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            The, “Post for Change”! If you have followed along in my first and second posts, you should know that I have been discussing a topic that is very dear to my heart, and that I feel very passionately about; the murder rate in Philadelphia. This is an increasingly ongoing problem, and I have been working on my own way to try and change this, more of on a smaller scale though. My entire blog has been leading up to this, where I explain to you how I have figured out how to create my own personal post for change.

            Throughout the past 3 or so weeks, I have been researching, and talking to as many people as I can to try and learn as much as I can about the violence in Philadelphia, as well as one of the main ways that violence can be reduced. After evaluating everything, I have realized that one of the most effective ways to reduce violence is to enforce an effective neighborhood watch. This has been shown to reduce the amount of door-to-door violence, which would result in a significantly lower murder rate in Philadelphia. Even though this is the most effective way, due to my lack of resources, as well as age, I did not think it would be very realistic for me to attempt to set up neighborhood watches in Philadelphia. So I decided to make more awareness about the Philadelphia murder rate. I believe that awareness may result in people having a reality check, and understanding everything that has and continues to happen in Philadelphia.

            In order to create this awareness, I have created a piece of original content that I have also posted onto my Tumblr, Facebook, as well as my Twitter in order to increase the amount of people that are informed of this problem. My original content piece consists of a video of a montage of photos that shows you the sadness that comes with violence, especially murder. This video also has a piece of background music that not only is also a piece of original content, but also fits perfectly with the video. The talented Ronald Harper; who is doing a blog of his own if you would like to check it out; has composed this rap, and is performed by me.

Here is my final bibliography link!

Hello readers! My name is Amy Farrell and this is my third post on the topic of testing on animals. If you wish to read  my first 2 posts, click here for post 1 and here for post 2. In post 1, I gave an overview of what animal testing is all about, and included an informative video on the topic. In post 2, it was more about my opinion and other research I have found. In this post, this is my plan for change. This is the last part of the project, so this will be my last blog post.  

The final question we all have is:

What can we do to help?

There are many things you as a reader can do to help. First, view this list of companies that do test on animals (Below) , and make sure you do NOT buy their products. Here is an easy way to find brands that do and do not test on animals.  If enough people boycott companies that use animals for testing, they will run out of business OR decide to change their testing methods. 

Here is a petition that you can sign that says you will not buy products from companies that test on animals. After signing this, a letter is sent to one of the companies saying you are boycotting their products. 

My Plan / Original Content 

I sent an email with this link to the freshman class at Science Leadership Academy. So far, I’ve gotten over 40+ people to sign it. By sending this link to people, it will spread awareness. Also, after you sign the form, it asks you to send it to a friend. By sending it to a friend, more and more people will be aware of this happening. Even after this project is done, I still plan on using products that do not test on animals, and I will continue spreading awareness. 

Acknowledgments:

I’d like to thank Mrs Dunn, Emma Hersh, Max Amar-Olkus, and RubyJane Anderson for helping me complete these 3 posts. 

If you want to do more, you could contact the companies by yourself and tell them why you aren’t going to buy their products. If many people do this, they will realize they need to change. Here is a list of companies that still test on animals. It may be shocking to see some of your favorite brands listed, but it is the truth. As I stated earlier, you can contact these companies yourself and tell them what you think about this. Change always starts with one person, and that person could be you.

Also, if you wish to join PETA’S Action Team to help animals, click here for more information. 

            From my survey, I found lots of interesting information. When I was finishing up making it, I decided that I needed one last question. While I was trying to figure out what this one would be, I had a thought; I wonder how many people typically would remember a friends birthday if it weren’t for a facebook reminder? Pleased with myself for thinking of this question, I quickly typed it in, thinking that most people would respond with “Yes, of course I would remember a friend’s birthday!” Instead, my results spoke very differently. Turns out that 60% of people would not remember. To me, that is incredibly shocking. Because of that fact, I’m contemplating changing my birthday on facebook to a false date so a bunch of people wish me a happy birthday and then I get to laugh at them.

            From my survey, I also found the average time that people spend on social networking sites per day. The largest amount was that somebody said was 16 hours in total, which is astounding. The least was no time at all, and that was obviously from someone who didn’t have any social networking accounts. I tallied and found the average of my results, and created this chart:

            The most controversial question on my survey was “Have you found that you can express yourself better on social networking sites than you can in real life?” One of the best points that I saw was that when you’re behind a computer screen, you can think about how you want to articulate your thoughts and once you start typing words, you can always delete them if you haven’t posted them yet. Whereas in person, once the words are out of your mouth, you can’t take them back. However, a wonderful point that one of the responders posted was that “nothing on the web is ever personal or private, once it’s out there everyone can see it.” (here is an interesting article about that)

            One of the most interesting answers that I received, however, was this: “Better? No, definitely not. More carefully crafted? Sure. Those are different though.” Another one that can be discussed is when someone said “No. Social networking can sometimes remove the ‘human touch’ that is present in verbal communication.” Related to the concept of missing the “humanness” of a face-to-face conversation, one person answered “No, it’s difficult to communicate without using the non-verbals like body language, facial expression and tone of voice.”

Well, it’s time to make change. Throughout this entire process, I’ve been wondering what it’d be like to do a week without any sorts of social networking. And so, I decided to put this plan into action. Five of my friends and I (I tried to recruit more people, but my friends weren’t to keen on going an entire WEEK without facebook or twitter) started yesterday and are doing a week (May 28-June 4) free of these sites! Every day, we’re filling out a four question survey that I created which asks simple questions such as “How are you doing without social networking today?” and “Are you less distracted than you normally would be?” Results from this experiment will be posted next week.

            And so, the main question comes back: Is social networking good or bad? Through this project, I have become enraptured by both opinions, good and bad. I have heard excellent reasons for each of them, and I have certainly learned more about the topic itself. However, I only focused on a portion of the internet: social networking. With all information online, the use of google rather than textbooks, and the majority of communication happening on the internet, where is our generation headed? And once we become completely immersed in a technological life, will be able to get back out?

 Will we want to?

>>>CHANGE BEGINS HERE .

Something I plan on doing to make change would be to create a slide show in order to raise even more awareness about my issue, more like informing others, especially the ones who are bias and don't know much about my issue in general. Adding on this, I felt like this still wasn't enough. In order for me to make change and feel good about it, I would have to go beyond my comfort zone, and so I did!!! That's why in less then a week or so I will be in front of an audience speaking about my issue! This will be taking place in my middle school, but I must admit this is really nerve racking! Along with this speech I will also be presenting something more visual to these middle schoolers and that is the presentation I mentioned above. 

To view this presentation, take a look below; 

My change is to let people know about what they are doing to people. I believe that I will let people know by going to some classes in SLA like Mrs. Dunn Class and telling people about bullying. I think a lot of people don’t think about what they are saying to people. Maybe if I tell them to think about what they say, then they might stop bullying people so much. That how I will make a change.

I found out a lot about bullying by doing this project. I found out that a lot of people that had been bullied or seen people get bullied start to bully other people. This help me understand why bullying was a big and everyone needed to know about this. That’s why I made a video about bullying. I only thing I ask is to please stop and think about what you are saying to people and doing to people. 

In globalization, we were assigned a project that required us to make connections with someone from a foreign country and have them conduct "voting day" interviews on their country's election day and share their findings with us. In the past year, Ms. Laufenberg had already assigned us to conduct voter interviews in our districts, but now it was time to branch out. The objective of this project was to 1.) learn how to make global connections via internet social sites and more importantly, 2.) to learn how the voting process and opinions towards the same differs in different countries other than the United States. The country that Ashley and I picked was Armenia. The hardest part of this project was making connections with people halfway around the world. We tried to contact a Philadelphia local of Armenian decent, Lavan,  who could possibly connect us with his family members or friends in our voting project country, but he could not get back to us. We also tried emailing many Armenian-American institutions in the country, like The Yerevan International school of Armenia, the American University of Armenia, and European regional academy of Armenia, among others, but we did not receive a reply. It was only until we messaged Ms. Karen Abalyan, an employee of the communications department of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America in New York that we actually got a hint of communication flowing, but in the end, this did not fall through. After this, Reverend Hakob Gevorgyan of holy trinity church recommended Greg Bilazarian as a good contact point. We emailed Greg several times and found that he was very helpful; he was even going to find a student to conduct the interview for us, but we could not get a reply from Mr. Bilazarian after the Armenian voting day (May 6, 2012). After a couple of weeks of hearing nothing back from our contact, we sent him an email  to follow up with his progress. It wasn't until we ran into an online article about the Armenian voting day that we found out that  there was a voting protest in Yerevan, Armenia in support for Ter-Petrosian because of suspicions of flawed voting. The protest became a violent demonstration that might have proved dangerous for the students that were going to do the interviews. Ashley and I assumed that this was the reason that Mr. Bilazarian was not able to send us a reply. In conclusion, we ended up not receive a reply from our contact, but learned the how bad Armenia's political system is at the present. 

• What did you learn from them? The different you would congruent the way of saying things. 
  

• What did you learn about yourself?

• What were you surprised about? I was surprised how nice he was, and how he took his time telling me all the little things, step by step.
  

• What are you proud of? I'm proud that I was able to find someone who is willing to help and understood what they wee teaching me.
  

• What will you improve on for next time?  Timing, I wish I knew like everything to say the way I wanted to say them In Spanish also he helped me understand it and I helped him understood English. 

Have you ever wondered what life is like for a celebrity's pet? Yes I'm talking about the pampered pooches you see on television and in all the magazines with the designer leashes and matching outfits. Well now take a step down from the glamour and the cameras and think about the animals in your very neighborhoods. Take an even deeper look and think about the animals who have ended up in shelters because of animal cruelty. Many places in Philadelphia have been known for having many untended animals.

  Many of them have become strays. Animal cruelty can start anywhere from not giving your pet the proper amount of food to beating your animal. Overall it still has the same effect on the animal, heartbreak. Yes animals feel it to. Imagine if the person you loved and trusted decided to just hurt you and beat until you could barely move, just because they wanted to. Now for the main question, what exactly is animal cruelty?  Animal cruelty is the infliction of suffering or harm upon animals, other than humans, for purposes other than self defense. Long story short, it means cause some type of pain to an animal other than when you are trying to protect yourself. 

One example of animal cruelty I have was even with my own dog Kujo. When Kujo was two months old he was tied to a fence as the owners moved out of the home and left him there to basically die. When we stumbled upon him, he was very skeletal and very dirty. If you looked into his eyes it was as if his whole body told a story of his pain. As a result of this horrific experience, Kujo now suffers from a dream anxiety disorder. Dream anxiety disorder is a sleep disorder that is characterized by very frequent nightmares. Even though this disorder is usually diagnosed for humans, Kujo has been diagnosed with this because of what the doctor called post traumatic stress. Now Kujo has to be taken care of a little bit more than a regular dog would need to be, but none complains because he is a joy to have. Animal cruelty is something that should be taken very seriously because poor pets like Kujo are the ones who have to deal with the physically torture but the people who are causing the pain will feel the emotional torture. 

• What did you find most challenging about this project?
  I honestly found that the most challenging aspect of this project was 
  actually figuring out what kind of story to bring to the light. 
  
  
• How did you go about finding this story?
  
  I volunteered to help with many capstones and projects and I realized that there is good happening right in my face.
  
  
• Why do you think this story does not receive more attention?
  I think that the story doesn't receive more attention because the media likes to make young black children look like they only know how to cause trouble, which is not true. My report clearly shoes that young, inner city, black youth can do something beyond amazing and positive. 
  
  
• Do you think this story will get more attention over the next few months?  Why?  Why not?
  
  No, because it's not a story most people care to hear about. If it doesn't involve violence it won't get as much attention.
  
  
• What did you learn?
  
  I learned that the news doesn't have to be the only outlet for information. I, myself can broadcast the good I see around me to others.