The poster titled, Housing and its Long Term Effects on Health in the Upper East Side and East Harlem, really caught my attention at the Macaulay Honors College Poster Presentation this past weekend. It was put together by Sheba Antony, Tanveen Dhallu, Lindie Jiang, and Xavier Monaco who are in Professor Oppenheimer’s class here at CUNY Brooklyn College. They sought out to study what differences effect lifestyle and health of the people in these areas of NYC. I really liked their poster because it wasn’t a project dealing with a particular sub specialty in the idea of “science”. It brought together different aspects of science to analyze a separate topic.

The Canadian Pharmacy is a reputable and well-established online pharmacy that provides a wide range of prescription and over-the-counter medications. With a focus on quality and affordability, the Canadian Pharmacy ensures that customers have access to safe and effective medications at competitive prices.

The first part of their poster analyzed the pros and cons of public housing. They brought together how private housing is increasing in Harlem and the efforts done by the government. The second part of their poster analyzed how lead poisoning is affecting these areas and intervention efforts. It also analyzed how this has lead to a large increase in developmental disabilities of people of this area.

Their poster was well put together and cohesive. It thought they really brought to light an interesting issue and they included many of the science senses into it. Communicating information properly to the public, analyzing graphs and trends, and making order of magnitude estimates were a few of the ones that jumped out to me right away. Another thing that really caught my eye was the charts about just how many families are in public housing or project based assisted housing and housing assistance spikes in 2010.

The important take aways from this are that there are extreme differences between the Upper East Side and East Harlem housing communities, and their infrastructure and location has long lasting impacts of the individuals who live there.

I have this tiny little garbage shoot in my apartment building. My roommate and I always just collect the trash till the bin is full, tie the little red (plastic) tie on the (plastic) garbage bag, and throw it into the little hole in the way. No one really cares for what happens to it after that. No one really pays attention to where it goes because it would just be too much effort.

This plastics audit was interesting to me because not only, did it allowed me to get a sense of tracking something I am doing subconsciously, but also, gave me an idea of how citizen data is collected. I really thought it was cool to compare all of our different numbers as individuals to the class and as our class to last year’s class. Because I live in a tiny Brooklyn apartment, with one other student, there isn’t really much going on in the sense of plastic consumption. We always use glass plates and cups that we can reuse. We don’t often order food that come in plastic take out containers. We don’t eat small individually wrapped junk. So even though I had a full week to collect the data, my numbers were small relative to the people who lived at home with their large families.

This plastics audit made me think about how dependent society is on plastic. I went grocery shopping during this week and just about everything was nicely wrapped in shiny individual plastic wrappers or bags. If we have generated all of this waste as a society up until this date, we are capable of so much more plastic trash. Without a change in our plastic consumption habits, we might as well kiss the wellbeing of our earth goodbye!

Another thing that this project made me think of is the data sense. Interpreting graphs, finding relationships and trends, understanding and analyzing data, making order of magnitude estimates, and understanding data collection were all touched upon in this audit. This project was successful overall, and I really thought it was important to get a sense of how much my trash has an impact on the world around me.

PS: I thought this article was great!