First One '09

For this semester, I like the idea of sharing articles from our respected fields of interest. I learn a lot about other topics that I would not normally be drawn to by listening to someone and contributing to a conversation about that subject. I also think that the articles or readings do not necessarily have to be restricted to someone’s major. We can all learn a lot by an interest in any aspect of human life, such as the economy or healthcare. Incorporating Newsweek articles would also help in that aspect. Maybe the first half hour or so of every class can be dedicated to talking about anything we found interesting.

Currently I am not working on a civic engagement project. Over the summer I attempted to return to my volunteering position at the Houston Humane Society, however, the time commitment was not compatible with my other summer activities. Up until this point I had not planned to continue volunteering because I have been preoccupied with my classes. I would love to start working with the boys and girls club again because I learned so much about the kids just through observation. I could connect a lot of what I was seeing to the material I was reading about in class. I still like the idea of doing civic engagement as a group. The group dynamics and working together, allows us to learn more from what we are doing. If I was to continue a civic engagement project, I would like to volunteer at the Georgetown Animal Shelter. Working at the Animal Shelter would be suited best for my major and my interests. It would probably relate more to the purpose of paideia if I move more out of my field of “expertise” while working on my civic engagement.

For my creative/ research works project, I will probably present my Animal Behavior capstone. I plan to start taking my 2 semester (possibly 3 semester) capstone next semester. I want to work either with Dr. Guarraci in the rat laboratory or Dr. Purdy with cuddlefish. I worked with the rats during my research methods class and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I liked learning about effects of drugs on the brain and the neurological aspects of the lab. However, I have not decided if studying the sexual behaviors of female rats is for me. I will decide soon which route I am going to take.

So far I have made no progress for my intercultural experience. I was 100% set on a program I decided on for last summer but then I learned about a new program that provides more of what I am looking for. No matter what, I will be working on a study abroad for next summer in Australia. Which program I choose is yet to be decided. I will be meeting with Ms. Mennicke once my schedule has settled down a bit, to go over details.

SWS

At the student works symposium I attended the paper presentations dealing with political sciences. I sat in on the lectures given by Paige Ammons: The Ethics of Earmarks, Stephanie Seaman: Governor Perry’s Decision to Mandate Gardasil Vaccination for Texas School Girls: Good Policy? Good Politics? or an Ethical Dilemma?, Drew Diamond: The Second Gulf War and Personal Framing of a Security Threat, Taylor Spalla: What Is the Ethical Decision to be Made with the Remaining Detainees at Guantanamo?. I have to be honest, I was completely confused half the time about what the presentations were about. Political science is not my specialty but I did enjoy learning about what issues the government has to dealing with. I do remember the debate about mandating the Gardisal Vaccination when it came out a couple of years ago. The presentation covered both of the approaches of why it should or should not be mandated. I enjoyed the lectures but think I could learn more by going to a science based lecture. I did stretch myself quite a bit by attending political science lectures. I think that the presenters did a nice job communicating their research and the visual aids were very impressive. They all seemed so calm and collected talking in front of an audience. I am already nervous about giving a presentation in a few years.

The poster presentations I saw were very impressive and informative. My favorite was The Rubens Tube by Will Hardy, Sean Smith and Pelham Keahey. Basically, the Rubens tube makes musical sound waves visible with fire. I was disappointed that the tube was not functionally properly because of the wind but Will showed me a video he had of the tube working. It was amazing to say the least. The tube is lit on fire and a song is played through the middle of the tube. As the sound waves pass through the tube, the fire jumps according to the frequency of the notes. Just like how a stereo system has bars to represent sound waves, the Rubens Tube displays the waves with fire (awesome). I also went to Matthew Dorris’ poster: Heavy Metal Toxins in Dillo Dirt. I thought his study was very interesting because it extracted different metals from the dillo dirt. Dillo dirt is a type of fertilizer that has been known to kill plants and live stock. Matthew worked to determine what the toxins are in dillo dirt.

I was impressed with all the hard work the students at SU have done. I can’t wait (but still nervous) about my future presentation.

Final Session

The boys and girls club was fun and exciting. The kids loved us and loved to see what new activities we had in store for them. I think our sessions went well overall. We carefully planned out each activity but of course nothing went as planned. I felt like some of the kids started understanding what it meant to work as a team but others still had trouble with the concept. On the first day one kid ended up on the sidelines watching everyone play while he was pouting because he did no want to pass the ball in a game of basketball. I felt like that kid (I don’t want to name names, but I think people know who I am talking about) got better at working with others especially during the paper airplane building competition when he taught his teammate a trick to fly the paper airplane farther. I do feel that some children, such as him, will have to learn how to work in a team environment the hard way but I think the idea is floating around in the back of his mind.

Some of the kids were a lot younger then I expected. Some of the activities we planned for required more attention and understanding then they were willing or able to give. By the end we adjusted our activities properly to provide a good time for all the children. When we saw an activity heading south we would quickly change the focus to a different game. I think that went well because they all have such a short attention span to begin with. I did see why Daniel is so desperately looking for a conflict resolution session. Some of the kids argue about everything. One kid (still not naming names) would spend about 10 minutes arguing why he was not out in four square every time he played. The other kids would get frustrated with him and not know how to express their emotions towards him. He would sit and argue until Josh or Gerald came to take him aside. One boy I was standing next to during the other boys tantrum whispered to me “he always does this, but I’m not going to say anything. He is just a big baby.” I thought it was cute because he was trying so hard not to get in the middle of the argument.

As I stated earlier, I am not sure if the kids understood the theme of our sessions. They liked having our attention and playing games with us. I liked how their faces lit up when we would walk into the club. I don’t know if I made a difference in a child’s life. I don’t even know if the kids will ever remember me (come on, we taught them how to make boats out of aluminum foil, how could you forget us). But I

First session

Today we went to the boys and girls club for our first session of team building activities. Overall I think our session was quite successful. I was worried before we arrived because we were told the entire club was going to be required to participate in our activities. However, the kids were given an option to participate. We first started with the name game which failed because the kids did not really understand the game. After a couple of rounds we learned names enough so we decided to move on to the next activity. For our next activity we played mafia. I think our game would have been better if we had older kids playing. I was not expecting to have kids around the age of 7. They did not really understand the point of the game. It was fun for the first few rounds but they lost interest quite easily. After the mafia game, we played chain tag. I believe the chain tag game was by far the most successful. We stressed the importance of working together in order to get other people. There was a problem with one of the kids. He would get frustrated with having to be locked in a chain and wanted to break free to chase after his friends. I think by the end the kids saw how important it was to work together for a common goal. We would decide who we wanted to tag and communicated with each other to chase after them. During the chain tag game, we also got a lot more kids to join us. We started with a majority of girls in our group. Toward the end of the tag game we attracted a whole lot more boys to our group. When we were done with the tag game we had an extra 15 minutes to spare so we decided to play basketball or four square. It was successful because the kids who did not want to play basketball were satisfied with four square.
I thought the dynamics of the boys and girls club were very surprising. I thought the racial groups were very diverse and the way the children acted were even more diverse. As a natural people watcher I learned a lot about the children by watching the way they acted. I tried to decide why they acted the way they did, for example some obviously did not get enough attention at home. Some of the pieces came together when we saw how the parents acted toward their children when they were being picked up.
I really enjoyed our first session and think that the kids really enjoyed having us around. The staff seemed satisfied with our activities, especially chain tag. I was afraid after today’s lunch meeting that the staff was going to be too strict preventing the kids from fooling around and having a good time. Actually the staff was great help. They stayed out of the way and let us regulate the activities. I did appreciate having Gerald around during the chain tag because he helped us make sure the kids were participating correctly and he knew how to handle the disobedient kids. I can’t wait for our next session.

As a side note: I just wanted to add this to the blog but I don’t think anyone will really read this. As I was playing with the kids I happened to see the conflict resolution group get out. When exiting one kid placed frosting from his cupcake onto another kids shirt. That kid turned to him and said “I swear I’ll hit you.” I found this interesting because they just exited from a session that should have taught them that violence is not the way to solve a problem. I am not saying that the conflict resolution did not work because I think it would be basically impossible to change someone’s raw emotions in just a few sessions. I just didn’t know if you guys wanted to address that as a scenario at your next session. I just thought that I would throw out something I saw from my observations.

JDA Lecture

I finally got to see the Jesse Danial Ames Lecture: Transgenderism and Citizenship: A Dialogue between Eli Clare and Matt Richardson.” During the lecture, much was argued about how citizenship is falsely defined. Eli Clare suggested that citizens believe that the government of there land should protect its citizens when in fact they do not, well not all of them. It seemed to be suggested that the government is biased to which people they protect, bringing race, disabilities, and sexual orientation into the mix. I disagree with much of the argument made. I feel like the government has made great leaps in the not to distant past to help all of citizens regardless of race, gender orientation and disabilities. I still believe that much improvement needs to be made but you can not change the minds of individuals by changing a government. Examples of hate crimes were spilled out left and right. While I do find hate crimes horrific I do not think it is right to assume a majority of people feel or act the way of the hater.

I did enjoy the lecture in the sense that I did not understand much about transgenderism. Reading the articles before last class period helped me understand the lecture a little more then I think I would have if I did not read them. Much of the information presented was new to me so I do enjoy that I learned something new. The speakers definitely did present a different view on things that I never would have thought about, such as the questions presented on paperwork. From my point of view I felt like some thoughts were a stretch maybe an over exaggeration to a poorly worded sentence. For example, the question are you a citizen or are you an undocumented alien, seemed like an over exaggeration. From my view point an alien is defined as belonging to another country or government. Eli interpreted alien as some sub human form. While there are two (maybe more, I am not sure) interpretations of an alien in today’s society, one being a foreign creature from space, I believe that the term alien first originate as a person who does not belong to the current government. I am not sure if this is what Eli mean but that is how I interpreted it. Overal the lecture did make me think. I thought about my own points of views and how I interpreted things. It made me think how different each individual is and how selfish it would be to ask someone to conform there ideas to suit your own ideas. I thought about how I wish every individual can see that everyone is different and not judge how they live their lives.

DRAGONS!!! Dr. Woo lecture

Recently, I attended a lecture given by Dr. Kevin Woo of the psychology department. The lecture was entitled Sensitivity to Salient Movement: The Motion Characteristics on Signal Design in the Jacky Dragon. The Jacky Dragon is an Australian agamid lizard. Their habitats include sclerophyll forest, rocky ridges and costal heathland. Jacky dragons perform stereotypical visual displays in the form of social signals. There are three normal social signals that are displayed the tail-flick is an alert signal, a push-up body rock is an aggressive signal, and the slow arm wave is a submissive signal. They also have a receiver sensory system. In this receiver sensory system, specific sensory receivers are engaged by specific signals. They exploit preexisting biases and are used to understand sensory and perceptual phena. There are four components to the receiver sensory system. The first two conspicuous and stimulate receiver organs are classified as sensory. Predictable and memorable are cognitive compounds.
Researchers need four things to understand motion perception. They need to be able to quantify motion perception. They need to be able to test sensitivity to movement. They need to understand basic sensory processes. Finally, they need to be able to identify correlations between visual sensitivity and movement.
The study that was conducted to test motion perception first trained the Jacky dragons instrumentally. Dot kinematograms, which do not resemble biologically meaningful stimuli, were used. The dots on the computer screen moved randomly until the experiment was started. For the experiment, the dots would move in one direction at a specific coherence, the percentage of dots moving in that direction, at a specific speed, either 5, 20, or 80 degrees per second. 128 conditions were tested. After the computer displayed the dots, the dragons would move to the side in which the dots were moving. When the dragons moved to the correct side, they received a reward of a cyber invertebrate. The results found that the dragons are sensitive to high speed movement and have difficulty in perceiving slow-moving targets. Next they placed the dot kinematograms on the backdrop of a natural setting. The natural settings included still, calm, and windy settings. In this study, the results indicated that increase of wind mask speeds that are low and the dragon’s capacity to discriminate the stimuli.
In another experiment with the Jacky dragons, a computer animated dragon was created on the computer. The programs created identical movements to the social signals displayed in the dragons. This experiment stimulated competition of isolated motor patterns across natural wind conditions. The results found the tail flick was the highest on the hierarchy of conspicuousness, followed by the push-up body rock and finally the slow arm wave. The slow arm wave is a submissive behavior so it is predictable that it would be on the lower end of the hierarchy. The results indicate that Jacky dragons are highly sensitive to fast motion. They have different sensitivity to aggressive and submissive signals. They are stable across natural wind conditions. They match displays to changing wind conditions. They can discriminate between morphological cues.
I greatly enjoyed the lecture. I liked the process in which Dr. Woo went about to learn how the dragons perceived objects and motion. I think it is hard as humans to think that other animals see the world differently then we do. It is difficult to put yourself in another’s’ eyes to see how they see things. I wonder what other research has been done with other animals that is similar to this.

Brown Symposium, Science and Religion

The topic of this year’s Brown Symposium intrigued me greatly as both a scientist and a Christian. Science and Religion has been discussed for as long as I can remember. In grade school evolution was touched on and then revoked and then again mentioned but then scold. I was confused as a mere 5th grader as to why such a controversy would exist. So as any good scientist would do, I researched. I could see a slight conflict when comparing my little understanding of both subject fields but I didn’t understand why it was a big deal, I always thought people should be allowed to believe in what or whoever they wanted. As I grew up and experienced life more, I created my own perceptions of God and used scientific evidence to back up my ideas. Still there are gaps in my understanding of the two fields but nothing is perfect including science and religion. I was very excited about the series of lectures that were given so I attended a good majority of them. My two favorite were Andrew Newberg’s “How God Changes Your Brain” and Christopher Bader and Paul Froese “Images of God and Views on Science: Findings from the Baylor Religion Survey”.

I enjoyed particularly Bader and Froese’s presentation because they engaged the audience to such a great extent. Bader and Froese created a survey for there study which categories people’s perception of God into four different categories. The study found that perception of God is related to the person’s view of science. The most interesting fact that was presented was that “non believers are more likely to see conflict in science and religion”. I think this makes total sense but total non sense at the same time. I see that a person can become a non believer because of the conflict, some people stop believing if they can’t understand. But at the same time, just because they don’t understand does not give them permission to criticize what someone else believes. Overall, Bader and Froese’s presentation was a clearly straight forward sociology study; however, I don’t think some of the audience members understood you can’t draw causation from a relationship.

Andrew Newberg’s “How God Changes Your Brain” was also very straight forward. His study examined the fMRI images of the brain of those who believed in God, in this case a nun, and an atheist. He found greater activity levels in the frontal lobe of the nun when she was told to think of God but no difference was found in the atheist when the perception of God was though of. I found this interesting because I recently have read a few articles about how meditation changes the brain. I wonder if praying would be considered a type of meditation and how that would affect the brain. I think I need to do more research on Andrew Newberg. I did not understand everything he was talking about but it was very interesting.

I feel like most of the presentations I went to did not present much controversial information. There were a few details that bothered me like when Simon Conway Morris said he believed conciseness does not entirely lay inside the brain, I just don’t see that. The other was David Williams’ belief that religion is a 100% social construct, as a scientist he should know better (nothing is 100%). I can’t wait to discuss the lectures further with my peers.