RJA #10a: Thesis Statement

Research Question:
Are art and music a vital part of brain development in children?
Precise Claim:
Art and music should be encouraged in children to aid in brain development and stimulation.
Reasons:
1) Music (especially classical) has been proven to stimulate brain activity and development.
2) Art is proven to stimulate certain areas of the brain that are crucial to brain development.
3) Both art and music provide children with special needs and learning disabilities an outlet to succeed in and also help them strengthen certain parts of their brain.
Thesis Statement:
Art and music are of vital importance to the development of a child's brain and to child development in general.

Internet Research Project

Name of Tool: Exalead....http://www.exalead.com/search/
Description: You can do a web search that will search the entire Web for information. Or, you can do an image search to search for photos, illustrations and icons.
Strengths: Produced pretty helpful results; liked the thumbnail feature;provides related topics and ways to narrow your topic on the right side of findings;provides results in many languages
Weaknesses: Lots of irrelevant sites, as with any other search tool...
Databases: web pages, images, videos, wikipedia, labs, baagz, blog, enterprise
Operators: the Exalead review that was provided for class states that the operators used are AND, Not, and OR, but when I tried using and, it brought up nothing, when I used +, it brought up over 1,200,000 results....so in my review, I say use + and - and your search will be much more effective
Case Sensitivity: none
Stop Words: "a", "the", "in" ignored unless in a phrase search
Advanced Search Function: provides a "Refine your Search" panel that you can use to make your search results more pertinent to the topic.
Limits: limits on language and country (though not many!), site, date available, and file type
Sorting: by relevance, like most sites
Display: text only, thumbnails of the site's homepage with a brief description, or thumbnails with detailed descriptions of the site
Help Function: FAQ and Feedback
Special Features: I would say the best special feature is the lists that are available on the right hand side of the results page that contain the related topics and links to help find blogs, etc that are related to your topic.

RJA #8c: Multimedia

videosurf
music+brain+development
Used +
10/12/2009
86 hits
Relevance, 2-3, helpful website overall I suppose....

RJA #8b: Social Media

Feedmil
music+child+development
Used +
10/12/2009
only 10 hits
Relevance, 0-1, very unhelpful
GlobeofBlogs
art+child+development
Used +
10/12/2009
? hits...did not say, far too many to count!
Relevance, 0...lots of stuff on children, none of it involving art

RJA #8a: Websites

Exalead
Art+brain+development
Just used +, turned up plenty of results
1,190,279 hits
Did search 10/11/2009
Relevance, maybe a two...not very helpful results...
Scour
music+brain+development
Just used +
22 hits
Did search 10/12/2009
Relevance, 4-5 for most of the hits, very helpful
WoW
art+brain+development
Tried using AND instead of + and it did not turn up anything...
1,019 hits
Did search 10/12/2009
Relevance, 1-2, some helpful, most not helpful
deepdyve
music and brain development in children
no operators needed
3,851,789 hits
Did search 10/12/2009
Relevance, 3, but it was frustrating because a lot of the sites were for great articles, but all of them required payment to view the full article...
Browsys
art+brain+development
Just used +
about 6,970,000 hits
Did search 10/12/2009
Relevance, 3-4, great finds, excited to look at more of them!