LJ7:genes and alternative medicines

Chapter 15 introduced us to heredity and disease.  I took an Intro to Genetics class last semester so I had a pretty good background going into this chapter. All the stuff about Genetic testing and Counseling was like repeat. I learned the most from chapter 20 on alternative medicines.  Some of the things I learned were about naturopathy and biomagnetic therapy.  Naturopathy is an alternative medicine that uses nutrition,herbs, massage, and other techniques to promote healing, while  biomagnetic therapy uses magnetic fields to treat pains,ailments and disease. Im sure there are many people who swear  by these alternative medicines.  In the discussions I was introduced to some information on acupuncture, and learned more about it by checking out a website.  I also learned more about dwarfism in the discussions.  That there are so many things that causes that one problem.

Some new vocabulary:

quackery :  promotion and sale of unapproved and worthless products,especially for medical problems and health enhancement.
homeopathy: an alternative medicine that administers very dilute solutions of substances that mimicthe patients symptoms
subluxation:  misalignment of a vertebra from its correct position.

LJ4: healthful Living chapeters 5 and 6

Chapter 5 really hit me hard and made me think of watching what I eat.  I by far have a terrible diet filled with junk food and fast food.  Between taking the realAge assessment for my project and reading Chapter 5 , that i should look into setting up a good nutrition planned based on my calorie intake need and guided by the food pyramid. pages 97-99 explaining and illustrating the food pyramid, and what should be consumed daily was nothing new to me,I just had always chose to say "who needs it".  After reading about fast food on pg. 121 in the text I have decided to cut that down as well, and hopefully cut down my risk of heart disease among other diseases from fat content.  Chapter 6 took it to a whole other step , and went into how to maintain a healthy wait.  I learned that Healthy weight is person specific, The BMI charts are more of a guideline that a concrete classification of people.  Everybody went nuts at work when they implemented a health program and had everybody find their BMI in the chart., It was borderline panic haha.  The media nowadays seems to put a high value on appearance and I think it directly leads to diseases associated with not being able to maintain a healthy weight such as anorexia.  I could never imagine what it's like getting caught up in what people thought of my outside appearance.  This site  http://familydoctor.org/online/famdocen/home/healthy.html  has links to things that can help you maintain healthy lifestyle. Found it to be very informational.

New terms :
 body dysmorphic disorder: a preoccupation with an imagined defect in one's body parts.
gamma irradiation: nonchemical method of food prevention
lacto-ovo vegetarian: one who excludes meats,poultry and fish , but includes eggs and dairy products.
phytochemicals: chemicals produced by plants.

Overall my participation in this module was okay, because of losing internet for a couple days, and not getting the chance to go elsewhere I kind of unfortuantely missed out on a better discussion. I continue to enjoy learning this new information about living healthy even though some of it is scary haha.

LJ3:Healthful living

Chapters 3 and 4 Covered Managing Stress and Mental Health respectively. Chapter 3 touched on the many factors that can cause stress, also known as stressors. I learned that something as simple as a homework assignment nearing a due date can cause stress.  Alot of the information on managing stress was quite new to me, such as the different coping mechanisms of emotion-focused coping and problem focused coping. I can now apply these things to my everyday life to manage my stress more effectively whenver it arises.  The whole section on college student stress was easy to relate to for obvious reasons.  There was so much information such as  ways to handle overload such as planning ahead and keeping to-do lists and time management suggestions such as avoiding multi-tasking and control interruptions.  Chapter 4 delved into the mental health aspect.  Alot of the content in the text was pretty straight forward and made sense.  I had heard the terms Coping strategies and defense mechanisms used before and this chapter furthered my understanding of them.  coping strategies are ways to deal with the emotional distress that comes from not having needs met. Defense Mechanisms are strategies used to distort the perception  and awareness of reality to avoid unpleasant thoughts.  I learned a lot more about the importance of sleep and how it helps your mind stay healthy along with helping your body recover from the stresses of daily life. The text goes in to ways you can get a good nights sleep such as establishing a regular sleeping time and winding down before going to bed. My participation in this module was much better and more involved due to me figuring out how to manage my 4 online classes which is a lot of work.  I continue to look forward to learning more when it comes to maintaining health. 

New Terms:
 General adaptation syndrome: A three-phase biological response to stress.

Agency: the belief that one can influence the nature and quality of one's life, rather than believing that one's fate is determined by reacting to circumstances not in one's control.

seasonal affective disorder:  depressive symptoms that appear in autumn or winter and remit sponatneously in the spring

self efficacy: the belief that one can carry out the actions to accomplish a goal.

LJ2: Intro to web technology

In this section of class I reinforced my knowledge of computer security. I knew some of the basics such as firewalls and antivirus protection but some of the facts about phishing and spyware were newer to me.  I had only heard the word phishing in browsing some websites. Now that I know that it is a somewhat hidden attempt to collect your personal information I can be more aware of it.  The mini game/quizzes were a great way to learn about internet security. The web lab on the different browsers gave me insight to other browsers that I may just begin to use.  I never knew that Opera and flock even existed, or that firefox was such a good alternative to Internet explorer.  This site --> http://raygen.info/blog/2010/01/13/firefox-vs-ie-vs-opera-vs-chrome/   , helped explain some of advantages and disadvantages of the different browsers. The answer to one of my biggest questions of the internet was about IP addresses, and that was answered in the material from this lesson.  After reading chapter 6, I now know that all the numbers with the dots between them mean. That each of them is an IP address that is specific to a different Domain Name. I enjoyed participating in the web labs, I found them a great way to learn important things. I feel I actively participated in this section, minus missing a quiz cause I lost track of the date, but other than that I plan on continuing to be eager to learn new things.  Some new terms I learned from this section are:

Biometrics: using devices to measure biological data to identify a user.

digital certificate:  electronically authenticates ano organization's or individual's identity

SmartScreen Filter:  when browsing the web, it works in the background, analyzing the pages you visit and looking for suspicious attributes that might indicate threats.

Data Switch:  an intelligent device that also interprets MAC addresses and filters and forwards packets to other network segments.

LJ entry 2: health and Wellness

      Over the couse of the reading from the text I have learned that there are many models, ideas, opinions on what being healthy constitutes.  I knew a lot of the physiological aspect of health and wellness, but not models such as the holistic and Environmental models.  Ive slso learned that there are no set definitions for helath and wellness, they are dynamic. In the case of the holistic model I got curious and checked out this site ------>  http://www.breathing.com/articles/holistic.htm    which compares the biomedical model verse the holistic model.  Also from reading the text i learned how much stress really does have an effect on the body, never knew that it could be so damaging.
      AS for my participation in this section, I am particular disappointed in myself that I didnt figure out how to balance my 4 online classes until a day ago. So my participation and work in this section has been minimum at best.  Now that I have an organized plan, I intend to fully participate and learn more and more as the semester progresses.
      A few new Vocabulary terms I came across that were new to me were :
holistic Model: encompassing the physiological,mental,emotional,social,spiritual,and environmental aspects of health.
Somatization: occurence of physical symptoms without any bodily disease or injury being present.
Mandala: an artistic,religious design used as an object of meditation.  
     I learned from Somatization that something as little as a stressful thought or social problem can cause physical symptoms without the presence of disease or injury, it makes you think twice about figuring out how to keep your stress level down.

    

LJ-1 Intro to web technology

Although I use the internet on a daily basis, I really learned quite a bit from the chapter 1 about the history of the internet.  I really had no idea that the prospect of an internet/network was thought about and started as early as the 1960's.  The first time i ever heard of ARPANET was when i read about it in our text and went through the introductory lesson.  Most of the other content, such as internet uses, email, http, etc  I am familiar with.  I can already tell that I will be learning some new things about the web and internet that I have'nt previously known. I look forward to broadening my horizons in Web Technology.

Some new word/acronyms that I hadn't previously known are:

Internet backbone- the main long-distance lines and the hardware that connect computers to the Internet.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol(HTTP)- a protocol that defines how HTML documents are transmitted to a browser.

Transmission Control Protocol(TCP)- provides flow control over the network and error checking for lost packets.

Internet Protocol(IP)- addresses and sends the packets.

I had never stopped to think about what the acronyms meant when coming across them in my web travels,I'm looking forward to the next section.

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