Minutes Week 8

Minutes Week 8

Survey questions:

Our survey questions are designed to make the interviewee go through a step by step process to make sure we are able to find suitable questions to ask to based on the how much the interviewee knows about the topic we are asking on. However, we would also like to have a standard call of questions so that the interview would be a fair and successful one. Having this two types of interviews will allow us to find out how much the audience knows about GMO products, whether they are aware of and most importantly, whether they accept them or not. And lastly, after the interview, we will hopefully provide them more information on the effects of GMO on the condition where they are interested or not.

Example: 

-Do you know what GMO stands for and its definitions?

  ~Would you like to know more about GMO( so that you are able to answer the following questions)?

-Do you accept GMO products? Why?

-Do you think GMO products are safe for human consumption personally, setting aside the current information we have on GMO products?

-Do you check for labels for products whether they are genetically modified or not?

 ~Do you think it is important for companies to indicate whether it is a GMO product or not?

-Finishing up the survey, how often do you think you consume such GMO products?

Done by WaiYan.

Please ask teammates to approve. Then tell Mr Tan to accept so that can go out and interview people.

Minutes Week 7

Viva Planning

1. What makes a good oral presentation?
A good presentation would convey the message clearly to the audience. Hence, we must present in a clear, loud voice. As well as explaining what we are presenting and ourselves, know what we are saying. We should also further elaborate the things we presented so that the audience would understand better. We believe that we should talk in an interesting and attractive way in order to hold the audience's attention, hence they would fully get the message we are trying to convey to them. We should also have eye contact and have good body language.

2. What makes a poor presentation?
A poor presentation is a presentation where the audience hardly receives any information from the presenter, he also is not interested and attracted to the presentation. This would happen if the presenter talks in a monotonous voice, making the presentation sound long and boring. The presentation would also be poor if the presenter only talks about the results, not elaborating and explaining the results, why is the results like that? How did you get results? Is it accurate? Poor body language/eye contact, would also be the cause of a poor presentation because the audience would feel that we are not serious and do not respect the audience, hence they would also would not pay attention and the presentation would be pointless.

S/N	Content	Presenter	Time
1	Introduction	Ian	2 min
2	Approach & Method	WaiYan	2 min
3	Results & Analysis	Minh Tri	3 min
4	Conclusion & Possible Improvements	Ethan	2 min
5	Q&A	Everybody	1 min

Please elaborate more on the contents after getting results. Say what we want to say in each component.

Minutes Week 6

Survey Questions will be made by Minh Tri and WaiYan.

The interviewer will mainly be conducted by Ian.

The person who collates and assemble the results would be Ethan.

Minutes Week 5

Start Data Collection.

WaiYan please start making the survey questions. I, Minh Tri will go through it with the team and improve upon it. After our Data Collection we will start to collect our Data in Week 8 as written in the gantt chart.

2. Methods

Methods

2.1 Study Area

The study was carried out on the major supermarkets of Singapore:

• Sheng Siong
• FairPrice/NTUC
• Cold Storage
• Shop and Save

The study area is also middle-aged people and young people.

Singapore is a country that has no natural resources and most of the time, imports products from overseas, especially, GMO. These major supermarkets, where most Singaporeans buy food products(which includes GMO) from, can give a very accurate result on their opinion and attitudes towards GMO. Young people and middle-aged people can affect the future of Singapore the most, since they still have a long way to go, they have a very strong mind and can make their own decision whether GMO is worthy or not.

2.2 Data Collection

We will collect our data via 2 main sources. The internet - that aims young people. And the SuperMarkets - aiming towards middle-aged people.

On the internet, we would make survey questions and put them on Facebook, survey sites. One of our more area of focus for young people, would be the students of SST. We would put the survey link on the Facebook School Group. We would also try to make the survey public and make available to everyone in the internet. '
And from the internet, we can see how many young people have negative or positive reaction.
On the SuperMarkets, we would like to conduct physical surveys, interviews(same questions) to middle-aged people in the SuperMarkets stated above. We would also like to take videos of some interviews to see their reactions when they realize that what they are buying are GMO and what GMO actually is.
The same thing, we see the number of positive and negative reactions for the SuperMarket group and calculate the percentage. At the same time, uniquely to this physical survey, we also can find out the reason why they like/dislike GMO.
Finally, we will compare the percentage of negative and positive results between the middle aged and the young people.


2.3 Data Analysis

Based on the results, we can obvious infer whether the reaction is positive or negative. From the video, we can see the reaction and how bad, good it is. And from the inference of the results, we can actually know what to do when Singaporeans complain about GMO.

Draft 2: Literature Review by Htet Wai Yan Linn

In this article, editor Deborah B. Whitman highlighted important pointers on GMO related issues regarding human health and environmental concerns. He started off the topic with an overview on whether GMO products are safe or not."European environmental organizations and public interest groups have been actively protesting against GM foods for months,"(Deborah, 2000) This tiny quotation shows that overseas, people are already rejecting GMOs and this gives us a hint that some Singaporeans might also reject it. 

Starting up the topic on GMO, he started off the article with the definition of GMO. “The term GM foods or GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) is most commonly used to refer to crop plants created for human or animal consumption using the latest molecular biology techniques.” (Deborah , 2000)This pointer would definitely benefit us when we try to make the public understand what GMO means.

Next, he stated the advantages of GMO products to make us understand the GMO products' , allowing us to carefully examine GMO products to use them effectively. He reported that the world population had topped 6 billion people and is predicted to double in the next 50 years. This piece of information shows that ensuring an adequate food supply would be a major challenge in the years to come, however, he also mentioned that GMO products would meet these needs in a number of ways- pest resistance, herbicide tolerance, disease resistance, cold tolerance, drought tolerance/ salinity tolerance, nutrition, pharmaceuticals and phytoremediation.

However, he also highlighted the criticisms against GMO products to maintain balance on the amount of information on the advantages and disadvantages so that the readers could make a fair comparison."Environmental activists, religious organizations, public interest groups, professional associations and other scientists and government officials have all raised concerns about GM foods, and criticized agribusiness for pursuing profit without concern for potential hazards, and the government for failing to exercise adequate regulatory oversight."(Deborah, 2000). This long sentence give us a hint that there are also a lot of people who turns down GMO products. The article also reports that most concerns about GMO products fall into three categories: environmental hazards, human health risks and economic concerns. 

He also opened up a sub-topic on the prevalence of GM crops and the plants involved. This sub-topic states the 13 countries adopting to GM crops and the plants which has been genetically modified. It is also reported that the acreage of GM crops have increased 25 folds, means the more and more food on the shelves of supermarkets have been genetically modified and this serves as a reminder to the people who have an issue with GMO products.

Lastly, he talked about how GMO products are regulated and also the question of how GMO products are labelled. Deborah reported that due to the political, social and economic climates in different countries, different governments are having their own individual different regulatory process without an universal one. This goes to show that GMO products are lacking a standard regulatory process and is something worth raising an issue on. Moving back to the part on how GMO products are labelled, it is stated in the article that an international trade agreement for labeling GMO products was established in January 2000. This gives us more information on helping the public find out which of the products on a supermarket shelve is genetically modified and which is not, which is in turn a great help to worried consumers.