For my fourth quarter benchmark, I decided to research the government in some of the places Jared Diamond analyzes in Collapse. He looks at them through the lens of his five point framework which includes environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and societies response to environmental problems. Nowhere does he mention the involvement of government in these places. This bothered me, so I researched the history of the government, as well as the current government in China, Rwanda, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. 
Some challenges that I faced while doing the research for this project were finding credible sources and understanding the interworking of each government. Because the way government works is very controversial, finding sources that had no bias was more difficult than I initially thought. I learned about how different each country is, but that still they are tied together by similar governments. The countries that I researched were all different and in different parts of the world, but were still united by poor government decision making and that also added to the collapse of their societies. 
Here is the link to my fourth quarter benchmark website. 

Click HERE for the benchmark



For this benchmark, I had to take pictures that show evidence of globalization in Philadelphia. Specifically, I went around the city and thought about things I saw everyday when I took the train, or walked to school. I took pictures of them, uploaded them to my wordpress and found interesting sites and graphics about these topics. I'd say the most challenging part of this project was connecting my image to a document or website that showed the topic of globalization. My favorite picture was of the woman waiting for a train because it is the most candid and honest of my pictures, the rest of them seem very posed.

I think that globalization in Philadelphia is similar to that of other large cities in the United States. Naturally, most immigrants and new technology come to the larger cities first creating region-specific impacts. Now that there is more social networking and media, I think that even big cities in other countries are affected by the same topics of globalization as those of the US. By doing this project, I have learned to appreciate the expanse of globalization and how it has affected even the small things in my life. Whether for the good or bad, globalization is all around us.

​Nissan

The car that this woman is driving is from the automaker Nissan. Nissan is the sixth largest automaker in the world selling 4,669,981 cars in 2011. Nissan was founded in Japan (which where it's still headquartered) in 1933, and has since spread to sell cars all over the world, and now has factories on an international level.

Nissan sells cars and has built factories all over the world, taking a place in the major economy. Currently according to google maps there are six Nissan Dealers in Philadelphia alone.  Another hint of Globalization is that Nissan current CEO is not Japanese as were the previous ones. The CEO is Carlos Ghosn a Brazilian born businessman.

Volkswagen

This a picture of a Volkswagen "punch buggy". Volkswagon is a German automobile manufacturer that was named in Forbes Top 25 Largest Companies in the world as of 2000. Volkswagen was founded in 1937, and has been in operation since.

Since then Volkswagen has grown to have 2 dealers in Philadelphia (according to Google Maps) and still continues to sell

L'Occitane en Provence

Is a retailer store of face, body, and home products originating from Manosque France. The company was founded by Olivier Baussan in 1976. This company currently has shops across the world and now has a shop located in Center City Philadelphia.

​Ferrari

Ferrari is a sports manufacturing company in Maranello Italy founded by Enzo Ferrari 1929. Now Ferrari has expanded globally and in Philadelphia like in many other places Ferrari's represent wealth

When we first picked our country we knew that Elisa’s father had connections in Venezuela. After asking him to contact them and give us their emails, we informed them about our project and what exactly we needed from them. We emailed them the questions that we needed answered. Luckily one of the contacts had a child that was happy to help, they interviewed people on behalf and emailed us the product. Below is the transcripts in english, of all of the interviews.

To view the transcripts click here

​Burkina Faso is a country in Western Africa, that is surrounded by countries on all sides of it. The capital of Burkina Faso is Ouagadougou. While doing some research on the country, we've learned that the President of Burkina Faso's name is actually Blaise Compaoré. Although entering the presidency in 1987 through a coup, he was elected by the people in the 1991, 1998, 2005, and most recently 2010. Burkina Faso is actually not having another election until the year 2015. Burkina Faso's presidential terms last 5 years at a time. They will, however, be having a parliamentary election December 2, 2012.

We started our project by trying to find some people living and tweeting from Burkina Faso. (1st picture below - click to enlarge). We searched Burkina Faso in the Twitter search bar to try and find some teenagers - but little was tweeted and English and everything seemed to be a dead end. Access to computers is not as common there - and sometimes limited technology is not being used for Twitter. So, we changed up our approach a little bit and tried looking up some International Schools located in Burkina Faso. The biggest hit we got was for the International School of Ouagadougou. So, we checked out the site at the URL: iso.bf  and went to the Contact page - so we can connect with some teachers, who could've potentially connected us with some teachers. So, we both filled out the form seem below (2nd picture) and wrote a detailed message about our project and how we'd like to get some of their teenagers involved. However, we never received a response. So, we then tried to email them directly not-through the site. Blase emailed them through my professional SLA email account at the provided email address on April 26 (3rd picture below) but never received a response. Ian did the same, and also did not receive a response. If we were to do it again we would probably try and find other International Schools and American programs/organizations in the area to try and connect us to some of the youth. 


 

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. 

check out this link to view our presentation.

To go to the youtube video that we received from the country, click here.

As for the process of going through all of this and doing the assignment, it was a rough one. At first, it took so long to actually get started. We tried to find different numbers, different people we could talk to, and even schools but we saw that it was landing us nowhere. We were not sure what to do. We went to Ms. Laufenberg and told her the situation, and she gave us an idea to get into contact with a british international school. We decided to give it a shot. We went to the website and found some emails, then we emailed each one stating what we needed and hopefully they could give us a response.

Finally, we received a response, but not only one, but two or three. Some people immediately offered to help us with the project. Even the people who could not do it gave us emails to other people and students that would be willing to help. With the extra push of Ms. Laufenberg, we were able to get the whole process running.

   There was one specific person we were in contact with whose name was Ms. Legg. She is a history teacher in the British International school, and she was the first to really give us anything. We stayed in contact with her, and though sometimes it took a long time for her to respond, she gave us what we needed, which was an interview of people on the voting process in Slovakia. Another person that really helped us alot was the principal of the school. He sent out to many people my message and through that, we got into contact with two different students. Both emailed us, but only one persisted, and his name was Juraj. He helped us out of the blue by sending a script of an interview, and that was a great addon to our project. To see that script that he sent us on the interviewing on their election process, click here.

In conclusion, we finally got into contact with people in Slovakia and were successful at receiving more information on the voting process in Slovakia by actual people there. It is very surprising and enlightening at the same time to think that we actually got into contact with someone on a completely other side of the globe. It just shows how technology is going far. To see some evidence of the process, look at the pictures below. We would like to thank Ms. Laufenberg for really giving us that push because without it we would not have gotten that far into the project.