan of the U.S. Geological Survey agency (USGS) recycles military drones for multiple purposes. He explains, “they fly cameras that capture images in natural color. Most also host video cameras that hunt for heat. Anything that emits heat- from vehicle engines to human bodies- produces infrared light. Thermal cameras can detect that infrared light, which the human eye cannot. The cameras push beyond what the human eye can see.” One of their projects is tracking wildlife. In 2009, Sloan’s agency used drones to monitor migration patterns and count the Sandhill Cranes in the San Louis Valley of Colorado. Rory Paul, is an engineer who works with Volt Aerial Robotics, a company that builds drones in Chesterfield, Missouri. Paul says, “ Almost any kind of sensor can be attached to a drone to make measurements. In 2012, Paul’s company used drones to observe a soybean field in Iowa. The cameras could detect insect damage without the farmer having to trek across hundreds of acres of field every day to protect his crops.

Many other uses of drones are described in this interesting article. Drones offer the possibility of increasing a farmer’s crop yield. Scientists are beginning to look at drones as a way of mapping landscapes. Scientists sent in drones to measure radiation levels at the power plant in Japan after the 2011 Tsunami. Recently, archeologists used drones to search for buried remains in a 1,000 year old settlement in the desert of New Mexico. Last spring, storm-chasers seeking to learn more about tornados, sent a drone into a supercell, a type of stormcloud that causes tornados. Drones are available on Amazon.com right now. They are exploring the possibility of using drones to deliver orders. And people have used drones to take aerial photographs of their properties.

The world is changing quickly, even in my short lifetime. I am impressed by the many ways that drones can be used to serve people: conserving and studying wildlife and increasing crop yields are just a few of the many possibilities this technology opens up for us. What if we could design micro drones that could explore microscopic things, including the human body? The possibilities are endless.

Field Trip Blog

Today, I went on a field trip to the Museum of the City of New York. I had a really great time, even though I arrived late from a Murrow tour. I thought the museum was very enjoyable and interesting. I especially loved the exhibit known as the Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao photographs. I appreciate the way he combined many smaller photos into one very large photograph- close to six feet in length. It’s fascinating the way that the pictures have an element of night, day, and morning in them. These were amazing pictures of New York, capturing the beauty of the city.

     I found the Activist New York Exhibit inspiring. So many New Yorkers have fought for their rights and their beliefs. The issues that environmental activists have taken on particularly struck me. Starting with the growing realization that the automobile was destructive to the environment, advocates began protesting against cars and urging their fellow citizens to use bicycles as much as possible. Bike activists have arranged many “Bike-Ins” in the last four decades to convince the city of New York to create separate bike lanes on city streets, and to generally raise awareness about bikes as great exercise, a valid mode of transportation, and a green house emissions-free machine. As I looked at the photographs of the bikers, I felt happy that people have been making an effort to pollute less, be more green, and convince the rest of us to do the same. After leaving the museum, I felt glad and proud to be a New Yorker now.

The Giver Reading Response

The Giver

What if you lived in a society where there is no choice for you and all the color, love, and all the feelings you have, have been eliminated? “The Giver,” by Lois Lowry is about an eleven-year-old boy named Jonas, who lives in a society many years ahead of ours. Is it true that as the Giver says, “when people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong”?  In “The Giver,” the reader learns that as flawed as we are as human beings, and as safe as a controlled world can seem, we still yearn for the right to exercise our free will and to see the world through our own eyes and our own senses.

At the beginning of the story, Jonas is living his life like any normal kid, but sometimes he sees things, things we know to be colors. In Jonas’s world, the “elders” have eliminated all sight of color because, as the Giver says, “our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with differences…we gain control of many things. But we had to let go of others.” Jonas lives in a society where everyone must obey the rules and tell the truth. In order to prevent conflict, differences aren’t allowed. In this way, the society Jonas lives in has eliminated fear, pain, envy, and hate. Jonas is unwilling to let go of some important choices.

Jonas is different from all the others in his community because he has the gift of seeing colors. I think this is a metaphor for Jonas’s capacity to see the nuance in life as apposed to just black and white: “if everything’s the same, then there aren’t any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things!” In the final scenes of the book, Jonas risks his life to have a choice and to give the possibility of choice to his community. Starving, he thinks to himself “If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways. He would have lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love.” The reader never learns whether Jonas brings color back to his world or not, but will know that he is willing to die trying. After reading this book, I appreciate all the choices, colors, nuance, and feelings that we have in our society.

I Am Number Four Synthesis Page

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” by Neil Gaiman is about a 7 year old boy who discovers a whole other world at the end of his English country lane in the form of the Hempstock family, who are immortals who wisely keep order between universes.  I found this book to be very complicated to write about and think about. So much happens in this story of a small boy who faces his fears in the form of a shape shifting being from another world.

The book begins with the adult version of the boy driving in his car after attending a funeral, and finding himself looking for his old home and the lane that ran behind it into the fields. He slowly understands what he is looking for, “It was only then that I realized where I was going, where I had been going all along, and I grimaced at my own foolishness. I had been driving toward a house that had not existed for decades.”

As he walks down the lane, he begins to remember the Hempstock family. When he sees the pond in the back of the house, he remembers the young girl named Lettie Hempstock, reminding him that it wasn’t a pond, it was an ocean: “I remembered that, and, remembering that, remembered everything.” And so, the narrator, who morphs from an adult to the 7-year-old boy, whose name we never learn, starts to recall the events that happened in his childhood, starting with his 7^th birthday party, when nobody came.

So began a series of strange events that led the boy to the Hempstock farmhouse for comfort and protection. The Hempstocks understood that a being had escaped into the world from another one, and had to be sent back. When the boy goes with Lettie to send back the creature, it secretly lodged itself in the boy’s foot, and began a struggle between the innocent boy and the powers of the universe, with Lettie and the Hempstock family as his teachers.

In the end, the boy wins because the creature is sent back to another world, and balance is restored in his world, but he loses his closest friend and protector in the process. To protect him, the Hempstocks make him forget what happened, and it is only now, in the story, as an adult, that he remembers his childhood trial again. Every young person, including me, probably feels like they’re up against powerful forces in the universe that are way beyond our control. We can only hope to have the same courage that this young boy has as he faces his fear of the darkness in the world around him.

The Kings of Summer

I’m writing about the movie I saw recently by the name of  “The Kings Of Summer.” This is the story of three teenage boys Joe, Patrick, and Biaggio, who are done living with their parents and all their rules, so they decide to build a house for themselves out in the woods. I found this movie to be very special because it relates to almost every teenage boy who hates living a life with rules and just wants to be with his friends.

The movie begins with a depressed, recently widowed Frank being harsh and judgmental with his son Joe, the main character. Joe sneaks out one night to go to a party to see a girl he has a huge crush on. The residents get mad at the teenagers for having a very loud party in a public space. One of the neighbors starts shooting a gun in the air, threatening the teens.

Joe and Biaggio, a kid Joe met at the party, run as fast as they can into the woods and find a clearing, which is very beautiful and magical. Joe then convinces his best friend Patrick, who is also struggling with his parents, to come with Joe and Biaggio to run away and build a house in the clearing that Joe and Biaggio found. There, the three boys agree that in this place there will be “no parents, no one telling us what to do; we make the rules!”

At the newly built house, these three boys are truly kings of their summer as they swear to “boil our own water, kill our own food, build our own shelter, and be our own men.” But beneath these rules there are unwritten rules that would soon be broken when Joe invites his crush to come to the house in the woods. Even though the boys start out as friends and end as friends, on the way they learn the power of trust between friends and what it means to lose it. 

My favorite character in the film by far is Biaggio. His awkwardness and weirdness provides the main comedic relief to the film. “The Kings Of Summer” is one of my favorite movies of all time. This movie reminds me of going into the woods in Maryland and building forts with my best friend Johnny, and the feeling of being free and having no restrictions. Whether we escape to the woods, or stay at home, we need to figure out how to have good relationships with our friends and our families. This film inspires me to do that.