For our presentation to all the parents and such, I shall create some information cards that stand up, a sort of banner to let people know what our project is about at a glance and (if time permits) some small ninja info cards that people can take with them. On all these things I’m going to try to use my good colouring style, not that easy, quick block shading (like what I’ve used in my header) to make it more attractive. Bright colours are also a must! 

Oh, I also went over to Lisa’s house on Saturday to work on the flash. I drew a heap of pictures, most of the ones she needed. A character that I’ve been drawing for a while has now made his way into our presentation too! It’s going well

I’ve been looking at other people’s blogs again. It seems quite a few of them haven’t included the info they’ve found. Did we have to? Oh well, whether we did or not, I think it made it a lot easier to work as a group. If you needed the info to work on something you didn’t have to sit around twiddling your thumbs, waiting for someone to get on msn, you could just go to their blog! It’s very useful. 

Well, I can’t think of any more to write right now. I may edit this or update again soon.

Till then, see ya!

Beth

This blog is great though, I enjoy writing it much more than a handwritten diary and I procrastinate a lot less! I think it’s because handwriting irritates me and leaves me with a hand cramp, or perhaps because I am a total nerd (lol internetz!). Oh well, the point still stands, being able to blog for this project is awesome. 

I’ve just noticed a neat little feature on this blog too, you can synchronize your blog with your del.icio.us account! Maybe I’m just a little slow and have found this feature after a lot of others, but I really like it! I definitely think it’s a good thing to include in a progress blog.

So where was I? Oh yes, I need to put in a bit more research! The finishing touches! Well here goes:

More Vaccination Pros and Cons

Pros: 

• In the event a disease is caught after you have been vaccinated against it, it can help reduce the severity of symptoms. 

Research is pretty much done, I have a few little pros and cons and a few other things on vaccination written down somewhere but I don’t have time to go searching through the dump my room right now. I have a bit on homeopathics too (just to help Lisa the sickie out). 

Homeopathy is based on the idea that like cures like. So if you had a disease with symptoms that resembled that of mercury poisoning you would take diluted mercury. Well, actually it would be like there is no mercury there at all, like 1 parts mercury 1,000,000,000,000 parts water. It’s so diluted that it can’t really be proven that anything is actually there, but it’s meant to sort of carry the energy of it (if that makes sense). It has been proven to work in a lot of cases but it has also been said that this is because of the placebo effect, which is when something works simply because the patient strongly believes that it will.

There are more specifics in a book I’ve given Lisa to read.

The animation is apparently coming along well. Monique is handling the script and when she does that I can make the storyboard to give to Lisa so she can tell me what she needs drawn for her to animate! I’ve done a couple more background and character designs in class so that’s good. Unfortunately we have yet to think of a good name for our doctor character, so it looks like she’ll be doomed to stay as Dr Smith (which is TOTALLY not a Doctor Who reference >_>) forever.

For our display on the day I’ll be making some mini-posters with drawings and information printed on them, so I’ll have to hunt down information that Lisa and Monique have gathered. Or maybe I should just copypaste from their blogs.  

That’s all I can think of for now, but I swear I shall update again with the rest of my vaccination information (el oh el rhyming!).

Over and- actually I think I’ll stop saying that.

Bye

Beth

Drawings For Animation

That’s all for now.

Over and out!

Beth.

Well, due to a combination of my incredibly short attention span and some giant mosquito bites on my feet (trust me, they’re HUGE distractions), I’m updating on Sunday night. There was much itching, but at least now my feet smell like flowers after covering the bites in lavender oil. It DOES work people! Oh hey, what I brilliant segue into out assignment on Conventional and Alternative medicine! (kinda, hur hur)

How goes my research? Well, I’ve been doing some research on vaccinations. It’s a very interesting topic for me, but it’s tough to not be biased. I have never been immunised, and don’t plan on it if I can avoid it. My mum has done a lot of research on them and doesn’t like them. That’s a bit of an upside though becuase I have quite a number of books to use for reaserch. 

• ‘Vaccination and Immunisation: Dangers, Delusions and Alternatives (What Every Parent Should Know)’ by Leon Chaitow
• ‘Vaccination’ by Viera Sceibner
• ‘Vaccination Roulette: Experiences, Risks and Alternatives’ by the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN)
• ‘Vaccination; The Right Choice?’ by Maureen Hickman

Yeah, I know those all sound terribly biased (except for ’Vaccination’ by Viera Sceibner, that’s just a history of vaccinations) but I of course have also been using internet sites. Here is all the research I have gathered so far:

A definition of conventional and alternative medicine.

• Conventional: “Conventional Western medicine is organized around the Theory of Diseases, which believes that a person becomes sick because he or she contracts a disease. In this model, each disease is seen as an independent entity which can be fully understood without regard to the person it afflicts or the environment in which it occurs. Conventional treatments are treatments of diseases, not of people. Most of the drugs employed in conventional medicine are designed to act as chemical strait jackets, preventing the cells of the body from performing some function that has become hyperactive.”
  It seems that this sort of medicine can have quite a lot of nasty side effects, in fact “A Harvard research team concluded that 180,000 Americans are killed in hospitals by their doctors every year.” This is apparently due to the doctors treating the disease and not taking a close enough look at the patient to see if environmental and other factors could make prescribing the certain drug a bad idea. I was a bit surprised by that, I mean I already knew that vitamins and stuff could be better for a cold than some cold medicines and things like that, but I had no idea that the death toll was that high! And that’s just in America, I wonder what it is worldwide… I might look that up later. 

• Alternative: “All alternative systems of healing, ancient or modern, share one common characteristic which separates them from conventional Western medicine. They all approach sickness as a dynamic event in the life of an individual, a problem of balance and relationship, the result of disharmony between the sick person and his or her environment. This approach to understanding illness is called biographical. In the biographical concept of illness, the “disease” itself has no independent reality. The healer’s job is not to identify and treat the disease entity, but to characterize the disharmony of each particular case, so that they can be corrected. These disharmonies are described differently in different cultures.” 
  Well, at least that tells me why when I feel sick my mum tells me to cut down on salt and eat more fruit. I think the idea of alternative medicines appeal more to me than that of conventional, but maybe that’s just the way I was brought up. *shrug*

Vaccinations:

What is a vaccine? 

•  ”Vaccines are medications that are designed to stimulate the body’s immune system to generate a response that will protect the individual from disease by the pathogen in question.”
• “Vaccines work by preparing a child’s body to fight illness. Each immunization contains either a dead or a weakened germ, or parts of it, that cause a particular disease.” 
• An interesting fact about vaccinations is that if you get the jab, you do not have guaranteed immunity, there is even a chance that the vaccination itself could make you sick (albeit a very small one and it’s impossible unless the disease in the vaccination is just weakened or modified, not dead) and there are whole lists of possible side effects for all vaccines. That’s not to say vaccinations don’t work, they do and there are a lot of people out there who have benefitted from immunisation as well as those who haven’t.   

Pros

• Vaccinations decrease the chance of contracting a certain disease.
• Peace of mind; if you get the vaccination you may be less worried about the disease.

Unfortunately, this is all I have time for tonight. I will be adding to the pros and cons as well as some more interesting facts in the very near future. This assignment has been so much fun so far, I can’t wait to see our final result. I think this is going to be one of the best projects I’ve ever done!

Well, since this is supposed to be a journal of our progress, I figured that I should upload the drawings of the characters we will be animating. Right now I just have some sketches of the main characters. 

Click to Enlarge

I’ve decided to stick with a very simple style here, so it’s easier for Lisa to animate. I’m going to edit these and colour them to give a full preview of what they’ll look like in the final piece. 

In other project related news, my research goes well. I’m reading a book my mum has on vaccinations which is very interesting. Perhaps slightly biased though, I’m going to have to do some research on a few other points of view.

That’s all from me today, over and out!

Beth

My group is a group of three, with myself, Lisa and Monique. (Should I post last names on the web? Perhaps not…)

The topic we have chosen is Medicine, more specifically a comparison between conventional and alternative medicine.

We’ve chosen to present our topic in the form of a flash animation. I’m going to be doing most of the character designs and drawing, Lisa will be animating and Monique will be voice acting. We will all be coming up with ideas for the presentation as well as, of course, researching. 

I’m going to be doing research mainly on vaccinations, the pros, the cons and alternatives. My mum doesn’t like in vaccinations, well, she thinks that people should at least make informed decisions about what they get injected with. I believe that too and that’s one of the main points of doing this segment in the topic. I have a few books on the subject and a few more on alternative medicine so that’s a good start on research. The internet is a good source of information too I suppose.

Over the holidays I’m going to finish the character designs for the flash and start doing some research. Perhaps I’ll read the books my mum has on the topic. 

Well since this has only just started, I don’t have much more to write beyond this intro to our project.

Over and out!

Beth

Testing testing 123

Oh yay, we get to make a blog for school, how fun! </sarcasm> Nah, it’s definitely a change, something a bit out of the ordinary. 

Not that anyone except my teacher will ever read this… HI TEACHER!  

Hmm, I wonder if you can embed pictures in this thing… only one way to find out! 

Awsome! It worked! I would upload a music file too but it perplexes me how they expect you to get your hands on a sound clip in jpeg format (you’d think they’s at least allow mp3!) 

Kay, I guess the next logical step is to add a video. Youtube surfage is the best for this I guess. RANDOM VIDEO TIEM! 

That’s my puppies when they were small. Yeah… 

Hmm, what now… ohhh, how bout I make your eyes bleed?

0mg 713k w7f 7|-|1$ b10g r $700p1d 707!

If you couldn’t read that CONGRATS! You’re SANE! 

Ok, so after this post I guess there going to be about zilch personal stuff since I’ve pretty much tested all the features I have an interest in (that I know of)…

This bores me now, 

KTHXBY!

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