CEJ #5

Harris, Gardiner
2/25/13

New York Times

World

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/world/asia/in-india-missing-school-to-work-in-the-mine.html?_r=0

Children Toil in India’s Mines, Despite Legal Ban

This article is about how children in India, as young as five years old, are working in mines to earn money to survive.  Most of these children are orphans, but some have families they work to feed.  There is an estimated amount of 70,000 kids working in about 5,000 mines.  Basically, what these kids do each day is go seventy feet down a bamboo staircase to a pit, crawl through a tunnel in mud about two feet high for about a hundred yards, and then start digging coal.  They don’t wear hard hats or steel toed boots, and stuff their ears with cloth.  A man named Kumar Subba watches over five mines in Meghalaya, in Northeast India.  He has about 130 people working for him, says that his mines produce about thirty tons of coal per day!  

I think that this isn’t right for kids to be working in dangerous mines everyday, because there is even a law in India saying that all children, ages six through fourteen need to go to school, but it isn’t really enforced.  There is about 28 million kids working in India instead!  Kids shouldn’t have to do this, because without wearing hard hats or steel toed boots, you’re almost literally lying at death’s door.  I think that India is not a very good place, because they don’t enforce their laws, and so many orphans are working there, so they probably don’t have orphanages.  They should at least make the mines safer, rather than having children climbing down wobbly staircases that could collapse at any moment, and having them crawl through tunnels only two feet high!  That’s really hard and unsafe.  These kids working in mines is not a good idea.

CEJ #4

Digital Tags Help Ensure the Price Is Right

Stross, Randall

New York Times

February 9

Technology

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/technology/digital-tags-help-ensure-that-the-price-is-right.html?pagewanted=1&ref=technology&_r=0

Have you ever wondered how times stores put a price on an item, and then there’s a different price on the screen for it when you go to check out?  There is a lot.  That’s why more and more stores are getting digital tags for their items, to ensure that customers get their things for the right price.  Most stores put about 5000 items on sale per week and remove the sale prices from a different set of 5000.  That’s what leads to mistakes, if you're changing 10,000 paper tags per week.  A digital tag and sensor maker, in San Jose, called Altierre, is selling the most of these digital tags right now.  They have a gray screen with black text, to save batteries, like calculators.  However, stores aren't switching all at once to this new idea.  The most probable answer is that they are afraid if they try it all at once, they will lose shoppers.
I think that this is a good thing because with this new technology, stores are less likely to make mistakes with their prices, because they can change the prices on their items without having to print all the tiny price tags out and put them on the shelves; they just change it on the computer.  Also, with these digital tags, less paper is wasted from changing 10,000 tags a week.  There are roughly 1.5 million stores in the United States.  That means that about 15 billion tags are produced per week.  That wastes a lot of paper.  So these digital tags are going to be really good.

CEJ #3

Cancer still kills more African-Americans than whites

Reuters, Andrew

Google News

2/5/13
Health

http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/05/16858566-cancer-still-kills-more-african-americans-than-whites

       This article is about how even though there has been drops in smoking with black men, cancer death rates for blacks are still higher than that for whites.  Some studies show that about 288 black men out of 100,000 die of cancer, and for white men it is only 217.  Researchers think that this is because they are less likely to get lung cancer, but have a better chance of dying from it if they do get it.  For black women, it’s about 181 per 100,000 and 155 for whites.  The numbers are more even, but black women still have a better chance of dying from lung or breast cancer than whites.  Carol DeSantis, from the American Cancer Society in Atlantis said "Unfortunately, as treatments improve and newer treatments are coming out, we will see a widening disparity if people don't have equal access.”
I think that it’s horrible how black people are more likely to die from cancer that other races are.   Hopefully this will change soon, but it might not.  At least blacks have stopped smoking as much.  Why they get cancer, is they get lung cancer from being addicted to smoking.  So they shouldn't smoke in the first place.  Maybe since all races have different things they’re good at, maybe blacks don’t have as good immune systems as whites and other races?  So if they smoke they get cancer faster than others.  I think that doctors can, or will, develop ways to stop cancer in the years to come.

CEJ #2

Astronauts Will Watch Super Bowl from Space

Malik, Tariq

Google News

2/2/13

Science

http://www.space.com/19611-super-bowl-astronauts-space-station.html

    The international space station's Expedition 34 team is made up of six men: two American astronauts, flight engineer Tom Marshburn and commander Kevin Ford, Russian cosmonauts Evgeny Tarelkin, Oleg Novitskiy, and Roman Romanenko, and Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.  Last Sunday, they all watched the Super Bowl from space!  
     NASA's mission control at the Johnson space station in Houston beamed the Super Bowl XLVII live to the international space station, so the astronauts could watch something (the TV options weren't too good up there).  "Yes, they are going to watch it this weekend," NASA spokesman Josh Byerly had emailed Space.com days earlier.
    I think that actually, it’s kind of a waste of energy to beam the Super Bowl XLVII all the way up to the international space station because it’s only for the Americans probably, because I don’t think Chris Hadfield, Evgeny Tarelkin, and Roman Romanenko needed to watch it because they’re Russian and Canadian.  Also, couldn’t somebody record it for them?
    On the other hand, it is pretty cool that we have the power and technology to do that though.  And a cool fact the article said was that the International Space Station was about the same length as a football stadium!  Maybe they played a game up there?

CEJ #1

Talking, Walking Objects

Diana Carla

The New York Times

January 26

Opinion

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/opinion/sunday/our-talking-walking-objects.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=technology

    This article is about the robots we already have made and what our future will have to do with them in a few years.  The author thinks that in our near future, we will have things like a sink that scrubs dishes on it’s own, a lamp that bends to follow your paper, a fork that vibrates when you eat too fast, things you can interact with, and more. This is already starting to happen because Simon, a humanoid robot is being developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

    I think that this is what’s going to happen in the future too, because people want work done for them instead of having to do it themselves, manually.  I want things being done for me, but this article reminded me of the story we read in class, There Will Come Soft Rains.  If we have all these appliances, and somehow the human race dies off, will these robotic machines still keep working?  I think that they would lose power eventually, but let’s just hope the human race doesn’t die off!  So, I think that in the near future, we will probably have a lot of appliances that we can interact with.