Innocence Project

Roland cotton was charged with two counts of rape and two counts of burglary. The was sentenced to life plus 54 years in prison and served 10.5 of that sentence for a crime that he didn't do. The evidence that was found against him was a flashlight found at his home that looked like the one in the house that was broken into. A photo taken, rubber from the sole of his shoe that looked identical to the one found on crime scene, and a police lineups by one of the victims.In 1987 Cotton was retried but his case didn't last long and he returned jail. This incident happened in 1984. In 1994 the chief defender requested two new lawyers to take over his case and in 1995 all of the evidence that was against him got released.

The outline of the progression of DNA technologies

· 1865, when Gregor Mendel was the father of Genetics.

· 1947, Erwin Chargoff found the DNA bases follow certain “rules” He also found the composition of species A=T, C=G for all species.

· 1951, Rosaland Franklin obtained sharp X-Ray diffraction photographs of DNA

· 1953, Watson and Crick description of the 3-D structure of DNA.

· 1958, Meslson and Stahl found how DNA replication is semi-conservative.

1977- 2000 The Floodgates Open

· 1970, Smith and Nathan’s discovery of restriction endonucleases.

· 1973, Boyer, Cohen and Chang transform E. Coli with recombinant plasmid.

· 1984, Alec Jeffrey introduces technique for DNA fingerprinting to identify individuals.

· 1997, Dolly cloned from the cell of an adult ewwe, DNA microarry technology developed.

· 2000, The Drosophila genome is completed. The Arabidopsis genome is completed. The human genome is reported to be completed.

What i will take away from this project is a new understanding of how our government works and how they handle these criminal cases. This changes my perspective because i really thought that our government had enough compassion for others and they would listen to people who said that they didn't do a certain thing. But in reality the government really doesnt care and just lets things go as they are. that is what i learned from this project.

Biology. Lucy the chimp.

In biology class we learned about a chimp named Lucy. Lucy got taken away from her chimp parents at a very young age by Maurice and Jane. They decided to do an experiment on Lucy to see that if she was raised as a human then would Lucy start growing the habits that humans. What do u know?, Lucy did start to grow the habits of a human.

After a while Lucy was acting so much like a human that she couldn't care for herself. She relied on humans to give her food. she made tea, got dressed, and did exactly what a regular human girl would do. After a while lucy got out of hand and started destroying furniture and everything else in he way.

The house sitter decided to take Lucy back to Africa with all of the other chimps that couldn't care for themselves.She stayed there for a year with them and then after lucy still wouldn't take of herself then she decided to leave Lucy alone with the other chimps. The care giver did come back one time, but the second time she cam back all that was left of Lucy were her hands.

The one thing that i took away from this story is that animals should not be taken out of their natural habitats and if there is a need to take them out then they should not be returned to their natural habitats. Lucy is a very good example of what can happen to animals when you do stupid expirements on them.

Veterans History Project

In the veterans history project we interviewed a veteran that either served in the Vietnam war or any other war. It started out with my humanities class learning about the gulf of tonkin. and all the other aspects that made this project happen. we were then assigned a veteran to interview. The veteran that i interviewed was named Calixto Cabrera. My veteran talked about alot about the negative impacts about his experiences in the Vietnam War. I really learned things that i did not know before and i am really glad that i got this experience to learn more about this war and how it may effect a person.

Slaughter House 5

Seminar Reflection

Reactions

In the Seminar that we had yesterday about the book “Slaughter House Five” By: Kurt Vonnegut, everyone had a very interesting reaction about the writings of Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughter House Five was a very interesting book about Kurt’s experiences in war and about a man named Billy Pilgrim who goes to war in Germany fighting for the Americans. Though this book may seem like a serious war novel but in actuality it has a lot of humor about aliens and the interesting things that happen in Billy Pilgrims’ life. The first question that we were asked in the seminar was “is this book an anti-war novel?” Everyone had good arguments about if it was an anti-war novel and if it wasn’t. What really stood out to me was when Stephen answered right away and said that it was. I found this surprising because it seemed to me that he didn’t have time to think about the question and just answered. He was very sure about his answer and I found that to be very nice. I was sitting thinking about the question the whole time were talking about it and I couldn’t figure out if it was an anti-war novel or not. So I was very surprised when he could come up with an answer so fast. I think that the reason that I couldn’t come up with the answer was because it was both. I think it was both an anti-war novel and a non- anti- war novel because Vonnegut really doesn’t tell about the horrific details about war that other books talk about. Vonnegut says that the war is bad but he also puts in funny key points in the book.

Detailed Response

The question from the seminar is “are you Billy Pilgrim?” I think that in a way we all are Billy Pilgrim. In the book Billy says “so it goes” many times. Many people in the book said that Billy only said “so it goes” after someone dies in the book like on page 69 Billy is talking about Wild Bob he says “The Germans carried the corpse out. The corpse was Wild Bob. So it goes”. We were asked in the seminar what might have been the emotion behind “so it goes”. A lot of people said that it meant that he didn’t care, but I think that he was just saying someone died; we have to accept that and move on. We can’t dwell on that for too long. For me personally I don’t dwell on things that much. I let thing o and move on as quickly as I can. Billy Pilgrim is the same. In the book on page 27 Billy says “I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes”. So that tells me that Billy didn’t just one day start saying “so it goes”, he was just quoting what the Tralfamadorians said. This is one way that I think we all have a part of Billy inside of us. We say what wise people have said and try to live by our own morals.

Another way that I think that we all have a part of Billy in us is because Billy has a calmness to him. On page 53 in about the last paragraph Billy says “The boy was as beautiful as Eve”. This stuck me as odd that instead of being afraid that the Germans were right there ready to take Billy and Weary to the prison camp, Billy was thinking about how beautiful the young German soldier was. It made me think of myself. I try to not think about the horrible things that could happen if I do something bad. I sometimes hope for the best and hope that I don’t get into trouble. I think this is relevant because almost everyone wants to seem like nothing is bothering them at sometime in their life.

Connections

I believe that the biggest connection that I made in the seminar that we had about the book “Slaughter House Five” was when Lori asked us if we thought the saying that Billy uses in the book many times “So it goes” could be good or bad. I have been in a youth group at a Unity church in Albuquerque for about three years and this type of question comes up many times in the group discussions that we have. In my mind “so it goes” doesn’t always have to be about a bad thing. Everything we do and experience in life is a building block to who we are and who we will be in the future. When something bad happens in my life I will be sad for a while but then after a while I move on because I know that if I dwell on the past then I will just be sad all of the time but if I go by “so it goes” then I have a chance to not live in the dark but to have a happier life because I chose to move one. As I like to say “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Lori’s Choice

One of the connections that I can make about AQotWF and Slaughter House five are that they both have people in the books that experience something bad in the wars. Edgar Derby didn’t really have any idea about what could happen in war and what he was supposed o do so he ended up dyeing which is pretty bad in my point of view, and the main character in AQotWF has to experience some very bad things in WW1. He had to see death in ways many people have never seen it. I think that they both share the fact that they are both Anti-war book even if Slaughter House Five is only partly an anti- war novel. They all talk about the bad things that happen in war. Like when Billy was drugged by the Englishmen at the prison camp, and when the main character in AQotWF had to see his good friends die in the hospital and out in the middle of war.

And this concludes my Seminar Reflection! J

Truth of War citing

Truth of war paper Citing...

Musil, Robert. “Diary Entry” Spartacus Educational. (Berlin, August 1914) http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWmusil.htm

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five Canada December 1991

Humanities