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Thursday, April 22, 2010

Ice Shaking News

Most people think that all glaciers move alike, creeping steadily toward sea or valley. News from Antarctica tell us differently. It has been a shocking discovery that undermines most theories to the way glaciers move and the speed they move at. The way the earth moves is fascinating and we find different things all the time that change the stand up the worlds theories and prove another theory.


Usually twice a day the massive Whillians Ice Stream, after sticking for hours on a plain of bedrock, slips forward up to two feet, triggering seismic waves equal to a magnitude 7 earthquake. Locating th source of the powerful quakes, researchers led by Douglas Weins of Washington university in St. Louis suggest the unusual behavior occurs because the half-mile-thick glacier gets caught on the bedrock until tides from the Ross Sea free it. Someone standing on the ice wouldn't feel or see a thing. The slip plays out slowly, taking 20 to 30 minutes.

I think that it's great this is being studied. From hundreds of years ago to the present, many things have changed and sped up. And without research, these kinds of things would've never been found and our world would be a huge mystery. In this particular case, earthquakes are happening more quickly which cause the rest of the ice and bedrock to move and change quicker. It's really good thing that science is being used to help us know of these small occurring things in the earth.

As the climate warms, scientists hasten the study of how glaciers move. In Antarctica they've learned how one stops and starts. Setting off ice quakes. Gravity tugs the ice stream toward the Ross Sea. Daily tides push the Ross Ice Shelf against the descending glacier. The glacier eventually grinds to a halt above a rough area of bedrock, building up stress within the ice. When the tide falls, the ice lunges forward with powerful motion. Seismic waves are detected 3,000 miles away in Australia.

The world is continually changing and it will always be that way. It's a really good thing that we have the people in this world that spend their precious time studying the earth and it's bazaar ways. Without them we would never have a clue about the earth and it's wonders. The earthquakes that hit under the ice are only the beginning of what the earth has to offer and what the earth will do in the future. I think that we should always keep checking up the earth and its news because in all that we know, the world gives us a lot more.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Is the internet making us stupid??

But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.”


It is a simple fact that the world is evolving and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about that. All of the little researches that are being done to try to get us to realize the world is changing are beyond pointless. The world is going to change, and that’s a fact. Those people would save a whole lot of time and effort if they would just simply look at how things changed from 1100 to 1200 to 1300 to 1400 etc. Minds are growing, people are becoming smarter, new things are being invented and that is the simple call for change! When it is said that google is making us stupid, they are very wrong. It has even been proved that Adult minds are like plastic, and it takes a lot for them to make a full on change. So, the fact that the internet came about when these “adults” were just becoming adults explains to us that it’s going to be a bit harder for them to get used to a whole new device. You don’t see young people coming out and telling us that the internet is making us stupid, because its not, it’s just the way we were taught from the moment we entered school. Because we were taught in a different way than these adults who are trying to tell us we’re all stupid, doesn’t make it right for them to come out and assume when they really have no idea. Their brains don’t work like ours and won’t ever work as ours do, so why then must they try to make us think we’re stupid because we’ve given our brains a different work out than they gave theirs.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand.”

That, my friends, is why we aren’t stupid because of the Internet. When we entered school the teacher taught us how to read, write, spell etc. and from that knowledge we then, were able to branch out on our own and use that knowledge in whatever ways we could possibly find. We read on the Internet, we spell on the Internet. Because we’re not studying books 24/7 like they used to have to do doesn’t mean we’re dumb, because we’re not. We have just grown up using our reading abilities and writing abilities in different ways than those “adults” did when they were young. We still do our projects, we just don’t have to go to every library in Utah to find the one item of research that we need. And because it’s easier for us to get our information, more is expected of us. And that is why we are not getting stupid. Schooling is getting harder and more is expected because resources are now easier to locate. Our brains may even be being pushed more than they used to be, so don’t tell me the internet is making me stupid.
They must think that, in generations to come, those youth are going to be dumbfounded if they think we’re the ones that are going to turn out stupid. They are going to learn in school everything that is expected and more. The internet is not putting any kind of change to that at all. Everything is going to stay the same, resources are just a million times easier to find.

Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.”