Blog on digital storytelling project

This blog will focus on the digital storytelling project. For my project, I collaborated with Brian Potocnik to do some crisis mapping. We each researched 6 articles and mapped them out. I chose to do two stories on the occupy Wall Street movement, and another on a violent protest outbreak in Bahrain. My articles were on the wall street events in California, where a protest was broken up in L.A. and protests started to break out in Oakland and surrounding stories. The maps can be seen on my screenshots and the links to my articles are also below. Brian also chose to do his mapping on the Occupy Wall Street Movement. He used the occupywallst.org site for 2 stories. His screenshots that he sent me only had the screenshots for 2 stories, although.



links for my articles

http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USTRE7AT0FO20111130

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/07/usa-protests-california-foreclosures-idUSN1E7B51BW20111207

http://news.yahoo.com/bahrain-police-clash-protesters-capital-170754250.html

My screenshots

Brians Articles

http://occupywallst.org/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/17/occupy-wall-street-protes_n_1099616.html

Brians screenshots

Harmful Ingredients in everyday products.

Today's beauty products are known for potentially containing harmful ingredients. To find out if any products that I use contain any harmful products, I researched my AXE Shower gel, twist scented. The shower gel contained Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, which is a chemical commonly found in cosmetic products that can travel through the body systems and collect in the body over time, and eventually build up. It is used to help the prooduct foam up. It is a possible carcinogen. It also contained PEG Laureth, which contains a chemical called dioxane, which is a potentially carcinogenic substance that mimics estrogen and can disrupt hormones in the body. This is a very dangerous chemical if it can cause cancer, because using the product everyday for years can increase the risk of these chemical ending up in the body. Tetrasodium EDTA is a known chemical that enables the soap to soak and diffuse into the skin. Another carcinogenic ingredient that was found was Cocamidopropyl, and it is a known cancer causing agent in animals.  These findings are very alarming and I am now ready to throw these products in the trash. The reason some of these chemicals are allowed in shampoos is because the FDA spends little time or money researching the chemicals that go into the shampoo. The FDA also has regulations that allow certain chemicals to be included in shampoos if they only contact the skin for a short amount of time. Over time, there is no doubt that there could be problems down the road from these chemicals after they have been in contact with me for long periods of time.

Ecological footprint

Today I ran the ecological footprint calculator, which asks questions about my lifestyle and calculates my ecological footprint, or how much resources my lifestyle consumes. After going through the calculator, it stated that my lifestyle would require 4.1 earths if everyone lives with my lifestyle. I found this number startling and surprising because I thought I answered every energy question at the lowest setting. The breakdown of my footprint said that my largest impact was on services. This is probably because of where I live, in a large community building where lots of people live. This large building consumes large amounts of energy for all the people that live in my dorm. It requires about 18.2 global acres of the earths productive area to support my lifestyle. Food also had a large impact, as I consumed the maximum amount of animal products that the calculator would let me select. I consume a lot of animal products because I like to workout, and to support my lifestyle and keep my body weight up I need a lot of protein, which comes from the meat that is served in the cafeteria. It is really staggering to see how much energy and resources I consume, especially since I thought that I entered in a very low energy consumption into the calculator. It shows how large of an impact we really have on our environment even though everyone goes about their daily lives believing that they do not have a very large impact. If I use this much energy, it is probably unbelievable how much energy people that drive a lot consume.
Some feasible ways to reduce my lifestyle could be to reduce the amount of food intake that I consume, since I consume a lot of animal products. The calculator said if everyone did this, then there would be 645million acres saved. Since I live in a dorm and cannot control how the school gets energy, It is hard to change the source of my energy. If I lived in my own home, then it would be easier for me to switch to solar panels or renewable energy. Because of my limited capabilities, some major ways of changing my energy consumption are turning of my electrical devices when Im not using them so that I am not wasting electricity. I could also reduce how long my showers are so that I am not using as much energy to heat the water for my shower.