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Assignment #4: Wild Card

THIS IS AN INCOMPLETE ROUGH DRAFT! PLEASE COME BACK IN A FEW DAYS!

Genealogy Sites

In August, I joined Ancestry.com to build a family tree and perhaps learn more about my family. My sister-in-law does a lot of genealogy research for her family, so she gave me the idea.

I had always been told that my grandmother kept a lot of genealogy research, but when I contacted the cousin that supposedly had all of this research, there was very little. She sent me a very short, hard-to-read family tree. It was only my grandmother's side and nothing else.  That's when I decided to go to Ancestry and build a family tree.  Later on, I had my DNA tested as well. I've been discovering some amazing things.  However, it does take some money and a lot of time. I haven't had much time to spend on it yet.

Ancestry is just one of many sites where you can research your ancestry online. To do really in-depth research, however, you would need to travel to various places and talk to real people, face…
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Assignment #3: Depiction of Women and Minorities

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Worldwide Persecution of Atheists in Media and Elsewhere

Throughout history, many people have been persecuted for their religious beliefs. They're persecuted because their beliefs are different from those in the majority, or those in power, or they're persecuted because they don't believe the same religion as their persecutors, or because their persecutors want to use them as a scapegoat for their problems (such as Jews in Nazi Germany). There isn't any religious group that hasn't faced persecution at some point throughout history.  One group that is also persecuted is those who have no religious beliefs: atheists (some of which prefer the term agnostics).


Most people are taught about religion by their parents, or they're brought into a particular religion by their family, and they don't ever stray from that. Parents have a very strong influence on their children, as I learned way back in my psychology and child education classes 30 years ago. For the first …
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Assignment #2: Digital Access

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Nigeria


I chose Nigeria for this paper for three reasons. For one thing, we used to have a friend from there named Arthur Onuora. He was in the Political Science program at Stony Brook with my husband back in the 80's and was very nice.  The second reason is that one of the volunteers for my website, Ebele Orakpo, lived in Nigeria. I thought it was so cool that she would be interested in writing about U.S. TV all the way from Africa.  She proofread for us, so her English was very good. Lastly, there is a new TV show on CBS that I like called "Bob Hearts Abishola," where an American sock salesman falls in love with a Nigerian nurse. They also show her aunt, uncle, and son, as well as some workers at the sock factory, and at the hospital, that are also Nigerian. They sometimes speak Nigerian on the show (with subtitles).  All of this combined to make me interested in Nigeria and how they access media.

According to Wikipedia, "Nigeria is the most populous country in Af…
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Assignment #1 - News and Information

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BBC News is a division of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) which gathers and broadcasts news and information.  It "is the world's largest broadcast news organization and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online news coverage."  BBC News covers news internationally as well as in the UK.  The BBC and BBC news operate under Royal Charter and are financed through TV fees that everyone pays in the UK.  The government doesn't oversee or control it, but its coverage must be "balanced and unbiased." It's regarded as owned by the people of the UK. Video


In 2014, the BBC commissioned a poll by an impartial polling service. They polled UK adults who read the news about which sources they felt were trustworthy and impartial. The BBC was the top rated under both impartiality and trust.  According to Business Insider in 2014, Pew Research polls show that the BBC News is one of the most trusted news outlets in the …
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