Poverty Humanitarian Aid and Main Goal Essay

Poverty Humanitarian Aid and Main Goal Essay Poverty: Humanitarian Aid and Main Goal Essay Teresa Oliveira Ruth Taronno Introduction to International Development Studies 5 March 2015 The Role of Media in Our Society Media plays a significant role in our society nowadays. We are constantly bombarded with information without being aware of it for the majority of the time. It is all around us, from the news we listen to on the radio, the documentaries we watch on television and to the books and magazines we read each day. Poverty is an international issue that affects all nations, some more than others, and because it is a common issue, media tends to portray it in a more drastic way, in order to get our attention. The media marginalizes people by showing the public what they want to see, usually stereotyping different groups of people, and indirectly infixing a distorted view of reality in our heads. The information the media divulgates can be very biased about a story, advertisements, or coverage on different social issue, because its main goal is to make a story sounds interesting, outrageous and different, just so they can make money out of it. As part of the audience, we cannot evaluate the accuracy of the stories we read or the images we view without direct personal experience or specific background knowledge of the issue. Furthermore, highly politicized issues are likely to reflect the interests of a dominant social group, causing less powerful groups to be stereotyped and devalued (Bullock). The messages conveyed by the media are important because the media has the power, to a certain level, to manipulate people’s feelings. Depending on the way they portray their point of view, it can make us feel all types of emotions, and easily affect our judgment. Although poverty is one of the most devastating problems faced by many countries, stories about the poor are relatively rare on television nowadays. When exposed to so much information, from all around the world, our brains start to ignore it. In the article Famine as photo op by Will Braun talks about how media uses certain types of photos to show their audience what they want us to see. ‘’The distended belly is back in the news. It’s a shocking sight – a motionless, blank-eyed Somali child with emasculated limbs, a seemingly over-sized head and a swollen abdomen. Or maybe it isn’t shocking’’ (Braun), but we are so used to seeing these photos everywhere that we became numb to them. Will Braun brings up the question ‘’If the images numb us, is the fault the photographer’s or ours?’’(Braun). Because of the unlimited access we have to information, or attention span is becoming shorter and shorter each day, which causes the media to try harder to reach us. ‘’The average international story on national television news in the United States lasts one minute and twenty seconds. On that basis alone, it appears almost inevitable that there will be misreporting, even if inadvertent, on the journalist’s side and misunderstanding on the viewer’s’’ (Rieff). The lack of background information can lead us to make assumptions, and those assumptions can turn into negative beliefs and reinforce stereotypes. The media has power. Disaster areas that are covered by the news tend to get our sympathy and humanitarian intervention. Media coverage is critical for the fundraising efforts of international development NGOs in times of emergency. ‘’When the media gets involved, the public is aroused and public emotion can become so intense that UN work is undermined – constructive

Howard Aiken, Grace Hopper and the Mark I Computer

Howard Aiken, Grace Hopper and the Mark I Computer Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper designed the MARK series of computers at Harvard University beginning in 1944.   The Mark I   The MARK computers began with the Mark I. Imagine a giant room full of noisy, clicking metal parts, 55 feet long and eight feet high. The five-ton device contained almost 760,000 separate pieces. Used by the U.S. Navy for gunnery and ballistic calculations, the Mark I was in operation until 1959. The computer was controlled by pre-punched paper tape, and it could carry out addition, subtraction, multiplication and division functions. It could refer to previous results and had special subroutines for logarithms and trigonometric functions. It used 23 decimal place numbers. Data was stored and counted mechanically using 3,000 decimal storage wheels, 1,400 rotary dial switches and 500 miles of wire. Its electromagnetic relays classified the machine as a relay computer. All output was displayed on an electric typewriter. By todays standards, the Mark I was slow, requiring three to five seconds to accomplish a multiplication operation. Howard Aiken   Howard Aiken was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in March 1900. He was an electrical engineer and physicist who first conceived of an electro-mechanical device like the Mark I in 1937. After completing his doctorate at Harvard in 1939, Aiken stayed on to continue the computers development. IBM funded his research. Aiken headed a team of three engineers, including Grace Hopper. The Mark I was completed in 1944. Aiken completed the Mark II, an electronic computer, in 1947. He founded the Harvard Computation Laboratory that same year. He published numerous articles on electronics and switching theories and ultimately launched Aiken Industries.   Aiken loved computers, but even he had no idea of their eventual widespread appeal. Only six electronic digital computers would be required to satisfy the computing needs of the entire United States, he said in 1947. Aiken died in 1973 in St, Louis, Missouri.   Grace Hopper   Born in December 1906 in New York, Grace Hopper studied at Vassar College and Yale before she joined the Naval Reserve in 1943. In 1944, she started working with Aiken on the Harvard Mark I computer. One of Hoppers lesser-known claims to fame is that she was responsible for coining the term bug  to describe a computer fault. The original bug was a moth that caused a hardware fault in the Mark I. Hopper got rid of it and fixed the problem and was the first person to debug a computer.   She began research for the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1949  where she designed an improved compiler and was part of the team which developed Flow-Matic, the first English-language data processing compiler. She invented the language APT and verified the language COBOL.   Hopper was the first computer science Man of the Year in 1969, and she received the National Medal of Technology in 1991. She died a year later, in 1992, in Arlington, Virginia.