Critical Thinking Gone Wrong

Double Standard For Olympic Swimmer

This story violates the rules of critical thinking by overgeneralizing and holding biases. 

This story is about Michael Phelps and the recent surfacing of a picture of him smoking marijuana at a party. Phelps is not being charged for the crime due to "lack of physical evidence," even though others in the investigation are being charged for possession. This presents a problem in critical thinking:

• Phelps is receiving a bias in the investigation in the sense that his fame status got him out of the penalty for his actions. Many think it is unfair that he receives "special circumstances" because he's a great olympic swimmer. There is a double standard there for him, and also the generalization that famous people get the easy way out. 
  

Research Challenge

A challenge I have been facing in my research is narrowing down the sources to use. I can use as many sources as I want, but when there's too many it gets confusing and cluttered. I have been going through the resource results on OPAC and picking the one's that will be most beneficial to my research. It seemed like when I went to the library and was looking at all of the books related to my topic, there was a lot more then was OPAC returned to me. I think I will spend some time looking through all of the books down there that relate to LGBT people. 

Research Project Progress Report

So far I have been working on finding resources for my research project. I have found various books that support my research, but have not put them in my Refworks account yet. I'm just working on gathering data and sources for my research. My next step is to go through all of the sources and organize the data I find to complete my research proposal. 

Library OPAC

The Great River Regional Library OPAC and the Miller Center OPAC are very similar. You could type in the keywords you want to search on the home page. The Great River OPAC returned fewer searches then Miller Center however. Both sites returned related information on the topics I searched for. I prefer using the Miller Center OPAC because it returned more books from my search.

Finding My Book

Finding a book on LGBT people in our library was an easy process for me. I used the keyword "LGBT people" and got numerous results. I went downstairs to find the book and found many more books that i could use in my research. This process was easy, and now that I know where the section of books is for my topic, I can access it easily to find more. 

Research Project

For the research project I decided to participate in the library. I didn't have time to join an organization so I will be researching the availability of resources for LGBT's in the library. I'm looking forward to seeing what the library has in regards to LGBT's and what else I can do for them!

One challenge that lies ahead of me is trying to keep up in all of my classes. I feel like I'm constantly running around, like a chicken with my head cut off! There's a lot of work involved in doing well in my classes, and I am feeling the pressure. I would never miss an assignment, but with the load I am taking I just might. I need to buckle down and focus on my studies more, but still keep my social life balanced. It should be an interesting journey!

~Sarah~