20 Time Final Post

For my 20 Time project, my partner, Leena Elzeiny, and I raised awareness on the amount and harm of plastic in the oceans through advertising, which we paid for through fundraising. I don't have the product itself but all of you, who go to Saratoga High School at least, can check our final product on page 3 of The Saratoga Falcon newspaper on the May 27, 2016, issue. We basically brought half a page, through fundraising, of a page on the May 27th issue; Then we designed and made an advertisement, that raises awareness on the harm of plastic in oceans, that we placed on that space we brought.

I think Leena's and my TED talk actually went very well, a lot better then I thought it would go. Pretty much everything went well, going by plan as to what we would say and when we would say it. I can't really think of any thing we could've done better, our timing was off but it was only a bit off so I'm not too hungover that. There were also times where Leena and I stuttered but it really only happened once to both of us throughout the presentation and I think that's really impressive; I expected us to stutter more and make more mistakes than we actually did. Watching the video, I think I would grade myself as Mr.Orre, my biology teacher, did, a 96, points off for the timing and also for how our third fact wasn't really clearly said. The experience of preparing for this talk was a stressful one; The day before, Leena and I met up for more than 6 hours, practicing and preparing at both the library and Starbucks, trying to perfect our presentation. We should've probably started preparing earlier but it was all so quick and we had to bend around our own personal schedules. The experience of giving the actual talk, though, wasn't as bad; It wasn't as stressful as I thought it was going to be and I was planning on just going by the script word by word, but during the moment I actually felt confident enough to just improvise and talk as if I was just in a normal conversation, talk more like myself and less formally basically. From this, what I have taken away is that practice is key to giving a good presentation and that feeling confident in yourself when doing a talk in front of everyone is so so important and is one of the best realization and feelings you could experience.

Pig Dissection

I think the purpose of this lab was to understand the humans' body more through using a pigs' body since they're both very similar. This dissection relates to the unit we recently just learned, Physiology, by helping us understand more about what our body has/does to keep us alive: the different systems (Circulatory , Respiratory, Nervous, Endocrine, Digestive, Immune, and Lymphatic) and how they work. My favorite part of this dissection was cutting the pig. I enjoyed this part the most because I've never really cut a animal open and when I was cutting I could feel through the scissors how thick the skin was and it was just interesting cutting a real organism open. I do think that this dissection was a valuable experience, due to it causing me to realize more about how our body works and how hard it works just to keep us alive and well. 

(Or here's the link if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3AikCAgpjY )

Unit 9 Reflection

This unit was about "What on Earth Evolved?". The first thing we learned about were the basics of evolution. Evolution is a very slow process, having mutations and sex served as the source of new phenotypes. Populations evolve, not individuals. The fossils we find and study from are the individuals of a population. Evolution is the change in allele frequency of a population, over time, whilst speciation is the rise of two or more species from a common ancestor. There is also classification, taxonomy, and phylogenies: Phylogeny is the evolutionary history and relationships of species using taxonomy; a phylogenetic tree/cladogram showing this shared ancestry. Taxonomy is the study of naming and classifying organisms. And there is classification, where there is also the 3 domains of life: Eukarya, Archaea, and Bacteria.

In terms of evolution and classification, it's been a good unit and I think I have learned enough. Something I would like to learn more about are human emotions, how they're triggered, and just about them. 

For my What on Earth Evolved presentation, I think it went pretty well, I was short of time and I could've done better in terms of that but I feel as if everything else was pretty good. I didn't procrastinate on it and finished it in time and the presentation itself was no that bad; waiting to go up was more nerve wrecking if anything. To my TED talk, I'll definitely won't procrastinate on that either and I'll time myself better so that I reach/be inside the time limit. 

My Inner Fish Reflection

This video series was about how us humans evolved from being fish to what we are now. Though we might not exactly look like them, we share many characteristics with them. The first question I would like to elaborate more on is: "Even though we don’t look much like fish what are some things that we have in common with fish? How does this give evidence for common ancestry?". Our hands came from fish. There is a specific gene that starts the development of hands; this gene was found first in the fossil of a fish, thus we, who have hands, have evolved from fish. My question though is could there be an organism that had that gene earlier than fish? The second question I would like to elaborate more on is: ""How and why did hair first evolve?". At first, hair evolved as whiskers but later on they evolved all over the body, providing organisms with warmth. With this I also have my own question: What would've happen if hair were just whiskers and never evolved to cover our body?