Big Think Free Write

When the world becomes smarter than it already is and we have created a virtual world that we can physically live in, the value of experience will decrease by a huge amount.  Being able to practice anything you want without the fear of danger will give more people to opportunity to gain experience in a field.  The best field that I can think of for this type of technology would be the military.  They could train their soliders in this virtual world and get them as ready as possible for real combat once they are deployed.  We do not know if this technology would actually prepare them for the world of fighting so I do not consider this real experience.  I believe that experience should be earned in the real world in order for it to be applied towards real world jobs.  In the video, the man compared the virtual world to the "matrix".  If I am remembering right, the matrix was not a place where anyone wanted to be.

Sign Diagram - Reformed

Sign Diagram of My Life - Original

My Moment of Inspiration

My moment of inspiration was the moment that I joined my last travel team.  My coach inspired me to reach my dream of playing Division 1 college softball.  He has pushed me mentally and physically in order to get myself in the best shape possible so that I could compete at the next level.  He helped ease the process of college recruiting because he would always talk to the coaches and put in good word for you.  We have become extremely close over the two years that he has been my coach and he is one of the people that I miss the most from home.  I can never repay him for helping me achieve my dream and inspiring me to become the best that I can be.  I am really excited to go back home during winter break and going to a few practices to see him, my team that I left behind, and the rest of the coaches and parents that all had a hand, no matter how small, in me succeeding at my dream.

Battlestar Galactica - Episodes 1-2

            The first episode of Battlestar Galactica was “33”.  This was the next episode after the miniseries that we had watched previously.  The humans were jumping all around space in order to avoid the cylons.  The cylons kept finding them exactly 33 minutes after their last jump.  After one of their jumps they lost one of their civilian carrier ships but not long after the jump it reappeared.  The humans found out that the Olympic Carrier had been taken over by cylons and ordered it to be destroyed.  The cylons did not follow them again after they destroyed the civilian ship and everything was somewhat safe.

            The second episode of Battlestar Galactica was “Water”.  At the beginning of the episode, one of the pilots found that six detonators were missing from the small arms locker.  They ended up being in the water tanks and detonating, losing 60% of the water supply in the process.  The pilots were sent out to find water on different planets.  They were having a lot problems finding water and at the end they found it and replenished the water supply on all the ships in the fleet.  The president, the commanders, and other important people had a meeting and found out from the evidence that there is a cylon aboard the Galactica and that no one else is allowed to know about this because everyone would start accusing each other of being cylons.  All the detonators were either used or found so no other damage was sustained to the ship.

In Class Video

• He went to an elite, snobby, school in India
• He was supposed to be a doctor
• The entire world was laid out for him
• Visited a village and it changed his life
• saw starvation
• death
• suffering
• This made him want to live and work in a village
• He wanted to give something back because of the education he had achieved
• Digging wells for 5 years
• He learned things that only poor people know
• He wanted to start a college only for the poor
• No one with degrees of qualifications are allowed to teach at the school
• Show that you have a skill/service that you can offer to the community
• "Barefoot College"
• "Whatever idea you have, come and try it.  Doesn't matter if you fail"
• Do not need a paper to show that you are qualified to help your community
• 1986 - first barefoot college
• food is solar cooked at the barefoot college that women created
• all roofs are connected and all rain drains into a vat where all water is saved, none goes to waste

Free Write - Mid-Terms

            Mid-terms are coming up for many students; they have been stressing out about all the tests that they have to take and have been studying for long periods of time.  I have gotten extremely lucky this semester because I do not have any “mid-term” exams.  I have an exam on Friday for my Business Law class but it is not a cumulative exam of everything that we have done.  I also have a test on Monday for my QBUS class and, again, it is not cumulative.  They are both just the second test on the progression to the end of the semester and the final exam.  I feel extremely lucky that I do not have to be stressing out about mid-term exams during my first semester in college.

The Dragonfly Effect - Wing Three

ENGAGE
To get to an emotional level with your audience

• if you can't engage people emotionally, they won't be swayed
• personal connections engage people
• Characteristics of a Highly Engaging Campaign
• transparency
• interactivity
• immediacy
• facilitation
• commitment
• cocreation
• collaboration
• experience
• trust

T.E.A.M. (Design Principles)

• Tell a story
• Stories move us, make us feel alive, and inspire us
• Barak Obama used story telling
• make a story sticky
• Empathize
• identify personal relevance to engage the audience
• you must empathize with your audience's needs and feelings.
• connect with the people you are trying to reach out to
• Be Authentic
• if you'r not truly moved by the story you're telling, no one else will be, either
• increase feelings of closeness and connection
• incorporate a wide variety of details
• Match the Media
• use different forms of media to meet different preferences
• utilize online and offline media
• engagement and empowerment is best achieved when information flows in both directions

The organization Charity: Water uses the four design principles to help engage and convey their cause of building clean water wells in developing nations

How to Change the World - Reformed System

This is the reformed system because of the work that was put into changing the system of college admissions as detailed in the book How to Change the World.

How to Change the World - Original System

This is the diagram of the original system as modeled in the book How to Change the World.  The explaination of the system and how it changes is posted below

How to Change the World Using Systems

Chapter 13 “The Talent Is Out There”

J.B. Schramm, United States:  College Access

1.      Detail the system that your subject encountered:  The system that J.B. Schramm encountered was the system of college admissions for the underprivileged youth that did not have the best statistical grades in the world but have the skills to get them through college.  Usually only the exceptional students who are underprivileged are the ones that colleges want in their student body and the average ones are the ones that get the short end of the stick.

The system is as follows:  Many students who are underprivileged have the possibility to go to college but they do not have the statistical grades to help them get there.  Instead of using other means to try to get into college, they never try to get there and end up on the streets or working for minimum wage.  Those who do try to not know how to play up their strengths, end up being rejected, and have the same fate as those who did not try.

2.      Explain the need and the problems that your subject encountered:  J.B. Schramm encountered the problem of getting these kids accepted into college when the college did not want them in the first place.  The need for this problem to be fixed was extremely high because there are many underprivileged kids around the country that deserve the same opportunities that the more privileged people of America already have.

3.      How did they attempt to change the understanding of the situation?:  They attempted to change the understanding of the situation by finding the source of the problem and starting there.  They realized that the reason that these children were not being accepted into college was because the admissions officers were not being shown what types of people that they are.  What Schramm focused on was teaching these children how to write well developed college essays that capture the essence of who they are within it.  They set up a college writing seminar for some of the kids that wanted to get into college but did not have the means to.  The first year that this was in existence, only four people were enrolled and all of them were accepted and enrolled in college.

4.      How did they change the system?:  The system was changed because of the overwhelming number of students that have gone to these College Summits in order to further their educations.  Opportunities were created by Schramm and all of the people that he recruited to help him.  Those people include the writing instructors that taught the kids how create well developed essays that told the story of who they are, the people who donated money to help fund the College Summit and fly the kids to a college where the seminar actually took place, and the kids that had the will and the drive to further themselves to reach the next level of education that probably would not have been possible without the help of everyone around them.  The most dramatic change of the system was being able to change the way that admissions officers look at applications and try to see what type of person an applicant was instead of the numbers that they put up in the classroom.

5.      What problems did they encounter?  What setbacks?:  Some of the problems that Schramm encountered were as follows.  Finding funding was one of the major problems that he encountered.  He had signed up approximately forty kids to go to the workshop at a college that they would have to be flown to but Schramm still did not have the funding.  He was on the verge of cancelling the workshop all together but then he met with a woman who said that she would fund the entire College Summit, all $13,800 needed.  Now he does not have a funding problem because he has grants from the Department of Education and many other smaller benefactors.  Another problem that Schramm faced was that he needed a substantial amount of kids to sign up in order for this to be a success.  He ended up getting a large amount of people to sign up not from advertising, but from word of mouth from those students who had attended the summits and told their friends, who told their friends, and so on.  This has become a very large program because of the amount of people who have joined and the amount of money that has been donated to this wonderful cause.

6.      Who were the allies?  The opposers?:  The allies of the project were the students that wanted to go to college, pre-existing programs that supported the same cause, teachers and administrators that wanted their students to succeed, and the communities of underprivileged children that wanted to give them a better life than the people living in them have had.  The opposers to the project were few and far between.  These people were not really opposers; they just needed to be shown a different way of thinking in order to let these kids into college.  The admissions officers are a prime example of this.  When they learned to look at applications differently, they could see what type of person the applicant was and let them into their college or university.

7.      Explain how the new system works:  The new system is as follows. Many students who are underprivileged have the possibility to go to college but they do not have the statistical grades to help them get there.  Students sign up for the College Summit that will teach them how to write a well-developed college essay that explains to the admissions officers what they are like as a person.  The essays that these underprivileged children send in persuade the admissions officers into accepting them into that college or university so that they can make a better life for themselves once they graduate.

Summary of Unwind (Parts 1-2)

            Unwind is a story about the adventure that three people have to go through to save their lives.  The world that these people live in has just finished its second civil war, which was fought over reproductive rights.  What was decided from the outcome of this war was that abortion was deemed unethical and illegal and so alternate measures were created.  Life was not to be taken from a person by any means until the age of thirteen.  From the ages of thirteen to eighteen, however, parents could have their children “unwound”.  To “unwind” means to harvest the organs and body parts from the child so the child would live on through their body parts that reside on another person’s body.  For example, if a child was an exceptional pianist and they were unwound, a person who was in need of a hand would get that child’s hand and would have that child piano playing skills only in that hand.  They would not know how they were playing the piano so well; the hand would be acting on its own.  As stated before, this novel is about three children between the ages of thirteen and eighteen that are running away so that they are not “unwound”.

            The first child in jeopardy of being “unwound” is Conner.  Conner’s parents cannot take care of him because is to wild for them to handle anymore.  They sign an unwind order, which is irreversible, and do not tell Conner about his ultimate fate.  Conner is looking around one day and finds the unwind order.  This makes him run away from his home and everything that he knows in order to save his life.  He gets in the back of a truck and ends up being found at a rest stop because he was traced by the GPS device in his cell phone.  To try and escape this situation, he runs out in the middle of a highway, avoiding many cars and causing a few accidents along the way.  As he is running away, he sees a miserable looking boy in a car that was in the pile up.  He takes him out of the car and they run away.  This boy ends up being the second person that is running for their life.

            The second runaway unwind’s name is Lev.  He has just celebrated his thirteenth birthday but he has known all his life that this would be his last.  From his birth he has been a tithe.  This means that he was born and destined to be “unwound” for, in his family’s case, religious reasons.  Lev embraced the fact that he was going to “unwound” and was actually on the way to the unwinding facility when they were stuck in a pile up on the highway and Conner reached in the car and took Lev out of his seat and ran away with him in his arms.  As they were running into the woods, they saw a girl run into the woods as well.  This is the third person in this saga.

            The third and final refugee in this novel is Risa.  She has never known who her parents are because she is a ward of the state.  She tries to excel in everything she does so that she can prove that she has a reason to live.  Unfortunately, she is chosen by the people of the school to be “unwound”.  She was on a bus on the way to the unwinding facility when the bus they were on crashed on the highway, killing the bus driver.  Risa saw this as her opportunity to get away so she gets off the bus and runs into the woods to protect her life.  This is where she meets up with Conner and Lev and their adventure begins.

            While the three of them start talking in the woods, they realize that they are all supposed to be “unwound”.  They see this as a blessing in disguise, except for Lev.  He had accepted the fact that he was meant to be unwound and did not want that destiny to be changed.  Conner and Risa try to convince him that going with them is the way to go and Lev obliges, but still believes that his way is the right way.  While they are walking around looking for food and clothing, Conner sees a baby that has been left on the front porch of a home.  This is not a rare occurrence in the world that these people live in.  The process of leaving a baby on the front porch of another is called “storking”.  If a baby is left on a person front porch and they do not catch the parents in the act of leaving the baby there, then it is the homeowner’s legal obligation to care for this child, but if the parents are caught in the act of leaving the child, they are forced to keep the child.  Conner sees the reaction of a family after they have been storked and pretends to be the father to get the baby.  As they are in the act of leaving with the baby, a cop car drives by as the school bus for the local high school is picking up.  The three children, along with the baby, get on the school bus to blend in with their surroundings.

            After they get to school, they all go to a girl’s bathroom and hide in the stalls.  Each person is hiding in their own stall.  Conner and Risa were planning on leaving during lunchtime when it was not out of the ordinary to leave campus.  Lev on the other hand had a different plan.  During a class change he left his stall and went to the office.  He told them that he had been kidnapped by two unwind’s and that they were hiding in the bathroom.  The principal called the police and they had arrived at the school.  As this was happening, Lev realized what he had done was wrong so to create a diversion he pulled the fire alarm. 

            While everyone was evacuating the school, Conner, Risa, and the baby were hiding in a chemistry lab, making an attempt to stay hidden.  Their plan did not work that well though because a teacher found them and instead of turning them in, actually helped them to escape.  She told them the name of an antique shop to go to and to talk to Sonia if they wanted help.  So Conner, Risa, and the baby escaped while Lev was left behind and was all alone.

            The three of them found the antique shop and talked to Sonia.  She had a cellar in her house where she housed other runaway “unwinds”.  There were three people in the cellar when Conner, Risa, and the baby showed up.  They spent four days in the cellar before being taken away to another location.  On the night before they left, Sonia called each of the people upstairs one at a time.  She told them to write a letter to a person that they loved.  Conner wrote a letter to his parents that was ten pages long.  She took the letter that was in an envelope and put it in a large trunk that had many other letters in it.  She told him that when he turned eighteen, the age that he needs to live to in order for him or anyone else not to become unwound, he needed to come back to visit and she would give the letter back.  If he did not come back within a year of his eighteenth birthday, she would assume that he had not succeeded in his mission of avoiding the unwinding process.  If this happened, she would mail the letter to the intended audience, in this case Conner’s parents.  This made Conner and all the other people living in the cellar much more motivated to beat the odds and not become “unwound”.

            The next morning they were all piled into the back of an ice cream truck so that they could be transported to the next stop on their journey.  The teacher who told Conner and Risa where to go was there to see them off and also take a burden off of their back.  She offered to take the baby that they have been caring for the past few days.  Both of them, especially Risa, miss the baby but they realize that they will not be successful on their mission if they have to bring a baby with them so they give the baby over and start off on their long journey towards freedom.

Free Write - A System

One system that I am currently involved in is as follows:

I am going to school to get an education. That education will help me enhance my skills. These skills will help me get a good job. The job that I obtain will pay me money. The money that I earn will help pay off the loans that I got to help pay for school.

This system has become one of the main systems in my life and I hope that I can continue to be a part of this system.

Artificial Life Attains Sentience

          The moments after the artificially created people were brought to life, their minds were like those of newborn babies.  They are innocent, and have no perception of the world yet.  Just like the people who were held prisoner in Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave”.  They could only see shadows and so their perception of the world was that it was created of shadows.  Once they were freed, they realized that those shadows were caused by something and that the world that the lived in was not what they had believed it to be.  This is exactly the same thing that happened to the newly created artificial humans.

            When babies come into this world, they have no thoughts, no memories, and no knowledge.  This state of innocence is one that is valued and smiled upon throughout the world.  Who doesn’t like babies?  This is the same mindset that people who have been artificially created have.  They have no memories, no thoughts, and no knowledge of the world that they have just become a part of.  But as they go through their lives, they learn more about the world around them and start thinking on their own.

            Most babies are taught many things by their parents.  The “parent-like” figures in the lives of these artificial people are the scientists who created them.  They teach them how to walk, talk, eat, think, and anything else that you can think of that a parent would do with their child.  As they live in this world longer, they understand the things around them and what they are there for.  They use the knowledge that they are gaining to create lives for themselves within the area which all of them are living.  They are becoming involved members of a community (even though it is a community of artificial humans).  This community might run differently than our communities today but every community has its differences.

            The path that these artificially created being had to take to make a normal life for them is a long and tough one.  But once they start understanding the world through actions, lessons, and mistakes, they will join the community and be a beneficial member of it.

The Creation of Artificial Life

            Artificial Life.  No one ever thought that the human race would ever be able to create such a thing.  Scientists have been working for ages to create life through simulated means but it has been an allusive feat until recently.  The scientists who started the creation of this artificial life have devoted their lives to this so-called “God-like” work.

            This idea of artificial life started as just that, an idea.  Hundreds upon hundreds of different models were created on many different computers that were networked together so that all the models could be combined together in the best possible way to create the best combination for a successful sample of artificial life.  As we have learned by watching Battlestar Galactica, having a networked computer system can be helpful to connect all of the different things that are working together to create a bigger and better system.  The best model that the system of computers came up with showed that artificial life should be created within a time span of seven days.

Day 1:  The cells from the heart of a deceased person had been collected and stored in a freezer for exactly a year.  On the first day, the cells were removed from the freezer and set out to thaw for twenty-four hours. 

Day 2:  After the cells have thawed, they are put into a machine that separates the DNA from the rest of the cell.  DNA is stored at room temperature while the rest of the cell is put into an oven to kill off any of the impurities that had previously led to the demise of the cell.

Day 3:  The newly sanitized cells are now injected with a serum that was created by the scientists that is proven to restart reproduction in cells.  This serum is injected in small amounts four times during this day.

Day 4:  Each individual cell is studied under a microscope to see if the desired effect has begun to take place.  If it has not, then a new cell will need to be created because each body needs at least 5 cells to start with that will later multiply into millions.

Day 5:  The cells are put into a machine for eight hours.  This machine fires up the electrons of the cells which give the cells energy.

Day 6:  The finished cells are now injected into the corpse.  After, the body is injected with the same serum that the cells were injected with on Day 3 to help the process along.

Day 7:  The sample must be left alone for twenty-four hours in order to fully develop into a living, breathing organism.

After the twenty-four hour waiting period, the sample turned into a living organism.  The body immediately started coming to life again.  The color came back to his skin, his heart started beating, and he started to move first his hands and feet, then his extremities, then his entire body.  This was the first instance of artificial life.  Since that day, there have been 486 documented cases of new life that has been created and they are all being kept in a research facility.  52 of the 486 are babies that have been conceived between two artificially created people.  What will happen with this new species??

My Life in the Future

Ray Kurzweil

2020 – Computers are powerful enough to simulate the human brain

2029 – Reverse engineering the human brain will be completed

2045 – Expanded the intelligence of machines a billion fold

By the year 2020, I will be 27 years old.  I expect to have graduated from Siena College.  I will be working full time and be working up the ranks to get to one of the highest positions in a business.  I do not know what I want to go into yet but I might have graduated grad school by now.  I also expect to be getting married around this time in my life.

By the year 2029, I will be 36 years old.  I will have worked up the ranks at the business I am working at and have a substantial, steady income.  I will have a family now with at least two children and my job will help provide for them.

By the year 2045, I will be 52 years old.  At this time in my life I will be sending my own kids off to college.  An entire generation will have passed from my life right now.  This is a weird concept to think of because of the spot in my life that I am in right now.

OUTLINES FOR ESSAYS (Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave")

The Allegory of the Cave

• There are people who are trapped in a cave
• They have been trapped there for a really long time
• Living in the darkness
• Seeing only shadows
• Then one day one of them gets to leave the cave
• He is blinded by the lights and the reality of what he is able to see,
• the reality that there are actually other things to see besides shadows
• takes him a while to adjust
• once he does, he realizes that he can see the world much better with the light because of what he saw when he was in the cave.

This is about a man learning about the world around him that he had lived in for many years but is now just experiencing it for the first time.

OUTLINES FOR ESSAYS (Genisis 1-11)

Genisis 1-11

• Creation Story #1
• God created Earth in 6 days and on the 7th day he rested
• (artificial life does not create all at once)(takes time)
• Day 1 - Created light and dark and called them morning and night
• Day 2 - Created the sky and seperated the waters from the waters
• Day 3 - Created land and sea
• Day 4 - Created the stars, the moon, and the sun
• Day 5 - Created living things that lived in the sky and in the water
• Day 6 - Created living things that lived on land and CREATED HUMANS
• RESTED ON THE 7TH DAY
• Creation Story #2
• God created a human from the dust on the ground and created the world around him.  Then he created a woman from the rib of the man and left them on the earth by themselves.
• There is tree that they are not allowed to eat from which they do because they are tricked by the serpent
• NOAH
• God destroys all life that was on the Earth
• Tells Noah to bring his family, and two of each living thing on an arc with him because he was going to flood the whole world. 
• Rained for 40 days and 40 nights (Cylons were gone for 40 years)
• God felt bad after he did that and promised to never destroy life again.
• (cylons and humans created an armistice to not destroy each other)
• (went back on that truce)
• Tower of Babel
• God scattered the people of Babel across the world, having them speak different languages
• (the cylons, who were different than the humans had been scattered throughout human kind)

***GOD COULD BE CONSIDERED TO BE A ROUGE SCIENTIST***





Settling in at Siena

I feel like I have settled into Siena very well these past five weeks. I have made a lot of new friends from my hall, from my classes, and from my team. I have settled into the world of college classes very nicely and I feel like I have more time, actually, than I did in high school for my homework. I have worked around softball practices/games, study hall, and my social life to get all of my work done and done well. I have always had pride in the work that I complete and that mindset is not going to change. I have had a few softball games since my transition to Siena College but all of our home games have been cancelled due to rain. We are supposed to play today at home but it is raining outside so I doubt that we are going to still. I feel like I have made the transition of living on my own very smooth. I feel like Siena College is my second home now, but nothing can replace the actual thing.