Friday, December 9, 2011

International Intervention on Muslim Countries - From Mr. Moon's Class



                   When we were young, we were told to act just the way our parents or teachers tell us to. “Come back by eight if you want to play outside!”, “Don’t do your hair like that and wear proper clothes!” are words we hear a lot of times during childhood and teenage years. However, luckily, we get out of this imprisonment by the time we become old enough to take care of ourselves and live responsibly. Now, let us imagine that this imprisonment continues forever, until the moment of your death, from people who are not related to you at all. Some people might want to commit suicide or they might want to raise a riot. There are people who actually go through this. They are Muslim women. Therefore, as an intention to rescue these people from viscious cycle, international forces are intervening directly to the situation.


                Muslim women are deprived their rights in all kinds of ways. One of the discriminations they get is honor killing. This term exists in a lot of religions, but the severity and cruelty exceeds the line in Islam. This authorizes Muslim men to kill any women whose beliefs are other than Islam and those who betrayed their husbands and ran away. Victims of this unreasonable practice are reported everyday in media, but Islam men still adhere strongly to this custom. Also, Muslim women are not allowed to laugh out loud or talk loudly outside. They also should not show their body parts except their eyes to see. This is why Muslim women cover their faces, bodies, arms and legs with Hijab and black blankets. Even with all these clothes, they should not make eye contacts with guys other than their husband or father. Of course, they cannot participate in politics at all, and kicked out of the field even if they make it entering the politics world with so much difficulty. Lastly, they are deprived so much of education, even very primary and fundamental education.
                A key to solving this problem is putting an end to international interference. One of the reasons is that individual countries have their own sovereignty, the power that a country has to govern itself or another country or state. No matter what actions the Muslim countries’ governments take, it still is a government, with public officials organized in a certain system. Therefore, the international society has to treat it as a proper government and recognize its right as a sole country. Besides, there are plenty of other solutions to the problem that global leaders have not tried yet, other than direct intervention to the problematic country. For instance, opening peace conferences with countries like Afghanistan and negotiating to reach middle ground of both sides might work, a solution international society has never even tried before.
Moreover, the intervention from different countries will only cause disruption inside the country, not only disturbing its system but also threatening the innocent citizens’ lives. For example, military forces of United States and other countries have been put into countries like Afghanistan and they actually created thousands of casualties, including deaths. Thus, Muslims are living in fear everyday, feeling insecure about their lives. This is ironic to goals the military troops declared at the first place; the protection of human rights. Being a cause of fear and serious casualties is certainly not opposed to protecting human rights.
Even after the Taliban had left, the Muslim women are still suffering from life threats and severe discrimination, and  the world already proved itself, by experience, that interference from international society does not work and ironic in a way that it is opposed to humanitarian goal of the international society. Now it is time to try new, innovative solutions to the problem instead of keep sending troops in Afghanistan again and again, killing innocent Afghan citizens.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Omnipotent, recollections and dayfly


Me in a NAVER dictionary:
Omnipotent: [ADJ] Someone or something that is omnipotent has complete power over things or people.
Recollection: [NOUN] If you have a recollection of something, you remember it.
Dayfly: [NOUN] A mayfly is an insect which lives near water and only lives for a very short time as an adult.

     If I were given just five seconds to describe myself, I would say, 'I'm omnipotent, a recollection and a dayfly at the same time'. It's not a normal way of introducing oneself but I think these three words summarize myself most perfectly. When I say omnipotent, it doesn't mean that I'm actually omnipotent like a God but I believe in myself that I can do anything if I try hard enough. I'm a recollection of memories because I become very sentimental when I think of the past and especially when I was very young in elementary school. I tend to watch some videos my parents have taken when I was in kindergarden and it makes me feel extremely comfortable. I'm a dayfly because when I make up my mind to do something, it doesn't last longer than a day. Also, my emotions change so easily that one day I'm full of rage and then the next day I become the happiest person in the entire world.


Monday, November 21, 2011

Snoopy~~~


My favorite snoopy video!
In a bad mood :(
I luv Snoopy

REFLECTIVE ESSAY: The First Minjok Concert: My favorite experience in KMLA.





Invitation Letter: The First Minjok Concert


Place: Sangmyung Art Center at Sangmyung University
Cast: Students at KMLA
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Date: Saturday, November 19th, 2011.



     At the start of last month, October, I walked into the Minjok Education building for my Samulnori practice, as usual, complaining this would take another self-study period. As everyone in KMLA knows, the self-study period is vital for studying for quizzes or preparing presentations in classes. We MUST use these hours very efficiently, otherwise we have no choice but to take away our sleeping hours. Anyway, when I walked into the room where we always practiced Samulnori, there was a strange guy standing beside our music teacher, acting like a real teacher. Right then our music teacher announced that this strange guy will be guiding us towards the better performance at Minjok Concert for a month temporarily. I didn't like this guy because he didn't look like a person who would be good at Samulnori. However, as soon as he started teaching us Samulnori from the very basic things such as posture, rhythm, and the correct way to treat the instruments, I was already building great deal of trust of him in my mind. He was certainly good and he looked really professional. Besides, I liked his teaching styles with which everybody started to build tensions in their minds and work hard to do a better perforamce.
     After that day, Samulnori practice became the joy of my everyday life, and as we were getting better every time, I felt this great pleasure I have never felt in my entire life. As the show day was approaching, I became more and more excited to show this great improvement of ours to the whole audience of teachers, students and others who come to our concert. And finally, it was November 18th, the rehearsal day.


     The entire first and second graders arrived at Sangmyung Art Center that looked like an Opera House, and the place was filled with numerous staffs who were about to assist us for a better show. The most impressive people there were the directors. These directors were absolutely amazing. The main director standed in the very middle of the audience seats and checked all the details meticulously throughout the performance. He checked the composition of how performers were arranged on stage, the volumes of different instruments, the colorful and atmospheric lightings and many other details that might alter the performance minutely. When a student band was playing, the director somehow managed to adjust the microphone volume of guitar, syndicate and vocal, and when he finished doing it, I was literally shocked by the extreme changes of the quality of the show. Before the adjustments, I didn't even want to hear a single note in the music but after the director made some adjustments, the song was so harmonious and lovely that I wanted to record it and keep it in my mp3 player.






I spent whole lot of time practicing Samulnori for a month, giving up my studies, and we successfully finished the Samulnori performance, receiving one of the most applause among other performances. I really enjoyed both practicing and going up on a stage. However, what I remember the most about directors moving around the whole stage back and forth so passionately. I was extremely fascinated at what these directors do. So I've searched for some stage management jobs in google and youtube, and I found this video so fascinating!!!!!




TED Video Review - Joshua Klein on the Intelligence of Crows



One of my weird characteristics is that I hate bouquets, especially the ones made with real flowers. I also hate live octopus or any kind of sashimi. I have this abnormal love towards animals and plants, especially the ones that are not taken good care of. Flower bouquets are the primary reason why so many plants are killed everyday, and innumerable christmas trees that are cut every year is a massacre to me.


 
Joshua, in this video, talks about similar topic using his interest in crows and others animals that are always around us and perfectly adapted to human environment.



     In this 10 minute long video, what he basically talks about is how intelligent the crows are compared to other wild animals. He presents several quite interesting experiments that can prove his theory and also says that the brains of crows are very balanced just like those of chimpanzees'. The high intelligence of crows was well known since humans started researching on wild animals. One of the hilarious examples he gave is about university students catching a few crows on campus and making them irascible by measuring their heights and weights and then releasing them. After repeating the exact same procedure a several times, crows not only became more and more skeptical and developed animosity towards those certain students, but these crows also began to instigate these students constantly, by pecking them and keep on flying around them all the time. Eventually, the crows were infamous among the university students who wanted to research on the crows. Inevitably, the students had to acquiesce to the crows. One pivotal thing to point out, is that, later, even after these students graduated, the crows remembered the students and kept on following the same students. This anecdote, according to Joshua, proves that the crows have enough intelligence to be trained by 'a vending machine for crows'.


    
     Joshua spends quite a long time explaining how the crow vending machine works and how the crows' thoughts change thoughout the process. Basically, the crows can be trained to pick up coins around the vending machine and put them into the machine in exchange of the peanuts. Normally, provincial people would just carefully scrutinize the crows to see if there are any tricks in the machine, get surprised and then just look away since picking up coins is a peripheral thing. After all, what does that matter unless we're the beggars waiting for a few coins to gather? However, here, Joshua suggests that this unprecedented machine of crows can be applied in diverse ways if we use our imagination. For example, the crows can pick up trash after a game at such a voluminous stadium, or maybe search for people in distress exhaustively around the disaster areas. Apart from these, thousands of laudable ideas can be used to utilize the machine effectively.
     What Joshua was trying to say in this video was not just about crows and their vending machines. He wanted to emphasize how we could enhance the relationship between humans and other animals. As we all know, humans are trying their best to annihilate other species of animals and destroy the Earth as much as possible. We have done such terrible things to our environment for our own goods. Because of this, the media from all over the world are emphasizing the importance of keeping our environment healthy and clean, and now as a solution, we can look for ways to save both humans and the Earth simultaneously. And Joshua Klein just made himself the start point of the project.






But then I was shocked to see this comment on the TED site:

Vending Machine for Crows


Published: April 12, 2009

An article in the Year in Ideas issue on Dec. 14, 2008, reported on Josh Klein, whose master’s thesis for New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program proposed “a vending machine for crows” that would enable the birds to exchange coins for peanuts. The article reported that beginning in June 2008, Klein tested the machine at the Binghamton Zoo, that the crows learned how to use it and that after a month the crows were actually scouring the ground for loose change.
The Times has since learned that Klein was never at the Binghamton Zoo, and there were no crows on display there in June 2008. He performed these experiments with captive crows in a Brooklyn apartment; he told the reporter about the Brooklyn crows but implied that his work with them was preliminary to the work at the zoo. Asked to explain these discrepancies, Klein now says he and the reporter had a misunderstanding about the zoo.
The reporter never called the zoo in Binghamton to confirm. And while the fact-checker did discuss the details with Klein, he did not call the zoo, as required under The Times’s fact-checking standards. In addition, the article said that Klein was working with graduate students at Cornell University and Binghamton University to study how wild crows make use of his machine, which does exist. Klein did get a professor at Binghamton to help him try it out twice in Ithaca, with assistance from a Binghamton graduate student, and it was not a success. Corvid experts who have since been interviewed have said that Klein’s machine is unlikely to work as intended.
These discrepancies were pointed out to The Times by the Binghamton professor several weeks after the article was published; this editors’ note was delayed for additional reporting. These details should have been discovered during the reporting and editing process. Had that happened, the article would not have been published.
     Although I'm a little skeptical on the practicality of the vending machine, I'm still quite sure that, if we work hard enough, we will be able to engender amiable atmosphere between wild animals and us! ;)