Where The Wild Things Are

Last night I went to see the new film based on the popular children's book, Where the Wild Things Are, as I have been looking forward to this film for quite a few months now and wanted to see how they would make an entire film based on a book that was about 38 pages long. The film does not take on the plot of the book but more expands upon it taking the idea and making a dark, playful tale based through the imagination of one little boy.

The film is about a young boy named Max who is a troublesome person, wearing a whole body suit with whiskers on it, being brought up by a single mother of two and during an incident Max creates to get his own selfish way runs away from home and through the power of a child's mind sails to an island inhabited by seven very tall monstrous creatures who are all very depressed with the way their lives have all turned out and would do anything to ll be very happy again. So when Max arrived and starts helping the strongest and most angry of the beast destroy all their homes the other gets angry with this and try to eat him, but due to a very imaginative and extremely impossible lie becomes their king to rule for them for all time, or until they are all depressed again and decide to eat him.

Max comes to befriend the beast Carol who just wants them all to stay together and all be happy and have things the way he wants and believes that this can only be done through Max and will defend anything he says trusting that he will keep them this way forever but when things start to get even worse than they were before Carol tends to loose his temper and threatens the little boy and chasing him intending to kill him very violently.

This in my opinion was a very good film that is defiantly not for younger children, even though it is based on a child's book it is not for them, more a film of a child for adults told through the eyes of a child with a very wold and at times disturbing imagination. What I really enjoyed about it was the lack of special affects as it felt very natural and the whole island was part of the story and how each part worked in with the plot, such as who owned what being a hole in a tree or a rock on the ground. It is a very dark story and a very depressing one and everyone is depressed for most of the film and at times did get a bit uncomfortable to watch as you really though that they were actually going to end the film with these beasts eating the young boy as part of his punishment for not keeping them happy, and just how angry the all got was very believable and worked very well with the tone of the movie. The monsters had some heart to them with all their deep emotions and anger, jealousy, love, loneliness and hatred, all had an element of Max's own emotions helping him realize just how lucky he is and that he has no need to be the way he is and through the course of the film we see that through every beast's emotion he is realizing just how much they are all his own.

Overall this was a really good film and would recommend you go and see it, but would advise that taking young children would be very frightened of this and would want to leave not very far into the film as it is a slow film and has the same sort of tone all the way through the film and would even think that kid's could even have nightmares about this, the maker's made a film of a child, not a film for a child.

Spot Advertising

Advertising skin care product to tackle that ever so annoying and upsetting skin problem of all, acne. It is something that we have all experienced, some yes have had more horrible time with it than others have but we have all no doubt at some point in our teenage years had it at some point. It puts us down, can make people think they look unattractive, emotionally cause stress to people, and irritates the skin and can even leave scaring for the rest of your life. So what can we do about it? Well some would say that eating less junk food would probably help a little along with cutting down on drinking alcohol slightly, some would say moisturizing can calm the spots down along with herbal tea and leaves but I do not know much about them. What else can we do well according to the main companies who specialize in skin care treatment say that we should use their products, these are the well known spot treatments such as Clearasil and OXY along with supermarket home brands, but the big question is do they really work? Well I can say that I have been using them for years and can only say that they do not help get rid of them but will only keep them at bay and only if you wash your face at least twice a day as this keeps the pores clean and unlike soaps do not dry up your skin so easily.

Now that we know what these products are about and what they are for, how is it that these companies advertise their products? Do they do this well or are they simply just using false advertisement? I think we are all thinking the exact same thing, false advertisement. As spot mostly occur during the period we are teenagers our hormones got completely out of control and we cannot control when our voices break, when we start to sweat more, or even when we begin to show acne on our face, so it is for this age group that these products are aimed at, and that is where the false advertisements come into place because all they need to do is get a familiar face on the TV to say they have used this and it works, sorry kids but this just is not true.

Over the years Neutrogena have used popular teen icons to promote their products such as the girl who was in Smallville and the one from those awful High School Musical films, truly terrible films, and both of them would never even go out in the daylight if they had one single and possibly not noticeable spot on their face, they are on TV and film, thy have people who can easily cover their faces up and can afford better skin care treatment than stuff you can get in the supermarket. This probably does work in getting younger people to buy the product as more and more people want to be like the people they see on TV and in magazines, advertising different products for different uses in all sort of ads aimed at all sorts of people. I think it is a disgrace that they would falsely sell their product by using someone who has most likely never even used the product and think it would be a lot better if they advertised them with someone who we can see did have bad skin instead tricking people into thinking that someone who they can obviously see from whatever they are in have no traces on acne at all into buying them.

The Death of Books?

Today I am going to blog about the latest in Sony technology and how they have developed a new form of reading books, with the Sony Book Reader.

I for one am all in support of new exciting technology and do see the beneficial side of having these in the place of books but since I read a lot of books there is nothing really like reading from actual paper, in my personal opinion it makes the book tell a story in a deeper way by reading it from paper rather than a screen where you have to scroll down instead of turning a page, is more personal.

Another benefit from reading an actual book is that you can read for as you want without hurting your eyes whereas with the book reader it will be like a computer screen and you will have to stop after a while as it could be dangerous to your site if you do not keep having breaks when reading a story. and could be annoying when you get to a really gripping part of it.

A major problem I see happening with the book readers are that they will seem more cold to use, by this I mean when we go looking for a book we tend to look at the books cover as this will help show what part of the story is about, it created an atmosphere and depending on who well it has been done would give someone an impulse to at least look at it, where the reader would most likely seem boring, even though it could look stylish it still wouldn't feel the seem to read such a flat two dimensional object, an actual book seems more practical by turning the pages than from scrolling down which is good for a computer and Ipod etc but do not think it would work so well for a book devise. It is similar to art, you do not get impressed by looking at say the Mona Lisa on a screen but you are in awe by looking at the actual artwork, this is what I think of books.

I don't know how much thought has been put into these but think that the design process of it has not properly thought out, I think that this devise has been made more so that the company can say look at what we have made now, so now you have to but it. Possibly people who are obsessed with technology will buy it as a way to encourage them to read more books but apart from that I don't think it will really over take picking up an actual book and reading that.

4A Assignment

Sorry I am just posting this after all the other assignments thought I had posted it already until I had a look through my blog

Article One

1. The main purpose of this article is: To make people aware of how ineffective the Internet is at supplying good affective treatments for sexually transmitted diseases, and just how much the Internet lacks the amount of information that is required to be a suitable treatment. It looks into the nature of the products as a search was carried out to find which were the most and least affective.

2. The key question that the author is addressing is: How little the public are to the hazards there are to purchasing drug from the Internet, and what can advertisers do to help prevent the spread of transmission and how much they rely on the Internet for a suitable source.

3. The most important information in this article is:
• Search tools on the Internet
• Advise available to public along with suitable treatments
• Harmful reactions

4. The key secondary sources used are:
• Websites through search engines (Google, Yahoo etc.)
• Number of products distributed from certain country's
• Cost of paying for products
• Awareness of Internet Advise

5. The key primary sources used are:
• Internet search engines (Google, Yahoo etc.)
• PubMed journal

6. The main inferences/conclusions in this article are: That the public should be educated on the dangers of using self-treatment of STIs, particularly where preventative measures are essential in stopping re-infection. Government agencies could explore the possibility of using the same search engines that are used by potential customers of these products, ensuring that similar searches also return prominent links to promotional sites warning of the dangers and giving appropriate preventive advice.

7. The key concept(s) we need to understand in this article is/are: That the Internet is not always reliable, who knows where the drugs are coming from and how affective they will be, they may be remedies for another disease and can be harmful to people. How much would a person know about a certain type of STI and would they use this knowledge to find out more.

8. The main assumption(s) underlying the author’s thinking is (are): I think the author is trying to aware people just how ineffective the Internet really is for obtaining remedies to prevent the spread of an STI and prevent it from eve coming back, and how ineffective they can also be as well, are people just looking at the first thing they see and do they know where they are buying them from?

9. If we take this line of reasoning seriously, the implications are: That the government does need to step up and do its part to prevent to sale of treatments from other countries and spread more knowledge through advertising to the public on the best advise to take and where to find it by practices or reliable sites on the Internet.

10. If we fail to take the author’s line of reasoning seriously, the implications are: People may want to take the cheapest option which would be to pay from another country and without realizing, risk being harmed through inappropriate remedies, also a bad advertising campaign could cost a lot of money and not help peoples awareness in any way.

11. The main point(s) of view presented in this article is (are):
• Lack of advertising and information
• More reliable sites can help reduce peoples risk of suffering
• The Internet is used a lot and more needs to be done to tackle inappropriate sites

Article Two

1. The main purpose of this article is: Let people know just how little is being done to educate teenagers of the risks that can be caused by sexually transmitted diseases and how they can be prevented form both contracting and spreading throughout the public.

2. The key question that the author is addressing is: Where do teenagers get their knowledge from and how can they be used to improve their awareness of STI's and their dangers, can more be done in schools at home and on the TV

3. The most important information in this article is:
• Questionnaire study
• Schools education on the subject
• What sources are the most helpful

4. The key secondary sources used are:
• The questionnaire study
• Comparing the most affective sources such as TV, books, parent etc.
• Schools teachings

5. The key primary sources used are:
• School students
• Questionnaire

6. The main inferences/conclusions in this article are: That the teenagers who took the questionnaire were seriously lacking the correct amount of knowledge they should know about safe sex and the dangers that can be cause if the right precautions are not followed appropriately, and that most of them stated that television was the most reliable source for finding these sort of things out rather than from schools.

7. The key concept(s) we need to understand in this article is/are: That not enough is being done, there is not a lot a advise or information with advertising campaigns to allow teenagers to want to get involved in using protection, we should not just assume that they know enough about it already so we should also do our part and teach them about it with the knowledge that we know about them.

8. The main assumption(s) underlying the author’s thinking is (are): the author is trying to show just how little their children are being taught about how to protect themselves, this may be because teachers may feel to embarrassed to talk to students about them and that other sources such as television cannot always be left to teach young people.

9. If we take this line of reasoning seriously, the implications are: That more should be done in school to teach teenagers, this can be done by bringing in someone to make aware the dangers, this need not be a teacher but someone that a pupil can feel they can talk to rather than feel embarrassed with. Television can be used so much for advertising the right messages during times on the TV of programs that are aimed at teenager during commercials such as Hollyoaks, even soaps can help out with this.

10. If we fail to take the author’s line of reasoning seriously, the implications are: It may be quite costly to create a advertising campaign especially if not enough research and development has not been put into the campaign as this would help it fail dramatically, also teenagers may not want to watch it willingly on their own.

11. The main point(s) of view presented in this article is (are):
• Not enough education on sexually transmitted diseases

• Television does not always have the right answers
• Not enough rese=ources are giving out enough information as well.

The Art That is Blogging

I have now been blogging for a few months now, as part of my Design Studies assignments and will admit that at first I found it to be boring and was only posting new blog entries just so I was doing them, but surprisingly I have grown to actually like blogging, I find that I have been doing it more often than I actually thought I would. What I like about it is that I am not just sitting thinking of what to write about but if anything thing catches my eye or I have just remembered something then I will post it as soon as i get the chance.

Other things I have been writing about is some of my work so far this year, be this design projects or reports I have needed to do, I do find personal blogging more interesting that the essays (I say that with a smile on my face).

Admittedly I have made a few mistakes on almost all of my posts as immediately edited them as soon as I was told as I needed feedback from our Lecturer so got in contact with him and did mention that I should spell check my posts. As soon as I realized this I couldn't stop thinking about just how stupid it was because it is such a silly little mistake to make I never realized I wasn't spell checking my blog for every entry I was applying to it, but now I have gone through all of my old posts and have spell checked them all and made all the font the same size as there were a few posts that did make the whole page look slightly off balance and helped to keep the layout neat and tidy.

I do not think that I will give up blogging over the Christmas and Summer holidays and even when I have left university as this will help me keep in contact with the design world and with those who I have made friends with in the class and what they will all go on to do when we leave, they can also do the same with me.

Assignment 4D: The Bibliography

This is the final part of the assignment and this is the two journals I decided to use for my report.

Freeman, E. (2009) 'Promoting chlamydia screening with posters and leaflets in general practice - a qualitative study, BMC Public Health. 9, 383.

Cooper, RG. (2007) 'Sexually transmitted disease/HIV health-care policy and service provision in Britain' INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF STD & AIDS 18 (10) 655-661.

Mellanby, A. (1992) 'Teenagers and risks of sexually-transmitted diseases - A need for the provision of balanced information' Genitourinary Medicine 68 (4) 241-244.

Vivancos, S. (2007) 'Internet treatment of sexually transmitted infections - a public health hazard? BMC Public Health. 7, 333.

Assignment 4C

For this final part of the assignments I am have looked back on how I tackled the previous ones and will mention areas that I would go back and look at again and ways I would do them differently or if there would be anything that I would improve the way I had previously done it.

What I would have done for looking at journals would have been to open my search a bit more instead of looking at mainly the one topic, I could have compared the journals I used in my report to other methods of advertising as well as how other diseases are advertised and how they are different from STI campaigns and whether they are more effective or not, I would also in this area have looked at a few more similar journals so that I had more of a varied opinion from other authors.

When I thought about the articles I do think now that it may have helped if I had done my own personal research into this, by this I could have actually gone to a doctors or hospital and taken some of the leaflets available to see what information is available and would also have asked if I could have asked a few of the nurses and doctors on their thoughts of how affective they think they are, this way I could have compared the authors results with the results I would have collected. I would have also done the same for sites on the Internet and done the same method by typing into Google, Yahoo and others, again comparing both of the results.

When I was reading my second journal I did agree with what the author said about how much teenager know very little of sexually transmitted diseases as I remember when we were being taught about it at school and we were only taught the very basics of a disease and were shown a 20 minute video that was about ten years dated and was very uncomfortable to watch but would disagree with the author when as they believed more that it should be schools and the government who should teach them to be aware of STI's more, but I feel that this should be done everywhere, mainly on TV.

What I did for looking at these journals, I found them on cross search but would try to widen my research by looking at not only the university library but also at public libraries, even though I did look for books in the university library I struggled to find any books on the subject so that was why I had done two journals. Even asking class and family members on how much they knew may have helped as well. I would do that to see how much adults knew about STI's as well as I felt that the second journal was being very one sided saying teenagers didn't know as much about it as adults, instead of just assuming that all adults knew about them, this was the impressions I got from the article.

A final technique I would possibly have done would to have done a mind map as I did this in previous assignment and thought it had helped a great deal but for some reason it didn't even occur to me to do this, but I will know to do it for the next time. What I did think was helpful was printing off the articles and highlighting the key factors of them, this allowed me to quickly and easily find an item I was looking for without having to read it over and over again.

Assignment 4B -Report

For our next assignment for this semester we were to pick a journal and a book on part of our chosen item from the previous parts of the assignments and are to write a report about the ideas the authors are trying to give across and were to then compare them with one another in the final part of the report. As I struggled to find a book on my chosen topic which is advertising and sexually transmitted diseases I have chosen two journals that I found interesting and thought were quite good at what they are meant to make people aware for.

My chosen journals are:

‘Internet treatment of sexually transmitted infections – a public health hazard?’

‘Teenagers and the risks of sexually transmitted diseases: a need for the provision of balanced information.’

The first of the journals goes on about the stigma that is normally associated with sexually transmitted infections as people who have been infected by any of theses diseases prefer to keep it private and would rather seek information and advice from the Internet than from a one to one from their doctor, as this is less embarrassing. It is though quite dangerous to seek out remedies from the Internet, as those who sell them do not always provide the correct information. The purpose of this journal was that the people who did the research and work for the article conducted an Internet search to find out the availability of STI treatments and the amount and useful information that they presented. What they intended to do was compare just how effective the Internet was in containing the correct medicine required to fight these diseases and those which did nothing are themselves cause more harm to a person because they were not the correct items.

The team discovered that when they ran a search engine on the information into Google, Yahoo etc they found that most people only read information on the first two pages of the results the engines found and that these were not the most useful of sites so they looked at all the links on these pages and took down all the information that was available. The information that had been found was quite interesting as they discovered that their was more information and help for symptomatic conditions with topical manifestations such as genital warts and herpes and that there was a far fewer number of treatments for conditions such as Chlamydia and Gonorrhoea but this is most likely because these symptoms are more difficult to identify and do require more advanced and thorough testing. Due to the Internet being a widely available access point it is no wonder that this takes on more sales than a normal prescription from the doctor as they are more affordable online and done within the privacy of someone’s home without having to get all embarrassed in front of people at the chemist. What is alarming with treatments form the net is that most of these remedies turned out to be herbal and homeopathic and would not help treat the cause at all, this is because of the lack of advise given on the sites that sell them, even though they may have information that will say how the product works they will not mention the fact that it does work and what problems and side affects they can cause, this is a problem as you do not know if it is a secure website that has a medically approved remedy.

The whole point of this journal was to make people realise, especially patients, is the Internet really helpful, should the public be more educated on the spread and protection and the cure for such diseases, they believe that the government should take a step up and make the dangers aware on these sites alerting people to whether it can be successful or not.

The second journal I chose is an evaluation of teenager's knowledge and understanding about sexually transmitted disease, conception and contraception. It goes on to explain how teenagers may underestimate their risk of contracting a STD after the promotion of information about HIV/Aids. It says that simple messages about them in mass media advertising programs may have unwanted results and need to be targeted and easy to understand for teenagers to take in the effect. So what is the problem with the campaigns and advertisements that are currently available to teenagers and what exactly they know about sexually transmitted diseases? What they did was carry out a questionnaire through nine schools in the South west of England in an exam type test, to prevent comparing answers, of how much was being taught to the youths of today, along with all the sources they got their information on, what they found was that five people did not answer any of the questions and 134 did not give detail of the sources they got them from. They also found out that it was television that was the base for most of the information of STI’s available to young people, but even this did not help with their understanding as most gave vague or incorrect answers.

What was the purpose of this, well it was to see just how much these people knew about diseases through sex and what they could do to prevent them and how often were they made aware of the dangers, where did they get the most useful information from, was it television, school, parents? All were very unclear of what they thought they knew, so how could this all be prevented.

What the article is also asking is that, will teenagers understanding of these affect their risk of contracting sexually transmitted, will they take this knowledge and use it wisely and lessen their chances of contracting a disease or will they ignore it thinking it won’t happen to them and think it will be difficult to contract it? Are the adverts in mass media advertising working well enough to fight it or are they just an unwanted annoyance? This is the main reason of this journal, to show that with test and the understanding of the high-risk people have that advertising the risks are not affective enough and are simply just there rather than informing teenagers of what it can do to your life and that more should be done in schools, at home and on the TV as the amount of teenagers who are contracting the disease will spread it even more without even realizing it until it is too late. The youth of today are not informed enough and advertising should be more effectively by being producing more professional interpretations to teenagers that is thoroughly researched and with a strong development of what can be done so that is easier for them to understand and feel that they should want to know more about it.

So to compare both of these journals and what they are trying to portray and how similar they are and which I think comes off to be the stronger article of the two. Both are tackling the same subject of advertising sexually transmitted diseases and how both are not being advertised effectively to their targeted audience, the first is stating that those who have already contracted a STI and are not being given the correct information of how to fight it, where the second is to aim teenagers as soon as possible so they are not at such high a risk of contracting it.

The first journal was had a similar theme to it as to another journal I read, 'Promoting Chlamydia screening with posters and leaflets in general practice’ by E. Freeman, and this partly states from a nurses point of view how ineffective the think the advertising in practices are as they said that patients were to embarrassed to look at a poster and pick up a leaflet, they would rather to it at home through the Internet on their own, and this is where I think this journal connects with the first one I have written about.

Both my chosen journals are trying to increase the message of how high a risk people are at contracting STI’s and how little information is actually available, it seems to me that if you really want to know all there is about them then you are best to do this through a doctor but doctors cannot always be there to solve this, more advertising that has been properly thought out and displayed should have to work better to increase the public awareness and make them think twice about having unprotected sex and how dangerous it is to buy something that may not be reliable from someone you will not even meet.

Both authors have carried out different tests, but both were used to find out important information that is available to all, and how reliable they are. From what I can tell from both journals are they think the methods used at the moment are working, they are lacking the natural element of awareness and safety. These also got me onto thinking of another journal, 'Sexually transmitted disease/HIV health-care policy and service provision in Britain' by RG. Cooper, who compared the advertising from the late 19th to the present 21st Century’s and how even trough this history the advertising to help prevent the spread of it has never been quite so affective because more people than you would think do not understand a lot or know how dangerous a single disease can be.

As said before of what can be done, well in schools advertising campaigns can be made more to be aimed at younger people instead of the current very dated programs that are being shown to students, and even getting taught about this a few times a year would help increase their awareness and perception. For tackling the Internet the government could possibly step in and label what product really work against STI’s and what sites are the best to look at.