The countries I picked were Japan and Belize. Japan is located in East Asia and recently had a tsunami and an earthquake. It is one of the technologies driven country in the world but this disaster has severely damaged them. The Belize is located in Central America. Belize has been dealing with a lot of environmental damages with deforestation and also extreme climate changes with hurricanes.

      For my benchmark, I did a compare and contrast with Japan and Belize, and also individually gave them a ranking for 5 different categories. When I first started, I did Japan first because the tsunami was so recent, and it was easy to get information about their environment and how their society is dealing with the environment. But for climate change, it was hard for me to do that because I didn’t know if a tsunami could be considered a climate change, so I kicked that to the side and looked at climate changes from the 1990’s up to 2010. Other than that, I think Japan was interesting to do since I got to learn about the deeper aspects of how they are dealing with their current situation. Belize wasn’t that hard for me to find information because when I looked up climate change on google, it automatically went to hurricanes in Central America and also I found out that Belize’s neighbors were their friendly trade partners, so it was easy deciding on hostile neighbors ranking.

Environmental damage for Belize and Japan was easy to figure out since a lot of their environmental damages was either recent, or going on for a long time. Climate change for Belize was easy for me to find, but Japan’s was harder for me because I was looking at the current times and didn’t know if a tsunami was considered to start from climate change, so I had to look at the climate change from the 1990’s to 2010 and found that the climate changes went up the roof from long ago. Hostile neighbors were also pretty easy for me because Belize’s neighbors were their friendly trade partners and for Japan, it was mainly surrounded by water and their neighbors were their friendly trade partners besides North Korea. Friendly trade partners for Japan was easy for me because Japan is known as one of the most technology driven countries in the world so it was likely they had a lot of trade partners who were interested in their items and technology. For Belize, it was kind of easy also because they seemed to like to do local trades with the countries around them. Last was society’s response to their environmental damage, which was a little easy. Because Japan’s situation wasn’t so long ago, it was easy to find news reports of how Japan is dealing with their situation, then for Belize, I had to look in deeper to see how they were fixing their environment and found out that environmental rebuilding was a part of the school’s curricular.

If I could change one thing about my product, I think I would of picked maybe better pictures or wrote more words because I think I don’t have enough words but also I didn’t want my project to be mainly words, I wanted the pictures to convey what was going on around the world.

This project was really fun because I got to know more about other countries and see how they are dealing with their society compared to how we deal with ours when in the same situation.

In American Government, we were given a task to pick a bureaucracy and make a flow chart on the steps of that bureaucracy. The partner I picked was Beth and we decided on doing the steps to obtaining a building permit in Philadelphia. 

We picked this topic without knowing what we were getting ourselves into and didn't know even one step of obtaining a building permit in Philadelphia. The first thing we did was head to google and googled, "building permit in Philadelphia" and came across this site, 100k house, that told us the steps of obtaining a building permit and what each paper/form that needed to be filled out, meant. Then we headed to Philadelphia L&I site to obtain the application and started to fill it out the best way we knew how to.

The paperwork that we had to fill out was very confusing. The paper work needed to be filled out by other people and you have had to contact these people before starting the application. Then you also had to fill out papers like, Zoning permit application, structural design criteria, energy conservation, and more. Most of these paperwork had to be filled out by a hired engineer/architect firm and a lot of contacting.

I don't think I would change anything because even though these steps are so complicated and has a lot of steps, it's made for safety. The city has to be on par with what you are doing because one wrong step/move, someone who wasn't involved, will get hurt.

Flowchart link: http://www.lucidchart.com/documents/edit/4d08c727-33f0-41dc-ab32-7f0f0afcbe04

Today I emailed PA state representative, Daryl Metcalfe and asked about his views on anchor babies. This is the email I sent to him:

Daryl Metcalfe,

Thank you for your email.

I personally receive and read the communications that are sent to this address.

I appreciate the time that you have taken to contact me. 

If your message expresses your view on legislation or a specific policy, please be assured that your input will be considered.

You will be contacted by one of my staff if you have sent a constituent service request or have shared a concern that requires further action by my office.

Serving the 12th District,
Daryl Metcalfe
State Representative
Pennsylvania House of Representatives

I think I will email him again soon on the steps of making this aware to others and also how would I effectively present this information to others without starting a fight or arguement