Blog Post #6 - Technology is Our Friend. Lack of Education is Our Enemy

In my opinion, Americans today are way more isolated, but it is not exactly "due to" technology.  American teenagers now a days seem to be more social than ever... except for the fact that the social group they worry about the most is one of people they don't even know, such as Facebook "friend."  Teenagers are becoming so caught up on what happens in their cyber social life that they are forgetting to live real life.  I have had friends who pride themselves on the amount of Facebook friends they have, but give little attention to the real friends that participate in their lives every day, and I find that depressing.  I don't know if it is because on the internet you can shape yourself in a certain way that may hide your real self and please others, but the increase in popularity of social media and the lack of education about such is making Americans more and more isolated.   

It is not only the lack of educations about social media that is making Americans isolated, but the lack of education about technology in general, and how to use it in a functional way.  When I was a kid back in my country, there wasn't a single day (besides rainy days maybe) that I wasn't outside playing soccer, talking to other kids, playing cards (weird, I know, but I've always liked playing cards).  My house was on a hill, and I remember my friends and I playing dodge ball every weekend in my street.  I remember wanting to be on the team at the top, because that way I wouldn't have to run after the ball as it rolled to the busy road.  I also remember us just sitting at each other houses gates, talking about school, homework, soap operas, counting coins to see if we could go to the store and buy a cookie (to share between 2-4 of us).  We often went to different schools, but unlike in America, school wasn't out life.  In my culture, school is the place where you learn, and the outside world is where you make friends.  You don't have to go to the same school in order to be friends.  Why?  Because we stick our big heads outside once in a while and meet new people.  We didn't have iPods, and iPads, etc.  Some of us had video games, but we never became obsessed with them, like American kids do.  We all had TVs, but we also never allowed ourselves to become stuck on a couch watching TV.  There was quality indoor time with family, and quality outdoor time with friends.  When I arrived in america I was shocked.  I was jogging in the place where I live, in a Saturday morning, and there was no one outside.  I went to the grocery store, and came back in the afternoon, and there were only some kids, re-enacting horrible scenes from the ridiculously violent games American children are so fond of.  I was disappointed.  

To me, this is something we should be concerned about.  We have never lived in an era with so much technology so readily available to the public as we do now.  The adults that we know today were once kids who also played outside, and didn't have imaginary cyber friends.  We don't know how our children will turn out to be, and how this isolation with affect them in the future.  Don't get me wrong. technology is amazing and extremely necessary.  Our society would not be functional without it, and it makes our lives much easier.  I love technology, and I do own a smart phone and have a Facebook account.  It would be stupid of anyone today to be opposed to technology, as it contributes to our economy, medicine, education and more.  However, children are not being properly educated about technology, and they are becoming caught up on a cyber world.  The solution is to educate our children to value their lives, like themselves, increase their self-esteem, so that they won't feel the necessity to please people who live in other continents and that they have never met.  We need to educate them so that out society won't become even more isolated.  

Americans are way more isolated than they ever were.  But it is not "due to technology".  It is due to the lack of education about technology.  

Technology is awesome!

Blog Post #5

This blog post to me is quite simple.  I was born and grew up in the rough city of Rio de Janeiro, a city filled with criminals.  Here in the U.S. things are different.  In Brazil, criminals are treated better than they should be.  The Brazilian government spends more money in criminals then they do in student, and that is revolting.  Here things are different.  I think the U.S. deals with the issue quite well.  I am not fit to propose solutions.  I honestly don't know.  In my eyes, I don't think there is much that should be changed regarding criminals.  Things seem to be going well enough.  For me, who came from such a rough environment, I see the way the U.S. treats criminals is much better than in my country.  In my country, even the police is made up of mostly criminals.  It is shameful.  Here the situation is much better, so I would rather be satisfied with that.  

Blog Post #4 - Nature Vs. Nurture

When talking about the subject of Nature vs. Nurture, people tend to get very divided.  Some people believe that we were born the way we are, and there is nothing we can do about it.  Well, that has been proven wrong (Refer to experiments on conformity by Zimbardo, Bendura, Asch, etc).  Our behavior is influenced by psychological conditions, some of which we are born with, but assume a psychologically healthy person was born with a certain kind of behavior, that behavior could well be changed by the environment around that person.
      
Many other people believe that we are born as a blank slate, and that everything we believe, like, desire, find important, and do is a result of being influenced by our environment.  This has also been proven to be wrong.  Let me point out a case that has caught my attention.  In Switzerland, there has been a huge discussion regarding whether our sexuality is innate or learned.  In the following video, you will see that, unlike what we would expect, scientists are not curious about that.  Much for the opposite.  They think it is an unimportant question.  Many people who defend gay rights in Switzerland believe that saying that our sexuality (and consequently homosexuality) is innate is the same as saying it is undesirable.  I found that quite odd.  In my opinion (as as the American scientist points out), seeing our sexuality as innate encourages people to be more sympathetic towards it.   

(WARNING:  This video contains images which may not be suitable for some audiences.  Its also in Swedish, which English subtitles)

So, what makes us good or evil?  Is a psychopath born a psychopath, or is there such thing as "The Lucifer effect"?  Well...  a little bit of both.  Some people are in fact born with genes that make them more likely to have some sort of personality, such as psychopathy, but without the environment to pull the trigger, those personality traits may never come to surface.  
Many researchers have explored the topic.  As the researcher in the BBC documentary below tells us, if  our pre-disposition to be moral or immoral depends on a chemical, than that makes it easier not just to measure how evil someone is, but also to predict how likely, lets say, a child is to become a 

psychopath as an adult.  The tests performed in the video below are amazing.  From the very first test, we can see that the discussion of whether people may be born instinctively good (or evil) is a complex one.  


(Fast video forward to 31:00) This is mid blowing.  There are actual physical signs of psychopathy.  Researcher Jim Fallon analyzed a group of brain scans, those of patients of depression, schizophrenia, normal people, and killers.  He noticed a pattern.  The group he separated as those with a defective orbital cortex and the front part of the temporal lobe.  This group, amazingly, was made up of the killers.  This finding is amazing in its own.  It, as the narrator says, is a step closer to finding the signature brain profile of a psychopath.  But this isn't the most surprising finding.  

From where do these differences in the psychopaths' brain come from?  The answer is:  Their genes.   The MAOA gene (also known as the warrior gene) became a vital player in this research.  Just being born with this gene can pre-dispose you to violent behavior.  The very fact that one is born with that gene makes them much more likely to be a killer than a person without it.  So, everyone that is born with that gene is deemed to become a killer, which proves that nature is stronger than nurture, right?  Wrong.

(Fast forward to 36:35) The researcher himself finds that he has a family history of serial killers.  After further research, he finds that he possesses the warrior gene.  So why didn't he become a murderer?  Because his environment hadn't allow him to do so.  As he points out, he had an amazing childhood, and that allowed the psychopath gene to not be triggered.  Fascinating!

And that raises a question.  Is our genetic make up enough to control who we are?  Or is the environmental trigger necessary?  In my opinion, there is no "Nature vs. Nurture" but rather a "Nature and Nurture".  Both nature and nurture work together in making who we are.  We are neither born evil, nor born as a blank slate.  Our genetics can have great influence on our behavior, however without our environment to (again) "pull the trigger", those genetic traits may never come to surface.  

Blog Post #3 - To be Great is to be Misunderstood: A Bit of Fry and Laurie.

Being a huge fan of Stephen Fry, and having watched nearly every episode of every season of "A Bit of Fry and Laurie", I can tell the reader that sketches like this one are very common, not just portraying Americans, but Canadians, Australians, and even the British themselves.  It worried me, however, that most of my classmates interpreted the sketch as representing the British "Looking down" on Americans.  Sir Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie do in fact poke fun of the American ego, but I don't think that at any moment they seem to look down at them.  The American sense of superiority is in fact annoying, and anyone from another country will tell you that.  Americans tend to poke fun of Hispanics for being poor/immigrants (see: Family Guy, Tosh.0, Comedy Central Presents), Asians for being good in math (See: Any comedy show), Canadians for being polite, the Middle Eastern for ridiculous reasons that boggle my mind, the British for their accents and their culture, Russians for being communists, The Jewish, The French, The Indian, Native Americans, Eastern Europeans, Africans...  You name it, America has poked fun of it.  Why shouldn't other countries have the same right?  I don't think that America looks down on the cultures it pokes fun of, it is just comedy!


About Stephen punching Hugh, it has nothing to do with the sketch itself.  It is more about Stephen (the composed, classy one) finding Hugh (the sporty, silly one) annoying.  It is sort of a recurring joke, which is more notably referenced in the later (and funnier) sketch entitled "Where is the Lid?" (Video below). 




So, as a conclusion for why Stephen punched Hugh, I can tell the reader that it wasn't a well thought out representation of the British despise of Americans, or that British people want Americans to shut up.  It was simply a representation of the fact that:  Stephen Fry enjoys hitting Hugh Laurie!  :)

  
 


Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie are intelligently hilarious, and its a shame that Americans don't "get" that kind of humor.  The American public is in need of shows like "A Bit of Fry and Laurie", and Stephen Fry's brilliant show "QI".  Getting to experience comedy that makes the audience exercise their critical thinking skills is priceless, and I wish the American audience was more exposed to the kind of dry, quick witted comedy that the British have been so accustomed to for decades.  

Now c'mon America, back to watching Tosh.0! 

Week #2 Blog Entry - Stanford Prison Experiment

Do you think the Stanford Prison Experiment was ethical? Why or why not? (Feel free to also write about any other aspects of the experiment that you find interesting or noteworthy.)

In its assumptions, the experiment was ethical, as the people conducting the experiment expected the subjects to know what their roles were, but to not get far into them.  However, some of the results were not foreseen by the investigators.  The study became unethical by the way it was executed by the researchers.  In my opinion, any study carries risk of developing into a situation that comes out of control.  The researcher’s responsibility is to recognize hazardous situations/behaviors and terminate the experiment immediately.  The problem is, the researcher connected to his work in a personal way, and it isn’t of a researcher’s interest to terminate his own work prematurely, even more so when there was o supervision by independent bodies (IRBs, for example).  A good example of that rule, is that after the prison experiment, new guidelines were approved in order to protect human subject in research, so that no other future study would get out of control as the Prison Experiment did.  Additionally, that experiment created guidelines to performing similar studies with minimal risk to the subjects. 

            The question is:  what was the benefit from that research.  By law, the benefits (direct or indirect) should outweigh the risk in any given human subject research, and in this case, the risk to benefit ration seemed to not have been assessed properly beforehand.  There should have been procedures to continuously monitor the research as is the case now days.  When looking at it from a modern point of view, the study was unethical.  By our standards, there should have been more ways to minimize the physical and psychological distress endured by the subjects.  However, when thinking in a broader point of view, we have to take into consideration that at that time, what we would consider “unethical research” was common, as there were little constrains to what a researcher could do, and researchers weren’t properly educated as to how to protect the subjects’ well being.