Wild Child

This week, we learned about feral children. These children are raised in the wild, which prevents society telling them how to act. We all have heard of stories about children all over the world in different cultures raised by wolves. But, I never really thought about it. Would children learn to speak? Get to know humanity? Understand and mimic our ways of living? We watched a movie of popular cases regarding feral children.
One is the case of Oxana Malaya, a girl from Ukraine who spent eight years of her life living in a kennel, practically raised by neighborhood dogs since her alcoholic parents couldn’t take care of her. She learned many dog-like habits and learning language was difficult for her. What’s very surprising is that she was born in 1983. It’s incredible to believe that occurrences such as this happen today.
Another interesting case is that of Genie, who spent thirteen years trapped and isolated and strapped to a potty chair in her Californian home. She never learned language or how to socialize. Genie’s mother ran away from the house in 1970 after a physical argument, taking Genie with her. Charges for child abuse were on both parents. Still alive and deprived from the childhood she deserved, Genie still has questions and much to learn about the world
Questions we must ask ourselves are: What can we do to prevent this? How many more are out there? How can we help them? How do they survive? How do they come to understand about society?
Food for thought!

Headlines' Facts With Hidden Third Variables

Last week, our class was given a packet with headlines of different articles. Data was written underneath each headline to support or abandon it. If the data didn’t support the headline, it was due to a “third variable” to basically throw off a reader.

Example) Headline: “Diet of fish ‘can prevent’ teen violence.” The facts said:

Participants were a group of 3-year-olds given an ‘enriched diet, exercise, and cognitive stimulation,’ assuming that the enriched diet included fish. They were compared to a control group who did not go through this same program. By age 23 they were 64% less likely than a control group of children not on the program to have criminal records. The media article doesn’t include what other kids ate or did.

The data, here, does not support the headline because the data doesn’t specifically say how fish at all aids to the prevention of teen violence. The data only says that one group of toddlers were given enriched diet assuming fish was in the diet. Along with the diet was exercise, which is what young, growing bodies need to get energy, and cognitive stimulation, which is the awareness and understanding of surroundings by utilization of planned stimuli. Wouldn’t cognitive stimulation have a larger impact on whether kids grow to be violent or not rather than an enriched diet that may (or may not) include fish?

Food for thought!

Men Vs Women

Last week, we read a short article about the differences between men and women. I found it particularly interesting and quite true for what I found out:
- Women apologize so much not to put herself down, as most men would think, but to make it so that they were still are at the same “rank” as the other person, on equal footing, even if it is the other person that may have done something wrong. Same goes for “thank you’s”; women do it to stay level with people, even though it may really be unnecessary.
- Women’s brains can multitask; men’s brain’s can only work one thing at a time without losing focus.
- Women give soft criticism; men are straight, to the point.
- Women see the “bigger picture”; men focus narrowly on a specific task.
- Women link all information of various topics (relationships, stimulus, emotions, etc.) in their brains; men separate the various topics in theirs.
- Men’s dominant sense is sight; women have more finely tuned senses then men do.
Obviously with this research along with much more out in the universe, women and men are different, even if we are a part of the same species.

The WoW Influence

We all have heard of World of Warcraft. Some call it the worst game ever created. Others call it a social environment where people gather and work together on quests. In a sense, it seems almost like a culture all on its own. A subculture is a group within a culture with separate norms and values. The “massively multiplayer online role-playing game” extends all over theworld with new gamers as fantasty players, doing whatever they want to do, in whatever appearance (virtually) they want to be in. We have seen games like this like Sims and Second Life, where people get together online. Some business companies use games like this to have business meetings without stepping one foot out of the comfort of their own home and into their company buildings. Is this way of “life” the new social norm of the 21st century? Will people wind up not ever going outside in the near future and step into the Internet-based games to talk to people?

Time's Society Effect

Technology Takeover

Earlier this week, our Soc class watched a documentary about how technology, like cell phones, computers, and the Internet has become a monster in the modern culture. Everyone everywhere must have a Facebook, E-mail account, the latest iPod, the latest cell phone, the most high-tech computers and cameras. Texts fly through the radio waves. People as young as three to as old as ninety stare constantly, without blinking, at blue glowing screens. What has this modern culture come to? No one calls each other on land phones anymore. No one works in office buildings anymore; they can work efficiently, if not more, from the comfort of their own homes. We start to rely on our computers to hold so much information that if we somehow lost any of the data we have, we cannot function. This madness is a wave of laziness, poor brain usage, and possibly a new norm in the modern public environment. Some modern technology is, however, very competent for day to day living, such as the wheel, electricity, antibiotics, indoor plumbing, and the printing press. We have needed these things and they make our lives easier! We don’t need the video color iPod or the fastest 3G network; they break all the time anyway! And our culture is practically alien to this way of life, this living with technology! If this is not a technological takeover, then what is it?