The Haitian presidential palace stands in ruins on Tuesday in Port-au-Prince after a huge earthquake measuring 7.0 rocked the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti, toppling buildings and causing widespread damage and panic.
Photo: Lisandro Suero / AFP/Getty Images
Over the next few days (or weeks), and given that I am a life-long resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I will be devoting a lot of my posts to earthquake / infrastructure related issues. Given the amount of earthquakes which have taken place recently (a 6.5 Earthquake recently hit near Eureka, California, causing some moderate damages, and a 4.0 Earthquake hit around the Milpitas, CA area), I feel it's important to research, as well as educate readers about issues related to earthquakes/infrastructure to inspire change, whether it be small or big scale changes.
With this article, Survivors struggle while awaiting aid, I want to analyze and compare what Bay Area residents need to be concerned about; while my analysis will be very obvious here, a lot of the factors of earthquake preparation are often ignored: earthquake preparation should be based on what will take place, such as damaged public utilities, lack of aid, etc., and I will highlight those problems.
Re-reading Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (a really complex book I recommend to everybody, btw), I started to think about political philosophy for a few minutes.
Before I begin, let me sort of describe how I am "politically active" (not as a bragging tool). I wrote for the school newspaper and was really persistent in bringing the current events that were taking place in our school district, and had debates within our debate club related to political events. I spent a lot of my time (sometimes late night) reading late night news articles trying to understand what was going on around the world while forming a political opinion on what needs to be done around the world.
But, Murakami really challenged my political activism; this is how I interpreted it: you can't just talk the talk otherwise you'll become elitist, hypocritical, and uncaring. Yes, it looks really damn fancy and cool that you are above everybody else if you know something about politics, but what's the point of "political activism" if you can't comprehend this quote: "Nobody cares how much you know, but how much you care."? Giventhat Murakami's tale takes place in the crazy 60s during the Japanese student protests, he places a very sexually liberated college student, Midori, in a student organization promoting "revolution" while ironically isolating her due to her ignorance and "slow understanding" (as definied by the group) of politics.
Midori joins a political group which uses big words she barely comprehends; the group does not make any attempts in explaining what those words mean. The first time she joins, she is told to read Marx, but since she can't understand it, nobody wants to associate themselves with her; meanwhile, the group goes on and lectures about political revolution. She notes that these people in the group, "aka" the working class, are trying to actually go up in social status just by impressing others with their political knowledge so they eventually be accepted (and quote, work for companies like "Mitsubushi and Fuji Bank").
These actions aren't political activism; that is plain arrogance and no action; how are people supposed to accept political activism (or politics in general) if this sort of elitist attitude exists, that people below your political knowledge aren't capable of being politically active?
This hypocrisy is apparent by the student protesters lack of full-sided commitment to the protests in the 60s. Toru Watanabe, the narrator, notes that in one semester, students went out of class just to protest the education system in Japan, and in another semesters, the protesters of the student movement aren't seen outside the classrooms as the leaders are all inside classes fearing that they won't graduate due to their involvement in protests.
That is true hypocrisy, letting fear or society's restraints (or society in general) lead one's lives in order to avoid changing the world.
But, how many of us who consider themselves "politically active" actually have been in these positions? Are you willing to go beyond the speech and debate part of politics that you see in high school, or the political junkies that claim they love politics to do something about the problems in the world? Are you afraid of changing the world (side note: how do you define changing the world; is it changing your community, changing your city, etc.?) because people claim you are too idealistic, don't realize the realities of government, and/or you fear you are hurting yourself?
After reading Norwegian Wood, I realized that I've been in this position and should not consider myself politically active, despite my knowledge about what's going on in politics.
It doesn't mean that much if I post Facebook links regarding political events going around the world, educating myself about issues in the Asian American community, or watching "political documentaries" or participating in all these ECs which enlighten your political thinking if the only thing you get out of it is a sense of pride for knowing a lot. It just doesn't, and that's what I have been doing these past few years.
How can I be politically active while going beyond being aware of the world around me?
Food Inc. teaches future generations to question how they eat and demand real food
Have you ever wondered where your food comes from?
With a tone quite similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Food Inc., a documentary directed by Robert Kenner and narrated by Eric Scholsser (who wrote Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (who wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma), seeks to challenge the way we currently eat based on where your food comes from and how your food is produced. The movie is currently playing in released theaters, but as the weeks go by, more theaters will play this movie.
As my philosophy teacher said: Real news is what people do not want you to know. The agriculture industry and meat industry do not want you to know the details made in this movie. However, food is a health, national security, and energy issue that deserves recognition from the current Obama administration, as outlined by Michael Pollan in an article he wrote in the NY Times. (I advise you that you should definitely read this article a couple of times to set up the context of the article).
I think the San Francisco Chronicle does it best by showing these facts which "galavinzed the filmmakers":
-- In 1972, the Food and Drug Administration conducted 50,000 food safety inspections; in 2006, the FDA conducted 9,164.
-- During the George W. Bush administration, the head of the FDA was the former executive vice president of the National Food Processors Association, and the chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Agriculture was the former chief lobbyist for the beef industry in Washington.
-- Cattle are given feed that their bodies are not designed to digest, resulting in new strains of the E. coli virus that sicken tens of thousands of Americans annually.
-- One in 3 Americans born after 2000 will contract early-onset diabetes; among minorities, the rate will be 1 in 2.
Given these facts, one would have to wonder: what's up with our food?
The movie's theme is: we cannot be eating the food the way we are today.
The movie explains that our food industry (aka agri-businesses) is completely owned by a few gigantic corporations which promote efficiency and profits in a growing global food economy over the health of people. I'll give a few examples the movie shows without revealing too much.
Take corn and meat. American farms like in Iowa do not have a lot of crop diversity; Corn is heavily grown in US farms as a form of mono-culuture, or one-crop field. In terms of meat, Cattle is not grown like in the movies where cattle graze in wide grassy fields and can be made meat.
Instead, agri-businesses want to maximize profit by fattening up lots of animals with fields of corn in cramped feed lots with no room to exercise (fattening increases!). It would be a lot easier to grow cheap meat than to just leave the animal in the fields grazing and growing meat slowly, but there are health risks.
First, cattle are not used to eating corn; they eat grass, and the corn will not end up digested well. Second, given the cramped space, the cattle can unknowingly eat feces that other cattle deficate out; so in other words, you risk exposing yourself to dangerous bacteria such as eColi, and the corn helps propogate that. Chicken and pigs face similar processes as well.
(a side note not 100% directly mentioned in the movie: meat companies can put antibiotics on the cattle to survive the feedlots, which means that your body can be exposed to different hormones that may not be healthy for our bodies when you eat different meats)
When feedlots of corn are gone, the bacteria may still exist in the land, but if a farmer decides to plant on the farm, other plants (i.e. spinach and tomatoes) can be exposed to harmful pathogens.
With greater growth in cheap corn (i.e. with the advent of fertilizers and pesticides), fast food companies buy this meat that was once cattle fed by corn under unhealthy conditions. The federal government gives especially subsidizes corn farms, but we are basically subsidizing fast food. The movie gives a good point: it is cheaper to buy fast food (i.e. a dollar menu at McDonalds) than to purchase fruits and vegetables at a grocery store. Government subsidies help keep corn costs down for fast food, but not for these basic healthy foods. No wonder many working-class people and minorities can easily get fast food and face health-risks more than upper-class Americans. Yet, all giant food companies care about is profit.
Since we can grow corn extremely cheaply, we now have the advent of high frutose corn syrup, which is prevalent among sodas (i.e. go to Mickey D's and get a soda) and a lot of other sweets. Not healthy for us.
Energy is a part of this problem as well. Given we need fertilizer (relying on natural gas) to give nutrients to mono-cultured corn, and pesticides (from fossil fuels) to make sure bugs who love the fertilizer don't take over the corn, our current way of eating is not sustainable. Since we have giant food corporations, you are aware that most of your food from the grocery store is not local, and truckers rely on a dwindling supply of gasoline to transport that food, from lets say, out of state or out of the country.
Government policies help keep this process alive; these giant food companies lobby extensively to make sure they can continue doing what they want. Even our government officials (i.e. former FDA chief during Bush Adminstration, or Department of Agriculture chief of staff) were once part of the food industry. Why isn't the FDA doing anything to stop this? This movie addresses these problems.
I should stop from here and let you watch the movie for yourself. The way we eat is not sustainable for our world, and poses health risks (i.e. diabetes), especially for those who cannot afford healthy food (or do not have time to cook due to busy work schedules) and have to rely on fast food for their meals. For those who can afford healthy food, it's difficult to find the meat that would actually be likely not contaminated, since a few global food companies control most of the meat, according to the above described industrial processes. It definitely is a daunting task to challenge government policy when government officals seem to be defending the food industry (and subsides for corn which feed these animals improperly) more than the health of the people.
I recommend this movie to everybody, regardless of degree / field, because this movie teaches future generations to question the origin of how our food is made so that we can demand real, healthy food.
I'm speaking to a mostly college-aged group, but all fields (engineering, i.e. industrial engineering, bioengineering, chemical engineering), public policy related fields, health fields, business fields, environmental groups, etc. have to do something about this problem, because this is our generation, and we have to think about what we can do to solve the problem. As consumers, we can choose what foods to eat (i.e. local/non-local, organic, etc.) to help mitigate the issue, but with these diverse fields and education, we have to go beyond the "powerless consumer level".
UC Berkeley Professor Ronald Takaki; (April 12, 1939 - May 26, 2009)
I know I should be sleeping now (I'm pretty tired; long day), but given the news of his recent passing away (he had multiple schelrosis, and commited suicide because he could not endure the disease anymore, according to his family), I felt compelled to dedicate a post to him.
Ronald Takaki was a very, very FAMOUS, Ethnic Studies professor at UC Berkeley who helped started one of the first Ethnic Studies programs in the United States (at UC Berkeley) during the crazy 1960s at Cal, taught the first Black History course at UCLA, and wrote many different books on Ethnic Studies.
Takaki was a huge influence in my life, and despite that I don't know that much about him as much as I should, I definitely believed he helped me value my Asian-American identity.
I remember taking a Sociology class in Community College the summer before my sophomore year in high school (Summer 2006) which changed my life forever; one of the topics we focused on was Race in California history. A book we read (too lazy to type down its title), had a review written by a Asian-American author named Ronald Takaki, who wrote a book with a title to do with "Iron Cages". Curious about his name (given that my early exposure to Asian-Americans were only limited to math and science like people, as well as working class As-Am), I decided to look him up.
I found the website: modelminority.com (unfortunately, somebody seemed to have hacked the website), and noticed Ronald Takaki's chapter, on the book, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian-Americans, dedicated to Asian-Americans and the model-minority stereotype, and wow, I learned thought-provoking stuff that challenged the way ordinary people viewed Asian-Americans. I began to learn that Asian-Americans were viewed incorrectly by the government, that while there are a good # of AAs in successful fields like science & engineering (Chinese, Korean, Japanese), medical field, etc. there were also a good # of AAs (i.e working class AAs, Pacific-Islanders or Southeast Asians) who were not, and the stereotype can definitely negatively affect how social services would be given to them (i.e lack of affirmative action toward SE Asians, lack of help for people like the Hmong ethnicity). Takaki was able to connect the amount of APAs in the professional fields (i.e. "the stable fields" )with the lack of APIAs in the managerial fields (i.e. "the somewhat risky fields"; he didn't say it like that quote, but you get what I mean). With the lack of APIAs in the managerial fields, think of the bad media image of Asian-American males (i.e. "femanized, nerdy, passive, non-social males") that makes it hard for Americans to associate with APIAs. The list goes on and on, but you can see the crazy connections.
In other words, the Model-minority stereotype makes it hard for Americans to understand who Asian-Americans are, and that made me feel compelled to discover my Asian-American identity and VALUE it, so future generations of Asian-Am know their ethnic background and don't become erased from the fabric of American history. I want my own government to be able to understand (fortunately, the Obama adminstration recognizes APAs are not model-minorities) that we aren't model minorities, and we need to be understood in a better way so that we can properly be respected in society for who we are, while we can express our identities in a happy manner. That's America.
Because of Ronald Takaki, I began to do a lot of things. I started reading Hardboiled Magazine at Summer 2006, a monthly APA newsmagazine at Cal; I began to read more Asian-am lit to understand my identity. I talked to my friends about the issues the APIA community faced (although nobody cared). I also read up on my Asian-Am history, and now, I know a lot about Asian-Am history (although I'm still learning). Now, I am inspired to preserve Asian Architecture, and he's one of the reasons why I plan to study at UC Berkeley (even though he doesn't teach there anymore).
Takaki inspired a sense of caring about our unique identities in America, political activism, and civic virue. Many APAs, Asian-American studies majors or Ethnic Studies, or not (he's a well-known figure in the AAS and Ethnic Studies department) have been inspired by him. Rest in Peace, and may our generation provide a benefical change in the world that benefits the common good.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Al Jazeera English will expand its coverage through showing its 30-minute news program through SF-based Link TV. The article states:
"The move not only gives Al-Jazeera English a foot in the door to the 31 million U.S. homes that Link TV reaches, but it is symbolic of a growing thaw in the post-9/11 feelings toward the Arab and Muslim worlds since President Obama's election, observers say."
For those who are interested, the Chronicle notes that these are channels where one can watch Al Jazeera English news:
"On satellite: Link TV is available on Channel 375 on DirecTV and on Channel 9410 on Dish Network, 7 pm PST daily.
On digital cable: Link TV is available on KRCB, Channel 22, in parts of the Bay Area from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. Monday through Friday." (note; I doubt you all want to watch TV that late.)
This is great news, however I recommend the YouTube version of Al-Jazeera English, which I subscribe to (unfortunately, I should catch up with watching the videos) and updates pretty regularly; I don't watch American telvision that often (I only watch my local TV station, KTVU, which also provides great local coverage), and the scope of Al Jazeera's news coverage is amazing; the journalists are very investigative-like, and its documentaries (ranging from Morrocan street food, Blacks in Suburbia, and most recently, the Arab Street; Beruit (a random video that I just found now) etc.), to kick-ass videos on Israel's injust apartheid treatment on Gaza (see Unemployed Palestinians in Gaza, and AJ's recent coverage of the Israeli blockades on foriegn aid to help the damaged Gaza strip after the Israeli attacks).
In other words, Al-Jazeera covers news and topics American mainstream media barely covers, so it's best to have a different, more international scope of what is going on in the world around us.
Unfortunately, what disgusted me even worse is the comments which I somehow started reading in SFGATE, regarding Al Jazeera English; Most of the comments are ignorant, racist, xenophobic and non-sensical because a lot of people think Al Jazeera will promote radical Isalmofacism; I already mentoned previously that SFGATE commenters are pretty dumb.
A voter has an entire row of booths to choose from in the basement of City Hall in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, May 19, 2009. (Paul Chinn / The Chronicle)
It's official; California voters say no to 5 out of 6 ballot measures in the special election ballot tonight, in one of the most lowest voter turnout elections in a while.
In terms of schools, this will mean more budget cuts in schools. Ironically, I'm glad people said no to these propositons: CA education is getting worse, and while I acknowledge that California's education DOES need money, having random propositions like these (i.e. Prop 1B - $9 billion to schools starting in 2011-2012; Prop 1C - the state borrows lottery money to pay for school) is are just temporary fixes, not permanent solutions.
I just watched a few minutes of this BBC documentary. It's pretty facinating; despite the fact that Japan is the second largest economy in the world, it still has a lot of social problems (i.e. Japan's current "lost generation"). Definitely going to watch this after AP exams.
People, wearing surgical masks, make their way in Mexico City, Friday, April 24, 2009. Federal health authorities closed schools across this metropolis of 20 million after at least 16 people have died and more than 900 others fell ill from what health officials suspect is a strain of swine flu new to Mexico. (Miguel Tovar / AP)
It's somewhat exciting to be able to look up info on this very scary issue and post updates on Soompi. For those who don't know, the swine flu is a virus which one usually gets from contact with pigs; ironically, there's a new strain (the source is unknown) in which the flu travels from human to human, and since humans have not developed a resistance to this flu, we can really be hurt by this virus with a heavy, possible, global pandemic.
So far, as of this evening, US cases (six in California, two in Texas, two in Kansas, and eight "supposed" cases in New York City, which are being sent to Atlanta for research) have been mild. About 1,300 cases have been reported in Mexico, and almost 70 people have died. For more info, click here.
The New York Times reports that there is a fight taking place up at Congress over Obama's proposed plan to remove all federally-subsidized student loans, which have been going to banks to use for themselves to send out loans, and have the government directly have more money to give financial aid. The article also notes that this could mean increasing Pell Grants (YES!).
This is great news, given that the private loan industry is just ridiculous (i.e. variable interest rates!). Supporers of Obama's plan argue that the private loan industry has already been charging "hefty fees" to students, but opponents of the plan say that the private loan industry has already been providing reasonable service to its clients.
This story is so horrific that a two-state solution, or one state solution, in Israel and Palestine doesn't seem important (or seems hopeless). Shame on Israel on being stubborn about this issue. Here are two facts this video stated:
70% of Gaza has become unemployed after the recent Gaza attacks from Israel's military.
1/4 of Palenstinians in Gaza depend on agriculture, but Israeli's government blockades on the Gaza Strip leaves the Gaza strip farmers profitless.
Having done a debate on this issue in the past, I feel that Israel's government has to be a bit practical and allow Palestinians into Israel (which will unleash economic mobility), because we are witnessing an apartheid-situation going on (the blockades are also taking place in the West Bank). Israel's governement says that this action would lead to the end of a Jewish state, but how many people in Israel actually care about that principle?
La Kretz Hall, UCLA's first federally certified green building, built in 2005.
When I'm trying to pick the college I want to attend (hopefully Cal), I try to learn as much about the college as I can. One of the things that amazes me is the extent that UCLA is doing to promote environmental sustainability. As an aspiring civil engineer, I can't wait to learn about how to build buildings that are under clean, energy-efficent, environmentally friendly standards, and UCLA has done that.
Some of the facts about La Kretz Hall are astounding. The building was built out of 80% recycled steel and its carpets are made out of recycled water bottles. The eco-friendly paint in the building does not send out as much harmful chemcials as ordinary paint does. Wow!
Plus, UCLA students can expect to see in their cafeterias biodegradable plastic (usually corn/potato starch, if I remember right) forks and other organic utensils.
One major thing UCLA does is maintain energy efficiency. I'll just quote what it does from UCLA's Magazine. UCLA uses a co-generational plant which powers 70% of the campus. Here's what it does:
"We generate energy with a pair of gas turbines, which you would call a jet engine," Johnson explains. "We burn gas in the jet engines, producing a stream of hot gas that drives a turbine that spins an electric generator, producing electricity."
The blazing heat doesn't go to waste. A heat-recovery steam generator uses the 1,000-degree jet-engine exhaust to generate steam, some of which is used to generate electricity. It doesn't end there. Part of the steam is sent across campus for heating, cooking and sterilization; the rest powers high-capacity water chillers making cold water for air conditioning. On top of it all, the co-gen's electricity is cheaper and more efficiently produced than what UCLA could buy.
Now, that's energy efficient!
For more detailed information, check here. There's also a very, well scripted video summing up UCLA's actions to promote environemntal sustainabilty below:
Protesters on Thursday outside the American International Group’s headquarters in Manhattan.
This opinion article from the New York Times address a great point I never thought off until now, given the mobs of people that are now against AIG's big bonuses: The Problem With Flogging A.I.G.
To summarize, if we criticize AIG too much (for example, there have been death threats to the executives who got the bonuses), we avoid actually helping the economy in a very suitable way while not looking through where the real problems lie.
For example, there are people actually working at AIG who actually were never part of the problem. How is AIG supposed to act if Congress is criticizing them so much? The House of Representatives has actually passed a resoluton yesterday saying people with annual incomes of $250,000 or more who work at a bank that recieves bailout money will be taxed a "90 percent rate bonus payments" (I actually don't know what the last two words have to do w/ the paragraph, but I can sense it's pretty bad). And we know executives make salaries in the millions, so how can this be an incentive for people at AIG or other bailed-out banks to fix the problem? The article mentions that many people work in "insurance divisions", which I wouldn't necessiarly know directly know what that means.
Congress wants to get this deal passed called: "Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility", or TALF. It basically gives out government-based securities, or loans, that requires Wall Street Bankers to participate. How will they participate if Congress creates this perpetual anger towards these bankers?
Yes, big banks can be bad, but banks are too big right now too fail. I've heard things such as restructuring banks to make them smaller, so that they don't hurt the economy as easily and cause a chain ripple of event. But, as of now, this is only making big banks look worse and they can't really do anything.
Now, honest by heart, I'm not an expert at this stuff. I don't watch TV very often now (or been having time to catch up on current events), so I'm not tracking this stuff down like I should be. But, it made me think: Should government be at the point of scaring big businesses away? The world isn't black and white, and all I want to do now is look for solutions.
Here's a quote I found interesting, as a soluton:
"What the country really needs right now from Congress is facts instead of rhetoric. Instead of these “raise your hand if you took a private jet to get here” exercises of outraged populism, we need hearings that educate and illuminate. Hearings like the old Watergate hearings. Hearings in which knowledge is accumulated over time, and a record is established. Hearings that might actually help us get out of this crisis. It’s happened before. In 1932, Congress established the Pecora committee, named for its chief counsel, Ferdinand Pecora. It was an intense, two-year inquiry, and its findings — executives shorting their own company’s stock, for instance — shocked the country. It also led to the establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission and other investor protections. One person who has been calling for a new Pecora committee is Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, a Republican and key member of the Senate Banking Committee."
Supposedly, Bernake and Geithner will be speaking at a Congressional hearing next Tuesday, discussing about what they know about the bonuses.
I'm glad I did not spent my time reading up the anger people face in the media towards AIG, because it would be very repetitive. In fact, I have only read like 2-3 articles on AIG, and saw most of the criticism toward AIG (ironically, on a station I do not watch frequently) on FOX News. I'm glad this is the next article I actually read.
The Daily Bruin reports that people who take language classes in the summer will get discounts on the courses. For example, you can get a discount of $800 in 12-unit courses , and $1,000 for 15-unit courses.
What the article also mentions is that UCLA has laungage intensive programs, where students actually go around the LA area to practice their language skills!
This is pretty depressing. A New York Times article today states that the trend of American newspapers seems to be going toward the Internet, due to decreasing ad revenue and increasing debt resulting from the buyout of many newspapers. Given the fact that less people are reading newspapers anyway and more people are reading online (Nielsen, according to the article, states that "Daily print circulation has dropped from a peak of 62 million two decades ago to around 49 million, and online readership has risen faster, to almost 75 million Americans and 3.7 billion page views in January, according to Nielsen Online."), the fate seemed imminent. Some newspapers have resorted to cut off certain sections or pages in the newspapers to save cost, but that also loses customers who like reading those sections.
One article from Time Magazine I remember reading said that newspapers should consider charging people a price to view online news content, so that people will value what they purchase, like music (think iTunes, although I don't personally know how effective it is given music piracy). The article also mentions that this could help boost profit because newspapers, which rely on three sources of funding, newsstand sales, subscriptions, ad revenue, are already losing the latter, as previously stated. If they lose the latter when newspapers are heavily ad-reliant (like these days given more people read on the internet), the paper becomes unstable. More people do read online, though. The article also suggests that people can pay a nickel, for lets say, a whole day's edition of the paper, or $2 per month. Not a bad idea.
Closing newspapers raises this this issue: Where are the varying, competitive, and differing sources of news? I am grateful that I subscribe to YouTube's AlJazerra English Channel (albeit, it's a internet source) because it gives me insight toward what goes on in Palenstine, for example, that an ordinary US newspaper might not be able to. Having different insights helps give one the bigger picture of the story. Think of 1984 - The goal of the Newspeak dictionary was to decrease the amount of words into one word under Big Brother. While the analogy might seem a bit radical, it does show you how limited expression can be if the different ways to say things (every synonym of a word, for example, has slightly different meanings) are all gone.
Here is a graphic on the NY Times article stating the current fate of specific newspapers in specific urban areas across the United States.
There are solutions that are out there to solve this problem, based on other news sources across the net. It would be sad if the newspapers the writers are writing from close down, which limits the solutions.
Can't really say much about this article, other then the fact that San Francisco and other major American cities will be lobbying in Congress (and possibly the Executive Branch, if I read right) for a piece of the stimulus package money for major public projects up. Some ways funding could be used include improving MUNI, attaining more funds for the high-speed rail plan, expansding broadband internet across San Francisco, and improving health care technology (i.e. making medical records computerized).
The Best Ways to Teach Young Newcomers. The New York Times, coincidentally while I just stated about a growing English Learner population, has recieved input and responses from education experts and place them on the Times' website. The biggest debate question that caught my eye was: is billingual education (i.e. learning English half of the time and Spanish the other half rather than cram English quickly) successful? I really don't know how to answer that question, regardless of the responses I read, since I was born in the United States and education was encouraged by my 1.5 generation Asian-Am parents. However, one expert did note that there are also a lot of native-born students who have immigrant parents, but those parents don't necessiarly have the resources that, let's say, a well-to-do family might have.
The best statement made, IMO, was: personalize the education.
This section also had a very interactive map tracking immigration of the major ethnic groups in the United States from the late 19th century to 2009. This map is facinating to look at given that our American generation has become extremely diverse, as of the year of Obama.
This is a side note - our school district is considering changing schedules from a block schedule to a 6-period schedule. One of the biggest questions, if you go back to my YouTube channel and see the Block Schedule Crusade playlist, is: how does a schedule change actually benefit ELDs, given a growing ELD population?
