Blog 5: Better Environment, Worse Economy?

            Last Tuesday, I went to a lecture that was held at the Lied Center. Marlo Lewis Jr. and Gilbert Metcalf were arguing with the popular question: better environment? Worse economy. Dr. Metcalt thought economy ruin the environment of Earth and he gave the pictures of Beijing- the Chinese capital city which was surrounding by a lot of haze. He wanted to show to us that only promoting economy will cause a lot of serious situations so that humans cannot have a good environment to live, humans must stop some harmful activities of developing economy and save Earth. Dr. Lewis did not agree with Dr. Metcalt’s idea and he showed some evidences too. He showed to us the research reports about the process of the environment changing of Earth. There were many so many same and even worse situations before, but Earth never been destroyed by these disasters. This evidence could show to us that it is not necessary for humans to concern how bad the environment becomes when we are developing economy or technology.

            In my opinion, I supported Dr.Lewis’ idea because his evidences caused me agree with him. Humans’ activities have not too many influences for Earth. Time and nature are very powerful to change everything including humans’ activities. We are only a small kind of species in the world. Human beings is just a little part of Earth. Earth is also a small part of Solar System. There are more than trillions of same and bigger systems in the Galaxy. And for this universe, galaxy is also insignificant. Actually we need to control some things to make sure the environment become well, but we do not need to worry about saving Earth. Earth does not need our saves. For protecting environment, it is just because we want to have a better environment to save ourselves. My opinion is that we can make the environment better unless our economy and technology have been good enough to support us to live. There are not really conflicts between environment and economy, they are symbiosis. Better environment makes economy developing faster, better economy and technology can offer better ways to solve environment issues and make the environment become better easily. 

Blog 10

            After almost 5 months’ learning and had written Evoluation, Argument, Causes and Effects, and Proposal essays, I think Creativity, Curiosity and Enthusiasm are three most important qualities for us. I always use them in my common life and English Writing is also used by these three materials.

            This high-tech world is almost made by people who have creativity, curiosity and enthusiasm, so we can find how important these qualities is. When people find that they cannot solve problems or cannot finish it perfect and efficiency, they will be curious about how to solve these problems or make the processes become better. After that, they need to learn and understand more knowledge to improve their skills so that they can find new ways to solve or improve. How can they find these ways? First of all, they must to have the creativity and brave to assume that there are some better ways and then design the plans by their creativities. If they have not creativity, they will not find and choose the ways that ancients never used before. The process of finding the answers and solutions is very boring, so these solution searchers and scientists must to keep enthusiastic on doing their works. If a person have not enthusiasm to do some things, he or she will give up soon.

            For English Writing, it is the same thing as people finding problems’ answers. For all essays, we need to have curiosity for them and then find a lot of examples to make sure that we can write a good essay like these examples. After that, when we use sources, we must to change other authors’ ideas into ours, and using the creativity to think about some viewpoints that belongs to ourselves. For the whole process to making a new essay, we must to keep enthusiasm for that, just like taking care of our kids with all best ways and information that we want to give to them. We also need to have enthusiastic when we focus on finding researches and sources. In my opinion, our papers just like to build an architecture. We need to have enthusiastic to build that and then be curious for how to make it best. After that, we need to use our creativities to design this building. And then using the enthusiastic to finding the best glasses, concretes, fixtures, and woods to make the building beautiful and safe that is same as we finding materials and researches to support our opinions and improve the structures of our writings.

            I believe these three qualities are the most important because they are basic of our lives and writings. If we have not these three qualities, we even have not opportunity to use other qualities. After we own these three materials, we can using others to improve and decorate our lives and writings.

Win-Win Flexibility

Kornbluh’s proposed solution is giving a survey to employees that employees can make a formal request to their employers for flexibility in the number of hours worked, the times worked, and/or the ability to work from home at the end of the second year. Employers will discuss with their employees by the formal request and then make a decision for the working forms.

After I read the author Kornbluh’s opinion, I was not surprised about that solution because I have heard some American companies had been using this way to make their employees have enough flexibility time. Actually, no flexibility time for workers is stricter in China than United States. In china, there are many companies asking employees to do more with their jobs without additional salary. These employees must to finish their employer’s requests because their bosses can fire them soon. There are not strict laws to ban this situation in China so that many Chinese have stresses on their jobs. Some factories even offer more than 10 hours working for their employees until government find this illegal situation. For example, Foxconn event is very famous in China because there are 14 people who worked for Foxconn suicide in 10 months. In my opinion, the flexibility time for workers is really important that can reduce their stresses.

I agree with the author’s opinion that do not make children age six to twelve be “home alone after school”. For these six years, children are always get some new knowledge and learn them. If there are not parents to take care of their children, these children may find some violation and eroticism information and then lean them to get a bad habits for their future lives. In my opinion, for some families that have children age six to twelve, employers should give these children’s father or mother an opportunity to take care of their children such as giving some works that they can finish in their homes. 

Fighting Bullying with Babies

     At the beginning, the author showed to readers what his problem and solution are in the title so that readers can understand what he want to express easily. For the first paragraph, it introduced what bullying is and using some examples from big magazines to show that bulling is a really problem in recently society.

     He used White House conference and the Department of Education’s “guidance letter” to make sure readers believe him and understand that these information are published by the government. These references make readers understand bullying’s meaning easily and then be attracted because they want to know what the author’s idea is to solve this problem that even government cannot solve.

     If he did not clarify what he means by bullying, readers will feel confused and misunderstand what he want to express and even think he want to write about other things such as education problems and young children’s problems. For giving involves of bullying, the author used the definition of bullying and showed the reasons of causing bullying. After that, he used some bullying examples and forms to support his idea and gave some numbers for strengthen his ideas. 

Is Google making us stupid?

The author Nicholas Carr expresses his viewpoint that Google makes humans’ brains become worse than before such as reducing the tolerance of reading a long writing and thinking an idea out slowly.

The first six paragraphs attract readers because the author used a story and his ideas about that story to catch readers. This makes me feel interesting and think some things happened around myself. For example, he introduced a situation after the appearance of Google that people can read some short stories very fast with their electronic tools, but they cannot tolerate the long writing. Before Google appears, people were very good at reading articles on the books and they could concentrate on the long article. For my experience, “deep reading” exists and sometimes I can use that. Deep Reading is a kind of feeling that I can only concentrate on the reading whatever any things happen. I can read a writing so fast and understand that with this condition. After I uses Google so many times, it is hard for me to get the “deep reading” condition.

I agree with the author Nicholas Carr’s opinion that expanded knowledge from online “content” is not enough, because all information that we can find from internet are updated by other people. They put their opinions in their writing so that we can only accept the information that the author wants to show us. It is hard for us to know more details and get the conclusion by ourselves. These information that edited by other people blinds our minds in some areas. There is a popular sentence in China which means “first impressions are strongest”. Because these authors give us the first impressions, we always think their viewpoints that bounded by the strongest impressions.