Author: scarletthief

Polio Notes – scarletthief

  • Polio requires polio vaccination between 0-5 years old because their immune systems aren’t strong enough to fight the disease.
  • Children tend to get polio easier than adults because they are “sloppy with poop” (they tend to put their unsanitary hands (maybe feet) in their mouths often) making them more likely to get polio.
  • Polio introduced through mouth and rests in the intestines so the disease is spread virally.
  • Polio can spread through flies that landed on feces that land on people’s food.
  • Used to be a global problem, about 1,000 children a day would be diagnosed with polio, now fewer than 200 cases of polio in the world are diagnosed, therefore we are doing better at preventing the spread of polio.
  • Vaccines eradicate about 90% of polio on the planet since the 70’s and 80’s so getting the vaccine is the first step to the eradication of Polio.
  • Polio only lives in humans, nothing else (dies easily outside the body) so once it is gone, polio will never return.
  • Takes desire, resources, etc. to have ALL infants vaccinated/ immunized, which is why it is VERY difficult to eradicate polio completely.
  • It is extremely hard to further eradication during wars, in refugee camps, or during any armed conflicts because it hinders the chance to have every child immunized due to distrust, the lack of importance, and/or records being lost.
  • About 600 thousand villages, 147 million children in India were vaccinated in a single day during those “one day efforts,” allowing many to have a definite day for their first vaccine and will be able to easily follow up on the next 2 they must take. Also, shows how beneficial of having “one day efforts.”
  • Difficult to eradicate polio due to less than 100% cooperation from populace who think herd immunity will protect them from the disease.
  • When polio hasn’t been seen in a while, we get lazy and stop focussing on getting the drops for polio, therefore allowing polio to grow and spread to unvaccinated people.

Write a lead (thesis) immediately in the opening. Your POV as soon as you can.

The eradication of polio is highly difficult, but not impossible. The first step to removing polio from the world would be for every single person in the world to start caring about polio. Many assume they are protected or that they will never get the disease since no one around them has polio, but this “herd immunity” could very well lead to everyone easily catching polio once one person does get infected. Attention must be brought to polio because it is still out there in the world, and though it may not be on our front door today, it can very well be tomorrow. When people begin to care, look past their distrust of the vaccine and of the drug administrators, and truly believe and put in the effort to end polio is when polio will truly be eradicated from our world.

 

Missing Dollar – scarletthief

The dollar is not missing. The prompt from the first and second paragraph make complete sense, but the third paragraph causes the confusion on if there is a missing dollar. With the change of the $30 the women gave being $5 since they only had to pay $25, is not evenly taken from each women. The most even split that can be made would be if two women had $2 taken from their $10 and $1 taken from the third woman. Now the third paragraph as I said is what causes the confusion of the “missing” dollar. Each woman did in a way pay $9 each at the end, but as mentioned the split isn’t even so it can’t be considered $9 multiplied by 3 is $27 with a missing dollar in the end. Basically, there isn’t a missing dollar since the waiter took the extra dollars from two of the women (when the split is 2:2:1 as I mentioned) and gave $1 back to each women equaling $5 total.

Visual Rewrite – scarletthief

 Your Son’s Messed Up Haircut

0:01

When the Ad begins the audience is shown a young African American teenager with a light mustache getting a haircut by an African American woman in the middle of a kitchen in the day time. The small kitchen does not contain updated appliances as seen by the small white fridge and the beige oven on the left of the screen; it is nicely cleaned except for the table in the foreground with two mirrors, a comb, a spray bottle, and a rag or towel. From the size of the kitchen, we can assume the house is similarly small and the family is middle class, possibly low middle class. The young man  is wearing a clean t-shirt and jeans with a bored expression on his face. However these clothing choices can let us assume several points. One is that the teen is not wearing brand name clothes, signifying either the lack of extra income of his parents or a lack income he may get from his parents as allowance to buy expensive products. Of course, on a less serious note, he may just not like wearing clothes from Hollister or Ralph Lauren polo tees, or finds spending money on such clothes unnecessary for contentment.

The boredom we can see on the young man’s face may be due to getting his haircut by the woman being a frequent occurrence. Having his hair cut at home frequently by the woman, who is possibly his mother, signifies the family’s thriftiness since they choose not to spend money on getting their hair professionally done. He is sitting on a chair with a towel partially covering his upper torso while the woman is focusing on the back of his hair with the shaver in her right hand. She also is in clean casual clothes, appropriate for being at home.

0:02-0:06

The woman uses the shaver, but immediately following the cut her eyes widen and an openmouthed frown appears on her face. She doesn’t curl her body into herself, so she doesn’t fear a violent reaction from the boy for her mistake. Her body instead backs up slightly from the surprise of her actions. This signifies a mishap in the haircut where she must have messed up and either cut to much or shaved the area completely.

0:07-0:08

The woman, who is confirmed to be his mother after what the young man says (based on the one syllable word we can discern from the video), leans closer to study the area she shaved as if in disbelief that she had made such a mistake. Her close examination can also signify her concern for her son’s well being. What good mother would want their son to have a bad haircut? The son, noticing something went wrong, shifts his eyes upward  with a propped up eyebrow and asks, “Mom?” and the text, “(A) Try to fix it,” appears on the screen. The boy does not make a fuss from what can be observed during these two seconds. He neither throws a tantrum nor reacts negatively to her mistake. The lack of a negative reaction means he doesn’t have violent tendencies when faced with problems and isn’t quick to anger when something doesn’t go his way. If he had a bad family life, he could very well be a temperamental and violent young man instead of the calm and quizzical young man we see in the video.

0:09-0:10

The camera moves to the back left of his head where the spot the mom shaved is now shown to the audience. The young man is holding a mirror  with his right hand to see his haircut. What is revealed is all but a single patch of hair in the middle of the shaved square. But how can he see the spot if we the audience only see his face in the mirror he is holding?

0:11-0:12

The camera returns to the front of the scene. The mother is seen to be holding a mirror behind her son’s head to help him see the spot. She is holding her hand up in a placating manner with wide eyes and saying something similar to “Like it never happened” at 8 seconds where the text said, “Try to fix it.” Even when he sees the “damage” he doesn’t react in a negative fashion and instead is quietly studying the spot. While the placating manner in which she holds her hand could mean the boy may react negatively, the audience sees this action more comedically as the small patch of hair in the middle of the bald spot makes a funny picture. No tension is found in this scene.

0:13-0:14

The mom is the only one in this close up camera shot with the text on the screen saying, “(B) Work with what you’ve got.” The mother may have shaved more of the hair to hide the mistake she made. The camera angle is meant for the unveiling of the haircut to be more surprising. Instead of trying to fix it, she chose to work with what she got.

0:15-0:17

The mother nods her head with a satisfied looked on her face as the camera shifts to the side of the son’s head. The haircut resembles a lizard lying on the middle of his head with the feet of the lizard on the side and the tail down the back of his head. The messed up hair cut is no longer obvious as she used her mistake to make an interesting haircut. Again he only studies the cut calmly, not appearing to hate the unique cut.

0:18-0:20

The scene moves to the family room of the house based on the sitting area and the television. The father and little brother of the young man sit with their backs to the camera on a teal couch. The young man has a smile on his face while looking at his family and another text is seen at the bottom of the screen, “(C) Show solidarity.” The father and brother are looking toward the young man, and probably smiling back at him since he is smiling. The family is a healthy and happy family from what we can observe. They seem to enjoy each other’s presence since they are all in the same room. Did they all get the lizard haircut? It doesn’t look like it because the son’s hair in this scene is not in the odd lizard cut and the brother and father do not have the lizard cut which would be obvious since their back is to the camera. So what haircut did they all get that makes them the same?

0:21-0:22

As the mom entered the camera, the whole family turns their head and a bald patch is revealed on the side of their head similar to the son’s bald patch at the beginning of the video. The brother and father shaved their head similar to his in order to keep him from feeling like the odd one out, reminding me of when families shave their head if one of the family members has cancer and goes through chemotherapy because of the hair loss from the treatment. She did not “Try to fix it” or “Work with what (she) got.” Everyone is all smiles and the atmosphere is light.

0:23-0:25

The final scene contains the mother finishing up the haircut as he holds the mirror to see the final cut. The mom went with “B) Work with you’ve got,” and shaved his hair in a less unique (not lizard), but nicely done, haircut as seen by the smiles on both of their faces. The mother wraps her arms around his shoulders and tightens her hug as he says “Thanks Mom.”

The final text on the screen says, “You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent,” and the logo for AdoptUSKids. She messed up, but the familial love between the mother and son and the entire family can be seen in the video. We, as the audience, couldn’t even tell the young man was adopted. He never feared asking if something was wrong in the first few seconds, or feared the mother’s reaction to his reactions. The brother and father also treated him as if they were blood relatives as seen by their support for the odd bald spot if they chose option “C) Show solidarity.” The mother’s hug further supports our observation that she really and truly loves him. The meaningful squeeze after the initial hug is often used to show support and care for  the person being hugged.

0:26-0:31

At the end, we learn that the ad is promoting adoption of children and based on the final quote, “You don’t have to be perfect to be a parent,” is hoping to encourage parents who may be afraid they won’t be good parents and role models to their child. The fear of doing something wrong is normal, but because of the mother’s haircut disaster, something fun always came out of the disaster no matter the choice the mom and the family made. Either the lizard hair or the whole family supporting the son by having their own bald spots shaved on their heads were fun choices the mom could have made. The ad wants the public to see that adoption can lead to fun memories and days full of love and happiness and that you don’t have to be related by blood to feel like a family.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hG5_0D8BDA

Open Strong – scarletthief

Self-identification of race encounters more opposition than self-identification of gender in America. We easily accepted Bruce Jenner identifying as a woman in 2015, but shunned Rachel Dolezal, a Caucasian-born woman, for identifying as African-American in that same year. Half of the Millennial generation acknowledge the idea that “gender is a spectrum” instead of just male or female; cities and public establishments have created no-gender ID cards and bathrooms to accommodate for all genders. So what makes choosing our race so different? One example would be that there are benefits to being a certain race, such as earning college scholarships by identifying as African-American. Many see this as unfair to real African-Americans who are eligible to the scholarships – no scholarship means no education. America separates race as White (non-hispanic), African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Alaskan Native, and bi- and multiracial and we are expected to choose our race when filling out applications and censuses. But if others don’t agree with our choice, then what race are we?

Proposal+5 – scarletthief

For my research essay I will be examining the difficulty to accept people identifying as a different race, when it is accepted in society today to claim a different gender from your biological one. In 2015, former Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner officially identified as a woman and was applauded for this announcement. She was accepted as a popular transgender woman, but when others identified as a different race they weren’t accepted. Also in 2015, the former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Rachel Dolezal was revealed to not be biologically black. She “identifies” as black, but just identifying as a race doesn’t make you a race. Or does it? If Caitlyn Jenner can be a woman, why can’t Rachel Dolezal be black?

America separates race as White (non-hispanic), African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Alaskan Native, and bi- and multiracial. When check marking a box for who we identify as there is even an option for “other,” and we are expected to pick our biological race rather than what we identify as. Gender used to be: Female or Male, but gender today isn’t as defined. A male can claim to be female, or vice versa, or even gender fluid, but know that whatever they claim is accepted and respected. What makes gender identification more acceptable than race identification? Being born into a white family means you must also be white, but there are cases of adoption to consider. If a they were born Asian, but adopted into a white family, are they still Asian? Also, the benefits of claiming to be a certain race, such as applying for colleges and scholarships, make many disagree with the freedom to claim one’s race. This problem is confounding yet should be able to be answered as easily as a person’s gender.

1.The Transracial Adoption Paradox

The Essential Content: This article is about how by being adopted into a white family causes others to treat the adopted child of different race as if they are also white. Despite the “white privilege” Janine Bishop received as a Korean adoptee into a white family, she truly considered herself to be Korean, yet society categorized her as White because she has been Americanized and raised by her white parents. Transracial is usually described by domestic interracial adoption or international adoption. Transracial adoptees tend to show more variability in their racial/ethnic identities. Racial identities in transracial adoptees tend to vary due to age, race, and geography. Prejudice and discrimination during adolescence and adulthood cause their choice of racial identity to change whether it’s due to pride, discomfort or other wise.

What it Proves: I can use this article to explain the complications of choosing a specific race with the transracial adoption example presented in the article. At one point in their lives, participants mentioned in the studies of the article had claimed to be white at one point, yet  changed their answer to their biological race in adulthood. The identity they chose was what they thought their race was at the time, but as seen, it can change for multiple reasons, such as discrimination or a growing pride in ones biological ethnicity.

2.Being Blackish: Race and Self-Identification

The Essential Content: Ethnic and racial classifications aren’t definite, but exist due to social conditions. All races have some example of changing or enhancing their appearance to look like another race, yet it is unacceptable for a woman like Rachel Dolezal to perm her hair and have a dark tan to appear black. Another example is how in the documentary Somewhere Between four Chinese adopted girls all felt white, but were considered to still be Chinese and were discriminated against for being Chinese. There is further personal information about Rachel Dolezal, her family especially in this article such as her having 4 adopted African American brothers.

What it Proves: I can use this article to help explain how race, like gender, can be a choice rather than a category. This article contains information that exhibits how adoption can create racial identity crisis.

3.Half of young people believe gender isn’t limited to male and female

The Essential Content: 1000 people from the ages 18-34 were surveyed to chose which category of gender recognition they believe in: Gender can only be male and female, Gender is a spectrum, or I don’t know. Half of them said that gender is a spectrum and believed in there being more than just the binary idea of gender. There are also ID cards in some cities like San Fransisco that have no specified gender.

What it Proves: I can use this article to show how supporting Americans, especially the current generation, is accepting of multiple genders and how society is making exceptions for people that don’t fall in the binary (male/female) categories. Society is willing to make ID cards for transgendered or otherwise people, so they should also be able to accept and support transracial citizens too.

4.Genetically white woman now claims self-identify as black: If you can choose your gender, can you also choose your race?

The Essential Content: Claiming race can create problems when applying for scholarships. Whites can identify as African-Americans in order to  apply for a scholarship since there isn’t a need for genetic testing to ensure you are black if anyone is allowed to identify as whatever race they choose to identify as. This denies actually African-Americans from getting the scholarships they need to further their education.

What it Proves: This article provides evidence of negatives to allowing people to identify as the race they choose.

5.Race and Ethnicity confusion

The Essential Content: Most Americans have multiple racial and ethnic origins that over generations of possible interracial marrying, ancestry becomes less important as family trees begin to include more than just one race. One example mentioned is that many whites are multiracial, but often times they choose their ancestry or race based on a favored cuisine or culture. There are also times when people tend to act “color blind” and not separate people based on races because they want to avoid using race as a descriptive factor.

What it Proves: I can use this article to support how racial origins in America aren’t just separated into white, black, asian, or etc. but is more complex. Why should identifying as a specific race or races be so important that a person is denied being black because they’re biologically white when a white person can claim to be German or Irish if they feel like it. There is no difference in claiming one race from multiple and claiming to be a race is what this article can help explain.

 

E03: Critical Reading – scarletthief

“Caleb has been home since 2006, way more than enough time for Brannan to catch his symptoms.”

  • The word “catch” signifies that Brannan was infected by Caleb, but when catch is usually used in this context, the form of infection is usually due to bacteria, viruses, fungi, and/or parasites from the infected.
  • The article was published in 2013, so the author is stating that in 7 years “catching” PTSD is definite when 7 years is “way more than enough time for Brannan to catch his symptoms.”

“This PTSD picture is worse than some, but much better, Brannan knows, than those that have devolved into drug addiction and rehab stints and relapses.”

  • How does Brannan know how her situation compares to other wives’ and families’ situations? And how many have “devolved into drug addiction and rehab stints and relapses?” The number of veterans who have “devolved” into situations that Brannan claims are worse than her family’s is not mentioned, so we are left wondering if there is a large number of these veterans, or a small number.

“She has not, unlike military wives she advises, ever been beat up.Nor jumped out of her own bed when she got touched in the middle of the night for fear of being raped, again. Still.”

  • Brannan claims that all the military wives she has advised have been beat up and raped by their husbands who suffer from PTSD.

“Trauma is a contagious disease; it affects everyone that has close contact with a traumatized person” in some form or another, to varying degrees and for different lengths of time.

  • Definition claim: “Trauma is a contagious disease.”

“She sleeps a maximum of five hours a night, keeps herself going with fast food and energy drinks, gets Katie to and from school and to tap dance and art, where Katie produces some startlingly impressive canvases, bright swirling shapes bisected by and intersected with other swaths of color, bold, intricate. That’s typical parent stuff, but Brannan also keeps Caleb on his regimen of 12 pills—antidepressants, anti-anxiety, sleep aids, pain meds, nerve meds, stomach meds—plus weekly therapy, and sometimes weekly physical therapy for a cartilage-lacking knee and the several disintegrating disks in his spine, products of the degenerative joint disease lots of guys are coming back with maybe from enduring all the bomb blasts, and speech therapy for the TBI, and continuing tests for a cyst in his chest and his 48-percent-functional lungs.”

  • Brannan has only slept for at most 5 hours for reasons unexplained. Nightmares? Screams from her husband? Screams from her daughter, Katie? We are not informed.
  • Her daughter is surprisingly a very good 6 year old artist who paints with many colors and creates detailed and complicated designs. As 6 years old.
  • Sleeping a maximum of 5 hours per night, eating fast food, drinking energy drinks, and driving her child to her activities is what the “typical” parent does.
  • Caleb has 12 pills he must take regularly for depression, anxiety, insomnia, and pain.
  • He attends therapy and sometimes physical therapy once a week due to his time serving in the infantry.
  • Who and how many are the “lots of guys” coming back with the degenerative joint disease that Caleb has? Are they infantry like Caleb? Navy or Airforce? Are the “lots of guys” only the ones who have been in the front lines fighting or including the other veterans who have been stationed to aid rather than fight?
  • Caleb’s lungs are only about half functioning which makes doing many activities very difficult, especially yelling (which he does frequently, as mentioned in the article numerous times) and physical activities very demanding on his body.

She also works for the VA now, essentially, having been—after a good deal more complicated paperwork, visits, and assessments—enrolled in its new caregiver program, which can pay spouses or other family members of disabled vets who have to take care of them full time, in Brannan’s case $400 a week.

  • “Which can” makes me think that the caregiver program “can” also not pay the spouses. The author should just write “which pays” and remove the “can” because it is almost as if it can aid family members in other ways and not pay them.
  • “In Brannan’s case $400 a week” – Brannan is paid $400 a week because that is the how much she needs to care for her veteran husband who is a recluse at home and in need of medication and medical care. Another worker for the VA could be paid a different amount a week depending on their situation.

“It may take years for the verdict to come in on whether secondary trauma will be officially acknowledged as its own unique form of hell. Meanwhile, Hofstra professor Motta says, while “a simple Google search [of the research] would tell you that the children of traumatized people have problems, the VA doesn’t wanna spend the money. Even with veterans, they try to say, ‘Well, you really had a preexisting condition.’ It would cost millions upon millions to treat the people affected. They just don’t want to foot the bill.”

  • The VA doesn’t want to spend money to help in the aid of veterans or their families, and specifically for the veterans they say the veteran had a problem before serving so their trauma was not due to their time serving.

“Lost wages. Nonprofit assistance, outreach, social services. There are an estimated 100,000 homeless vets on the street on any given night.”

  • There are around 100,000 homeless veterans due to not getting aid (financial or otherwise).

“When Caleb checked into his VA inpatient therapy in 2010, more than two-thirds of his fellow patients were veterans of Vietnam.”

  • The number of “fellow patients” is not mentioned. More than 2/3 is easily achieved with 3 out 4 patients being veterans of Vietnam. There may also be 21 out of 30 patients being veterans of Vietnam since 21/30 is more than 2/3.

Stone Money Rewrite – scarletthief

The Illusion of Money

Money. One word with countless definitions. To understand the concept of money, I searched the internet and came upon the article by Adriene Hill, “Money: The Myth We All Believe in.” In the article, psychologist Adam Waytz said, “Money is a shared illusion.” Money is not a physical paper or metal, but a pure and dedicated belief in an object with no real value other than the value of what others believe it to be. If every citizen in the United States thought buttons or sea shells had monetary value, then the use those objects would become our currency. To a seven-year-old, the colorful Monopoly game hundred dollar bill could have the same value as a real hundred dollar bill if that was what his parents made him think. In reality, that child couldn’t use the Monopoly money to buy their favorite candy from the dollar store because Monopoly currency isn’t excepted as “real” money to the cashier ringing up the treats. Literally anything can be money if everyone thinks it has monetary value.

Take for instance, the natives of the island Yap mentioned in Friedman’s essay “The Island of Stone Money.” While here in the United States we make our deals and purchases with paper money and copper pennies, the Yaps use large, carved limestone wheels called fei as their physical money. The fei is an immovable stone where its owner can change with only an agreement between two inhabitants of the island of Yap basically states, “It’s yours now” and the other responds with, “I own it.” In the essay, Friedman mentioned how a family’s wealth is “acknowledged by every one” despite the fact that no has seen the fei that makes the family as wealthy as it is. How can anyone, let alone everyone, believe that the family owns some stone only seen by the family’s ancestor and his expedition crew? It is only because they believe that the stone exists that the stone has value. The “illusion” that a carved piece of stone, seen or not seen, has value because everyone says it does is baffling, but they’re not the only ones in the world with this view on money.

Similar to the Yaps, the United States relies on the customers of banks and business to believe in what we call credit. Today, many U.S. citizens use credit to purchase items despite the only evidence of one having “money” is a plastic card, maybe containing a chip, that according to the bank has a value of so-and-so dollars.  We neither see the money that is acknowledged as ours by the bank and the establishments we use the credit to buy merchandise from nor move the money physically because we trust that the credit will move from the bank to our account to the establishment through virtual means. The only difference to the Yaps is that we have a third party involved, a.k.a. the bank, during agreements of “I own this, now you own this.”

As I mentioned previously, the value of money is due to the pure and dedicated belief that the currency used is real. My point is further proven by NPR’s article about Brazil’s currency change from cruzeiros to reals. In the beginning, Brazil suffered from inflation that made the cost of items in cruzeiros increase day after day. Brazilians lost faith in the cruzeiro’s value. The government then introduced a virtual price, URV, that had the price f items remain at a constant price unlike the ever-changing prices in cruzeiro. Overtime, the URV was trusted and believed in more than the cruzeiros, thus leading to the end of the cruzeiro and the beginning of the Brazilian real. The real was only able to be made the new currency because of the collective thought that this currency was better than the old cruzeiro currency. Money is valued only by how much everyone believes in the currency as seen by how the Brazilian cruzeiro became obsolete when a better looking, new currency was introduced.

The German government, as mentioned in “Bitcoin Recognized by Germany as ‘private money'” on CNBC, planned to have Bitcoin potentially become the new currency if the faith in the euro decreases like it did for the Brazilian cruzeiro. Bitcoin is more similar to the Yap islanders’ money exchange because of the lack of the middle man, the bank, and how the lack of physical evidence does not affect the value of the Bitcoin, since it is purely an electronic currency. This raises the questions, Is this real money? Is there any value? All I can say, is that the value of the Bitcoin will be what the people of Germany and the world will believe it to be. ((((((need to add Clinch in this paragraph))))))))

Physical money can be paper, metal, or stone, but the true value of money depends on the thoughts and beliefs of the people who use it.

Works Cited 

  • Clinch, Matt. “Bitcoin Recognized by Germany as ‘private money'” CNBC. CNBC, 21 Aug. 2013. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.
  • Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” (n.d.): n. pag. The Hoover Institution, Feb. 1991. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.
  • Hill, Adriene. “Money: The Myth We All Believe in.” Money: The Myth We All Believe in. Marketplace, 12 July 2013. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.
  • “How Fake Money Saved Brazil.” NPR. NPR, 4 Oct. 2010. Web. 14 Sept. 2016.

Summaries – scarletthief

Surviving the shower – That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer

It seems counterintuitive that simple chores and seemingly harmless everyday acts, such as showering, could be seen as hazardous and life threatening, but it’s the little things that may one day do us in.

The natives of New Guinea acknowledge how low risks can lead to death and act accordingly by sleeping in clear fields away from dead trees which can fall down during the night. Are they just being paranoid or is their attention to low risks justifiable? To most the possibility of dying by being crushed under a dead tree is 1 out of 1,000, but the New Guineas live each day as if it might be that 1 in 1,000 day.

Their well practiced habits to watch out for repetitive low risk (but of course still very risky) situations can be considered “constructive paranoia.” The New Guineas aren’t the only people in the world to embody this attitude. Pilots who have lists and lists of safety regulations and checks are just one example of being careful and meticulous to avoid the 0.000001% chance of dying by something that can be avoided by practicing such methods and avoiding the danger altogether. How can you die by sleeping under a dead tree if you never slept under the tree in the first place?

Americans tend to not think like the New Guineas do because of the availability of doctors, police officers, and 911 dispatchers. Also, we tend to underestimate the possibility of ourselves being in a life threatening situation. Take for instance, getting in a car crash. A young driver may think “It’ll never happen to me. I’m a careful driver,” and the parent may  think “It’ll never happen to my child,” but the risk for getting into a car crash is still out there and often times happens when one least expects it to. A risk is a risk, no matter how small the risk is.

It is important to remain alert for these type of  low risks that are often underestimated. I’m not saying to go through life paranoid that you can die by tripping on the sidewalk, or slipping in the shower, or getting crushed beneath a tree. Just to be vigilant and aware of the surroundings in order to lessen the chance of this day being that 1 in 1,000 day.

Do Toms shoes help anybody? – Do Toms Shoes Really Help People?

It seems counterintuitive that by trying to help provide shoes for a kid in Africa by participating in a buy-one-give-one program  we are either not making any significant change to their life (as they already have shoes to wear), or worsening the local shoe company’s market.

By providing free shoes, food, and other goods to people in other countries that we believe need the provisions, we are actually making the locals dependent on the foreign organizations providing the free goods instead of the countries’ local governments and businesses (shoe stores, clothing stores, food markets, etc.). The perfect example would be the Haitians after the Haiti quake. Haitians began to rely on NGOs for the services and goods that could be provided by the Haitian government.

One company, Two Degrees Foods, is able to truly aid the people we intended to help with our “good deed” by working with the local industries of a country to identify malnourished children. They then contact the food manufacturers so the manufactures can produce food appropriate to the country involved.

Wanting to do  a good deed by donating food and other goods like shoes isn’t a wrong thing to want. However, if by donating goods to a country’s we are essentially hindering the country from advancing and relying on themselves, then is the buy-one-give-one program really a good idea?

What Other People Say May Change What You See

It seems counterintuitive that people are given freedom of choice, but are ultimately influenced by social pressures to unconsciously conform to the majority’s choices.

Experiments have been done to see the effect of social conformity. One experiment, first conducted by Dr. Solomon Asch, is when test subjects were shown two cards. The first card had one line on it and the second card had three lines of different lengths on it. The subject had to decide which line on the second card matched the line on the first card. However, before the subject made their choice, they witnessed several other “subjects” choosing the same wrong line. The other “subjects” who went before the real subject were actors meant to impose peer pressure on the real subject. Surprisingly, 3 out of 4 subjects agreed with the actors’ wrong answer at least one time, and 1 out of 4 agreed with the actors’ decisions 50% of the time.

Why would they choose the wrong line if they know it’s wrong? Researchers discovered that seeing isn’t believing, but seeing what others (the majority) want you to believe. Using MRI scanners, researchers discovered that when agreeing with the majority on a wrong answer, the subject is doing so unconsciously (no brain activity in areas that show conscious decision making).

Social pressure is very real and very influential to how a person can perceive the natural world and make important decisions. Conforming to the social majority is sometimes easier, but isn’t standing firm with one’s decision more important? It is imperative for people to become aware of the social pressure and its effects because most of the time, they don’t even know they’re affected.

Moving Image – scarletthief

 

0:01

When the Ad begins the audience is shown a young man getting a haircut by a woman in the middle of a kitchen in the day time. The small kitchen does not contain updated appliances as seen by the small white fridge and the beige oven and is nicely cleaned except for the table in the foreground with two mirrors, a comb, a spray bottle, and a rag or towel. The young man  is wearing a clean t-shirt and jeans with a bored expression on his face. His boredom may be due to getting his haircut by the woman being a frequent occurrence. He is sitting on a chair with a towel partially covering his upper torso while the woman, who is possibly his mother or of close relation to him, is focusing on the back of his hair with the shaver in her right hand. She also is in clean casual clothes.

0:02-0:06

The woman uses the shaver, but immediately following the cut her eyes widen and an openmouthed frown appears on her face. Her body also backs up slightly from the surprise of her actions. This signifies a mishap in the haircut where she must have messed up and either cut to much or shaved the area completely.

0:07-0:08

The woman, who is confirmed to be his mother after the young man says (based on the one syllable word he says), leans closer to study the area she shaved. The son, noticing something went wrong, shifts his eyes upward and asks, “Mom?” and the text, “(A) Try to fix it,” appears on the screen.

0:09-0:10

The camera moves to the back of his head where the spot the mom cut is now shown to the audience. The young man is holding a mirror  with his left hand to see his haircut. What is revealed is all but a single patch in the middle of the square spot is shaved. But how can he see the spot if we the audience only see his face in the mirror he is holding?

0:11-0:12

The mother is seen to be holding a mirror behind her son’s head to help him see the spot. She is holding her hand up in a placating manner probably saying something similar to “It’s not too bad” or “I can fix this” like at 8 seconds where the text said, “Try to fix it.”

0:13-0:14

The mom is the only one is this close up camera shot with the text on the screen saying, “(B) Work with what you’ve got.” The mother probably shaved more of the hair to hide the mistake she made. The camera angle is meant for the unveiling of the haircut to be more surprising.

0:15-0:17

The mother nods her head with a satisfied looked on her face as the camera shifts to the side of the son’s head. The haircut resembles a lizard lying on the middle of his head with the feet of the lizard on the side and the tail down the back of his head.

0:18-0:20

The scene moves to the family room of the house. The father and little brother of the young man sit with their backs to the camera on a teal couch. The young man has a smile on his face while looking at his family and another text is seen at the bottom of the screen, “(C) Show solidarity.” Did they all get the lizard haircut? It doesn’t look like it because the son’s hair in this scene is not in the odd lizard cut and the brother and father do not have the lizard cut which would be obvious since their back is to the camera. This scene also may be on a different day because of the son’s lack of lizard. So what haircut did they all get that makes them the same and did the mom make the same mistake?

0:21-0:22

As the mom entered the camera, the whole family turns their head and a bald patch is revealed on the side of their head similar to the son’s bald patch. The brother and father shaved their head similar to his in order to keep him from feeling like the odd one out, reminding me of when families shave their head if one of the family members has cancer and goes through chemotherapy.

0:23-0:25

The final scene contains the mother finishing up the haircut, probably on a different day again, as he holds the mirror to see the final cut. Practice makes perfect, right? This time the mom did not make mistakes and shaved his hair well based on the smiles on both of their faces. The final text on the screen says, “You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent,” and the logo for AdoptUSKids.

0:26-0:31

The mother hugs her adopted son as the ad finishes.

At the end, we learn that the ad is promoting adoption of children and based on the final quote, “You don’t have to be perfect to be a parent,” is hoping to encourage parents who may be afraid they won’t be good parents and role models to their child. The fear of doing something wrong is normal, but because of the mother’s haircut disasters, something fun always came out of them. First the lizard hair, then the whole family supporting the son by having their own bald spots shaved on their heads. The ad wants the public to see that adoption can lead to fun times and days full of love and happiness.

Stone Money—scarletthief

The Illusion of Money

Money. One word with countless definitions. To understand the concept of money, I searched the internet and came upon the article by Adriene Hill, “Money: The Myth We All Believe in.” In the article, I found one quote that truly embodied my definition and explanation of money – “Money is a shared illusion.” Money is not a physical paper or metal, but a pure and dedicated belief in an object with no real value other than the value of what others believe it to be. If every citizen in the United States thought buttons or sea shells had monetary value, then the use those objects would become our currency. To a seven year old, the colorful Monopoly game hundred dollar bill could have the same value as a real hundred dollar bill if that was what their parents made them think. In reality, that child couldn’t use the Monopoly money to buy their favorite candy from the dollar store because Monopoly currency isn’t excepted as “real” money to the cashier ringing up the treats. Literally anything can be money if everyone thinks it has monetary value (Adrienne Hill).

Take for instance, the natives of the island Yap mentioned in Friedman’s essay “The Island of Stone Money.” While here in the United States we make our deals and purchases with paper money and copper pennies, the Yaps use large, carved limestone wheels called fei as their physical money. The fei was an immovable stone where its owner can change with only an agreement between two people where one basically states, “It’s yours now” and the other responds with, “I own it.” Am I exaggerating? In the essay, Friedman mentioned how a family’s wealth is “acknowledged by every one” despite the fact that no has seen the fei which makes the family as wealthy as it is. How can anyone, let alone everyone, believe that the family owns some stone only seen by the family’s ancestor and his expedition crew? It is only because they believe that the stone exists that the stone has value. The “illusion” that a carved piece of stone, seen or not seen, has value because everyone says it does is baffling, but they’re not the only ones in the world with this view on money (Friedman).

Similar to the Yaps, the United States relies on the customers of banks and business to believe in what we call credit. Today, many U.S. citizens use credit to purchase items despite the only evidence of one having “money” is a plastic card, maybe containing a chip, that according to the bank has a value of so-and-so dollars.  We neither see the money that is acknowledged as ours by the bank and the establishments we use the credit to buy merchandise from nor move the money physically because we trust that the credit will move from the bank to our account to the establishment through virtual means. The only difference to the Yaps is that we have a third party involved, a.k.a. the bank, during agreements of “I own this, now you own this.”

As I mentioned previously, the value of money is due to the pure and dedicated belief that the currency used is real. My point is further proven by NPR’s article about Brazil’s currency change from cruzeiros to reals. In the beginning, Brazil suffered from inflation that made the cost of items in cruzeiros increase day after day. Brazilians lost faith in the cruzeiro’s value. The government then introduced a virtual price, URV, that had the price f items remain at a constant price unlike the ever-changing prices in cruzeiro. Overtime, the URV was trusted and believed in more than the cruzeiros, thus leading to the end of the cruzeiro and the beginning of the Brazilian real. The real was only able to be made the new currency because of the collective thought that this currency was better than the old cruzeiro currency. Money is valued only by how much everyone believes in the currency as seen by how the Brazilian cruzeiro became obsolete when a better looking, new currency was introduced (“How Fake Money Saved Brazil”).

The German government, as mentioned in “Bitcoin Recognized by Germany as ‘private money'” on CNBC, planned to have Bitcoin potentially become the new currency if the faith in the euro decreases like it did for the Brazilian cruzeiro. Bitcoin is more similar to the Yap islanders’ money exchange because of the lack of the middle man, the bank, and how the lack of physical evidence does not affect the value of the Bitcoin, since it is purely an electronic currency. This raises the questions, Is this real money? Is there any value? All I can say, is that the value of the Bitcoin will be what the people of Germany and the world will believe it to be (Clinch).

Physical money can be paper, metal, or stone, but the true value of money depends on the thoughts and beliefs of the people who use it.

Works Cited 

  • Clinch, Matt. “Bitcoin Recognized by Germany as ‘private money'” CNBC. CNBC, 21 Aug. 2013. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.
  • Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” (n.d.): n. pag. The Hoover Institution, Feb. 1991. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.
  • Hill, Adriene. “Money: The Myth We All Believe in.” Money: The Myth We All Believe in. Marketplace, 12 July 2013. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.
  • “How Fake Money Saved Brazil.” NPR. NPR, 4 Oct. 2010. Web. 14 Sept. 2016.