Should All Inmates Have the Right to Be Treated Fairly?

Imagine . . . It is 10:00 PM on a Friday night. You walk into a liquor store to get a night cap when a man in a ski mask barges in with a gun. The man points the gun at the clerk behind the counter demanding that he give him all the money in the cash register. The store clerk tries to fight back and gets shot. The robber jumps behind the counter and empties the cash register, and then he decides to rob everyone in the store as well. While he is gathering wallets and purses from the patrons in the liquor store, the police show up and arrest the man.

After the robber is handcuffed and placed in the police cruiser, the policemen start to take statements from everyone that was in the store at the time. They get to a middle aged man and ask him his name. Upon running his name through the system they find out that this man has a warrant for his arrest for non-payment of child support. Both men are taken to jail. Should they both be treated equally as criminals? Does one or the other, both, or neither, have the right to be treated fairly?

Copyright Laws: Are they important?

            Have you ever printed a copy of a photograph you found online? You could be guilty of a copyright infringement. The fact is that all work is automatically copyrighted whether it bares a copyright symbol (©) or not (Copyrightclear, 2010). There are many people that infringe upon copyright laws every day; some people are aware of it, and others just do not think about it. This essay will discuss some of the advantages and challenges of having such a broad spectrum of images available at our fingertips, some of the legal and ethical implications of using copyrighted images, and ways to avoid these issues. It will be shown that ignoring a copyright is a dangerous and unethical action.

            The main advantage of having all of the images available is to learn. Many people learn by seeing and looking up an image of something may be much easier and clearer to understand than reading a description. It is also a great way to see photographs of places in the world you may want to see but are unable to visit; or even to research different places to go for vacation. The author uses Google Images to show her children new things; for example her daughter asked last week “What is a cornucopia”, Krystal was able to look up an image and use it to help describe what it is and how it is used.

What is Visual Literacy?

            What is visual literacy? Well, it could depend on who you ask as it can be described in many ways. Yet, the common idea of visual literacy is comprehension of vision or images. This essay will look into the commonalities and differences of two definitions of visual literacy; that of Brian Kennedy of Dartmouth College, and of William Ryan of the University of Oregon. The essay will also go on to explain how visual literacy is universal and how it can impact communication and global understanding. Through this discussion it will be discovered that, no matter the specific definition, visual literacy is important to our daily lives.

            William Ryan wrote the CGD218 course text, Visual Literacy: Learning to See (2012), in it he describes the definition of visual literacy as “the competent creation and consumption of visual messages” (p.5, para.4). In Brian Kennedy’s video clip on YouTube, he goes on to describe visual literacy as the “ability to construct meaning from images . . . [it is a] form of critical thinking that enhances your intellectual capacity” (Dartmouth, 2010). Basically, these two definitions can be broken down to mean the same thing, using cognitive thought to understand visual elements. Although their requirements of how use visual literacy do differ slightly.