Review #1

Computer Applications

Section 1: Please put the paragraphs in order. Center the title and put it in small caps, put 4 points of space in between the title letters, and use a red underline. Next, find two pictures that work with the article. Make sure that the text is wrapped around the pictures.

Almost Without Hope

Seeking a Path to Health on the Rosebud Indian Reservation

9. I can only wonder: How did things get so bad out here in the middle of the windswept prairies, land of majestic sunsets and home to once-proud warriors? Is there any hope for the future?

5. Cursed with some of the highest suicide rates in the country, tribal leaders declared a state of emergency here back in 2007 making headlines in The New York Times. But today, six years later, not much has changed. Across the United States, American Indian and Alaska Native youth ages 15 to 24 are still committing suicide at rates three times the national average of 13 per 100,000 people for their age group, according to the U.S. surgeon general. On the Great Plains, the suicide rate for Native Americans is 10 times the national average. Unemployment hovers at 80 percent, and the life expectancy of 46 years is one year shorter than Haiti’s — 33 shorter than the U.S. average.

8. “These were all Sioux land from the Missouri River in South Dakota west through eastern Wyoming into southern Montana,” says Emery, referring to the wide swath of land that stretches across the northern Great Plains. Emery is a member of the Lakota Sioux. He worked as an Army medic for 17 years before returning home to his reservation and this hospital. The military has provided a way out of poverty for many here. “Lakota were nomadic tribes who followed the buffalo. Then the government put us in these desolate places. ‘We’ll take all this land in exchange for health care forever,’ they told my people. They just didn’t say what standard of health care that would be.”

10. I’ve found my way into this emergency room as a writer covering Stanford students in a class on rural health care and Native American health disparities. The course ends with a weeklong trip to the Rosebud Reservation, where students volunteer in the hospital.

1. In the emergency room of the Rosebud Indian Health Service Hospital, suicide attempts by drug overdose are seen nearly nightly. Alcohol-related car accident injuries fill many of the small hospital’s beds, competing for space with tuberculosis, pneumonia and liver and kidney failure. Diabetes is common, leading to loss of life and limb.

6. The ambulance arrives with the assault victim — a middle-aged Native American male with a blood alcohol content of 0.2 and a wide gash across his skull.

7. Someone attempted to choke him, then bashed him in the head with a piece of firewood. The patient before him was a 26-year-old woman and former meth addict suffering severe vaginal bleeding. The patient after him: a 2-year-old boy with a raging dental infection who will have to be helicoptered out to a hospital hundreds of miles away to get the care he needs.

3. “There are three ‘spiritual’ paths here: Native Lakota, Christian or alcoholism,” says Rick Emery, a physician assistant here for the past 13 years. He’s hunkered down in command central, a small office in the ER, awaiting the arrival of an assault victim. It’s late March — spring break for the local schools. Drug- and alcohol-related cases are up. The staff morale, down.

4. “Bath salts, meth, Sudafed, anything that’s cheap,” Emery says. His hair is gray, his kind face weathered. “It’s worse when school’s out, when kids on the reservation have nothing to do. We get young people, 17, 18 years old, coming in with chest pains.” Sometimes they’re drug-induced, sometimes not. The night before, a 16-year-old came in with a severe anxiety attack. The night before that, a 25-year-old male who had hung himself arrived too late to save.

2. The physical complications of poverty, joblessness and epidemic rates of alcoholism, diabetes and depression spill over into the wards here at the only hospital on the Rosebud Reservation, which has a population of 13,000 and stretches across 1,970 square miles of South Dakota prairie. Life is short, violence high and health care lacking in Todd County, the second poorest county in the nation.

Section 2: Correct all of the misspellings. Translate the last paragraph of this article into Spanish. Find the name Obama; format all of the names in a font of your choice, size 16, bold and italic, and blue color.

Obama's New Education Proposal: Change, or Changed Subject?

ByMatt Taibbi

POSTED: August 23, 4:00 PM ET

It's been a strage week in the histry of Barack Obama's presidency. On sunday, the NSA scandal exploded in one of the clumsiest political gaffes in recent memory, with British authorities (with American foreknowledge) snatching up Glenn Greenwald's brazilian partner David Miranda and preposterously detaning him at an airport for nine hours, citing a subsection of the West's increasingly dystopian, Matrix-like anti-terrorism laws.

By Tuesday, shameless pro-administration flacks like Jeffrey Toobin were going on TV and doing the dreary work of dirteing up Miranda in the press, comparing him to a drug mule and blsting critics who think the whole freedom-of-the-press thing confers "magic immunity sauce." Add in the indefensible 35-year sentence for Chelsea Manning, and there were progressivesfolowing this revolting national-security sory a few days ago who probably found themselves pining for the civil liberties panacea that was the Bush administration.

President Obama has a very difficult situation to face in the coming months. Think about it: on Monday and Tuesday, the Democratic Party was the face of a represive new global security state which improbabl had forced Vladimir Putin's Russia into the role of earth's symbolic defender of individual liberty, and in a miroring irony had turned journaists like Greenwald into the dissidentof our age, with Brazil the new Vermont and Greenwald's Guardian articles the new samizdat

But now it's friday, and what do we see in the news? Lots and lots of coverae of the President's sudenly urgent new road show around America's college campuses, where he's stumping for his "bold" new plan to tuition costs. Obama on Monday and Tuesday was Darth Vader; today, he's being feted in the New York Times for his ostentatiously progressive-sounding newplna to help the student demographic. From the Times editorial baord this morning:

President Obama has been acused of promoting small-ball ideas in his second term, but the proposal he unveiled on Thursday is a big one: using shapr federal pressure to make collegemore affordable, potentialy opening the gates of higher education to more families scared off by risng tuitions. While there are questions to be about his plan, his approach – tying federal student aid to the value of individual colleges – is a bold and important way to leverage the government's powre and get Washington off the sidelines.

The Times should have loked more closely at the fine print of obama's proposal, which in theory would create a govrenment rating system that would tie student aid to performnce (by both students and universities). The key number in it is a daet. This is from Time:

Obama will also Congressto tie those ratings to federal student aid by 2018. . .

One friend on the Hill laughingy called it "complete nonsence" and stresed the loose time frame, noting that we wont even know what the rating sytem looks like until 2015, and then nothing actualy happens until 2018. Which, conveniently, is two years after the President leaves office.

“The president's curent ‘Bus Tour’ is just another, agoniing, frustrating whitewash, to be blunt,” is how Alan Collinge of studentloanjustice.org, who was a key source in a featuerwe ran on this very topic (skyrocketing college costs) just last week. Collinge too was unimpresed by the “feckless” proposal that might “eventualy” be implemened. “The schools have come up against far stronger attempts to tie school performance to aid,” he said, “and they have redued them to soft oatmeal.”

The problem with this proosal, which is the problem with many of this President's proposals and speches, is that you just never kow. The plan he and his people came up with could, at least in theory, turn into something that significantly changes the landscape and helps reduce college costs. He could trun out to be right on this thig. But we most likely wont have a hint one way or another until next year at least, and we apparentlly won't know for sure until well into the seond year of the Cory Booker or Ted Cruz presidenc.

In the meantime, most mainstream critics will hold their tongeus and won't blast Obamas road show as a transparnet change-the-subject gambit designed to solidify his highly disilusioned base ahead of an approaching fiscal showdown. Few have even gone as far as Time did in making careful note of this crcuial context:

The roll-out comes in the midst of a weeks-long economic push by the President focused on iproving the stability of the middle class. Obama is mounting a public relatins effort that builds on his 2012 camaign themes in advance of a fical showdown with congressional Republicans this fall over the budget and the dbt limit. The White House is seeking to drive up the Prsident'sunderwater poll numbers before that confrontaton.

That this "bus tour" is political groundwork for the upcoming fisal battle was pretty clear from Obama's speech at the Univerity of Buffalo earlier this week, which incidentally got rave reviews inside the Beltway. In his opening remarks, the President set the tone for his educaion proposal by talking about the general challenge of turning around the dead mnufacturing economy (it can't be a coincience that they picked towns Buffalo and Scranton to present this education plan):

Section 3: Define a new bullet for the list below. Put the appropriate subscript and superscript in the chemical compounds and equations below.

The Most Amazing Places to Visit

  • Santorini, Greece
  • Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia
  • Glacier National Park, Montana
  • Nishinomaru Garden, Japan
  • The Subway, Zion National Park, Utah
  • Capilano Suspension Bridge, Vancouver
  • EileanDonan Castle, Scotland
  • The Gardens at Marqueyssac, France
  • Preachers Rock, Preikestolen, Norway
  • Mount Roraima, Venezuela

KNO3N2OC12H15N

a3+b3=(a+b)(a2-ab+b2)(a+b)3=a3+a2b+ab2+b3