Geologic Timeline Individual Reflection

          In class, we made a scaled timeline of Earth's history from the creation of Earth to the present. Three major events that happened in Earth's history were the creation of Earth, the formation of life, and the evolution of humans. The creation of the Earth is important because that is when Earth is formed. That leads to all the changes that happened after that. The formation of life is important because that led to all of the evolution of life that led to the extreme diversity in life and changed the planet. The evolution of humans is important because they are the most advanced organisms that have developed technology that is changing the Earth to this day.

          The scale of Earth's history is very large. What surprised me the most was the length of some of the eras, especially the periods in Precambrian era. Also what surprised me was the large amount of evolution and speciation that occurred all throughout Earth's history. My thoughts on human's impact on the Earth in such a short amount of time is that it is hard to comprehend. We have just been on this planet for about 200,000 years and the Earth has changed dramatically, whether it is climate change, or the urbanization of the world.
Some questions I have are why are the Precambrian eras and periods extremely long compared to the Post-Cambrian eras and periods. Also, I wonder what led to all 5 of the mass extinctions that happened.

Forgetfulness Project Post 3

          My 20 time project is about how and why we forget. Also it is about figuring out how the human memory system works. What I have learned about my topic so far are the types of memory, what causes us to forget, theories of forgetting, memory retrieval, and types of short-term memory experiments. The types of memory are sensory, short-term (working), and long-term memory. Some examples of what causes us to forget are retrieval failure from the long-term and failure of encoding the memory into the long-term. Some theories of forgetting are the decay theory, the interference theory, the retrieval failure theory, and the cue-dependent theory. Memory retrieval is when a memory is brought from long-term to the working memory.

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         What I have learned about myself is that I have expanded my knowledge about this topic a lot since the beginning of my 20 time project. Back then, I didn't know that there were so many things that go on in forming memory and how it all works. When I started this project, I thought I was going to learn only about how people forget, but that has led me to how memory overall works, and that has made me realize many things about myself, such as my memory patterns and what sticks in my mind and what doesn't. I have used this information to help me remember more things, such as for tests and projects.
          Some setbacks that I have had were learning the information and then applying it in the experiment. Also, I had trouble with analyzing the data from the experiment and relating that information with the information that I had researched. However, I was able to eventually see why both the experiment's information and the research's information matched or didn't match and I was able to make my review and relate process better. The next steps are to conduct a couple more experiments to broaden my data and information to produce more concise and developed findings. Next is to collect and analyze the data into a concise and easy to understand way to present, which will also give me the ability to compare and contrast the data collected. What I can apply this to in school is by understanding how my memory works and how to take advantage of that to help me remember information for tests, quizzes, project, etc.

Unit 8 Reflection

          In this unit we learned about evolution. The themes and essential understandings were that evolution changes populations, not individuals, and what triggers evolution. Evolution occurs when there are different traits in a species, and the individuals who have the best trait to deal with what the environment pressures them with, then the individuals with the more favorable trait pass on their genes while the individuals with the less favorable genes die off and don't pass on their genes. Eventually, the population will look more like the individuals with the more favorable trait, meaning that the population has evolved. When a population's trait frequency changes, or its allele frequency for a particular trait changes, then it is said that the population has evolved.

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          We did two labs in this unit, the Bird Beak Lab and the Hunger Games Lab. In the bird beak lab, we observed different traits of bird beaks and we saw which phenotype did the best at collecting food. The birds with the better beak for collecting food survived and produced more offspring than the birds that didn't have a good beak to collect food. Eventually, the population of the birds became more and more like the birds with the better beak. The allele frequency of that beak phenotype increased in the population, while the others decreased, so the bird population evolved to have the better beak phenotype. In the Hunger Games Lab, we also observed different bird beaks and their abilities to collect food. Those whose beak allowed to get more food produced more offspring and survived, and those who didn't died off. From that data, we could see that the allele frequency shifted to a higher percentage of the better beak to collect food, which means that the population evolved that trait.

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         What I want to learn more about is how the traits that die off evolved in the first place, and what traits ended up surviving through natural selection all these years to make the present organisms and traits we see today. Also, I wonder about what traits and species died off over Earth's history and what caused those species and traits to die off. In the Unit 7 Reflection, I talked about my assertiveness and how I can improve and make it better. So far I feel I am assertive enough to tackle the jobs at hand. What I am doing well is that I am being assertive in the first place. What I need to do better is to be even more assertive, because I feel that I am being assertive in a passive way.