Last night on American Idol, the four remaining contestants performed two songs each. I honestly don’t have a favorite person that I want to win because they are all equally good! At first I loved Lauren because she wore pink cowgirl boots and her voice was awesome! That was the first person who I liked. As the season went on and people got voted off, the competition kept getting better and better. If you ask my mom who she likes the best she will say either Haley or James. Now if you would ask my cousin Olivia, she would say Scotty. I think that it has something to do with them being the same age.
I honestly don’t know who to vote for after last night’s performances. Lady Gaga was there to help them with their songs for the week. She tried to put her funkyness into it because that’s just how she is. Almost everyone has heard of Lady Gaga and that might have something to do with the show’s ratings so high! I would like to know if anyone has been watching American Idol? If so, who is your favorite singer on the show? Who did you think would have made it this far or even to the end?
Laura Keesaer
I remember hearing in one of my classes that people get into a set routine of doing things. For example, students setting in the same seat in class everyday even though there is no seating schedule. This was easy for me to test out, so the next couple of weeks I sat in other students chairs to see what they would do. And of course the teacher was right. When I sat in someone else’s chair they would give me that what in the world are you doing look, and the next day they would get to their seat before I did. This didn’t seem like that big of a deal to me because we have been programmed since kindergarten to sit in the same seat every day. But then I started noticing at home to and it didn’t even occur to me until the teacher had me looking for the patterns. I don’t know about you but at my house my dad has “his” chair and if you’re setting in it he will let you know.
These patterns of behavior might not seem very important. But if these patterns can affect the way people set, why couldn’t it affect the way they do other things. Hears the answer, it does. Next time you see people going through double doors around campus stop and watch them. The majority of them will wait to go through the door that’s open even though there’s a door right next to them they could go through. Don’t ask me why but it has happened I’ve noticed it. I don’t know why this happens but it does. I think if we could understand these patterns we could see if people are more likely to listen something they heard advertised on the radio or something they heard advertised on television. I believe these small little patterns could help public relations out a lot.
Brice S.
Time may be running out much faster than we thought for the United States.
In just five years, China may lay claim to the title “World’s Largest Economy”. This is not coming from China fear mongers or doomsayers – this is according to the International Monetary Fund and its new GDP forecasts.
The numbers: China’s gross domestic product will rocket $8 trillion in the next five years to $19 trillion. The U.S. GDP will grow $3.5 trillion in the same timeframe to $18.8 trillion. And it will be in that year - 2016 that China’s slice of world output will start to edge past the United States’: 18% versus 17.7%. In the years after, that gap is forecast to widen. This gauges the strength of China’s domestic consumption, which is then compared to that in the U.S. EX: The famous Big Mac index is based on this. That operates on the notion that the iconic McDonald’s burger should cost the same in each of the more than 120 countries it’s produced. If a Big Mac costs less in another country, then that country’s currency is considered undervalued. This year, you’ll pay 40% less for a Big Mac in China than in the United States.
Regardless, it is not a question of “if” but “when” China - which last year overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy - will be the world’s biggest economy. Whenever it happens, that day will herald a new dawn for China and the end of an age for America.
I-Shan Shih
Working with my students this past spring semester on this blog project was a great experience. I think everyone got quite a bit out of writing every day, referring to relevant information about communication, and connecting it all together.
The not-so-bright spot in all of this has been Tumblr (I hate to say it, guys). Sometimes, my students had issues getting their posts to even work. Others had commenting issues (we used the Disqus plugin).
I’ve had greater luck with Wordpress in the past for class blogs, so we’re going back. Please see the new iteration of the UCM PR Writing blog in Wordpress land!
Students - Start making your posts on the WORDPRESS blog!
May 11, 2011
I wonder about what we can truly label as news. I wonder mostly about parody news such as The Onion. Boiled down, The Onion is not telling of actual events and in the chance that they are actual events, they are delivered as being from fictional people or a different point of view of actual events. This can seem outright to not be news, but I wonder if that is really so simple. The Onion points out things that are so trivial and mundane in our lives in a humorous way as to make us look on our day and see what could be shaped to be newsworthy or has the events described happened to us. Such headlines as “Dude, there are like, five cop cars next door”, to “Local man chasing after bus delights bus riders”, “Mom reported to be in a rare mood” have the ability to strike relevance to us.
I guess all in all, we cannot consider The Onion to be legitimate news (and it never says that it is), but what they report as news can certainly be events that are so common we do not think of them as news.
“Report: Most College Males Admit to Regularly Getting Stoked”—The Onion
Leonard M Rodriguez
I was reading this article today I came across and thought it sounded interesting. There was this girl who had a layover on Easter Sunday in Dallas, TX. She had already lost 120lbs. She knew that she had a lot more weight to lose, but all people looked at what they saw from the outside. She was there in the airport with her mother who was also a heavy set woman. The woman asked what the weight restrictions were and the man for Southwest airlines said he did not know. He just said that she was too heavy to fly. Southwest has a policy that if one cannot fit in one seat, which is 17 inches across , that they should but an extra seat ticket.
The man had pretty much ratted them out on their weight and even though she had flown internationally and here in the states but never had any asked her that. Before boarding or prior to, the women were asked about the sizes of clothes they were, their weight and measured them to see if they were “too fat to fly. ” The employees at Southwest were supposed to be discreet about it but they weren’t at all, just embarrassed in front of all these random people. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think that the employees did the right thing? If not, what could they do differently?
Laura Keesaer
I was raised on a farm in rural Missouri where I had three television channels and no internet at all because it was slower than molasses and pointless to have. So you might think I would love something I have never had much of, but it pains me to say this but I hate technology. I just spent almost two hours on the phone talking to a machine. The machine sounded like a very nice lady but she couldn’t understand a word I was saying. I pride myself on not getting aggravated or overly stressed out, but when I have to repeat myself over and over again and can’t talk to a real person I get upset very fast. Then when I finally get to talk to a real person I find out that I communicated with the machine better and hang up the phone and didn’t accomplish anything.
I had to go through all of this because my internet was not working. That is nothing new for me so I went to the library to work on some homework and found out that during the summer they close at 7. So there I was with a load of homework that could only been done on the internet and me with no internet. I decided that the only thing I could do is try to fix my internet and I had no idea where to start. Instead of calling charter and talking to a machine again, I unplugged all of the cords from the wall. Then I had a nice cold beer and looked at the mess of cords on the floor. There was a cord for the television, blue ray player, router, modem, and can’t forget about the cable cord. Long story short the problem was the splitter that took the cable cord to the television and the modem went bad somehow. I hardly ever watch television anyway so I got rid of the splitter and have the cable cord running straight to the modem.
This experience shows me that if the world ever lost internet most people would probably die from an anxiety attack. Whether there trying to get their working on a million dollar business deal over the internet or just trying to facebook creep, if they don’t have their internet there world will seem like it’s ending. This is sad that one thing that millions of people around the world do without would affect our community so drastically and we take for granted.
Brice S.
I’m watching KMBC 9 news, it’s talking about tougher DUI laws throughout Missouri and Kansas. The news anchor was talking about how a a certain company, Evergreen, provides breathalyzers to offenders. The new laws would make an offender have a breathalyzer in his/her car. This person would have to blow in the car every time they got into it. The car wouldn’t start until the breathalyzer showed that the person hasn’t been drinking. There would also be harder, different stipulations for repeat offenders. I think that the idea of stricter DUI laws are good. I don’t have any solutions, but I think that these purposed laws would aid in lowering the number of deaths due to drunk driving.
In a prior news article that I skimmed over earlier today, I saw another article promoting a crack down on drunk driving. This particular article was talking about how the Kansas City Police force were teaming up with the Missouri State Patrol to patrol harder through the end of April and beginning of May, during prom and graduation seasons. This teaming up of both forces will ensure safer, happier times for both high school and college students. With parents making groups like M.A.D.D., Mothers Against Drunk Driving, there is quite a bit more social pressure for there to be a stricter enforcement on drunk driving. So, this group effort and possible new laws show that people are trying to take on this problem head on.
Today I saw on T.V. that Skype is going to be bought by Microsoft for 8.5 billion dollars. At first I thought that 8.5 billion was a ridiculous amount of money, but when I realized how much these companies are worth, I realized that this amount of money was understandable. Skype is a computer program that allows a person to talk face to face with others through the internet. Microsoft is obviously an extremely wealthy corporation that is probably worth about twenty times more than Skype. Once Microsoft starts putting Skype in programs and computers or whatever Microsoft chooses to do with Skype, Microsoft will benefit and profit from it enormously. It must have taken hundreds of highly trained professionals over a long period of time to organize and figure out an 8.5 billion dollar decision. I also realized that as both of these monster corporations make such drastic decisions regarding such large amounts of money they must maintain a good image to the public. In order for such a large merger like this to work out, public relations specialists must constantly monitor what information is available to the public. The way that public relations specialists handle the company’s image affects everybody working for the company, which is usually thousands of people around the globe. My point is that in the corporate world, public relations are crucial to the success of multi-billion dollar companies. It both excites and intimidates me to know that one day I might hold such a responsibility that would involve so much money and impact so many people.
-Max Crane
May 9th 2011
So it is the first day of the summer semester PR class. Basic stuff today about the syllabus and who we will be seeing a lot of during this session. We also did interviews of a classmate to write a biography of them as an assignment, which is rather novel.
It became clear that even though this is my only class this semester, there would still be plenty of work there. Right now I have to figure out my focus topic. This is proving difficult as I have so many things I take interest in. I am thinking something along the lines of psychology, video games, military journalism, parodies (like The Onion), or anything along those lines really. Those are each still so vague and I remain unsure what I need to be boiling down to. I am not even sure I am doing this blog correctly.
While this class is a required class for my Mass comm. major, I do require this class of myself. I do a lot of writing in my free time, and I seek any chance to improve. Now I do not exactly write beyond fictional and some philosophical essays, but I realize that any perspective of writing is one that I should be learning.
—Leonard M Rodriguez
