"Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and honors depend upon heaven." - Confucius

 A few weekends ago University of Maryland Medical Center held their annual conference (started in 1995) during which doctors meet and attempt to identify  the mysterious illness(es) that killed Darwin.  I found it somewhat fitting that while during Darwin's time no diagnosis could be made, as medicine has continued to evolve the same questions and illnesses are recycled in order to aid in the development and evolution of the field itself.  I like the idea that even events of the past, that a are long gone, and pose no significant selective pressure to a species continue to be used as lessons for the future.  I find it most fitting that Darwin's death is used as the mystery case.

Tr

English, as a subject, and I have ave a tenuous relationship at best: I usually don't 'understand' English, and English seems to enjoy grinding me into Julia-paste. As other similar classes, we are parting with a healthy respect for each other and a polite hat-tip, and quietly grateful for a break from each other. In this class, I’ve been learning about labels, about information, about other peoples’ points of view.

So, guess what I found on my computer!  ...yeah, I'm really sorry about this.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Class began with administrative some posts from last week.

A sizable percentage of the class posted about how labels were perhaps not desirable, but necessary.

For our final project we chose to play "Mafia" as an exercise in communication. In this game the participants have to discuss with one another who they think is the mafia. It could be anything from a funny  look, to an intuition.  This also tied into our conversations about information. What constitutes information? We were curious with this game to see what our classmates would chose as information to decide who they were going to accuse. I found it interesting that the people who were more vocal about their accusations were also most likely to be accused by the majority.

When thinking about what kind of a project I wanted to do for the end of the semester, I tried to think about the different ways our class had learned and been taught to learn over the course of the term. For me, the two most important things I came to understand where the way I presented myself in arguments, and the ways I learned to hear more openly, and allow my views to shift. Consequently, my group decided to create a human barometer in which our classmates would line up on a spectrum ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ as they responded to prompts inspired by the works we studied in class. In keeping with the ‘evolution’ centric topic, we ordered our prompts in the same order as we read/watched them.