Facebook Ads

I just had a rather unnerving experience with a Facebook ad, similar to what we were talking about earlier today during the final exam discussion. I was on Facebook just now and I noticed an image of the top of a mountain that looked strangely familiar with a caption that just said "Manisa". I clicked the photo and it brought me to a page talking about the city that contained "Niobe's Rock" on Mount Sipylus. I realized then what I had recognized about the image and the reason why it had appeared as an ad to me. I had recently made a project for Latin about the myth of Niobe where she is transformed into this very rock, and Facebook must have noticed some post I had made about the project. I am a little worried by this because in the past I had believed that Facebook only pulled information from things I had chosen to like or groups I had joined, not any post I may have made on a friend's wall or a status update. This experience really made me realize how much information Facebook actually pulls from your profile to make more directed ads.

Final Meta Post

When I think about the most prominent skill I took away from this year of blogging, drawing connections is really what comes to mind. Almost all of my most recent posts have been about how I noticed that something in class related to or reminded me of something I have experienced elsewhere in life. I have come to see that this is a very useful skill in writing, and it has definitely helped me in essay writing recently. I also noticed that blogging has begun to affect my writing in general. For example, when I was writing our final exam, the "Winnetky Cycle", I kept reading what I had just written and thinking "wait, is this formal enough? This has the feel of a blog post, not an essay..." (hopefully this is a good thing). I also learned the only way to write blog posts that works for me. Until recently, I had been planning a time each week where I would sit down and write a blog post. This lead to a great amount of wasted time staring at the screen waiting for a great topic to blog about popped into my head. Then I began to only write blog posts when I had an idea of what I was going to write about already in mind. When I did this, I started to have ideas for blog posts pop into my head at random times when I noticed a connection between something we had done in class and something I was experiencing just then. I would write down these ideas and then turn them into posts later. For me at least, this was a much more productive system of blogging than trying to think of a topic on the spot. Overall, it took me about three quarters, but I really began to warm up to the idea of blogging when I started using this new system of having a predetermined idea for a blog. Thank you Mr. Bolos and Mr. O'Connor for a great year of American Studies, and a year's worth of blogs to remember it by.

The post I would like you to look at is The Caste System of Flatland

The Caste System of Flatland

I noticed an interesting connection between a book I have been reading for math, Flatland, and the aspects of the American Dream that we have been talking about in class. Flatland is a book about a two dimensional world where an aggressively enforced and restrictive caste system is put in place. Different people are different shapes (triangles, squares, pentagons, other polygons, and circles) and each shape represents a different caste. The isosceles triangles are the lowest, or "criminal" class, the equilateral triangles are the middle class, the squares are the upper middle class, and shapes with an increasing number of sides belong to an increasingly higher social class, until the shape has so many sides it is indiscernible from a circle and has reached the highest possible class. The catch is that, with the exception of isosceles triangles, the children of each shape gain one more side than their father had, so there is potential for upwards movement through classes by means of one's descendants. What I found interesting about this is that at one point in the book, all the shapes essentially have the option to abolish the caste system altogether, but because many of them "anticipated for their children a distinction they could not hope for themselves," meaning that their children would be born into a higher class, the majority ruled to keep the caste system in place. This is very similar to a concept we discussed in class relating to the American Dream, that some people live their lives in certain ways so as to give their children the opportunity to achieve the things they never could.

Vincent Chase: An American Dream

A few days ago we talked about the myth of the American Dream and how people like the story of coming from a humble background and ascending the social class ladder by making a lot of money. This reminded me of a scene in the TV Show Entourage, which follows Vincent Chase, a movie star, and his friends. Vince is talking to Eric, his manager and friend, about how they are going to make $500,000 for a days work by singing at a girl's birthday party. Vince says "You know my father didn't make that in in his whole life." Eric responds, "No, mine either. He owed it though." This scene shows how they both came from families without much money but pulled themselves out of the rut and rose to where they are now, making half a million dollars for a days work, an exemplary accomplishment of the American Dream. The writers of Entourage could have had Vincent Chase and Eric grow up in million dollar houses and merely follow in their parents footsteps by making a ton of money as well, but they decided to have him come from poor beginnings. They did this because people like to see characters living the American Dream, succeeding against all odds, not rich people making even more money.

The Wonders of the World Before Man

On the last page of The Great Gatsby I really liked the paragraph about long island when it was "a fresh, green breast of the new world," and I noticed that I had seen this theme of being awed by imagining the past in other places. For example, there is a Dave Matthews Band song that talks about the wonders of a world untouched by man. The line goes "Now the world is small, compared to how it used to be with mountains and oceans and winters and rivers and stars". This is similar to the way Nick describes his wonder with this land before the trees were cut down to make way for Gatsby's house. The most interesting part of this paragraph, in my opinion, is when he describes how a man must have "held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." I can absolutely relate to this overwhelming wonder about the world's past, before humans settled in it. The beauty of this untouched nature, the "old, unknown world," is something we all like to imagine. From what Mr. Bolos and Doc Oc have mentioned about The Kentucky Cycle, that it follows the same piece of land throughout different sections of history, I imagine that the wonders of the unknown world before man will play a part in that book as well.

Be Specific

During Mr. Bolos's speech about asking teachers for college recommendations, he made a very good point about what makes a compelling recommendation or essay in general. Bolos said that the best teachers to ask for recommendations are those that know you best because they can use the most specific examples in their letter. This got me thinking about the power of using specifics rather than generalities when writing. Yesterday was the track and field banquet, and I noticed how this principle applied to the banquet as well as essay writing. The banquet consisted of many runners and coaches giving speeches and there was a consistent theme throughout the speeches. The ones with specific stories and details were much more interesting than those that used general statements. For example, one runner gave a speech in appreciation of one of the coaches that told a story about a time they talked with the coach and what it meant to them. This gave the audience a much better understanding of the relationship between that runner and their coach because they could see for themselves what kinds of interactions went on between the two. Because the audience contains a lot of parents that may not personally know the coaches or runners, it is hard for them to connect to speeches about the coaches if general statements are used rather than personal stories.

Indirect Victims of Terrorism

When we talked in class about the death of Osama Bin Laden and the feelings we had about the situation, I noticed a recurring theme of fear of retaliation. We talked about this in class a bit, and Mr. Bolos mentioned that Al Qaeda does not operate on a short timetable, so a retaliation attack is very unlikely. Personally, I was concerned with this recurring worry about retaliation because it shows the more long term effects of terrorism that persist after a bombing or attack; fear. I am not trying to blame those who feared retaliation for their feelings, but it is sad to see these feelings take place. Even when we are on the offensive and successfully execute an operation, the effects are the same, citizens experience fear just from the idea of conflict with terrorists. I recall reading a very interesting chapter in Freakonomics that addressed this point exactly. The section talks about Richard Reid, who attempted to detonate a shoe bomb on an airplane in an act of terrorism. Although he failed entirely to actually detonate the bomb, the attack prompted airport security around the world to require passengers to remove their shoes while passing through security, a process which I'm sure we are all familiar with. The authors, Levitt and Dubner, then calculate that if taking off, x-raying, and replacing one's shoes takes an average of 1 minute, then 1,065 years of security and passenger time are spent, per year, on this process, equivalent to the average life span of 14 people. In summary, although Reid failed to harm any people in his attack, he still "levied a tax that is the time equivalent of 14 lives per year." The chapter also talks about the actual risks of being involved in a terrorist attack, "roughly 1 in 5 million"and notes that, in fact, the average person is "575 times more likely to commit suicide." Again, this post is not trying to say that those who feared retaliation are being irrational, but merely that I saw an interesting connection between our classroom discussion and a Freakonomics section I read a while ago.

Financial Status and Test Scores

When researching PSAE scores for my last blog post, I came across a very interesting blog post which I believe was written by a concerned parent in the Proviso school district. The post explored PSAE test score data, looking for a connection between the amount of low income students at public Illinois schools and the test scores of that school. The post can be found here, and the post before it from which the data is here. Earlier in the year, as a class we discussed the clear correlation between income and test scores, and considering that both are on average very high at New Trier, it is definitely worth looking critically at this data. The first post contains data about the amount of low income students at each school, the percentage of passing PSAE scores at the school, and the amount of money spent per student at the school. In the second post, the author uses the data to find the percentage of non-low income students that meet or exceed PSAE standards. The first thing I noticed was that New Trier had both the highest test scores and least number of low income students in all of Illinois. I also noticed that at ETHS almost 100% of non-low income students pass the PSAE, while only about 66% of the whole school meets the standards. This huge difference in test scores between students of different financial status is even more alarming because the students attend the same school. This data definitely supports Doc Oc's point from when we discussed this earlier in the year, that standardized tests measure socioeconomic status rather than knowledge.

Illinois and the PSAE

In class we talked briefly about the ACT and PSAE that we all took last week. In many of my classes, students discussed their feelings about the PSAE, and the general consensus was that the non-ACT portion of the test was very simple. Students made fun of the basic addition questions (wedding photographer) on the math portion and the simple textual comprehension questions (is a hamper a bin or a washing machine?) in the reading section. My curiosity was peaked, however, when someone mentioned that the majority of students in Illinois do not pass the test. Unable to believe this, i did some searching to see what percentage of students passed and what a passing grade entailed. I was able to find an interesting statistic here, stating that 92% of New Trier students met or exceeded PSAE standards, a very impressive percentage, especially when you consider that it is likely that at least a small percentage of New Trier students make no effort to answer correctly because the test does not get sent to colleges and they are taking it the very next day after the very stressful ACT. As for the state average in illinois, according to data found here, last year 54% of Illinois passed PSAE reading, 52.7% passed math, and 52.4% passed science. While this data does not show that the majority of Illinois fails the PSAE, it does show that there is a great difference between the scores at New Trier and the state average.

Gatsby and the Fundamental Decencies

When reading the first few pages of The Great Gatsby, I was struck by a certain statement on page 2, the narrator's notion that "a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth". My curiosity was peaked when I read this quote because I have occasionally wondered if a concept like that were the truth. At first it seems irrational, but when you think about it we are all different and we each have a different "sense of the fundamental decencies" (assuming that my understanding of this phrase is correct). Some people are more kind than others, some are more athletic, some are more intelligent. This is not to say that some people are somehow better than others, but merely that we are all unique and our skills and talents all lie in different areas. When I began thinking about the meaning of this quote, I googled the passage to see what others had said about it. I was led to a Yahoo Answers page where the general consensus was that the narrator was stating that "rich people are born with better ethics/morals/outlook than poor people". I have not read more than a few pages of the book so far, so I cannot say for sure if this is or isn't the narrator's overall point of view, but at least at this point I don't feel that this is at all what he is saying. He is not saying that a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth, favoring wealthy people, or that those with a better sense of these decencies will end up being wealthy. In fact, in this statement, wealth is not brought up at all. But maybe I'm just missing something.

Remix Culture

I have just finished watching two films, one a lecture by lawrence lessig titled "Keeping Culture Free" (here) and a documentary called RiP: Remix Manifesto which follows Girl Talk and Lessig, looking at remix culture around the world (here). Both of these films were immensely interesting and I have learned much more than I had expected to about copyright law and the restrictions it tries to place on the remix and sampling of media. Girl talk, a musician who creates songs by taking small samples of many songs and combining them, has not been able to release an album because of the great risk of being sued by the companies that own the rights to the media he samples. These presentations often focused on the idea that culture always builds upon itself, and restricting artists ability to use the culture they could build on is a hindrance on culture in general. One example that struck me was Disney. RiP: Remix Manifesto used Disney as an example of culture building upon itself because of the way movies like Snow White, Cinderella, and Alice in Wonderland were all modern remakes of fairy tales. The difference in this case, however, is how Disney copyrighted these works and the characters in them so that nobody could build upon what they had built upon. They also were able to get copyright law extended greatly, so that their exclusive access to these fairy tales would last even longer.

Eyes on the Prize

I was listening to more of Macklemore's music and one line from the chorus stuck out to me, "Each moment's precious, don't let life pass you by, keep focused keep your eyes on the prize." Of course, this line stuck out because of the phrase "eyes on the prize" which happened to be the name of the documentary we recently watched in class. I realize that this connection is merely a coincidence, but it gives me a chance to point out some more of Macklemore's lyrics that are relevant to the topics we have been discussing in class, civil rights and equality. In one of his songs, Claiming The City, he talks about the problems in his city, Seattle, that were around when he grew up but he hopes will be improved by the time his children are "claiming the city". He talks about growing up with two parents and two cars and then realizing when he was older that most people did not grow up like him when he found out "there was something called a social status and my black friends weren't in my financial bracket". He also says that although he went to a diverse school, the city is still "divided neighborhood to neighborhood". In my opinion one of the most powerful lines in the song is, "to think that we claim that so much has changed since Brown vs. the Board of Education and Roe vs. Wade, but around my way it all stays the same, they just figured out a way to separate the black and white race"

The Power of Education

Recently we have been working on a project that focuses on thinking up an alternative way that reconstruction could have gone that would have been more successful. One of the sections of reconstruction and freedman integration into American society that I believe could have improved the whole scenario if it was more prevalent is education. In the modern day, education is a topic that has been in the news frequently and was addressed by President Obama during his State of the Union address. I've been thinking about why this is and why education is seen as so important by most people. This lead me to recalling a phrase, "if you give a man a fish he eats for a day, if you teach him how to fish he eats for life". This concept can be applied to how I think reconstruction should have gone, with education as the biggest priority. When we consider ways that reconstruction could have been revised, it may seem like a good idea at first to have given freedmen money or payment for their many years of working with no pay. However, I think it would have been a much better idea to use that money to give them access to a first-class education. It is my belief that the majority of problems and struggles of freedmen such as sharecropping and racism would have been solved or avoided by offering them the same access to education right from the start as the white people received.

White Privilege

During Mondays class we talked briefly about the Grammys. We had been discussing the portrayal of black people in the media and performance before that, and the two topics relate heavily. A lot of the portrayals that I listed during Friday's class about black people in the media came from my exposure to rap music and the "masks" that many black rappers use to attract listeners. All these discussions reminded me of a song titled "White Privilege" made by one of my favorite rappers, a white rapper called Macklemore. The song talks about how white rappers like himself are essentially invading the rap culture created by black people, and the importance of recognizing that although "good music is good music regardless of what you look like" it "doesn't change the fact that this culture's not mine" (lyrics from White Privilege, read all the lyrics here). He talks about how hip hop was created to counteract the struggles of being black in a horribly racist society, a struggle that he's never been through. He also mentions an idea that I have observed in the past but never really thought much of. The fact that the majority of fans at rap concerts tend to be white, even if the performer is black. Thinking back about the times I saw Kanye West and Nas & Damien Marley, I definitely recall seeing this. I would say the audience was at least 80-90% white, and seeing as the concerts were both in Chicago, that is not the ratio you would expect to see. I also noticed this line in the song, which I liked: "we still owe them 40 acres now we've stolen their 16 bars"

Holy Cows

Mr. Bolos used the term "sacred cows" to describe the areas of government spending that are nearly impossible to reduce without receiving extensive criticism. These areas include Medicare, Social Security, and National Defense. This description helped me put a term to something that I had noticed while watching the State of the Union address. President Obama proposed that "annual domestic spending" be frozen for the next 5 years. This seemed to me like it may have been a move to reduce spending on one of the sacred cows, so I was intrigued. I did not fully understand what was meant by domestic spending, so I researched what the freeze entailed. It turns out the freeze really just meant that the salaries of government employees could not go up for 5 years, and the government could only use the currently available funds for domestic projects rather than increasing budgets. I also saw that the spending that this freeze affects makes up only of 13% of the U.S. budget, and therefore does not touch any of the aforementioned sacred cows. The fact that this spending freeze, although it may seem major, does not affect the sacred cows shows how powerful they really are. Although President Obama is making a great effort to show that he is making strides towards reducing spending, he still understands that the sacred cows cannot be touched.

Meta-Blog 2

Looking over this quarter in blog posts, I find that there is one thing my best posts have in common, something concrete that I based them off of. This could be a quote, a websight, or an event in my life. It seems that the bigger the connection I have to the topic of my blog, the better I can write and the more comfortable I am while actually writing the post. Something else I have noticed is that my two most recent posts were based off of opinions I hold that I would not commonly be willing to commit to publishing. However, my extensive use of the blog system over the last semester has made me more comfortable with publishing my opinions even though I understand that not everybody will agree with the things I say. I feel like being able to publish more one-sided posts as apposed to posts that simply bring up a question and support both sides is an improvement. I am actually starting to like the blog medium, because I am realizing how often I see something in everyday life that I hold an opinion about that I would like to share. All in all, I am definitely becoming more comfortable with the concept of blogging frequently. Quite honestly, I hadn't really seen myself as likely to use a blog, but I am finding out that the freedom of blogging can be very intriguing.

Parents, Kids, and Media

A few days ago I was watching an episode of Family Guy on hulu.com and an interesting advertisement was played during the break. The commercial showed a teenage kid playing what looked like a computer game and when his mother walked into the room, he closed the game so it looked like he was doing homework. Then a message something like this appeared "how can we know what kind of information our kids are getting from the other parent" (meaning media). The commercial was for a site called commonsense.org I was intrigued by the commercial so I paused the video and browsed around the website a bit. What I found, at least from my perspective as an adolescent, was rather disturbing. The site was largely based on instructing parents on how to control what media their children are exposed to. The two sections I read were about managing the music you let your kids listen to and monitoring the browsing history of your children. The section about music suggested that parents monitor songs purchased with iTunes because there was a chance that their child may have bought songs with *gasp* explicit lyrics! The idea that your teenage son/daughter will never be exposed to "adult language" if you are able to control what music they listen to seems rather far fetched to me. As for the article about checking the history on your teenager's computer, I was most disturbed by a section that suggested that if your kid's computer shows no history it means they have been "Covering their tracks" meaning that "they've been somewhere they think you don't want them to go". I can only speak for myself, but I set my browser to automatically clear the history whenever I close it simply because I don't like the idea of someone being able to look up all the sites I have visited. I feel like someone willing to do that could only have bad intentions. Anyway, my overall opinion of the site is that it encourages parents to try to control their children and force values upon them rather than trust them and allow them to become their own person. But that's just me, tell me what you think

Discretion in Dialing

When we find ourselves in dangerous situations, we always like to rely on the better-safe-than-sorry philosophy. This is a good policy most of the time, but what if we aren't the ones in danger? Recently, as many of you know, there was a misunderstanding recently at Washbourne School where a woman in Winnetka believed her husband was being held hostage at the school. After the school was surrounded with SWAT vehicles and many police officers and both New Trier campuses had been locked down, they discovered there was no gunman and the whole situation was borne of a butt-dial that the woman thought was the sounds of her husband being held hostage. Although because the situation is in the past so we try to look at it as a training exercise we can learn from, really it should never have happened and the valuable time of many of our police and SWAT officers was wasted. This reminds me of a situation in my own life where myself and about 10 other kids were filming scenes for a movie one of them had written. We were dressed in camouflage and had props for the filming which was going to occur in the forest. by the time we got to the area we were going to film the scenes in, a police officer approached and led us out of the forest. There on the street we were surprised to see 4 police vehicles and numerous officers of the law. It turned out that they had received no less than 10 calls about suspicious activity. After the officers saw us teenagers walking out of the forest most of them drove away, and we were simply told we could not film in the forest preserve so not much police time was wasted, but the situation disturbs me nonetheless. 10 people who were driving by and saw teenagers walking into the forest believed that the situation was so dangerous that it actually warranted a call to the police. My point with these stories is that the police are there to help us and they do a terrific job of doing so, but it would be in all of our best interest to not waste their time by calling 911 unless we really understand the situation we are calling about.