jenna tynan's blog

Well, as a college student, I'm always looking for a way to score a little extra cash.  Even though I'm affraid to enter into the stock market because it just seems like glorified gambling to me, I was wondering if anyone had any idea about a company that has been intriguing me since I moved to Ithaca.

Now that it's a regular thirty to forty degrees up here and our first snow is expected this Sunday, I see everyone walking around with their arctic gear.  Well, it's not just any old arctic gear, probably one out of every three people I see is wearing "The North Face."  We're talking jackets, and fleece pullovers, and winter boots, and hats, and gloves.  You name it, they got it.  I even remember seeing it around last year even when I lived in Florida.  Read More »

Alright, so I'm pretty sure that most of us have or at least have had a cell phone.  Now I'm not making any judgements but people around me are pretty obessed with their cell phones.  I myself turn mine off and use it only to call my mom to say good-night because when I carried it around with me, I became one of the masses with a cell phone attached to my head.

So why do we have this obsession with cell phones?  Well, some people think that it has become a new sign of prestige.  Whoever is the coolest will have the newest cell phone with the most up-to-date features.  Others say that cell phones grew out of the need for rapid communication in the emerging global economy.  All what I know is that one time, when I was walking with my friend, I had to call her to tell her our plans for the night because now the only way to communicate with her is through cell communication.  Now I know that experience is a little extreme, but I bet you guys probably have a similar story.  Read More »

Alright, so rich people live longer and poor people die earlier.  There are many studies that confirm this, but have you ever thought why this could be?  Well, many thoughts come to mind.  Maybe because people from a lower socio-economic status have less access to good affordable health care.  Maybe because poorer people live in neighborhoods with higher risks of physical and environmental hazards.  Well, one conclusion was that poorer people just participated in riskier behaviors attributing to their own earlier mortality.  Read More »

Alright, so I know there's a lot out there about the War in Iraq both positive and negative, but I'd like to pose the question if the Iraq population was better off under Sadam.  Well, looking at social variables and equality, one would say no.  You know, Sadam was considered a pretty oppressive leader.  However, when looking at the actual death tolls, the Iraq population was actually better off pre-invasion than post invasion.  Read More »

Well, there's a saying out there that crime doesn't pay.  Now, I'm not going to debate the validity of that statement (I myself support it) but I can definitely say that it costs us a lot of time, money, and stress.

Well, on September 13, 1994, President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law, authorizing the Attorney General to implement a six-year, 8.8 billion dollar grant program to enable state and local law enforcement agencies to hire 100,000 additional officers for community policing efforts.  Then Attorney General Janet Reno announced the establishment of the Office of the Community Oriented Policing Services in October 1994 to administer these grants.  Since then, the COPS prgoram has developed into a set of different federal greants that cost American taxpayers 7.5 billion dollars through the year 2000.  Read More »

In 2002, over 600,000 individuals left state and federal prisons.  According to a national study, however, within 3 years alomost 7 in 10 will have been rearrested and half will be back in prison, either for a new crime or for violating conditions of their release.  Released offenders are responsible for a large share of violent crime, proving that past approaches to correction and release have done little to prepare criminals for life outside of prison.  Read More »

Alright, so everyone who listens to the news every once in a while, or maybe tunes in to a presidential debate knows that health care costs are one of those buzz topics of the day.  Soon health care costs are projected to exceed 17% of our nation's GDP.  Think about it, for everything that everyone consumes, healthcare is nearly 1/5.  Now I'm not saying that the costs are incurred equally, of course certain people have more cost than others.  But for how high our nation's health care cost is, our actual level of health is pretty low.  We actually have one of the highest rates of infant mortality out of all developed countries.  So what has the administration proposed for these ballooning health care costs?  Read More »

So, as you can see, the Bush presidency was one that tried to focus on education such as the passing of the no child left behind act, and who can forget his state of the union address the beginning of this year (you know about the AP teachers, and science teachers etc.)  Anyway, one of Bush's proposals was a Merit pay Pilot Program for fiscal year 2006.  To fund this program, he proposed a 500 million dollar teacher incentive fund.  The house passed bill 3010 to provide for this fund but the senate has yet to pass a bill like this.  Read More »