I have a lot of experience with background checks...

Before I launch into the assignment part of this blog, I'd like to take a moment and make it an actual blog.
When this class began and I found out there would be weekly blog entries, I was a little skeptical. This was simply because I had never made one before. Upon creating my blog and starting my first entry though, I found I liked it. This was a place where I could express myself, and I could do so a lot faster than in my journal. I enjoyed expressing my opinions and being passionate about something, such as my hometown. Those were good times.

But things have changed.

Blog assignments have gotten progressively more assignment-like, rather than blog-like. Naturally though, as students we comply with the requests of our teacher. Well, most of the time. In any case, I miss the old times, when the things we wrote applied to us as individuals rather than to our assignments. It's like there's no room for me in my own blog, not unless I take time out to make room, such as I'm doing now.

Well that felt good to write. And now for the assignment part.


For this blog I chose the article "Globalization and the Decline of the Welfare State in less-developed countries" by Nita Rudra. The research behind this article was ridiculously extensive, and certainly more than I was expecting. Somewhere in the vicinity of 95 sources were cited in the references section. I didn't get a good look at every single one for obvious reasons, but most of them that I checked were either from academic journals or government sources, or still others from UN and World Bank reports. From those sources I checked I can pretty easily infer that the information is very credible, given that it is backed by so many other professionals. I think that by using articles such as this one for my research, the information in my article will retain that same credibility. However, my research methods are not nearly as extensive as the particular example I used. I don't even want to think about using 95 sources at this level of scholarship.

Title Goes Here

Since the topic could be completely unrelated to our actual topic for our paper, I thought I'd find sources about the brain. So here we go.

The first source came from the Library of Congress. They have a Science Reference Services section made specifically for researchers. The particular source I chose was a literature guide intended for general readers, likely because it was so comprehensive. It covered brain divisions, anatomy, activities, and conditions of the brain. I consider it highly credible simply because it comes from the Library of Congress. Perhaps I should scrutinize more, but I think if I were actually researching I would do so.

The second source I found on the brain can be found on the "Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition" of EBSCO host. I figured this type of source would have some trouble finding articles on the brain because they are mostly reports on studies and therefore have more specific information. With that said, I chose an article on the brain's defense against cocaine. The authors of this article are Chandler L Judson and Peter W Kalivas. I consider this source pretty credible because it was originally published in nature, a credible journal, and was retrieved from EBSCO host.

For the least credible source, I turned to everyone's favorite place for general information, Wikipedia, thinking it would fit what I was looking for perfectly. So I went to Wikipedia, looked up the brain, and got an incredible wealth of information that would make you think it's a very credible source. However, given the obvious nature of Wikipedia and its lack of peer reviewing, I knew that its credibility could only go so far.

And that's that.