Human Health

Given that our society operates as a democracy, it is of utmost importance for every member to vote. It is each citizens’ civic duty after all. Based on that principle, I would expect to see numbers supporting the claim that more people vote than those who do not. After looking into the voting rates published by the NSLVE, I was shocked to see that more people are not voting than those who do. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement(NSLVE) is an organization that collects data on each college campus regarding its voting participation. Here on my college campus, the rate of students who vote is significantly less than the national average for all institutions. Based on data from 2016, the average voting rate among all institutions was 50.4%; on the campus of Michigan Technological University, around 34.3% are voting. Even more shocking was that the registration rate was 62.3%, meaning that only half of the people who register to vote end up going through with the process...

Vance Cook 2-21-20 Growing up attending a public school can teach kids quite a lot regarding how they fit in related to other kids. There are many groups being formed, and kids are figuring out which groups they belong to. Some of the groups that I noticed were the athletic kids, the smart/nerdy kids, the art kids, and the farmer kids. Groups may be different based on where you grew up, and the culture in that area. Religion is another heavy influencer of group dynamics, and one that tends to encourage conformity and discourage outsiders. In this blog posting, I shall talk about my sociological experience growing up as a religious outsider in my community. I grew up in a town outside of Grand Rapids, MI. The town is called Hudsonville, a small town in between Grand Rapids and Holland. Grand Rapids is a medium sized city with close access to Lake Michigan. Early on, Grand Rapids was settled by a lot of dutch Christians, and that influence is still prevalent in the area today...

Within my hometown I had noticed that the students who had a forest, near their house tended to be more active, and enjoyed being outside more than the students who lived in the city or in a large subdivision. As a child, I was always outside playing in the woods in my backyard. I feel that growing up playing in the woods has led me to be more active than some of my peers who grew up in city/urban environments. This has led me to hypothesizing that living with easy access to forests will cause the surrounding population to be more active due to increased access to exercise activity.   Lewis County, Washington has an area of 6,309,842,400 feet^2. Of this land area, 51.96% is evergreen forest, 7.59% mixed forests, and 17.86 % is considered shrubs. Overall, this is considered a highly forested area when compared to other counties across America. King County, Washington is a similar size to Lewis County and is made up of 41.79% evergreen forest, 13.42% mixed forest, and 1...