Research Log Entry 2

1. The balance between protecting privacy and the meetings of the needs of national security is not an easy task. I believe that a person's privacy is very important. I also believe that national security is also important. I think a fair balance would be to let a government invade a person's privacy only if that person raises a level of suspicion. This level of suspicion would have to meet a checklist of requirements. So in theory, if a person meets half of the requirements, it would be illegal for his privacy to be violated. In more general terms, a balance in this scenario would be meeting the needs of an individual's privacy and that of national security.

2.I was surprised that so many of those books were banned. I was actually glad that those books were not banned in my high school. I think certain books should be banned. It true that some of those contents are indeed inappropriate and the ban should be that of an age requirement. For example, only high school students should be allowed to read The Color Purple. The reason for this is that young readers will not be able to comprehend the advanced concepts in those books and misinterpret the book because of the use of profanities. Some books should definitely be banned. The Anarchist Cookbook, for example, only serves to harm others and there is no relevant need for books like that.

3.My overall information ethics have not really changed by completing this unit. I strongly believe in fairness. I believe in privacy and that of national security. I want to be able to be safe and free to have my own ideas.

Research Log Entry 1

1. The author and publisher can be accommodated by selling text books to the students. The teacher can be given a free or reduced price copy of the material. The library should be given a few free copies of the book. The students can be accommodated with being able to check out the free book at the library. The students could also be given the option to buy an online version of the book minus the costs of printing.

2. A fair arrangement can be reached by satisfying all the parties involved. The publisher and author should be compensated for their time and effort. The teacher should have access to the materials without it being a financial burden. Students should be given a reasonable rate and or alternative access to the book as the cost of convenience. The library should be given free books to let students and teachers borrow.

3. The challenges of creating a fair arrangement is satisfying all parties. An issue arises when one party believes they are not benefiting as much as the others. For example, a student may feel it is not fair if the publisher charges an outrageous price for a book. On the other hand, if books were very cheap, the publisher might lose money. Creating a fair arrangement is like a balancing act where it is difficult to find the appropriate level of fairness.

Research Log Entry

1. The main subject of my question is Yangtze River.
2. The subject guides I identified were Environmental Sciences and Geology and Environmental studies.

1. I chose JSTOR as my first database.
2. I used the terms "Yangtze" "River" and "contamin*"
3. I retrieved 119 results.
4. I started my search as usual with just the term Yangtze River. This gave me around 3000 results so I had to narrow it down. I added contamin* to my search and it brought down my results to a more reasonable 119.
5. I read the titles and short descriptions to determine if the results were good
6. I chose the article Changzhou, China: Water Supply, Sewage Treatment and Waste Disposal Strategies for Sustainable Development Changzhou
Author: Yang Yaliang
Copyright: 1996
Publisher: Allen Press on behalf of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/4314428
7. For this particular article, I mainly looked at the content to determine if it was meaningful. I also payed attention on the intent of the author. The author seemed to write in an informative way which was a good thing. The year of publication was an indication that the article was fairly recent.


1. For my second search I used the database LexisNexis
2. I used the terms "Yangtze" "River" and "toxi*"
3. I retrieved 75 results.
4. N/a
5. I looked at the title, source, and word count of the list of articles to determine their meaningfulness.
6. The title of the article I chose was Yangtze River blue algae bloom affects drinking water, fish supplies
Author: no specific author, Chinese news agency Xinhua
Published: June 20, 2008
7. This particular article was recent. There was some skepticism on my part because this article was written by a newspaper in China. Knowing that the Chinese government censors some of its information, this article might be biased. The content was short, but it addressed a lot of areas in my topic. It was able to give a cycle type of picture of the pollution process. For example, phosphorus would be released by businesses. These phosphorus would cause blue algae to thrive and multiple which would result in a water that is not safe for humans.

Research Log Entry

1.I chose Newsweek (Feb. 2nd 2009), Chemical and Engineering News (Jan. 1975), and Journal of Management Accounting Research (Fall 1991)
2.I chose The Steep price of Secrecy by Jonathan Alter in Newsweek, The Determination of Catalyst Properties by J.B. Butt and V.W. Weekman Jr., and Analysis: Partial Survey Applications for Management Accounting by Dath Enueuprent
3.The articles were very different in the style of writing. Newsweek used basic vocabulary while Chemical and Engineering News and Journal of Management Accounting Research used more industry jargon. The articles also were written in different times.
4.The major difference between the periodicals were their audiences. The periodicals also served different purposes.

Research Log Entry 2

1.I used Britannica Online.
2. I used the terms "Yangtze" "River" "Pollution"
3.I retrieved 15 results.
4. One way to reduce and filter results over 100 is to choose your source content in Britannica.
5.I began to look at the title and short description to determine if an article was meaningful or not.
6."Yangtze River." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 15 Feb. 2009 .
7.I read the article, and it provided good information on my topic. The article explained various things like pollution, animal life, and other topics relating the Yangtze River.

Academic Search Primer

1. I used the same terms "Yangtze" "River" and "Pollution"
2.I retrieved 110 results.
3. Yangtze, by itself, produced over 1000 results. I added terms to my search to narrow down the results.
4.I found it harder to manipulate the terms in Academic Search Primer. However, when i was able to manipulate the terms successfully, i was able to retrieve more results with Academic Search Primer.
5.I used the same method as i did previously and read the short description and the title to make judgment on whether or not an article was good or not.
6.
Title: The distribution characteristics of nitrogen and phosphorus in the ecological system of Mt. Beigu wetland.
Authors: WU Yanyou, LI Pingping, HAO Jianchao, WU Chundu, FU Weiguo
Copyright:2009
Publisher:Academic Publishers Brill
Link:http://search.ebscohost.com.bob.csueastbay.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=36034754&site=ehost-live
7. I read the abstract to determine this article was meaningful.

Research Log Entry

1. I tried to answer the question "What type of animal life is in the Yangtze River?"

2.I used the term "yangtze" for my search

3.I used the subject heading of River dolphins-- China

4. There was another subject listing of "River Dolphins : A new river-dolphin from China", but it was published in 1918 so it wasn't current. I then chose "River Dolphins China : Baiji : the Yangtze River dolphin and other endangered animals of China / by Zhou Kaiya and Zhang Xingduan ; translated by Luo Changyuan " because it was published in 1991 and it related more to my topic.

5. Author: Zhou, Kaiya

Title: Baiji : the Yangtze River dolphin and other endangered animals of China / by Zhou Kaiya and Zhang Xingduan ; translated by Luo Changyuan

Publisher: Stone Wall Press ; Nanjing : Yilin Press

Copyright: 1991

6. I could not find any quotes in this book

7. A reference book is a reference point for regular books. Regular books use reference books as a source for factual information.

8.I think the material comes from between 1980 to 1985.

Research Log Entry

"Yangtze River" and "Pollution"n provided no hits for me under the school's catalog. So instead, i just searched up just the term "Yangtze" to see if i could find an article that could address some possible environmental impacts. Yangtze provided only 18 hits.

1. a. Lyman P. Van Slyke
b. Yangtze : nature, history, and the river
c. N/A
d. Reading, Massachusetts
e.Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.
f 1988

2. Location: Book Stacks
Call No. : DS 793.Y3 V35 1988
Status: On The Shelf

3. Yangtze River -- History

4. Yangtze River History : Yangtze : nature, history, and the river / Lyman P. Van Slyke
(There was only one entry)

5. a.The subject heading search provided less results than the keyword search.

b. Although the results were not what i completely wanted, they were more on target than the keyword search.

c. I think the whole idea of subject search is to produce results that are similar in subject. This causes it to be more on target that a keyword search. A keyword search may find results with similar letter structure, but not necessarily topic meaning.

B. Research Log Entry

A keyword search is like using Youtube to find videos; It finds all results that have the same spelling. A subject heading search is like the "Tags" on Youtube. The tags correspond to similar videos that share a common idea. By clicking on the tags on youtube, you are able to find videos that wouldn't automatically show up on the intial search. This is the same as keyword and subject heading searches.

Research Log Entry

1. a. Pollution
b. Factory and businesses releasing pollution into the environment
c. Water contamination in the Yangtze river.
d. The toxicity level of fish in the Yangtze river
e. Human risks from consumption of fish.

2.
a. What kind of contaminants are in the Yangtze River?
b. What type of animal life is in the Yangtze River?

It was much easier to start with pollution and work my way down. I ended up with the topic of Water contamination in the Yangtze River. I could only imagine it would have probably be very difficult if i had started with the broad idea of pollution and used it as my center topic. Thanks once again Ms. Soules for going over this with me.

Week 2: Research Log entry

a. Delicious is basically an online tool in which you can save your bookmarks on an internet site. It allows you to access the same bookmarks when you use different computers.

b.It becomes less of a hassle when you can access all your bookmarks from different computers. This tool lets you build a big list of bookmarks which can be viewed by other people. You can also view other people's bookmarks which might bring you to a site your type of interest.

c.I don't think i like to use this tool. It seems like a great idea, but i do not like the fact that a website will know what sites you bookmarked. I like to keep things private.

Week 2: Research Log Entry

1.My question was "What was Frederick Douglass' childhood like?"
2. I began with the terms "Frederick Douglass" "childhood" and "slavery"
3. I used the search engines: ask.com, google, and yahoo.
4a.I used Frederick Douglass, Childhood, and slavery. I varied the results by omitting slavery on certain searches.
4b. I tried using quotation marks to narrow down the searches and to keep important terms together. I also tried the nesting technique to get more hits that would be more relevant to my question.
5a. I first looked at the website's URL and short text under each hit. By looking at the URL, i can usually determine what kind of site it is and whether or not it would be relevant to my topic. I also paid attention to the link's title.
5b. All the search engines got hits about my topic, however, they all did not get the same exact hits. It was helpful that all the search engines i used had some sort of suggestion. This proved essential as it would check my spelling and show similar useful topics. It seemed that Yahoo has the highest hits while Google and ask.com trailed it in respective order.
5c. I think the search engine did its search on the basis of who their target age group was. Yahoo normally caters to young adults and teens as they have games and fun things on their normal website. I recall seeing quite a lot of Sparknotes.com hits on the yahoo search engine which would be a result of catering to young adults who usually rely on summary sites. With this in mind, naturally assumed that ask.com and google were targeting an older age group.
6. One question i had was if there were more boolean operators than the basic quotes, and not, and etc.

Research Log Activity and Entry

1. I was trying to answer the question "What are the diseases that the Europeans gave to the American Indians?".
2. I used the GOOGLE search engine.
3. I used the search term "European diseases AND Native Americans" and "Europeans diseases OR Native Americans"
4. I received 1,200,000 hits when i used AND in my search and i received 14,200,000 hits when i used OR. Using OR created more hits in my search. I think this was because OR included either search terms while AND only allowed hits which had both terms used.
5.I mainly used Authority and Objectivity when i evaluated my results.
6. On one site, i determined that the value of the site was not good because the person did not have much Authority as he based most of his article on an unreliable source. There was also no mention of a specific author of the information and there was no way to contact the author.
7. The main question i had was whether or not a source of an article was credible.

1. Reseach Log Entry

1.)
a. I already knew about the C.A.R.D.I.O. concept in evaluating information resources.
b. The AND, OR, and NOT were new concepts to me.

2.) If I had to use the web to conduct research, I would need to consider the Authority, Currency, and Objectivity of the material.