My dear "Alma Mater"...

I’m on fire jejejeje, because I’ll write two posts in a row so this one is about my faculty, The Faculty of Social Sciences.

The current status of faculty, mmmm, is a bit hard to say because I would need a topic to discuss, I mean, academic or administrative situation, so for this post I will focus on talking about academics. First of all on the academic side I must say that we have been a kind of experiment because we have changed the signatures almost every year, some signatures have been ghosts, where I felt that I haven’t learned anything new, or signatures in where I don’t even need to go classes, signatures whose programs were modified on the fly, or where the teacher didn’t review and even take the exams. That is exactly what would improve, how to join our faculty and teachers how the curriculum is built. The first steps point to the review of curricula for teachers, seeing what they have done along their career, but mostly to know what to expect in this classes, their objectives and working methods. (in that sense, “teacher survey” which it’s done each time at the end of the semester is a good opportunity to know the performance of individual teachers)

Well, in order to solve this situation I definitely cut off teachers who had two bad evaluations in one year so I’ll can keep the educational level of the students of this university and keep teachers with a real vocation to teach.

The benefits of this measures will be a better teaching because a teacher with vocation cans inspire to the students, he can make a difference in his students since he has a vision and an ambition when he accept to teach in this university, specifically, in this faculty.

As I already said marketing teachers and bad teachers must go and leave the spot to the good ones, to the real teachers who aren’t very known in the society and don’t appear very often on the media, but with a condition to do a decent class.

Shichinin no Samurai (1954)

Hi again, this week I talk about my favorite movie, Shichinin no Samurai a.k.a. Seven Samurai from Kurosawa Akira, the most famous Japanese filmmaker ever.

In the 1700’s, in Medieval Japan, a village full of very poor people is constantly looted by armed “ronin” (Samurai without a master) taking all their crop of rice, the only treasure for this people. Their Old Man advises the villagers to hire another Ronin (a good one) to defend the village. A bunch of farmers head to town to seek out their potential protectors, but they just can offer three meals of rice per day for each hired samurai. They succeed in hiring the veteran Shimada Kambei that advises that he needs other six partners to protect their farms. Kambei recruits five samurai and the brave jester Kikuchiyo and move to the village. After a feared reception, Kambei thinks a plan of defense strategy and the other samurai start training the farmers in combat in order to defend their lands and families for the battle against the bad ronin.

I like this movie so much, in fact, it’s my favorite of all time and I like the plot itself, the environment, but in general the plot is well structured, nothing is left to chance and the film is full of suspense until climax, where the final showdown occurs between farmers and ronin, because no one knows if the training and conviction of the samurai will work or not, and Kurosawa is a master of suspense and tension.

About the crew of the film, Kurosawa always tried to maintain a core team for their productions, so you can see Mifune Toshiro as the lead actor, which made a lot of movies with Kurosawa, becoming the most successful pair of Director/Actor in the history of Japanese cinema. About the script, Kurosawa was always involved, but also he had a team that specializes in feudal times which is why his movies, despite not having the special effects of today’s movies, are very loyal and realistic, simply awesome.

In order to finish this review I’ll write about the Original Soundtrack (OST). It’s almost whole OST orchestrated music mix with traditional Japanese music in some parts of the film, which may seems strange but in the postwar era it was common that movies have a soundtrack orchestrated according to the kinematics of the film, it was almost sound effects in the film, which is good because it brings back memories of the innocence of that film era, when the main thing was not selling tickets, but quality storytelling.

Well, I really enjoyed writing this post because I talk about my favorite movie ever so I hope that you can enjoy it as well.

I email you?... no sir, it's... I wave you...

Hi again, today, for teacher’s recommendation, I browse through Guardian.co.uk looking for a news connected to my area of studies, so I’ll mix my career and my personal interest in this post and I’ll write about a new way of communication, and communication is a wide area of sociology's studies because in Chile at least it’s not a very developed field and if there are studies those are from TV, radio, or written media and nothing about social networks and web communications that will become the future in social relations, so with this post I could be a kind of pioneer (joke). Well, in this case it's only a preview because still this platform isn’t public and only we can access to it by invitations (I already have an account but shshsh.. jejejeje) I'll show you Google Wave. Strictly I’ll just make a summary of a complete review of Lisa van Gelder from Guardian.co.uk

We are seeing a tremendous leap in how we communicate, so the importance of Google Wave and perhaps everything does not end with this service, but it is a preview of the future.

Google Wave is a concept that works thinking that e-mail as we know it already has 40 years, and every time we send an e-mail we are creating a file that is shared with the recipient and we lose control over this, and that the recipient can generate copies that would become different versions of the mail. In practice this means a loss of information and resources, where we are always exposed to spam and we can’t have a complete picture of conversations generated by our e-mails.

So every time we send a wave we are creating a link between the initial recipients, to start a conversation that will last over time, where we can add other recipients and interact in real time on this. In practice you can see how other people are typing into the Wave, and providing attachment containing like some sort of shared document.

So Google Wave is a mixture of Gmail, Google Talk and Google Docs where each wave represents a multidimensional communication channel that connects people with content, creating distributed conversations and connecting to members of different networks to collaborate on the construction of this information.

Clicking at the Google Wave logo you'll can see a video with some of the features of this new way of web communication.

Honduras: Pressure for democracy...

This post is more political than the older post but this isn’t trouble to make a good post, after all political it’s not synonymous of boring ones so here we go…

Manuel Zelaya intended to modify the constitution to remain in power and for that he had planned a referendum. The Supreme Court of Justice, which opposed to this measure, ordered the army to arrest the president Zelaya. So did the military, which relocated Zelaya to Costa Rica.

Lawmakers have appointed interim president to the Congress leader, Roberto Micheletti. Election officials said the country's presidential elections on November 29 will be carried out as scheduled before the coup. However, the international community considered that the legitimate president is Zelaya and Zelaya himself has assured that he’ll come back to Honduras as president.

Well, Micheletti could be the visible face of the Hondurans factual powers, as he was chosen precisely for them to hold the presidency, but his presidency is rejected by the international community and Honduras can’t survive as an island, so Micheletti sooner or later must resign his current position.

Zelaya instead could be regarded as the victim of this coup, however we must also recognize a certain thirst for power because he want to change the constitution just for to be reelected, but caution with this, I ‘m not justifying the coup, I just say only that Zelaya isn’t a white dove.

This conflict appears to have a single type of solution and is that Micheletti cedes power because it’s not possible to maintain a country divided and in constant conflict for a long time, and less with foreign pressures and internal pressures, so Micheletti will leave his post soon, maybe he is waiting for the election period in order to leave, although it would be suspect because with him in power while elections take place it could raise suspicions of electoral intervention. But above all I hope that the resolution of this conflict will be the least violent possible.

Santiago isn't Chile but...

Well, I’ wasn’t born and neither I lived on Santiago so I hardly can tell to anyone where they can go or what they can do in Santiago, but don’t worry my readers I won’t let you down and as always I’ll do my best…

Even if it’s a polluted city, Santiago can offer a couple of things that worth to visit… but where do I start? Mmm…

Ok, the tourist in first place must go to cultural and historical places to learn where he is and who we are and how we became what we are, yeah it’s kind of complicate but it’s history and tourists are compel to learn or at least visit some historical place.

Secondly the tourist must do fun activities mixed with traditional activities because fun experiences remains on memory so this tourist can tell to other tourist in his home country “touristland” other tourist will want to come to visit Chile, so the tourist must leave this country with the best of the impressions and for that I did a short list of “you must do it” things.


1. In first, but in very very first place I surely recommend going to “La Moneda” palace because it is the house of the government and a symbol of our sovereignty and it’s a building dating from the colonial period, but if Mr. tourist doesn’t have time he can take a virtual tour from here.

2. Another interesting place is the ”Huelen” hill, or renamed it for Spanish people, “Santa Lucia” Hill, a pleasant place, where one can walk and where the tourists can appreciate a great view of the city, if “smog” allows jejejeje

3. An entertaining biking tour which will provide you a bicycle for 1 hour and then you can return it at any station of the company, a fun activity

4. The Maipo Canyon is another must for a tourist as it’s one of the few places in the Greater Santiago where you can still breathe relatively clean air and provides a green and noble landscape.

5. Sport, culture and nature, what am I forgetting? The good alcohol that is always welcome, and for that I can’t think better place to go as "La Piojera", a traditional bar where the specialty is the “earthquake” drink and to eat the classic ham with generous chili.

I hope that list doesn’t let you down but this is the best that I can do like a provincial boy.