A play I have recently saw "Radio Time".

I watched a play presented by Sogang University Communication Division, named "Radio Time". The original play's name is "Welcom Back Mr. Mcdonald." I have wrote a short review.

The play itself was interesting and fun to watch. The actors acting were actually very professional. But the first part of the play seemed to be a bit boring. When the first scene is started the actors seemed a bit nervous and unprepared. When the play went along, they seem to be more natural and confident. Also, they seemed to be a bit over exaggerating at some points. I have not seen the original movie “Welcome Back Mr. Mcdonald”, but I assume that the actors have well expressed the original characters. The fact that the setting is in a radio studio, it was interesting to see the actors interact with each in such a closed area. Moreover, it is astonishing to know that each character has different personality. Mary Jane is played by once famous, stubborn and arrogant actress. She wants everything in her own way. The actor playing Mr. Mcdonal is passionate and hard working. The drama producers show different personalities as well. It was fun to see the team work of people with different personality to complete the drama on such a short time. Lastly, the play can also be thought of reminding the good old days where radio was the essential method of broadcasting. Overall, Radio Time is a warmhearted, humor mixed play depicting odd behaviors of the world of radio broadcasting. I never heard a radio drama but it was an eye-opening experience to know how radio dramas are made.

Watching the poor original screen writer be forced to change her scenario was sad. The power of the actress playing Mary Jane was immense. The screen writer has to surrender to the demand of the actress. This depicts how powerful people abuse their power to achieve their goal. This shows the sad reality of our life. In this sense, this play can be sorted as a black comedy. There are many humorous situations but if you think once more, it is not fun but a bit gloomy.

In conclusion, I liked the format of the play and the acting was good. However by watching the weak surrender to the strong was sad. If the producers didn’t surrender to the offer of Mary Jane, the play would have been much better. Radio Time is an entertaining, human drama which leaves people to laugh and think at the same time. I would recommend this play to other classmates.

It's not just money, my life

You've must heard about the bankurupt of savings bank. When I heard about the news, I wondered why depositors put their money in such a risky bank. The higher interest a bank gives you, the higher risk you need to accept, which is a basic principle. However, many depositors were underclass. They deposit all their money into the troubled savings bank. They just believed that my bank is never gonna fail. They believed what bankers say. Some people invested even in subordinated bonds which are not protected by Deposit Insurance. A woman who saved her money by working as a temporary worker and lost 24,000,000 won which is less than other people's damage said "it's not just money, my life". We can not just blame their ignorance. One reason they invested in risky bank is they are not informed about finance sufficiently. The problem about failed savings banks will be solved in anyway, but I think the more important thing is to educate underclass people on finance.

Plagiarism in music

One of many topics we studied was Plagiarism. It was mostly about text, but I want to talk about plagiarism in music. It is more difficult to identify plagiarism in music because even though two music sounds similar, which is not plagiarism until the composer accept that.

On April 13th, the court judged that "외톨이야" by CNBLUE did not copy "파랑새" by WHYNOT. I've been interested in this issue. To many people, two songs sound very similar, but the songwriter of "외톨이야" denied the suspicion. He even said that if he really had wanted to copy a song, he would've chosen a song by famous foreign musicians, not indie band. However, it sounded very strange to me because he could choose a song by indie band because he thought no one would realize the similarity between two songs.

The dispute is still going on even after the court's judgement. Meanwhile, a software company is developing a program identifying the similarity between two songs. Music is art, but we need a computer program to know whether a song is original. It sounds very ironic.

Three 50 minute classes

I have been trying to observe some problems that we experience in our everyday lives, and one problem I have encountered in school was the lack of focus in class. I think that 75 minute classes are a bit ineffective due to the long class time, so I thought about the advantages and disadvantages of 75 minute classes. The advantages was that even excluding class preparation time, there was enough time to cover a lot of material in one class. Another would be that because one class is 75 minutes, we only have classes twice a week. There were also some disadvantages that I found. The most important being the decreasing level of focus towards of the end of class. This would mean that the effectiveness of learning in the last 15 minutes of class drops dramatically. Another is that since we only go to class twice a week, we tend to study for the subject only twice a week, making it easier to forget the contents of the class.

As a solution for this I thought about 50 minute classes instead of 75 minute ones. Three 50 minute classes would solve the problems that are present with the 75 minute class system. First of all, because people tend to become less attentive during the last 15 to 20 minutes of class, focusing for 50 minutes and having a 10 minute break will help students focus throughout the whole class. Moreover, since having 50 minute classes would require three classes per week, we would have an opportunity to review class material more frequently.

However, there is also a potential problem with this system. It is that if too much time is wasted preparing for class in the beginning such as taking attendence, turning the computer on or waiting for students to settle down, there might not be enough time to cover all the necessary materials. A solution to this problem would be to have TA's finish the preparation for class during the break times in between classes. Another would be to have a more strict tardy system to encourage students to be prepared for class by the time class starts.

The Forgetting Curve of Ebbinghaus

Hope everyone had a great mid-term exam period. This is my 6th semester, but I never get used to exams. I get nervous before them as I do “last minute rush” for most of my exams. Moreover, I always blame myself for having such a bad memory. Some, maybe few, of us may get frustrated by the fact that we do not remember what we have studied, even something that we have studied just before an hour. However, we should not be stressful since this is a very natural phenomenon according to the “Forgetting Curve of Ebbinghaus.” By using this curve, I’d like to suggest two simple study tips that could help you on the exams!

Tip one: Use the power of “spacing.” Rather than studying every day, increasing the interval between your reviews of studied materials actually resulted in better retention. In other words, reviewing your materials everyday could be less effective than reviewing in one day, three days, six days, and so on. To effectively retain new information, we need to spread review sessions out.

Tip two: Take chance of your last 20 minute. The technique, called “cramming” in fancy word, can be most effective when you do it for your last 20 minute before an exam. According to the curve, for newly acquired information, we already lose about 60% of them just after an hour of study. Do not waste your last minute by chit-chatting with your classmates, but go back to some important information that may show up on the exam.

Once again, acknowledging the fact that your brain is not perfect can increase the efficiency of your study and will make you less stressful. Share your secret study tips with us if you have one!

Thousands of swallowed objects form curious collection

In a certain museum, it is filled with various things, safety pins, small trinkets, buttons and other items. And these objects were swallowed and extracted by people. Chevalier Jackson, a pioneering laryngologist of the late 19th and early 20th centruries, donated to the museum. he collected these things after he operated and extracted them from other people bodies. When we explore the various drawers, we will feel astonished and wondered. How could someone swallow such things? Mary Cappello wrote a new book about this -Swallow: Foreign bodies, their ingestion, inspiration, and the courious doctor who extracted them'(The New Press). In this book, we learn that not only about Jackson, but the lives of the people who once ingested the objects. These are stories from comic to tragic. In some cases, it's not accidents, it's voluntary swallowing, a social history of hunger, confounding human class and race.


Take, for example, the 1923 case of a boy, Joseph B. According to his account, Jackson removed 32 things from the child, including buttons, closed safety pins, bent straight pins and cigarette butts. His mother had ignored signs-such as a button found in her son's stool-by assuming it fell of his clothing. Even his friend believed that she fed these things to his child.


'The main cause of swallowed things is the carelessness'. Jackson said. He pointed to the carelessness of using an old broken egg-beater in making the custard pie. He said. 'So care should be taken, when cooking or serving food, to see that there are no loose pins or buttons in the waist that could fall into the food.' And other cause of this is chewing of pencils, toothpicks, grass, stalks, etc, he said.


Cappello also said. 'Poor children were not victims of careless caretakers or lacked self-control but because they were starving, they ate.'


This story is not only interesting to me, but also sad. Someone swallowed such things because of just a mistake. But babies ate those things because of their parents' carelessness. And poor children ate because of starving.


And there were my cases swallowing somethings-such as chewing gums,etc. It's awful to me. I think other people may feel that, too. So we should care about swallowing accidents. We can take out of eggshells from food before cooking. And we should take care of food for children. We have to prohibit them from eating things not food.

the article I referred

Freedom of religion?

Recently I was very interested about the history and culture of England. It is mainly because that I'm planning to travel England during the summer vacation, but aslo because of the wedding ceremony which was held today. While watching the wedding ceremony of Prince William and Kate Middleton today, I was interested about their religion 'The Anglican Domain'. As I also saw in the movie 'King's Speech', the role of the pope was very powerful, for example during important events of the Kingdom of England, the pope was in charge of those events.

As United States and England share a lot of things in common, I searched for informations about 'The Anglican Domain' in the States. But while studying the culture of the United States, I've found that the religion of United States wasn't similar to England. From the book I read gave the reasons why those two nations have different religions. United States is known to separate religion from the personal lives of its citizens. United States was founded upon the doctrine of “separation of church and state”. This originated from the European founders who came to America to avoid religious prosecution in their homeland, and many Americans take pride in religious freedom that government provides and keep harmony among different groups.

While seeing the freedom of religion in the United States, I was questioned about Korea. Although we also state the freedom of religion in Korea, when seeing the happenings which happen here sometimes make me confused. How do you think about it? Do you think that we have freedom in religion in Korea or not?

Ever seen a Two-headed cow?!

As I was surfing the net today, I came across a very shocking picture.
What I saw was a picture of two-headed calf!!!

A news article reports that a two-headed calf has been born on a Chinese farm.
Except the fact that this calf has 3 ears instead of 4 ears, the head is almost like
two seperate heads bind together; each part of head has its own pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth, all in perfectly-normal state.
The two heads point in opposite directions and they are literally 'head-to-head' without an additional neck to be separated and rested on, so the two heads cannot see one another by its eyes.

I wonder if the two heads stand out seperately - as individual characters - or that the calf has only 'one' brain and it just happened to be born to with an extra, surplus head.
It would be really weird if they really have separate identities; Then the calf will be like some kind of creatues in myths. It's really freaky when I imagine seeing two heads somehow expressing different wills :b

Despite its abnormal body appearance, the news says that the calf is healthy. Unfortunately, the two-headed calf can't stand upright by itself so it is bottle-fed by a person.

To my surprise, this two-headed calf was not the first to be born on earth.
There were more incidents of two-headed calves' births in Estonia, China, and Georgia since 2000 and it is not clear whether those were results of genetic problem or environmental pollution.

I had heard more news of 'mutated animals' thesedays, especially of those contaminated by radioactivity. People are worrying about the possible effects of radioactivity, after some serious radiation leakage accident took place in Japan.

What I had only considered possible in Sci-fis and imagination are actually happening in front of my eyes.
It sure would be a serious problem if the cause of this calf's mutation turns out to be environmental pollution. We should really care about environment and make plans to effectively deal with problems rising from environmental pollution and radioactive contamination.

iPhone location tracking issue

I want to talk about iPhone location tracking issue. Recently, I saw the news telling that we should care about iPhone using. Because our location datum were stored in our iphone.

I referred to this article http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/04/iphone-location/

Whenever we use apps with location services, the iphone gets information about nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi accesss points, and stores the infomation. Every 12 hours, an iOS device's stored geodata gets anonymized with a random string of numbers and it gets transmitted to Apple in a batch. Apple says it keeps this data in its own database, so it can provide you quicker and more precise location services.

But after they use the information to provide location services, the information remain on our iphones permanently.

I agree that this function will benefit us. Because we can get information that we want to know more easily, fast. But the problem is that remaining geodatum on our devices permanently. Geodatum are personal information. So if a thief got his hands on our iphones, he can figure out where we live and moved. So the information can be used badly. Then it will be problems and risks to us.

So the location datum should not remain our iphones. These personal information shouldn't be used by other people. We should care about that problem. And we should ask Apple to fix this. There are many iphone users around the world. Apple must suggest a solution about this problem.

Part-Time Jobs

I decided to write about college students and part-time jobs because for the last couple of days I've been doing some part-time translation job and was wondering if this is has a positive or negative effect on my studies. Ever since my admission to Sogang, I have always had a part time job, such as teaching, working at a cafe, and translation. The reason why I took on a job in the first place was because my parents decided not to give me allowance when I turned eighteen. Even though this was fairly rare among Korean students, I thought it would be a good experience and eventually have a positive effect on me. I thought it would help me become more independent, become more aware of my spendings, save up more, and get ready for the managing a real job later on. The last one about better managing a real job later on, I wouldn't know since I am still in school. However, as for the other positives influences I thought a part time job would have on me, I actually think the disadvantages outweighed the benefits.

Of course, I could say that I became more aware of my spendig habits. However, I found myself spending much more than I used to and saving even less than before. In addition to these disadvantages, I think the biggest problem with having a part-time job is the effect it has on school. I think that when we are in school, it is better to focus on school. Though having a job has benefits, I think it can actually act as a distraction.

Many people criticize today's young generation because we are too dependent on our parents. However, I think for a college student learning should be the first priority. I am, in no way, suggesting that college students shouldn't work at all. I think intership programs that allow you to experience the real work environment and help you to find your interests are great. In other words, I think the purpose of the job is actually more important than whether or not you have a job. I think it is great for college students to take on internships during the vacation and gaining hands-on experience. However, managing school and work at the same time, I think have more disadvantages than advantages.

This is just my personal opinion. I ended up writing about this because for the last couple days, trying to meet a deadline for work while also having to study for the midterms really troubled me. What do you guys think of college students having part time jobs? Do you think it should encouraged?

The Royal Wedding

I hope everyone's enjoying their Easter!

I wanted to bring up the "celebrity wedding" between Prince William and his love Kate Middleton. Their announcement had brought a great sensation to the whole world because the couple's marriage between the royal family and the middle class is the first in 350 years in the history of the British monarchy.

This short clip with Richard Quest is about why royal weddings matters so much to us. There are other articles and clips too that you might interesting.

Your breakfast can be unique!

You wouldn't want to be eating the exact same thing as anyone else, would you?  Well, look at this!  You too can be special and have a breakfast that's uniquely yours.  How's that for individuality?

I sometimes cook oatmeal as part of my breakfast, and this is a photo of the box it comes in.  I think this is a perfect illustration of the implicit assumption that individuality is something everyone strives for.

Counting your sugar intake for the day

Along with the post on “Popcorn’s Dark Secret,” I found an article on calories which gives you the pictures of sugar cubes contained in popular food. I want to give you an idea of how much sugar we are taking every day.

Awareness on eating healthy food is increasing every day, so whenever we eat food, we pay attention to the calories that is printed on the label. But, even though we know there are 39 grams of sugar in soda, we do not know how much of that sugar look like!

So this website offers you pictures of food with stacks of sugar that is hiding in popular foods. This website may help you in preventing the unintentional consumption of sugar.

As an example, when we drink a can of coca cola, we are drinking 10 sugar cubes which are 4 grams each. This is a fact that we rather want to ignore. No one would drink a coke just for thirst knowing that it contains 10 sugar cubes! But I realized that a lot of popular food we eat every day is just stacks of sugar hidden with different flavors. Especially when we eat ice creams, we cannot taste the sweetness as exact as other food because the coldness of it hinders us from tasting its sweetness.

Clearly, in this case, “A picture is worth a thousand words”

harsh criticism on "Please Look After Mom"

Recently, I read a transcript from NPR (National public Radio)'s one of radio reviews on "Please Look After Mom", the well-known Korean novel written by Shin Kyung-Sook.

Maureen Corrigan, a professor at Georgetown University, made a cynical, unbearable remark about this novel that made me furious. She thinks that the novel is nosense and has nothing to do with American culture that values individualism than collectivism where one is to feel guilty for not taking care of their parents. She says that the message is "completelalien to our own therapeutic culture."

Okay, I understand that one may feel this way in any Western countries, because it is true that we value collectivism and believe it is duty for children to take care of aging parents in our society. It is also true that by the age of 18, it is natural for western young adults to leave their homes. Although it is changing in Korea, it is still common for us to stay home until we get married and have our own family. So I"m not here to criticize her opinion, because as we learned, we can accept other people's opinion without embracing it. However, what made me furious is her barbarious comments about this novel not worthy enough to be published by Knopf, a well-known publication for literary work.

The worst comment she made is that this novel is a "cheap consolations of kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction." What a phrase to degrade the novel in the first place and humiliate Koreans as well! How dare she talk about novel in such ridiculous way? Just because she is a professor does not mean she can just talk rubbish about a novel that has our tradition and culture rooted in the story. It touched our hearts because the story shows the changing generation of less valueing their duty as sons and daughters and it touched our hearts because that is exactly how we as Koreans mostly feel. Who is she to criticize our culture? It is one thing to not like a novel, but it is a whole different story to talk about it in such unrespectful manner.

May be I am the only one infuriated by this critic. See it for yourself classmates by going to this site.

If you want to see what Korean news writer wrote about this review by Maureen Corrigan, go to this website.

The Case for Letting Your Partner's Eye Wander

This article is telling about a new study about why we should let our partner's enjoy themselves in a wandering eye. To support this research, the article is showing the experiment and the conclusion for it. There were three experiments, each showing the relationship between peoples satisfaction and the limit they were given. It has proven that the more we limit and block our partner seeing a attractive person, it will make the relationship worse. As a conclusion the authors of this new study tells that an effective way to boost satisfaction during a relationship is to work on enhancing relationship processes that will naturally lead to decreased attention, such as focusing on positive aspects of ones partner.

It was very interesting because the study which is introduced in this article is actually talking about a situation which happens to a lot of us. For example, when we are with our boy/girl friend, if a attractive person(of course opposite sex) passes by us we happen to see that person. And as a normal respond we try to block our partner seeing at the attractive person and try to just focus at us. But in this article it is telling us that just blocking and limiting isn't a good way to make are partner concentrate to us. I first thought it was quite odd, but as a read through the article I was able to fully understand the writers idea.

But there were some parts I thought that this article should cause a argument because actually this experiment was involved with a group of 42 undergraduate students. But I think that the number of the group were quite small to prove the things the researchers wanted. And also, this experiment was tested by undergraduate students, which can't prove whether the conclusion of the experiment will work the same to other ages. So I thought that to be a more reliable experiment, there should be a larger samples.

Well... in some ways I think this research is actually true. How about you?

When is the last time you wore hanbok?

When I heard about this news, I just laughed. It was ironic! Just hearing the word "Shilla" makes me think of something traditional. However, they rejected a woman from entering a hotel restaurant because she wore hanbok! I understand hanbok is long and it flares out that others may step on it. And due to the characteristic of a buffet, there can be some accidents. However, I think the staffs were not trained properly. They should have just given the designer a warning to be careful when walking around. And I guess the staffs didn't know who she was. If they knew that she is a well-known hanbok designer, how could have they said that to her?? I wonder what happened to the staffs of The Parkview.. And I also think that this happening spreaded out so quickly because she was a famous person. It could have gone much slower if this happend to a mere citizen..

21st century and its ideal image.

Just looking back a few decades ago, being fat was equivalent to beauty. But then what has changed our perspective? Is it all because of the media? Or is it due to technological invention? Maybe, it’s the economical growth in our society. I don’t have the answer to this question but, what I am really sure of is that both man and woman have unrealistic expectation when describing their ideal figure. Just a few days ago, I was having a conversation with my friend and he was asking me for a blind-date. He expected me to introduce a girl who was funny, pretty and smart just like Kim Tae Hee. GOSH. He then told me that he could do average looking girls too. Then he stated that average looking girls meant ‘girl groups.’ I instantly told him that I’m not going to set him up for a blind date. We just laughed off about this topic but the conversation really got me thinking for a few days. This wasn’t my first time hearing this. Girls too talk about this oh so very often. Then, is this the new phenomena in our society? Is everyone so self absorbed that they all expect this standard. Or are we still living inside a fairy-tell story scared and worried to enter the actual world itself? What has made our society (especially Korean society) become obsessed about our outer experience? I personally want to blame the media. MASS MEDIA. Well, Media plus technology. Initially, technology equals to economy, and economy is always followed by politics. So are these problems all inter connected? One leading into another problem… Our current perspective has now become rooted down into our society so deeply that are hands are tied down. Is the outcome of our thoughts initially our own fault? There are so many questions…. And no one with the definite answers to it.

Don't you dare touch that popcorn!

Classmates.. (especially girls who care about their looks!) let's stop eating popcorn when we are watching movies at the theater! Even if you are on a hot date or a ladies night out after your big long stressful exam week, let's not go too far and eat popcorns at a movie theater. I just found an article on New York Times, called "Popcorn's Dark Secret" by Karen Barrow.



Go Here


Yes, I know that everyone knows how much fattening those popcorns at movie theatres are with double amount of sodium and butter. Though knowing the vague idea of it and actually knowing the exact amount of fat and sodium in popcorn will make you think twice about having that popcorn this weekend! According to the article, in order to have just enough amount of popcorn as a healthy snack, you would have to share your popcorn with the entire row of moviegoers around you! The study from the Center for Science in the Public Interest researched three movie theaters ( probably in America) and small size popcorn has 670 calories, 550 miligrams of sodium and 24 grams of saturated fat! The only relieving fact from this article is that the size of American popcorn cup is much larger than Korean ones and I believe Korean movie theater popcorns do not use coconut oil for their popcorn. So hopefully we can cut down about 100 calories from what they say on this article, but I don't guarantee anything from the amount of sodium! Also, I wrote the portion of small size popcorn so I don't scare you away too much. For large popcorn.. see it for yourself on this article!!


Now, as you can see if you go into the hyperlink, the article was posted on November, 2009. That is almost a year and a half old article and yet I have to say there are a lot more popcorn flavor invented since then! Just in Korea for example, we have buttered pop corn, spicy flavor (using ramen sauce), garlic flavor, and charamel flavor. I personally love charamel flavor, but I heard that is buttered popcorn coated with charamel on top. Don't make me calculate the calories there... I walk & run for 30 minutes on treadmill every other day and I bet you that doesn't make me lose 700~800 calories I eat from charamel popcorns! Now, the article suggests to skip popcorns when watching movies at theater. I can do that. But it also says that air popped popcorn also contains enough sodium for your daily nutrient. I am sure no body just eats one popcorn for a whole day.


Now, the movie theaters pops their popcorn using coconut oil, which often has 90% of saturated fat. So I repeat, let's just forget about popcorns from now on when we go to movie theaters if you are not going to share your popcorn with the entire row of movie goers as this article says!


Just to add a little information: this does not mean you can have nachos instead of popcorns at movies!!

What is self-esteem, confidence, and conceit?

Confidence: belief in oneself and one’s powers or abilities.

Conceit: an excessively favorable opinion of one’s own ability, importance, wit, etc.

Self esteem: a realistic respect for or favorable impression of oneself.

I looked up these words in the dictionary because after taking the self-esteem test in the class, I got a relatively high score of 75 and I wondered if I’m more conceited than confident. To make sure if I’m conceited or confident, I had to find the difference between the two.

By looking up the definitions, I found out that confidence is a belief of one's own capabilities, powers, and etc. and conceit is about believing and showing others about his or her ability that they are better than others. These two words could have the opposite or the cause and effect connotation. Because sometimes confidence can bring conceit. For example, when one succeeds in his/her work and is acknowledges by others because of their self-confidence, they are likely to become conceited.

A Former General Electric CEO, Jack Welch said, Quote His view on self-confident people is that they are not afraid take others’ views into consideration and change the old views.

These two definitions are very different. Confidence is a belief of oneself. It is not about showing or comparing oneself to others. But conceit is an expression of one’s capabilities. These two words may sound similar but there is a big difference to it, which is a belief in oneself. It means that people who are conceited is likely to put a low value on others because they have a low self-esteem. They may be unaware of the fact that they have a low value too. They have self-doubt in themselves and that is why they have to push others down to prove they have higher values than others. But if they already consider themselves as a valuable person, then they don’t have to prove it to others. People of self-confidence and self-respect are acknowledged as they are because they respect others the same way.

It is hard to draw a line between the two and I think the only way to maintain a balance solely depends on one’s attempt to control self-esteem. After researching this subject, I think I have a relatively high self-esteem than others but not so conceited.

How important is 'First impression'?

While I did yesterday's reading assignment, the part "be wary of first impressions" really got me to think.
How important is 'first impression' and to what extent?

It is true that the first impressions we get at the moment of first encounter on anyting, affect us greatly.-They easily take over your mind and constantly makes you think, react, and behave in the similar way and it's really hard to change your attitude.

When I look back myself, I think I have missed many chances due to my 'first impressions' on many things and the followed bias that led me to behave in certain ways.

For example- certain movies, after I saw the trailers or advertisements, I thought they were not the type of movies I prefer to watch and skipped them.
Some movies, I thought the storyline was so cliche and my perceptions even progressed to a negative feeling about those movies; that they were not good movies. A Few years later I happened to see those movies by chance and actually found out that they weren't so bad after all. Some of those movies, surprisingly, were very entertaining for me and now they are even one of my favorite movies.

I Even had similar experience with my friend. One of my friends, when I first saw her, I thought it would be the most likely that we become close friends. I didn't have bad feelings about her, but we seemed to have 'nothing' in common; Her ideas were so mature, she was always hard working and seemed to excell on any given work, and she reacted so cool on any situations or frustrating events. And I seemed to be everything BUT all those. Then one day we had a chance to chat a little and found out that no matter how different we seemed (and we were), we were connected very well anyways.
Now, she is one of my closest and most dependable friends.

What I have wrote are situations that I do 'realize' because my impressions and behaviors changed. There are sure to be many chances - either finding a good book, chance to be good friends with someone, trying new things, etc - that I have let go
and not even notice until now, because I clung on to my narrow first impressions which are not even very reliable ideas.
(Writing all this, I feel like such a fool. Too much affected by first impressions and so biased! :b)

First impressions seemed to have affected me my whole life.
I think everyone had similar experiences on first impressions somehow.
Like the main point of the class, it can prevent you from producing and accepting better ideas.So as the book suggests, we should "be wary of first impressions".
But no matter how hard one tries to be aware of his/her first impressions, I think everyone is bound to be affected by first impressions to some degress and its power controlling your mind is not so small.

Below are some cartoon cuts that I've found on the internet.
See how the cartoon characters react to the idea of 'first impression'.
(I thought it was so funny that the Asian businessman bowed in very low position, to make good first impression to his clients)




source) http://www.titusconsultingllc.com/services.html



source) http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/f/first_impression.asp

More About Fan Deaths in Korea

After the lecture on the April Fool's day, I have once again realized that becoming a critical thinker is definitely not an easy thing. The fan death article, I totally have accepted all the information written on it without any hesitation. I regret about it and now I decided to find more about it.
The arguments on this issue clearly divided into two. Those who believed that fans can actually kill, and the other who argued that they don't.

Those who believe fan deaths argue that if a fan is blowing in a sealed room then it may cause the body temperature to cool down, eventually causing hypothermia. This hypothermia even leads a person to death. Their second assertion would be suffocation. The argument is that the blowing fan creates a vacuum around one's face area, which prevents him or her from breathing, leading to death. Actually, the strongest arguments may be the anecdotes of some people who have experienced a "near-death" when they have forgotten to turn their fans off while they were asleep.

However, there never was an objective scientific study that proved fans can create such deaths. It is so widely believed among Koreans, but no one exactly knows how really a fan kills a person.
In fact, a research was conducted in Korea back in 2007 which led by KBS(Korea Broadcasting Service). According to this controlled research the doctors proved that fans did not cause suffocation, nor hypothermia. On the other hand, there were some experts saying that the fans may work negatively to people who are already suffering from obesity or respiratory diseases.

To sum up my short research, the fan death may not be a direct cause of a death, but may be an indirect cause. This means that when a person is already suffering from chronic diseases, he or she may be more susceptible to change in body condition by a fan.
I think more researches must be conducted on this issue controlling various circumstances that may affect the result of the research.

** For your information, refer to the research done by KBS. Sorry that this is only provided in Korean.
** This is an interesting article on Fan Death from Snopes.com, an urban legend reference site.

KaTalk Boom!

When smart phone first came out, I did not welcome. What's the use of having one? I can use the Internet with my laptop, and I don't mind carrying it with me.
But it was iPhone4 which changed my mind and to register online among the first. I just loved the design. So simple, but attractive.
We live in the world where there are so many products to choose from with the technology advancing everyday. It is us, the consumers, who have the control to make a company thrive or just die. However, Apple is different. Who would ever thought that so many people will stay up all night and wait in a long line to buy a product these days? And we thank Steve Jobs for inventing such a product.. As Kimsun posted below, I think people who get addicted to smart phones are the ones using iPhones.
And now the new issue is about applications! Application industry is emerging, and it's true that telecoms are gaining less revenue because of it. The use of SMS and MMS is decreasing. Even though I can use 300 SMS for free, sometimes I don't use them all! Most of my friends have smartphones, and therefore we talk continuously using KakaoTalk or MyPeople. But it is possible since I monthly pay enough money for using data. Isn't it more profitable than revenue that can be earned from SMS and MMS? If one of the telecoms block the use of mobile messengers, I am sure that many will switch to other telecoms.

Can humanitarian intervention be justified?

With all that is going on today in Libya, I thought about issues regarding humanitarian intervention, state sovereignty, political reform, and so on. I used the W.I.S.E. approach to clear my ideas and think more about the issues. To begin with, in the "wonder" stage, I thought of numerous controversial questions. When the United States and several European countries attacked the Qaddafi government in the name of humanitarian intervention, it made me wonder if humanitarian intervention can be justified. Furthermore, I thought about to what extent the sovereignty of a nation should be respected by other nations. These questions and more were essentially rooted in the issue of humanitarian intervention.

Moving on, I thought about the conflicting arguments that exist regarding this issue of humanitarian intervention. In this section I did both steps two and three (investigate and speculate) because since so many ideas and arguments are interrelated it is difficult to separate one idea from another, issue from resolution and conclusion, and so on. Humanitarian intervention refers to the use of force across state borders aimed at ending infringements of fundamental human rights of individuals. At first thought, it seems that intervention of such nature is for a good cause, resulting from good intentions. However, on the other hand, it seems ironic that force and violence is used for the purpose of stopping force and violence that result in violation of human rights. Then the questions arises, whether the use of force can be justified if it is for a good cause and a desirable end result. The use of force is not the only controversial issue when it comes to humanitarian intervention. Another very important problem is state sovereignty. The idea of sovereignty allows a state to have supreme and independent authority over its state and state affairs. This would mean that a state has the supreme power over its state over any other nations. Then given this, is it just or fair for a nation to intervene in the matters of another nation, how ever good the intentions may be? Though there are many conflicting ideas regarding humanitarian intervention, it seems that without it a countless number of innocent people may never be protected as in the case of Libya.

Finally, for the last step (evaluate), I thought about which arguments I think are most agreeable. In my opinion, there are many flaws in this idea of humanitarian intervention such as the use of force, denying a nation its sovereignty, and etc. However, I still think that humanitarian intervention is necessary and inevitable. Sovereignty should not be an unlimited power. If a state abuses its power and denies its citizens their fundamental human rights, it is the responsibility of the capable nations in the international community to intervene and end such abuse of power by the government. However, the sole purpose of such intervention should be to end infringements of fundamental human rights of the individuals and not be to further the intervening nation's interest such as political reform or economic gain.

In conclusion, I think that humanitarian intervention was needed in Libya where the government was basically waging war against its own people. However, as the US and the European countries turn over their responsibility to NATO, more questions arise. With the US essentially being the leading nation of NATO, it seems that the US may be getting too involved with what is actually a civil war within Libya between the existing government and rebels who want reform.