Panda Diplomacy and Other presentations

This week we had our first set of final presentations. I decided to do my presentation on "Panda Diplomacy" which is the gifting of the of Pandas by China for the purpose of heightening foreign relations. I thought that this would be a good topic for this course as it is an example of how a nationally and culturally important icon (the Panda) plays a role in conservation. Specifically the national conservation efforts through the creation of over 60 reserves meant just for Pandas. While I didn't include it in my presentation, I wanted to talk about how other animals, such as tigers, don't receive as much special attention by the Chinese government even though they are highly endangered. I also wanted to talk about the struggle between the environment and religion, as traditional medicines, which can involve the body parts of endangered animals leading to poaching, is still a multi-billion dollar industry.

Some of the other presentations I especially enjoyed were the presentation on solar panels and the presentation Nicole did on the oranges.

The solar panel presentation was interesting to me because he talked about how many people have had an aversion to solar panels not just because of their cost, but also for aesthetic reasons. To solve this problem, some companies have been cutting solar panels into solar panel art. The powerpoint included very interesting examples of this type of art.

Nicole did a short presentation of an experiment which she explained a few weeks ago. She cut an orange and passed it out to three different people with the instructions that one was to be yelled at and given negative energy, one was supposed to be told loving words and given positive energy, and one was supposed to be a control. I was really looking forward to seeing the results, but sadly, the person who took home the negative orange forgot to bring it to class, and only had a cell phone picture. While it seemed like the positive orange did a little better than the control, I would like to have seen the negative orange.