A Good Way To Leave?

I hate to say it, but I think that I understand the grumpiness that some ex PM’s must feel when they are booted out of their spot as the country’s leader. From the video (http://youtube.com/watch?v=uJ77kN8Yh2Y) it is apparent that Jean Chretien is bitter towards his successor, but is it political reasons or is it solely because of ego damage? Being the leader of a country is a very powerful position and only a select few ever get to experience this kind of power, but getting thrown off your thrown by someone of the same party, especially if you’ve been working side by side with them, when the time runs out, maybe not the most favorable exit strategy. I, not being the most politically aware person in the world, would imagine the bitterness coming mostly from the social and egotistic shots of having someone else take over your job and criticize your work.

A Prime Minister, as I see it, goes from being in the newspapers daily, to nothing! Do people even care about ex PM’s unless it’s for a history project or when they write a controversial memoire? One is forced to ask, why would a ex PM even write a memoire? Why does anyone write a memoire? I think it’s to spark up conversation about their name, about their history and to bring them back into the public eye. One lesson that needs to be learned by a few people is that once you are out, you rarely come back in. And, is it really worth it, writing a book about it, bashing your old party and supporters to get one article written about you, one news minute spoken about you?

After you get your news minute or your article and have raised a fuss, is your reputation even made better? Or is it damaged? Do fifteen minutes of fame turn your whole career into a forgotten and only let the public remember your bitter defeat?

CCA #2

Gender Differences in Non-Verbal Communication

Women and men have always been good at, and taken different approaches, to different things, including communicating. Women are better at understanding non-verbal communication and have more success at delivering it. Women are more frequently changing their facial expressions to partner with their mood than men are, as well; posture and gesture are more likely to change with feelings and the people that surround them.

A woman’s facial expression can very easily tell her mood and her feelings on a particular subject if interpreted the right way, men tend to show less emotion through their facial expressions. When I’m standing with a group of friends, both guys and girls, and one same emotion throughout the group is sparked by a comment made, it is much easier to see how the girls in the group feel as opposed to the guys. The girls will smile, look disgusted or get an angry look while usually I don’t see too obvious of a reaction from the guys. Facial expressions can be very important in any sort of communication and help to direct the next appropriate comment in the conversation.

Posture can tell a lot about how you feel about the person you are conversing with, “women interact at closer distances, both with men and with other women, than do men in same-sex conversations,” and “women gesture more frequently, whereas men use more expansive gestures”(Sevigny 181). It can be seen everyday on T.V, different talks shows interview men and women each day; when a man walks onstage there’s a handshake, when a woman walks onstage there’s a hug. I think that gestures are a huge part of communication; they let someone else how you feel about them and what they are saying.

To conclude, women are more frequently changing their facial expressions to partner with their mood than men are, as well; posture and gesture are more likely to change with feelings and the people that surround them. Women have excellent success with delivering non-verbal communication. This way of communicating is an asset for a person, it appeals to people and creates a sense that the person is confident with themselves.

CCA #1

Medias Affect on Societies Ability to Listen

Shortened movies, flashy magazines, and information overloaded newspaper paper pages - it’s where the media has taken us today. Media influences society everyday but, less obviously, it influences the population’s ability to listen like they used to. Today, it is easier to pay more attention and be more interested in listening when a visual is present, as well; people in today’s society are more inclined to stay interested in something for its entirety if that something is short and sweet.

People tend to pay more attention to a presentation or a lecture when one, even multiple, visual aids are present. “All-news networks, for instance, run headlines across the bottom of the screen, and sometimes weather forecasts across the top, while simultaneously an announcer is reading news items”(Sevigny 141). Added to that, when I watch a lecture or a presentation, it always seems more interesting and more informative when there’s more than one thing going on at once to interpret. When it causes you to think while you listen and watch, and to think about multiple things, it seems more informative and you feel as though you have learned more.

As well, the population has changed with respect to the length of time that they will pay attention to a certain form of entertainment or teaching because of the media. Today Hollywood puts out shorter movies than before, and is criticized harshly if it is too lengthy- there was an intermission at the theater when I went to see titanic. Because of the shorter lengths of programming in the media, people have a harder time listening and, for me, I find it hard sometimes to sit through a fifty minute class.

In conclusion, most recently, it is easier to pay more attention and be more interested in listening when a visual is used in a presentation. Also, people in today’s society are more inclined to stay interested in something for the length if it is straight to the point. Media, more and more, influences a person’s ability to be a quality listener in different areas of life. Listening is a major part of life and with this fairly new need for things to be as short as possible, it creates a sense of urgency in a lot of areas that should be explained more thoroughly than they have the chance to be.

Sex and Marriage with Robots? Are You Kidding?

Would your wife look like this? http://youtube.com/watch?v=lJZTWwy6eUw ... no pores in her skin? sharp movements? recorded voice?

At first when I saw this article (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21271545/wid/11915829?GT1=10450) I was wondering what it could possibly have to say about marrying and being intimate with a robot and as soon as they got to “... once you have a story like ‘I had sex with a robot, and it was great!’ appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I’d expect many people to jump on the bandwagon,” I was in shock. Clearly this scientist has never read Cosmo! Cosmo has articles like ‘His Nine Pleasure Triggers’ and ‘Feel Sexier Naked- Now’, not go be with an object that doesn’t carry a heartbeat or breathe. So, I continued with the article thinking a better argument would turn up to sway my decision…

Haven’t found one yet… next point says that what makes people fall in love -personality and having another be interested in them- can be PROGRAMMED into a robot! I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but even when a REAL guy is told to ask a girl out by one of her best friends I find it fake, let alone having someTHING be told by a computer chip. Why not just date the scientist who has the same personality as you? Then they started on the topic of sex and the programmed robot. At least sex toys are recognized as toys and not lovers- this makes a bit of sense to me. With these robots they are going to program them to vibrate and give them responses to blurt out during sex- all I can imagine is words being broken into their syllables by these robots while they try their hand at “sexy”.

Still no sign of a reasonable remark… this one just seems to be the weirdest one of them all. This reasoning is for the people who can’t find someone to love who loves them back. This one is for the people who are lonely and want to be made happier. “The main benefit of human-robot marriage could be to make people who otherwise could not get married happier,” – would that not make most people more depressed? If I can’t find someone to share my life with when I’m older, I’m sure as hell not going to buy ‘my prince charming’ at the local future shop! Is it even healthy for someone to form a personal intimate relationship with something that can’t think for itself? “it” being the main word. Will this not make a lot of people a lot more antisocial, assuming people actually fall for this kind of lifestyle.

My prediction for the future of robots is that they remain robots, not husbands or wives. Robots should and hopefully will remain as machinery to do jobs that humans don’t want and experiments with/on. If this does become a reality in 2050, as predicted, I’ll kick myself for thinking the idea was so ridiculous that society wouldn’t have it, but I sure won’t be taking a robot out for a night on the town.

*when i was writting this blog it wouldnt let me add pictures*

In Dalton McGuinty's Déjà Vu (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Aocqn68LE&NR=1) he is accused of lying and breaking promises after being elected in 2003 and ending 8 years of conservative rule. I believe that a big reason for his majority win was because Tory was so back and forth on his own campaign. His stand on public funding for religious schools changed once people started criticizing him, this put him behind because what people are looking for in a politician during an election is consistency and reliability. If you can't be steady on your own beliefs how can you be steady on the beliefs of a province? Because of all the focus being on the religious schooling, focus from tax hikes and other broken promises by McGuinty were overlooked, this might have given him a false sense that he is backed by a lot of Ontarians- the major issues that would have put him in the hot seat were not put in the spotlight. I would hope (not that it is a problem for me YET) that McGuinty doesn't use this majority win to support raising taxes. This victory was a big win but had very low voter turnout, 52.6%, reasons for this have been mentioned to be because the election wasn’t exciting and didn’t deal with day to day issues. I would agree with this because people won’t take time out of their busy schedules to vote in an election that doesn’t seem to be focusing on anything of a heavy weight or that would be affecting them personally. McGuinty says that he will be focusing on health care, education, the economy, and helping the poor- but aren’t they all? The big question before the vote is who do we trust, and the big question after is do we REALLY trust him again? Time will only tell whether voters made the right decision, and if non-voters made the wrong one. ARE WE IN FOR A DEJA VIEW?

An Economic Decision or One of the Heart?

Shouldn't a decision as life altering as marriage be made as a careful one? Shouldn't the decision of who you will sleep beisde, eat with and merge incomes with be something that you are sure of? Shouldn't it be someone that you love with nothing less than your whole heart? "It's one of the only decisions in life that needs sometimes months to be sure of - and you'd want to be sure in a world where in 1998 2.2 million couples married and 1.1 million couples divorced,58 million couples were married, yet separated, and people between the ages of 25 to 39 make up 60% of all divorces. In the video, it is suggested that we are drying up as a society, i thought about it and was confused, but then I decided that there must be some witty analogy to go along with this statement- nope! Everything was about the kids, "people are having less children," "people aren't wanting to have children," "people are being selfish." Okay, I'm fine with the statements about not having as many children if any now, because it is fact, but how are people being selfish? Selfish to me would be if people were getting married and had children that they only sort of wanted, or had children that they didn't want at all. Anne- Marie ( seen in the video) was dead on when she said that society was more self aware now because of all the choice- marriage and children shouldn't be a hurried decision, it should be what YOU want! Barbra (also seen in the video) was far off when she started speaking of marriage being something that is right when you are in your twenties and having kids before you are thirty is what's right. With how far women have come in the past 100 years not one is going to fall for the idea that marriage and children are right at a certain time, people will make these life changing decisions when they are ready- not because it is economically correct.