Stem Cell Research

Many times I have had fights on the morality of stem cell research and abortion with my mother, a very, overwhelmingly, Christian woman. I truly don't feel that anything is morally wrong with stem cell research and I feel that if someone wishes to donate their unused eggs to science, go right ahead. My mother feels otherwise and she usually tells me that the only reason I think that stem cell research is a good thing is because I try too hard to be against Christianity. While I may have had my fair share of troubles with that religion in particular, she is false in her accusation. Rather I think that the only reason she is going against stem cell research is because she is a Christian and has nothing better to do than complain about random crap that no one truly cares about. I feel that even if I was tied down to a religion I would have no problem with stem cell research anyways.
Okay the point I want to make is; people who say stem cell research is killing babies are idiots. The embryos that they use for research don't even count as fetuses or for that matter babies. It is simply a egg that has been fertilized many for a week and shows the presence of stem cells. The egg doesn't have thoughts yet and it couldn't even live with out being inside a mother, so using these embryos for research is not killing anything. The unused embryos for invetro fertilization are just going to be dumped anyways, so we might as well get some use out of them anyways. And for those people that say that life begins at the moment of conception; I would love to see them find a freaking heart beat or single brain wave with in this ball of cells, that doesn't look like anything yet.
To be continued...

Moe Takes The Test

Simpsons Episode where Mr. Burns dies and then random people get lie detector/polygraph tests and I thought it was kind of humorous.

Telling Lies

Okay so I walked into Barnes and Noble one afternoon in desperate search of a book that I could use for my book review. After having rejected all of the dozen or so books I was looking at, something caught my eye. There was a bright sticker on one of the books that said something like, "Research used in making of Lie To Me T.V. show." I was immediately attracted to this because anything that is related to television is interesting, right?
So I started reading the book and nothing about it is interesting, sure the beginning was alright only because it went into some of the famous lie that have happened over time. Yet the prospects the rest of the book would be just as good was small. It turns out that Paul Ekman, the writer of the book originally studied psychology and has research deception clues that increase the chances that people are lying. He tells us that there are a number of ways that these deception clues happen, such as facial expressions, body language, and involuntary things like heart beat and sweating.
He also starts to talk about how there are so many different human actions that happen because of many different situations, so no one can really tell if some one is lying or not. The presence of deception clues only increases the chance that people are lying. Yet some people who show no deception clues at all, also have a chance of lying, so Ekman says that a truly skilled lier will through in some slip ups to make it seem like they could be an innocent bystander.
He started to talk about the polygraph and how its accuracy and inaccuracies have changed the way the US thinks about interrogation and other stuff to deal with it. I'm actually planning on writing my paper focusing on the polygraph related aspect of that. I'm going to tie in some court case related research, where the judges deemed either the use of the polygraph as evidence as being constitutional or unconstitutional, or whether deemed appropriate as evidence because of the general inaccuracies of the polygraph. I've watched some tapes of interrogations using the polygraph and it's been useful in seeing the tactics that they use to get people to admit to crimes or to get them worked up enough that it almost looks like they've done the crime. I do believe from watching these videos that innocent people are very often deemed guilty because they show many factors that would make someone look guilty during an interrogation.
First off, many people have the view of the polygraph being like a godly devise that can always tell if you or lying, or it measures your brain waves in a certain section of your brain that is set of when you do lie. The real truth is, the polygraph only measures the frequency of stuff like heart beat, breath rate, also how much you perspire. If it truly measure whether you are lying or not we would have a lot more people in jail. When you enter the examination room they usually have you pick a card and then they tell you to answer whether what card it is as always no. They have it rigged so that when you say no to the card it actually is it makes a mark that you were lying. This ultimately destroys peoples confidence since they now think that it could tell that they were lying, since the people taking the test didn't know that the example was rigged. Another area where people get tripped up is that when you go into a high stress situation like this innocent people get really nervous because they've heard of people who were innocent getting tested as positive, therefore the takers of the test are quite stressed out. Often times there are important reasons for them not to fail the test and sometimes the consequences for failing the test are more than enough to make them have little slip ups. This is why I think it is quite unethical for polygraph tests to be held against people, especially if it's for a job like situation. I believe that it is entirely unethical for someone to be turned down for a job or to lose their job if they fail a polygraph test. There are a large percentage of truly honest people who fail the tests and it is entirely wrong for them to be held accountable for something they couldn't control in the first place. There have been enough studies to prove that more liers get away than actually innocent people. Natural liers are trained and ready for situations like this where intense pressure is put on them. If you can train yourself to focus and keep your heart beat and breath rate in great rhythm then you could ultimately fool the lie detector.
So... Ya not a book I would recommend but I'm kinda stuck with it now, but it does provide me with enough of a broad range of topics that I feel I will be able to tie in a bunch of outside information and possible have a great paper. The only problem will be how to get it started, and I think that I will be able to tie in the show enough that I won't have a real problem with it.

Lie To Me trailer

My thoughts on Lie To Me

Okay so I decided that since I was going to do my book review on the book, "Telling Lies," by Paul Ekman, I should probably watch one of the T.V. episodes that are based on research from the book.
The show turns out not to be so great, it was really boring and I felt that the plot was rather dry. The actors are actually quite bad and you would think that this guy would kind of be a bad ass, while he does do some cool shit, it's mainly like weird stuff that no one cares about.
The show barely uses any of the stuff from the book and all of it is just like examining facial gestures or slip ups of the tongue and the book goes way more in deepth about everything than that. I mean you could find little to no connection at all between the show and the book. I can see where some of the research might be incorporated, where the main character interrogates the people but I don't see how watching the show would make me want to read the book or where reading the book would make me want to watch the show. So know I have officially deemed the show full of crap and badly set up with little to no plot line and I will not being using it in my book review paper other than to make a reference to why I chose the book to do and how it may relate to today's life. In other words, what makes me care at all about reading the book.

Chosing A Book

Okay so for class we all got this assignment to pick out a book and write a review about it. Now I am a very indecisive person and I have a horrible time trying to pick between anything. When faced with the issue of picking between more than two things I can usually narrow it down to being between two of the items but to narrow it down to just one, is a seemingly impossible task for me. I usually just end up resorting to chance to decide my future. I know this seems like a particularly crappy way to choose between things, but it works for me because I am quite a flexible person and can work my way with any decision I make, no matter how stupid.
Okay so in relation to my book thing, I had this same problem. Early on in dealing with this assignment I was trying to choose between three books that sounded great and that I most likely could go many different directions with.
Okay the first book I had in mind was the Quiet Room, an autobiograhy written by Lori Schiller with the help of Amanda Bennett. This book dives into the life of Lori Schiller, a women deeply tortured by a mental disorder known as schizophrenia. She tells how her life was filled with the horror of voices taunting her, multiple suicide attempts, and traveling from half-way house to half-way house. I felt that I could go many different directions with this book, I could talk about schizophrenia itself, or psychologists opinions on dealing with schizophrenia. I could also have talked about many different treatments and possible solutions to the mental illness. The only problem with using this book was that it is kind of an older book so I would have had to find a way to relate the book, which was written back in 1994. I could think of a possible excuse for writing a book review of the book now when it was written such a long time ago.
The second book that was in the running was, a book of my friends, Rumspringa. He was also trying to decide between two books, this one and another. I decided to take a look at one of his books yet he told me that if he decided to use it I couldn't. Okay so Rumspringa is a book about the time period where the Amish youth are allowed to run free and experience the world before deciding whether to stay with the church or leave it forever. Okay so the next day after reading like one chapter of the book my friend decided he was going to use this book. I told him that's fine and thus I was officially left with my last option. One that was not entirely interesting to me but it was all I had left.
So the book I chose, or rather a series of events chose for me was Telling Lies, by Paul Ekman. It's a book talking about the research the Ekman did, over lies and the detecting signs of lies. Ekman talks about people feelings associated with lies and how ultimately no one can tell with out a question whether someone was lying or not. So the book was kind of interesting to me and before I started reading it I knew that there would be a number of ways I could take this book and write a paper about it. I knew I could talk about stuff like interogation methods or possibly torture, I could also have gone in a direction of changes with in the jucidial system due to research associated with Ekman.

Inspired

Okay so as part of a new thing I've decided to characterize my friends as different superheroes or villains that they would possibly be. I will be characterizing them by different events that I have seen them involved with and by different personality traits that they all have. I will try and remove any of my biases towards them about appearance or about gender, or sexuality, though I am bound to leak some of this information into my choosing.
I actually got the idea to do this from facebook and I already know that sounds sort of weird. If you have ever taken one of those quizzes where you answer a question and it has a bunch of dumb answers that don't even fit your personality so you just kind of pick one. Then after you are all done with it you have to send it to like ten or fifteen people. If you are like me you will send each one of these you do to the same group of people just to annoy them or avoid sending it to someone and making yourself look totally uncool for taking an Internet chain quiz and then actually sending it out to find your answer. Okay so needless to say these little quiz things are quite annoying and may actually hinder the development of my brain since I am drawn to facebook like a moth is to a candle, and these quizzes just keep me on there longer. So, after you have sent them out to so many people, a humiliating thing to do, you finally get your results. The results are sometimes hilarious and may actually make sense yet usually they are completely stupid. I sometimes get something saying like, "you are the color green, because you love the earth," or "you are like Shaggy because you are always trying to help people yet you do stupid things." Needless to say, quizzes are pointless.
Okay so bringing me back to my point, I have like a total obsession with superheroes and haven't seen a good superhero related thing on facebook, besides stupid little groups made because of all the excitement over Watchmen, so I decided to do something kind of fun and will now be profiling my friends, who shall all remain nameless, and yes I will profile myself. So over the next few weeks I plan to get like five or six of my friends profiled and I will hopefully have a ton of fun and will certainly enjoy seeing most of my friends expressions while they read their respective characters.