Response to Eric Larinois' Ethics and Medicine Blog

Eric wrote his blog about embryonic stem cells, and why or why not we should utilize them.  Eric did a nice job presenting both sides of the issue, and he showed why people support and despise stem cell research.  One of the positives to stem cell research is that the cells can create a perfectly good organ or body part for someone in need.  One of the negatives is that you basically have to kill a fertilized embryo.  This is a very compelling argument.  I agree with Eric on this issue. One of the arguments posted in his blog was "that to kill one potential human being to save another cannot be justified." This argument stood out to me, and is the main reason why I would oppose embryonic stem cell research. 

Technorati Search

For the first blog I chose a blog related to steroids in sports, and this one is exclusively about steroids in baseball: http://thesteroidera.blogspot.com/ . The blog is basically all news relating to steroids in Major League Baseball, and includes timelines, news, stats and more.  The blog was created by George Godfrey, and it has been active since 2006. The author seems to create posts whenever there is news in Major League Baseball relating to steroids. So in 2006, there were many posts because that is when steroids in baseball were most popular, and posts have declined a little bit since then.  The blog is very complex, and includes many hyperlinks, pictures and even has its own search engine. The blog also uses plenty of media coming from other sources, but most is created by George Godfrey himself.
For a specific blog, I chose to do my research on my persuasive speech topic of medical marijuana. I found a blog post that is about legalizing Prop 19 in California, which would legalize medical marijuana for those in medical need. Here is the link to the blog: http://my.firedoglake.com/valtin/2010/11/01/two-easy-reasons-to-vote-yes-on-19/ . The author of the blog is Jeff Kaye, and it has been active since November 1, 2010.  This particular author, Jeff Kaye, seems to be pretty active in the blogging world and posts a new blog two or three times a week.  He uses a couple of links in the blog, one is a picture that I have attached and the other is a link to a study done on race and marijuana possession. The writing style is quite different than a research paper format.  It is very opinionated and displays only things that support his arguments.

Self Review of Demonstration Speech

I think I did a pretty decent job with the speech.  First of all, my introduction wasn't as good as it could've been, however I think many kids in the class could relate to it.  I'm not sure that it really grabbed the audience's attention and I could have used more enthusiasm while opening my speech.  I was also a little nervous, which is natural, but I was moving around too much.  I think the content of my speech was pretty good and easy to understand.  The main idea was to get the audience involved, and I think that happened.  My eye contact was limited because I had to look at my own paper airplane, but in the rest of the speech I did pretty well with eye contact.  I noticed a couple things wrong with the end of the speech.  In my conclusion I never really stated the relevance to the audience, which I planned on doing beforehand. The main things for me to improve on are being more enthusiastic and using more emotion while speaking, and work on opening up and wrapping up my speech better.