Response to Matt's Post

I am responding to Matt's post about a speech on obesity.  Matt did a great job responding to this speech.  I agree with all of his ideas.  He did a great job grabbing the audience's attention with all of the staggering statistics.  I mean 1.5 million people dying because of obesity just during his tenure in college is eye opening.  Already, just through his introduction, I can tell this is a problem that needs to be changed.  The increasing calorie counts and unhealthy soda drink consumption is again crazy.  It just shows how bad our diets have become.  The CEO's and presidents of these fast food restaurants do realize that people eat all those healthy foods everyday, they just fail to realize it because it would hurt their profits.  They want to make people fat that way they continue to buy their products.  He does well to state many, many facts about obesity, as Matt had pointed out.  The two places I do disagree with Matt is his opinion on the stumbles on his words.  I think that he should have practiced his speech more.  This way he would have learned all of the vocabulary and would have known where his speech was going at all times.  I also think that he was very mono-tone.  He had no emotion in his voice until the very end with the death statistics.  I think he could have used much more emotion through out the speech to emphasize the points.  If he were to use emotion, he could have really emphasized the important points making it easier on the audience to find important things to take away from the speech.  Because he didn't use that much modulation of his voice, the audience must really listen incredibly intently to his points.  I agreed with Matt's thinking that the speech is very good over all. 

Demonstration Speech of how to make Pizza Burgers

I, of course love to eat, so I decided to watch a movie about how to make pizza burgers.  This was an interesting video to say the least.  I found it to be a poor speech.  The speaker did not make much eye contact at all.  He was either always looking at his speech on paper or looking up at the slides.  I think he could have done a better job of memorizing his speech and looking at his audience more, making more of a connection with them.  I also think that he was very quiet.  He did not seem to be projecting his voice much at all.  Just by the video we do not know the size of the room but he seems to be speaking very quietly.  He also uses many place holders like 'ummm' or 'welll'.  Normally these mean that the people do not know what is next in their speech and need to memorize it more.
There were a few positives that he did very well.  I did like his use of slides.  I think he chose good pictures that help demonstrate how to make his burgers.  I thought it was a good idea to show it step by step of what the burgers would look like.  I also thought he did a very good job of describing the steps.  He did well going into depth on how to put them together and how to make them.  I did like how he added that ingredients were all to taste and the variability in the ingredients.  The only step I thought he didn't do to great on was his step on browning the meat.  Many people have no idea how to brown hamburger and I think that he should have gone more in depth instead of just saying you put it in a pan and wait until its not pink anymore.   I thought it was an average speech overall.  He made a good product which makes it a better speech.


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The Great Debate over Assisted Suicide

In today's world there is a huge debate waging about whether or not physicians should be allowed to help patients with terminal diseases kill themselves.  Many people think this should not be allowed to happen because the doctors will begin to show serial-murderer type signs in the psychology.  People really believe that if doctors are allowed to help kill patients that they will start killing just for fun.  I believe this side is grossly misrepresented.  The doctor's are simply trying to help the patients escape their pain.  They are not trying to just kill for the fun of it.  I know of this conflict because I did a  presentation on in it senior year in high school.
I found a site that did a very good job of explaining all the pros and cons.  I only chose to look at the pros from this site.  I really believe that the strongest argument from this site is the saving of health care costs which would save estates and insurance premiums.  If a hospital has to keep a patient alive, they must pay for their food and all the tests necessary to keep that person alive, costing the hospital a large amount of money.  Some estimates put that cost at 50,000 to 100,000 dollars.  If they are insured, the insurance company must pay for that somehow.  Most of the time they will raise the premiums for other people.  If the patients are uninsured, the cost will just be imposed upon that person when they die in the form of repossession of property.  That will take away money and estate from that person's next generation.
Another site does well to show the ethical arguments against assisted suicide.  It shows that if assisted suicide was made legal that any person thinking that they were a burden on the family could commit suicide.  It says that they are vulnerable members of society and can be pressured to commit suicide if that option is there.  I know I wouldn't want to be under any pressure if I were forced to make a choice of that importance.