Pressure groups, petitions and civil disobiedience

Sean Hruswicki
January 7th 2018
Social Studies 11
Mr. Chan

Pros and Cons of Methods of Change

What are the advantages and disadvantages of petitions, civil disobedience and pressure groups / lobbyists? Petitions are a great way of inducing change in whatever you want but, they do have some disadvantages, especially before the Internet was a thing. You need 10% of registered voters to sign your petition just for the government to acknowledge its existence and read it but, before the Internet was a thing you needed to actually go to people and they needed to physically sign it. This would be extremely difficult and time consuming. The Internet makes petitions much more efficient. The fact that people can sign petitions online can make certain petitions gain a huge amount of signatures in a short period of time. The only disadvantage to this is that people who don’t have access to the Internet can’t sign the petition and they won’t be able to make an impact in a movement they are passionate about. In the petition to extinguish GST over 150,000 of the signings were invalid, which is a disadvantage because it is almost impossible for your signature to be invalid if you were to sing a piece of paper.

The disadvantages of pressure groups / lobbyists are that lobbyists are probably only there for the money and can be super expensive, but they are a great way to pay for change. In the example of the pressure group full of CEOs, pushing for NAFTA, the CEOs were only wanting NAFTA for one reason, to make money. NAFTA was supposed to create jobs but it actually decreased the amount of jobs, but increased the amount of money the 1% were making drastically. Pressure groups and lobbyists can be abused by very rich people but it is very affective and are great when used for making good change. Pressure groups in general, formed by average people tend to not work out so well because they cannot afford lobbyists.

Civil disobedience has the greatest disadvantage of all, which is the fact that you are breaking a law. This can lead to you going to jail for a short or long amount of time. For example in the case of Viola Desmond she went to jail after refusing to leave a movie theatre when asked by police. An advantage of civil disobedience is that is makes a bigger deal than just speaking your mind. If you break the law to make a point there will be a process of you going to court, or possibly making the papers, it creates a lot of attention around the issue.

 

November – December Lab Reflection

My second favorite activity this month was when we had to make the 3 course meal. We made chicken soup, nachos, and chocolate overed strawberries I would not make this lab at home or anything becuase it took pretty long, even with 3 people, I also think the chicken was sub par and the nachos were just regular nachos with nothing special about them, my group worked well though besides the fact that some of them may have might been late. I would give our meal a solid 6/10. I only enjoyed this activity because it was kind of fun to create 3 meals at once

 

My favorite meal we made in those months, and even the whole year was fettuccini Alfredo, which is why i chose to reflect on this recipe. we made the pasta from scratch which was a good learning expierience, I didn’t know the sauce for fettuccini Alfredo was so easy to make, Ive already made this recipe around 3 times at home. My group worked really well and we executed the lab flawlessly, nobody wanted any so i got to keep the whole thing, which was great. The product turned out as good as I have hoped, it was really good.

Iron Chef Reflection

Sean Hruswicki

Foods 12

Iron Chef Reflection

 

               The iron chef activity was one of the activities that i enjoyed most, it was definitely an enjoyable challenge. I enjoyed this challenge becuase of the ingriedient we were given to use, which was the bell pepper. Bell peppers have a range of colors and flavors to choose from which made the dishes more dynamic. The process of desicision making in our group was simple, somebody would throw down an idea and everybody else would agree or disagree, if we all agreed we would use that idea. I liked this method of desicision making, it was just simple, fair, and easy. To choose the recipe to present to the judges we originally chose a bell pepper stuffed with ingiedients that we could not acquire, so we made up our own recipe for a stuffed bell pepper. We agreed upon stuffing the orange bell peppers with eggs, bacon, green and red bell peppers. I am happy with how we found our recipe becuase we made it ourselves and we felt more original because we made our own recipe. If we were to do this activity again there is definitely one thing I would change in our recipe, how the orange bell peppers were cooked. We didn’t really think that much on how we would cook the bell pepper than would be stuffed, we just put it on a pan but it didn’t really get cooked. To change this I would put the orange bell pepper in the oven instead of a pan, it would definitely make it more cooked. The time restraint effected the technique we used to cook our eggs. Originally we wanted to put the ingriedients inside of the bell pepper, where the egg is beaten and still raw, into the oven but that would take too much time because we read online that to cook a scrambled egg in the over it would take around 20 mins. We decided that it was more time efficient to cook the eggs in a pan.

Nuclear Power Debate

Sean Hruswicki
14 January 2018
Physics 11
Ms. Jackson

Why Nuclear Energy Is Great

When you hear the words “nuclear energy”, you don’t usually think of clean, efficient energy, but rather dangerous and hazardous to the environment. Nuclear energy is very misunderstood by the general public or people who have not done some research on it themselves. Nuclear energy is actually one of the most environmentally friendly sources of energy, it isn’t as clean as wind or solar energy though, but it is significantly more efficient. The production of nuclear energy doesn’t emit any greenhouse gasses, which is the main culprit for global warming. Greenhouse gasses absorb certain frequencies of infrared eradication and scatter them back to the surface of the earth, heating it. Greenhouse gasses prevent heat from escaping the earth, keeping it warm, which can lead to the melting of the ice caps, which will lead to dangerously high sea levels. A nuclear power plant actually emits fewer radioactive materials into the environment that a traditional coal burning facility. It is estimated that nuclear energy has saved 1.84 million lives by not releasing countless pollutants. Nuclear power is more efficient than other sources of power. It is estimated that nuclear energy has a 91% efficiency rate. Actually building a nuclear power plant will cost a lot more than a power station that generates the other types of energy, but nuclear energy itself is cheap. In 2007 the cost of nuclear generated electricity was 1.7 cents per kilowatt hour, the cost for coal for 2.4 cents, 6.7 cents for natural gas, and 10.2 cents for oil. Nuclear energy has an enormous capacity. One kg of 4% enriched fuel grade uranium released the same energy as almost 100 tons of coal or 60 tons of oil. Each year the US saves $12 billion dollars on energy costs because of nuclear power. Nuclear power plants save a lot of money that could be used on great things such as hospitals, education, and making sure people are fed. One in five households and businesses receive power from nuclear power plants in the US. 13% of the worlds energy comes from nuclear power plants, even though there are only 449 of them in 30 countries, as of April 2017 there are 60 new nuclear power plants under construction in 15 countries. Nuclear power is extremely powerful so there must be some serious downsides when handled incorrectly. What about the safety of nuclear energy? Nuclear energy is used in massive bombs used to blow up entire cities so it must be super dangerous right? Accidents in nuclear power plants are far more harmful than accidents in other power stations but the risk of an accident is low and declining. A repetition of the famous 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which displaced over 300,000 people, is virtually impossible. Hopefully after taking in all this information you are now informed on why nuclear power is not the terrible thing you may or may not have thought it was. I believe that nuclear power will be the main energy source in the future because of how great it is.

Biff Monologue

I am Biff, I am a fantastic football player. I have yet to graduate high school because my math teacher flunked me. My father is Willy Loman, a mediocre salesman, and possibly a suicidal maniac. I am most definitely a ladies man. Keeping jobs has been a trouble for me, I haven’t kept one job for as long as I would like and I am just jumping around from job to job. I really don’t think my father, Willy likes me for this specific reason. I am trying to get a loan of 15 thousand dollars so I can have my own ranch but I am asking for the loan from somebody I have stolen from in the past.

Blackout Poem – “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings”

Sean Hruswicki
English 11
18 December 2017
Mr. Barazzuol

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, Poem Analysis

The poem “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, by Maya Angelou, is denotatively about a bird that is in cage, restricted, watching other birds outside fly around with no restriction. Connotatively this poem is about how black people are oppressed and have restrictions that white people do not. black Poole in this poem are represented by the caged bird, and white people are represented by the free bird. The theme of this poem is oppression and restrictions, and how oppressed people had nothing but their voice to protest. To put this into a thematic statement we could say: your voice is your most powerful weapon. Violent protests from black people in America never worked, but when revolutionaries like Martin Luther King fame along, they got social reform by using their voice instead of violence. Three poetic devices in this poem are: Allusion, personification, and rhyme. The birds in this poem allude to the different races, the free bird referring to whites and the Caged Bird referring to black people. When it is said that the birds sing it is personification because the birds are given a human trait. There is also rhyme in this poem. Ex.

The caged bird sings
with fearful trill
of the things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill 
for the caged bird
sings of freedom

The rhyme scheme in this stanza is ABABBABA. This poem is significant because it represents to much move than just birds flying around. It has a very deep connotative meaning.

 

The Magic of Light

Sean Hruswicki

Physics 11

 

The video below looks just like magic, how can something just change by itself right in front of our eyes? Well, with some understanding of waves we can explain this phenomenon. The big idea, or sole reason to this so called magic is refraction. When you look at the glass the light rays bend around the center of the glass, causing the light rays to intercept each other between the glass and the arrow, or piece of paper, creating a focal point, the light that was on the right side is now on the left and vice versa, this causes the arrow to appear to be inverted, which makes it appear to be backwards. Anytime light light goes through one medium into another, it refracts. In conclusion this is in fact not magic, but can be straight forwardly explained using wave physics.

Waves Lab

Rig wavevibrating   a  pulse4323763F-EBDF-4914-8675-FF0B811CC920-22wlw2x 870A91D6-4D73-4A74-85F6-3D141B420AFF-xyofqh 8D1A7876-C09D-43AC-B816-2E89896BCCAF-114t502 6206D598-9F07-4CE8-96F2-8081DC7625DE-1khk1gr

A pulse wave as shown in the first video. A pulse wave is just one wave that is emitted it is the shape of a half circle, or a wave.

Periodic wave is a wave that is constantly going, kind of like oscillating. It moves with a constant speed that does not change.

A transverse wave by definition is “a wave vibrating at right angles to the direction of its propagation”.

A longitudinal wave by definition is “a wave vibrating in the direction of propagation”, longitudinal waves include sound waves or vibrating waves.