This is the end, the end...

Well, this is the last item I’m talking about. After another year of studies, I’m faced with one of my last semester of my college life and for that in this blog I’ll proceed to do a little review about how my school year was this 2009 and for that I’ll try to talk a little about each of the subjects had this year, I mean, first and second semester and how things were going to reach my current position at the end of my fourth year of sociology, although I must say that has been interesting so far, very interesting.

During the first semester I had five courses, of which only one was six months, Sociology of Culture, I hated that subject and therefore I think I flunked, I never spent enough time and I think that was one of the reason for my catastrophic result. The other four subjects were then in the second half, Workshop, Theory, Public Policy and English, which I approved in its entirety in the first semester and to date I have approved Policy and Workshop because I don’t have the marks of the other classes. I also took two other elective classes, so I did six subjects this semester.

Now, I'm pretty confident that I’ll approved most of the subjects that I studied this semester because my attendance rate increased considerably, which it’s pretty good because I learn so much just going to classes, instead of not going and stay at home reading books for tests, so in that sense I can say that during the second semester my academic level increased. On the side of the marks it’s too early to say, however in the first semester I had to pass many examinations to pass, but now I think that I won’t do too many exams, so I'm also quiet and I think my level has also increased on that side.

Finally and to conclude this brief post, the last of the season, I can properly say that my academic level has increased since I began a little lazy and a little slow but I got better during the year. Although I must say that at this point I'm almost dead due to the organization of the Faculty which isn’t the best and all the academic load is left to the end of the year which makes to many collapse or lose a few marks at the expense of others, This shouldn’t be so, but this complaint is already posted in the previous one, I think. Finally, as general balance of my academic year 2009 I can say it was satisfactory in many aspects, first of all because I passed most of the subjects, second because I'm about to leave the university and therefore Santiago and third because my academic level has been rising steadily which pleases me greatly.

See you when I see you.

Society challenges us...

Well, within the challenges faced by sociology in terms of technology is that it’s the current state of the “Technique” technology develops to capitalist standards, contributes to the improvement of the technique, so in a sense it’s the full profit maximization and thus to over-specialization of labor, which produces some workers alienation, I think that it’s sociology’s major problem in terms of technology, the problem of alienation of individuals as the technology advances more and more. However this can overcome by improving working conditions, avoiding the technology to penetrate all aspects of work, that machines are only a tool to achieve our goals and that machines are not a goal in themselves, they just help us to improve our lives, that might be the only directive for machines and in our present society we can see how this directive doesn’t accomplish because machines and whole technology is used like workers instead of tools for workers, if we walk through this path I don’t know and I don’t want to know where we’ll end in the future to come.

In social matters, the challenge of sociology is to provide good information for decision making at government level and a central problem in this area is the state administration and as seeking a balance between beneficence and providing opportunities and that the sociologists should be efficient in their work of providing the most complete information possible in order to make the best decisions.

In education, the challenge of sociology is similar to social issues, the giving of good information so that the central government makes the best decisions. However, within this point is to say how it obtained the information.

Well, the sociologist must improve their tools, ie, improve decision-surveys, interviews questions and improve data analysis but on everything else should improve the objectivity of the various types of studies made by the sociologist and this account for all the areas mentioned above, since it is known that the work of sociologist always be associated with a certain ideology, but the important thing, if you want to make good decisions is that the information obtained comes as clean as possible, prejudice and unscientific ideas that they can lose credibility in the discipline in making wrong decisions.

Well, this post was about the limit of the word count but I spend all my energy and creativity in the past post, so I suggest to read this one first because it’s more boring than the other, it’s just a recommendation.

Hobbie time...

I'll change a little bit the order of topics in order to do a more structured post, so I hope it works out this "innovation".

Among the forbidden things I like to do is download movies, videogames, comics and books from the internet, I always do, but in fact it’s not prohibited because I didn’t market to them, it is only for personal use, sometimes I give copies to my friends so it would be a kind of piracy. Another forbidden thing I always do it’s to see two and sometimes three movies for the price of one, I always stay until movie credits finish and just then I go out, when the guards are no longer so I go to another room and see another movie, if I'm interested, of course. At the moment I can’t think other things, well that would be enough about forbidden things.

One of the things I hate to do it’s read for exams, because the readings for some exams are too long and tedious, which consumes much of my time, especially on weekends. Another thing I don’t like it at all it’s to travel every day to Santiago, as they are about six hours per day spent on travel, besides I hate Santiago, but in reality the trip is bad only when I go to Santiago but for the journey back I really enjoy it, I know that it’s the same distance and time is the same as well but the sense of where you’ll arrive is what causes you to enjoy the trip. Finally another thing I don’t like it’s doing written work, it takes too much time thinking of ideas, literature search, print and in general a waste of time, it would be far better oral exams or oral presentations.

I’m among those who attached great importance to free time, therefore I have many hobbies, so I really don’t know where to start, I suppose I should list the things I like to do in order of priority, so that's what I’ll do, see how it goes. What I like to do is play videogames, mostly console, also on PC, so when I just have some free time, I play. At the moment I have no console because I haven’t much time to play, so I do it only on weekends at a friend's house, at least 2 weekends a month, I dedicate a whole afternoon to play on Xbox 360.

I like video games since I can remember I've played videogames, since I was 5 years old with an atari 2600, perhaps in the beginning was the interactivity of a joystick what attracted me at first, I don’t remember exactly but now I can say that my passion for videogames is the graphics power and the stories that in some cases exceeds the films, which it’s incredible, there is work behind every new game that is also above the film industry. Within this fascination I can also say that there is some desire for competition with myself and against my friends, it’s great.

Another thing I love is movies, I have no preference for the style of movies, but the directors, and I always know what to expect when I see a new film, but it’s always fun meeting new directors, however I really enjoy seeing my favorite films, one and again, it may seems psychotic, but I really like.

Through the film you can learn about history, indeed, from a particular point of view of history, however, we can enjoy atmospheres and lifestyles of an era that is gone. Also we can access to entirely imaginary worlds where the only thing that guides us is our expectation for things to come, that is amazing because for example, in Avatar, the last film of James Cameron, the only thing one can see is a trailer about how the film and the world could be, that contains the movie and only generates expectation to see it, amazing.

I could stay until next week listing all my hobbies, so this time I’ll talk about 3 of them, so third one is reading, I love to read fantasy and science fiction as novels or short stories but also I so fascinated with comics, so in this hobby I can unite two hobbies into one. The fantasy and science fiction, in addition to comics, I like because imagination has no limits, no limits of technology in special effects, no limits of budget to meet a certain standard of quality in literature the author can write he pleases, go to any kind of possible worlds, that's what fascinates me about the literature and it’s the same that sometimes makes me disappointed when I see adaptations of these works in film, because in literature there are no limits and sometimes the film falls short trying to match the literature.

Actually, now that I think the three hobbies that I have just named are connected with the idea of disconnecting and escaping from this world and meet new worlds, worlds better than this in many ways and give us the possibility to imagine to be part of those worlds, besides it's possible to learn from these worlds because it’s not just about battles and endless journeys but are also values, values that are much needed in this world today.

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.