Funny~
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Friday, July 20, 2007
What is happiness?
For me, I think happiness lies in fulfilment of mind, the absence of desire, and a feeling of pleasure not really of sense but of spirit, and surely not of imagination I should clarify. Because human creatures have never-ending desires one after another, never will be satisfied. Even the desire of happiness itself makes you unhappy. The desire of possession can always make you unsatisfied in life. So the definition of happiness and the way of feeling it depend individually on their way of thinking and looking at life. It's difficult and a bit controvertial sometimes for people to get it, because in reality, it's hard for people to stop their desire which is positive for progress, improvement and development, but at the same time exhausts and even stresses people who desire to reach out and realize the goals in their life. Some usually say, your life would stop and become meaningless when you don't have any desire, goals or dreams in your life. But Some would say, happiness belongs to the one who's always satisfied in life.
Indeed, happiness can be arosen in various occasions. For example, you can feel the happiness when surrounded by your family or friends celebreating your birthdays;When you're beloved and giving your love to others; When a new couple get married to each other they feel the happiness too. Sometimes, happiness is just a temporary thing. It would disappear later. In my opinion, the happiness gained on a material basis isn't real happiness, but the one you own in your spirit can be happiness forever.
Indeed, happiness can be arosen in various occasions. For example, you can feel the happiness when surrounded by your family or friends celebreating your birthdays;When you're beloved and giving your love to others; When a new couple get married to each other they feel the happiness too. Sometimes, happiness is just a temporary thing. It would disappear later. In my opinion, the happiness gained on a material basis isn't real happiness, but the one you own in your spirit can be happiness forever.
Population
Q1
Personnally, I feel optimistic about the trend of the declination of fertility rate, not to mention the low fertility rate in some developed countries such as Canada, and the ones already with a stablized population like Australia, Japan and Western Europe, and also the decreasing trend in Russia. The control of population growth in many countries also seems optimistic by cutting fertility rate. In the video showed that many women in Japan choose not to give birth and prefer to be single, despite the fact that it's extremely expensive to raise a family of good qulity and difficult to balance between work and children since women in Japan have to work as well. The population growth though has many negative effects has also its positive side like younger generations make the country looks younger and compell human development.
Q2
The global aging population will be one of the pessimistic result in the future centuries because of fertility rate decreasing trend. It seems a controvertial problem that if the population increase significantly in the next 25years, there would be lack of resources in general, particularly water and petroleum, and also less jobs for too many people.
Q3
What I think should be done in the industrial areas is to stablize population growth as much as possible and to maintain or modify our ecosystem and biodiversity environment. Developed countries should help developing and poor countries for the world development as a whole. And education is important especially in poor undeveloped areas as a way to spread information on health and sexual knowledge to prevent or overcome the problem of Aids in African countries and to cut birth rate. Also, it's a good way to make people to be aware of and use carefully the limited resources on our planet.
Personnally, I feel optimistic about the trend of the declination of fertility rate, not to mention the low fertility rate in some developed countries such as Canada, and the ones already with a stablized population like Australia, Japan and Western Europe, and also the decreasing trend in Russia. The control of population growth in many countries also seems optimistic by cutting fertility rate. In the video showed that many women in Japan choose not to give birth and prefer to be single, despite the fact that it's extremely expensive to raise a family of good qulity and difficult to balance between work and children since women in Japan have to work as well. The population growth though has many negative effects has also its positive side like younger generations make the country looks younger and compell human development.
Q2
The global aging population will be one of the pessimistic result in the future centuries because of fertility rate decreasing trend. It seems a controvertial problem that if the population increase significantly in the next 25years, there would be lack of resources in general, particularly water and petroleum, and also less jobs for too many people.
Q3
What I think should be done in the industrial areas is to stablize population growth as much as possible and to maintain or modify our ecosystem and biodiversity environment. Developed countries should help developing and poor countries for the world development as a whole. And education is important especially in poor undeveloped areas as a way to spread information on health and sexual knowledge to prevent or overcome the problem of Aids in African countries and to cut birth rate. Also, it's a good way to make people to be aware of and use carefully the limited resources on our planet.
Friday, July 6, 2007
Summary of the Lecture
The topics in this lecture is about communication in general. To show the ways people in different genders and age groups communicate. In the first part of communication patterns, it introduced different patterns of communication, word order, grammar, the way we chose words or expressions and why we do chose them. Also, the analysis of natural conversations is to see if they can be presented to general public. Through a cross-cultural study shows the differences between men and women, youngs and olds on communication styles. Through the example of conversations between American and Japanese groups on how they start or end a conversation, how they present ,argue, or fignt, etc. we noticed that American style is quite straightforward often by ladies-first-style whereas Japanese is not in a direct way. They tend to start conversation by sequence of gender and age, and the don't use the same way talking to different kinds of people. For example, the ways of speaking to children and adult or elder people are quite different in their culture. From my point of view, compare with western people who are more direct in way of speaking, Asian people usually choose their words and expression, especially when asking for request or refuse somebody, they express indirectly.
In the part of conversational coherence, focusing on the physical arrangement in conversation of man- to- man and man -to -woman . it happens that men don't face each other when talking, but when a man talk with a woman, they usually look at each other face to face. Girls aged between 7 or 8 are comfortable and open freely to talk a topic, even in a story telling way, but boys aren't comfort under that situation, and they don't talk much in the topic. Boys and girls aged 12 or so are different, boys would have more topics to talk, we say according to research, 55topics within 20 minutes, such as sports,TV shows politics etc. When in trouble talking, boys tend to talk more about their own problems instead of listen to other's problems. But girls of this grade with more coherence, they agree with each other, and usually avoid saying 'I'm better that you' that kinds of thing. but to convey a feeling of 'I'm almost the same as you'.
In the TV debates part, they took 10 people involved in the TV debates for study, during the show, they noticed that people tend to listen to experts more than the one who are not, and they also listen to men more than women even men are not experts. Men present themselves and talking a lot in a lecture way to show themselves as experts.
In my opinion, men are more active in such situations, they tend to dominant the conversation and get control of it.
In the part of conversational coherence, focusing on the physical arrangement in conversation of man- to- man and man -to -woman . it happens that men don't face each other when talking, but when a man talk with a woman, they usually look at each other face to face. Girls aged between 7 or 8 are comfortable and open freely to talk a topic, even in a story telling way, but boys aren't comfort under that situation, and they don't talk much in the topic. Boys and girls aged 12 or so are different, boys would have more topics to talk, we say according to research, 55topics within 20 minutes, such as sports,TV shows politics etc. When in trouble talking, boys tend to talk more about their own problems instead of listen to other's problems. But girls of this grade with more coherence, they agree with each other, and usually avoid saying 'I'm better that you' that kinds of thing. but to convey a feeling of 'I'm almost the same as you'.
In the TV debates part, they took 10 people involved in the TV debates for study, during the show, they noticed that people tend to listen to experts more than the one who are not, and they also listen to men more than women even men are not experts. Men present themselves and talking a lot in a lecture way to show themselves as experts.
In my opinion, men are more active in such situations, they tend to dominant the conversation and get control of it.
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Post-reading discussion
1.
It's hard to say if I am satisfied or not with the ending. The feeling I got with the ending like it's not too much like an ending of a novel in the usual ways. If have to be an answer I should just say it's ok. To be honest, I wasn't sure if it ends until I saw there's no more words in the next page.
And I was wondering if I didn't understand the whole story or there's something wrong with it.
Through all my way reading this novel, I was trying to figure out if there's a clue line up the whole story even if it is composed of seperate stories each chapter. In my opinion, the ending of the story didn't really line up the whole book. They are seperate stories till the last chapter and ,each chapter telling about characters' performance as professional doctor, their treatment and dealing with different kinds of patients, I guess all these seperate stories are maybe in one purpose to support the main idea of the novel.
For myself as a reader, there's still unanswered or puzzled questions to think about. Such as: why Ming, the girl medical student who was acutally deeply in love with Fitz, didn't marry him just because of two points: one should be the disapprovment of her family's traditional notion that her husband should be a chinese guy. Another one should be her commitment and concentration for Med School and her future career as a professional doctor. She finally turned out to be Doctor Chen's wife, (Doctor Chen was also a student in med school once), is this just because Chen is a chinese guy so she married him? Or if she really loves Chen, then what about her deep love before with Fitz? If so, I wonder about her heart and feeling change so easy and fast. Another question puzzled me is why Fitz (one of the medicine school student who later became a doctor) made an HIV injection to the criminal patient brought by police. Was that because the criminal patient hurt him twice (one is cutting on hand because of the patient's struggle to the medicine cure, the other should be the patient's biting on him during his treatment with him)?
2.
1) The major theme from my point of view as well as the other ones in group has identified should be the commitment, endeavour and struggles of getting into Superior Medicine School, to become professional doctors, and being professional doctors. And as professional doctors, there were many things and aspects that are more demanding, tough, obligate and expected envolving into their lives. And the description of certain characters are thought-provoking for life, for love, and for aspects such as humanity, morality and relationships of people, especially the one between doctors and patients, their subtle emotional feelings and the attidude to patients' family memebers. For example, as a professional doctor, they would sometimes tell lies when facing certain bad situation actually resulted from their lacking of responsibility to the patient. Even they got the fear and guilty feeling inside themselves, they hide the truth as a secret.
2)In this book, each chapter dealing with certain character's daily life and work as a doctor that reflects and illustrates the most important part of his or her life - for medicine students, it's important to success in tests to get into higher medicine school and then become a professional doctor in the future of their lives.
3.
The characters in this book is quite clear. Fits, Ming, Chen and Sri are the mainly four characters in this book. I'm able to put each of them in role but I don't feel them as real person even though I consider some of the stories may be true and did happened in real life, but I think the author used these characters just for expressing and making up the stories.
4,
The reason that I kept on reading this novel till the end is because I was always hoping to find a clue and answers to some questions that puzzled me. In my opinion, the plot didn't seem quite clear or get lost too often during the reading, maybe that's what this novel for, to leave the suspend and puzzle to us for thinking and let wandering our imagination.
It's hard to say if I am satisfied or not with the ending. The feeling I got with the ending like it's not too much like an ending of a novel in the usual ways. If have to be an answer I should just say it's ok. To be honest, I wasn't sure if it ends until I saw there's no more words in the next page.
And I was wondering if I didn't understand the whole story or there's something wrong with it.
Through all my way reading this novel, I was trying to figure out if there's a clue line up the whole story even if it is composed of seperate stories each chapter. In my opinion, the ending of the story didn't really line up the whole book. They are seperate stories till the last chapter and ,each chapter telling about characters' performance as professional doctor, their treatment and dealing with different kinds of patients, I guess all these seperate stories are maybe in one purpose to support the main idea of the novel.
For myself as a reader, there's still unanswered or puzzled questions to think about. Such as: why Ming, the girl medical student who was acutally deeply in love with Fitz, didn't marry him just because of two points: one should be the disapprovment of her family's traditional notion that her husband should be a chinese guy. Another one should be her commitment and concentration for Med School and her future career as a professional doctor. She finally turned out to be Doctor Chen's wife, (Doctor Chen was also a student in med school once), is this just because Chen is a chinese guy so she married him? Or if she really loves Chen, then what about her deep love before with Fitz? If so, I wonder about her heart and feeling change so easy and fast. Another question puzzled me is why Fitz (one of the medicine school student who later became a doctor) made an HIV injection to the criminal patient brought by police. Was that because the criminal patient hurt him twice (one is cutting on hand because of the patient's struggle to the medicine cure, the other should be the patient's biting on him during his treatment with him)?
2.
1) The major theme from my point of view as well as the other ones in group has identified should be the commitment, endeavour and struggles of getting into Superior Medicine School, to become professional doctors, and being professional doctors. And as professional doctors, there were many things and aspects that are more demanding, tough, obligate and expected envolving into their lives. And the description of certain characters are thought-provoking for life, for love, and for aspects such as humanity, morality and relationships of people, especially the one between doctors and patients, their subtle emotional feelings and the attidude to patients' family memebers. For example, as a professional doctor, they would sometimes tell lies when facing certain bad situation actually resulted from their lacking of responsibility to the patient. Even they got the fear and guilty feeling inside themselves, they hide the truth as a secret.
2)In this book, each chapter dealing with certain character's daily life and work as a doctor that reflects and illustrates the most important part of his or her life - for medicine students, it's important to success in tests to get into higher medicine school and then become a professional doctor in the future of their lives.
3.
The characters in this book is quite clear. Fits, Ming, Chen and Sri are the mainly four characters in this book. I'm able to put each of them in role but I don't feel them as real person even though I consider some of the stories may be true and did happened in real life, but I think the author used these characters just for expressing and making up the stories.
4,
The reason that I kept on reading this novel till the end is because I was always hoping to find a clue and answers to some questions that puzzled me. In my opinion, the plot didn't seem quite clear or get lost too often during the reading, maybe that's what this novel for, to leave the suspend and puzzle to us for thinking and let wandering our imagination.
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