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Agnieszka Dremza

the facebook generation

Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.

The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.

The website currently has more than 175 million active users worldwide. Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria and Iran. It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service. Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. It is also facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg's former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.

A REAL ADDICTION?
This is a real post from allfacebook.webside forum:

"Are you addicted to Facebook? I know I am. It starts of with a simple exploration of your friends on the site and suddently you are logging on 10 times a day to see if any of your friends have made updates to their profile, changed their relationship status or have posted new videos or articles. Suddnely you are glued to your computer monitor and the only thing on the screen is Facebook. So maybe your addiction isn’t that bad but apparently enough people are addicted that wikiHow has published an article entitled “How to Quite Facebook.”"

It's a scary reality. For many users facebook is an addiction, so serious as alcoholism, or so. Better think it over.



WHAT ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY ON FACEBOOK - according to facebook terms of use?

One study at the University of North Carolina, for example, found more than 60 percent of Facebook users posted their political views, relationship status, personal picture, interests and address. People also post a whopping 14 million personal photos every single day, making Facebook the top photo website in the country. Then users diligently label one another in these pictures, enabling visitors to see every photo anyone has ever posted of other people, regardless of their consent or knowledge. Even if users terminate their membership, pictures of them posted by others remain online. But users can't really quit, anyway.
Like guests at the Hotel California, people who check out of Facebook have a hard time leaving. Profiles of former members are preserved in case people want to reactivate their accounts. And all users' digital selves can outlive their creators. As the company's "terms of use" explain, profiles of deceased members are kept "active under a special memorialized status for a period of time determined by us to allow other users to post and view comments."
Facebook's 58 million active members have posted more than 2.7 billion photos, with more than 2.2 billion digital labels of people in the pictures. But what many users may not realize is that the company owns every photo. In fact, everything that people post is automatically licensed to Facebook for its perpetual and transferable use, distribution or public display. The terms of use reserve the right to grant and sublicense all "user content" posted on the site to other businesses.
Terrifying? Yes it is.

So.. do YOU have a facebook?

sources: allfacebook.com, The Nation, wikipedia.com, New Yorker

Class organisation rules

1. No more than 2 absences in a semester will be accepted.

2. Students who will retake more than 2 quizzes ( no matter whether vocabulary or grammar) after the classes finish ( June 5) will get a grade no higher than 3.

My duty hours this semester:
Mondays 13.00-13.30 room 109
Wednesdays 10.30-11.30 room 109 or 102 ( depending on the number of students)

3. Students are expected to check blog content before EACH class.

Best :)
Agnieszka Dremza

The Greener Way to Pay

Printing cash consumes energy, but it beats credit.

It takes an enormous quantity of energy to print, transport, count and sort the dollar bills in your wallet. The U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving cranks out $750 million in new currency each day, trucking the paper from its Massachusetts manufacturing plant to be printed in Washington and then to secret distribution points, where it's held before it's carted off to banks. When you pay with a credit or debit card, in contrast, all you're doing is moving electrons, as e-money moves between accounts—so it has to be the greener alternative, right? Not so fast.

Credit and debit cards are made using six different kinds of plastic. They're laminated and embossed to make them slick enough to slide through card readers. There are more than 2 billion cards in America alone—and each will take decades to fully biodegrade after it expires, gets shredded and buried in a landfill. The machines and servers that track card spending all run on electricity, most of it generated by burning carbon-rich coal. And even in an age of electronic bill payment, at the end of the month most credit-card customers still receive paper statements, sent through the U.S. mail, and many still write a check to pay the bill and then mail it back. That kicks off an entirely different energy-intensive process, as the banks route and process those paper checks.

Cash has other advantages. It's made mostly from cotton and linen—both of which, when harvested, emit less carbon than cutting trees. Once bills get printed, they stay in circulation for up to five years, on average. As its color suggests, it is the greener alternative when it comes to payment methods. The fact that it won't put you at risk for experiencing your own personal credit crisis is just icing on the cake.

source: http://www.newsweek.com/id/170350
by Joanna Kuc

Eco-news

EARTH CHANGE THEORY.

By its very nature, planet Earth is always in a state of flux and change. Many predict 'doomsday fear-based scenarios' due to increasing earth changes.

The term 'Earth Changes' to describe this apocalyptic sequence of events originates with the American psychic Edgar Cayce who made many prophesies of cataclysms involving the whole planet. He claimed the polar axis would shift and that many areas now land would become Ocean floor.

The belief that the California coast would slip into the sea - a common feature of Earth Changes predictions - originated with Cayce's alleged prophecies. In more recent times, self-proclaimed psychic Gordon Michale Scallion has issued a variety of prophecies centering on the concept of 'Earth Changes' that mimic Cayce's.

Scallion also believes that a series of major tectonic events will re-shape the globe, and herald a new age in human life. Scallion and his predictions were featured on a number of documentaries that appeared prior to the year 2000, highlighting millenarian beliefs in both world and New Age religious traditions.

Recent events in world affairs (September 11, the beginning of the 21st Century, and the 2004 Asian tsunami) have been interpreted by Earth Change believers (as well as some more mainline religious movements) as signs that the era of Earth Changes or the apocalypse is at hand, or soon to begin.

Some believers in the Earth Changes phenomenon interpret the changes as purely physical or scientific in nature; they believe that the changes are the product of natural processes (such as global warming, or changes in the Earth's orbit), and that life after the period of changes will be dominated by the struggle for survival.

Groups that support such a belief may evolve into survivalist-style organizations, hoping to pool supplies and expertise to create communities that will survive the coming change.

Other groups interpret the changes in a more positive and spiritual light, seeing the changes as the product of a wholesale transformation of human life - an Aquarian age - that may include contact with divine or alien intelligences and the fullfillment of religious prophecy.

Since the growth in popularity of the Internet, many Earth Changes believers have used the world wide web to discuss and popularize their beliefs. Famous adherants of the Earth Changes beliefs (like Scallion) publish their predictions on the web and publish information that they claim validates or proves these predictions. Believers in the Earth Changes phenomena may congregate around sites that track and report on natural disasters, wars, politcal developments, and other phenomena that are seen as possible signs or components of the predicted changes.

GLOBAL WARMING- fact or swindle...

Source: http://www.crystalinks.com/earth_changes.html
www.all-creatures.org

Cancelled class

Due to a conference, 13.15 class on March 5 has been moved to Thursday March 19 18.30 ( we meet at the reception). You can also come this Friday at 11.30 or 13.15 to make up for the Thursday March 5 13.15 class.

Best :)
Agnieszka Dremza

Relationship


What is the relationship? This is a connection between two or more people. There are many examples of relationships, like a connection between man and woman like love, cohabitation, friendship or a bond between parent and child in other words family love, marriage. Individuals can also have relationships with groups of people, such as the relation between a pastor and his congregation, a grandfather and a granddaughters, or a mayor and a people from “his/her” town. These bonds are so strong that nothing can withstand them and they are unconditional. The connection is based on truth and faith between people. What kind of friend is/are a man/men if we cannot trust him/them. But always we should remember, that even a very strong relationship can be destroyed by a lie or a neglect. All this types of relationships are different, because all relationships involve some level of interdependence. People in relationships share their feeling, thoughts, and engage in activities together, so they always have something in common. Always if one member of the relationship has some problems it impacts on the rest of a group.
The relationships between people are very important nowadays (there were in the past and there will be in the future), in private life as well as in professional life. Staying in contact with other people can be very useful and help you in your career or to find a good job. But also this is very important in your private life, because these days we live in very stressful, hard times and sometimes the only remedy can be a talk with someone trusted. A possibility to confidence one’s secret to somebody. This makes that we feel more comfortable, when we know that there is someone who thinks about us, that we are not alone in this crazy world.

by Marcin Kowalski