Gender Social Experiment

Today, we had H.I.S cross dressing day, which guys have to dress like girls, and vice versa. We also went to 7-11 during Global Ethics class in our outfit, and we took pictures with the beetlenuts girls. All the passersby stared at us unusually. It felt really awkward and uncomfortable for guys to wear in female clothes. Physically, female clothes are smaller. In ethically, male do not like to do activities that girls do, such as playing dolls and doing makeups. In some religions, gender binary blurred is also known as desecrate. Cross dressing is more difficult for a guys over the girls. It is because male are inborn with aggression. Males compete for social rank and mate. Girls dress like guys do not really matter that much than guys dress like girs. The society is more used to to see girls do what guys do. I personally think cross dressing could be healthy, it is because only one day of the year when people can do crazy things. I think it was really fun today!

Ideas for Innovation

The article discuss nine ideas to innovate the world, which are:
1. Spur greater parental involvement.
2. Make schools smaller.
3. Utilize community service to foster civic engagement.
4. Teach civics effectively in schools.
5. Fund extracurricular activities.
6. Model a high school on a community.
7. Create opportunities for meaningful youth contribution.
8. Establish mentoring programs that work.
9. Ask youth for solutions.

I found out this article is quite interesting. Yes, I also believe that education is the first step to innovate the society. Parents really should spend time on what the students are doing at school. Most of the parents, even if they have time, they choose to rest from work instead of watching what kids are learning. Making schools smaller is basically also strengthening the education system. Every little kids is the leader of the future; some might be the political leader, some might be the pop culture leader.
I agree with the articles. Children even have to solve problems that the adults left out, such as global warming. Encouraging people to do community service can make the society more united. People can learn a lot from service people. I agree with that supporting more extracurricular activities can generate more ideas for innovation, because it makes the students to reach outside of the school, and to make connections. What Mr. Truchon, our math teacher does in our class is one of the most successful teaching model. We have a lot of peer to peer teaching, which I think is very constructive for students to learn!
I think our school has a lot of chances and time for students to contribute something. I think a lot of people in our school is very creative, because of these opportunities. I think one of the most important thing is every team needs a leader, especially an adult. Students all need an adult to guide and to be encourages. This is a reason why I really love my former basketball coach and baseball coach. They are all really good leaders, and give us a lot of positive feed backs.
The last point, asking kids for the answers, is the most powerful incentive for more ideas of innovation. This is why the world has a lot of conferences where they gather all the kids around the world to talk about some global issues. What we act will lead to what children will act in the future, so we need to teach them properly!

The Overwhelming Globalization

The world has become globalize. Globalization is the transformation of local to global. The purpose is to unify the world into a single society. It is the integration of economic, political and social cultures, and diffusion of modernization throughout the direct investment, capital flows, migration, and technology.

I think the three positive impacts of globalization are: promotion of modernization, reduction of unemployment rate, and doctrine of new technology for developing countries. On the other hand, the three negative impacts are wide disparity between rich and poor, rise of crime rate, and the eradication of local culture.

China is the best example of globalization. About 20 years ago, China was still really undeveloped. The production China had was mainly agriculture. Their military defense was not strong either. But after China opened foreign relationships, their traditional society promoted their economic growth throughout the multinational corporations, such as NIKE. The multinational corporations not only expand and market themselves, but also promote the international economic market. As the involvement of multinational corporations increases, it gives more jobs to people. It reduces the unemployment rate efficiently in those developing countries, such as Indonesia and China. Globalization also allows developing countries to contact and learn new technology, the ipod popularity around the world. They can have better communication systems, and also let the world network better, spread ideas broadly, such as the idea of the spiritual leader of Tibetan people: Dalai Lama.

China also provides some of the best examples of negative impacts of globalization. There is a big disparity between the rich and the poor in China. The gap is so wide that poor people do not even have chance to become rich. Urban city has all the advanced technology to network well. But on the rural sides, people have lack of transportation and network to get into the city. Even in such an urbanized city, there are still lots of homeless people, begging for food and money.

The crime rate has also risen as the world globalizes, such as Internet fraud, and inappropriate pictures and films distribution. There is also more and more telephone fraud from China. Prostitution has also turned into big business with the growth of tourism, such as the prostitution organizations in Macau, and the entertainment business, such as strip club.

Multiculturalism has supplanted the local culture. This reduces cultural diversity. For example, Hollywood movies play most of the time on televisions channels and movie theaters than local movies. The whole world is all watching Hollywood movies. There are also less people wanting to dress and eat traditionally; everyone is following the same pop-culture.

There are negative and positive impacts of globalization. People need to keep the positive impacts; modernization, reduction of unemployment rate, and doctrine of new technology. Multinational corporations also need to find ways to reduce the disparity between rich and poor, drop crime rate, and keep the local culture. “Multinational corporations symbolized what is wrong with globalization,” implied by the author of the book Making Globalization Work, Joseph E. Stiglitz.

Reflective Blog on Movie, End of Suburbia.

Last week Friday, we watched a movie called "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream" during Global Ethics. After I watched this movie, I really had no ideas of what the movie was talking about, but I kind of got the ideas of the suburbanization and oil crisis. As global warming is going worse, people start finding some ridiculous solutions, such as moving to the countryside, places without polluted air, and buying hydrogen cars, vehicles without oil, etc.

I am shock by these facts, because my parents just bought a house in Jhudong, Hsinchu's countryside three years ago. My parents are always complaining about spending too much money on gasoline, because it is far to go everywhere from our house. Whenever we are out of town, we always have to go to RT- Mart, and buy a lot of food and daily necessaries. It is beautiful here, but it also brings a lot of inconveniences. We also have a Nissan SUV, so it needs more gasoline than that of small cars.

What is happening in the US is actually exactly what is happening in Taiwan. Taiwan's first car corporation started in 1988, called the Formosa Automobile Corporation. During that time, the price of gasoline was really cheap, so everyone wants to fill the gasoline fully. But, during the world gasoline crisis, this car company has closed. And now, the price of gasoline has declined again. People who have cars might just add more and more gasoline during this time, because they never realized there is one-day gasoline is going to run out.

Taiwan is also doing these "Suburbanism" advertising. There are more and more people who want to live on the countryside, but changing the way we live cannot change the fact that natural resources are running out. I also think this is not a sustainable life, because one day if we ran out of gasoline, there is probably not many ways to travel.

What Do Organic Food & Financial-Collapsed Company Have In Common?

Our senior students read an excerpt called Big Organic, from chapter nine of the book, The Omnivore's Dilemma written by Michael Pollan. Our task is to make connections with a movie we watched last week, Enron- The smartest Guys in the Room. As I first read this excerpt, I really do not know how simple organic food have relationships with a financial-collapsed company. I realized what our Global Ethics class exhibition currently is- Corporation.

I started thinking that everything we study must have to do with money. The reason why it is really hard to maintain a sustainable business is because it does not earn much money, and it is too small. Originally, organic food companies were good; they started off small, worked with only small farm, but when corporation involved, they produced as much as they can, and do whatever they can do to get the economic benefits. They now have the same as the purpose of Enron. For example, Earthbound Farm started off really small with small washing lettuce in the living room, but it industrialized in the end, and became the business type like Enron.

When we talk about business, we need marketing people. Organic products and Enron all have really persuasive marketing group. Corporations need marketing people in order to package their figure, control the media, exaggerate their good, and twist consumers' minds. For example, organic company's marketing people will tell loads of benefits of buying organic food, and by doing that, the company earns so much more money than those of regular company. They tell a good story, same as Enron telling people that their company is going to be fine and earn money.

As I think of corporation and money, I think of greed. These companies all have lots of people who are behind scenes, and helping to make more and more money. As this phenomenon happening, organic food is going to be the next economic impact!

Internship at NIKE.

Nike is a very good place to work. People there are mostly really friendly. Their dressings for work are very casual. Shirley, the director of finance and administration is the person who we interview with, and got accepted. She is a really nice person, looking after us like mother and sons! John is the mentor I work with. He is like the director of the footwear-testing laboratory. Judy taught me all the materials that were use in shoes manufacture. Finny taught me how to type a data entry report, which is most likely what I will be doing through out the year. The other four cool and humorous ladies teach me how to do footwear-testing all the time. Betty is Angus’ mentor. She was also the lady who took us to the factory last time. I think that was the most powerful experience I had. The shoes manufacturing process actually looks very complicated, and it takes a lot of workers to make a pair of shoes. A worker might have to do the same step for years, such as packaging the shoes. It has been a tiring month, but I think the experiences I have are valuable.

Foxies In The Room

After I watched this movie, I was really shocked by the facts. I have heard lots of companies collapse, and people can not get their money back. But, I did not know that there are these kinds of things happened behind each financial collapsed company. Enron- The smartest Guys in the Room, This movie really shows the greed and hubris of people. One same moral between Enron’s movie and Ishmael is that people eventually hurt themselves by getting more and more power. Peter Parker’s uncle, the main character from Spider-man, Ben once told him: "With great power, comes great responsibility." As Enron got more and more power, they did not handle well with responsibility and ethics. Those managers and CEOs do not care the others at all. This ties back to the book Ishmael, the competition and survival fits ideas by human. People want to be at the top to take control of everything. I think once people got on the top, they would do whatever they can keep themselves away from falling. One of the parts from the movie that really shocks me was the psychological test where one person is acting to be electrified and another person is adding up the voltage without knowing it is fake. This just shows that Enron’s Company already lost their ethics when they were lying to people. The founder of Enron, Jeffrey Skilling is serving a 24-year, 4-month prison with the conviction in 2006 of many crimes as the financial collapse of Enron. Kenneth Lay is dead by the heart attack in July 5, 2006, just about three and a half months before sentence. I think one of the misinterpretations they had which let to their financial collapse is- “Market will correct itself.” They are too arrogant and over confident with curability they might have. They did not want ask people for, because they feel it might look bad. Enron cares too much about the look. They did not want to be frank, because they think it might damage their reputation, even though it is just temporally. One thing I really think all the company should follow is King Car Company. It is a Taiwanese drink company. When the contaminate milk powder events exposed in China, King Car Company was the first one who acclaim that they imported milk powder from China, so they took back every milk powder products they sold, and apologize to the people. Now, the consumers would more likely to buy their products, because they are really honest and sincere, and they stopped using the contaminated milk powder. They might loose some money and reputation, but these are just temporally; they will be really successful in the future. Honesty is the most important thing in corporation!