Author Archives: mb996

Who Judges the Judge?

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My high school mock trial team had a running joke that being a judge was the best job in the world because you got to sit in a comfy chair all day while everyone treats you like a god. Scott Miller’s talk really showed that we were probably overstating it. Over the course of his talk, Scott Miller really showed that having that kind of power over people and the ability to set precedents like People v. Brukner is something that should never be taken lightly. It’s a position that can have really strong restorative power, and it’s important to take responsibility in that. I enjoyed his discussion of restorative justice and the notation of the importance of not just punishing for the sake of punishing in the case of nonviolent crimes.

I slightly disagree with his idea that all of our domestic problems could be solved by considering health care and education a human right and acting accordingly (i.e. making addressing both of these issues a priority) I agree that health care and education are a human right, and that not considering them as such causes many problems in United States. However, I feel this outlook ignores more basic problems. Americans still face lack of affordable and safe housing, food insecurity and a growing income disparity. These problems are more immediate concerns. People’s right to a living wage, a safe place to live, and food is more necessary. It can be said that housing and food insecurity are part of health care, but I think it’s important to consider them initially as steps of prevention. The fact that people don’t have clean access to clean water, food, and housing in this country is a bigger problem. I agreed with his point about the needless focus on military spending and cases where funding military operations was given almost unquestionably while citizens go bankrupt trying to pay for necessary medical treatment without private insurance. Near the end, he added a point about us being lucky to live in a time of upheaval that could change the course of history. I don’t feel very lucky.

These complaints are mostly nitpicks. I was really glad to have the opportunity to hear from him about his experiences. I missed the meeting last semester because of scheduling conflicts, so I was really glad to be able to go this semester.

Stretching Out Instead of Stressing Out

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This Saturday, even though I was feeling a bit stressed, I went to the yoga and stretched out. I mostly see yoga as a way to practice mindfulness while giving my body something to do. Last year, I went to relaxation yoga almost every week on Tuesday evenings, and I’m usually more of an evening yoga person in general. Because of that, doing yoga on a Saturday morning was a little strange, but still enjoyable. I had more energy than I do in the evening, so some of the harder balancing poses were a bit easier, which pushed me to try more challenging styles of them. Overall, it was great to just take an hour to be mindful and aware of my body. Often, during the school year especially, we spend much of our time ignoring the different aches and pains we feel to just push through and get finished with work or reward ourselves for a job well done by relaxing in a way that leaves us even more worn out. Yoga is a time to slow down and listen to what our actually needs and just to be still both physically and mentally. So maybe the next time you feel a bit overwhelmed, take five minutes to be mindful and aware of your body, and do a little yoga instead of stressing out.

GMOs: The Next Step of Selective Breeding?

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This week’s table talk on GMOs in meat was really interesting. This past week I actually had a lecture in FDSC 2000 on regulation of GMOs in food and different methods of gene transfer. With all of the background, both from previous knowledge learned in class and from the suggested reading for the talk, it was interesting how everyone had slightly different opinions on how GMOs should be introduced to general consumers and what it should be used for. I was amazed that some people didn’t think GMOs should be labeled partly because it could hurt their introduction financially and partly because it would be contradictory to label GMOs and not other forms of selective breeding. To me, it had always seemed the obvious choice for GMOs to be labelled for transparency’s sake, so it was really eye-opening to hear why people thought they shouldn’t be labeled.

It was also interesting to talk about all the possible implications of expanding GMOs to animals and not just plants, now that genetically modified salmon are approved by the FDA to be sold in the United States. There are so many recent changes to GMO policy with the introduction of GMO salmon being approved for sale and the requirement of GMOs being labeled in the United States that it was just great to talk about these changes and how people felt about it.

Stress Talk

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This week’s table talk on stress was really a broad discussion ranging from causes of stress to coping mechanisms to physiological responses caused by stress. One part of the discussion that I thought was really interesting was how higher household expectations on women especially in developing countries combined with lowered resource availability leads to higher stress levels. It’s interesting to think of stress beyond the usual academic “Oh, I’m so stressed because I have a prelim tomorrow” kind of stress.

It was also fun to hear how everyone copes with stress. We talked about some studies that have found interacting with and reaching out to people reduces stress, but almost everyone at the table talk thought that reaching out to people when stressed only led to more stress because of concerns about judging. People talked about a lot of different stress relieving methods, such as going for walks, catching insects, and watching TV. We also talked about the benefits of planning out events and writing out lists of what we plan to get done on a given day or in a given week. It was interesting how different people had different methods of working through multiple projects. Some people liked to just have one goal for the day, like finish a paper and space the projects out over several days. Others liked to work for a set little amount on many different projects. I definitely will be trying these different ways of dealing with stress in the future.

Apple Technology

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One of the great things about apples is that, unlike so many other kinds of produce where uniformity is so encouraged that some perfectly edible fruit is thrown to the wayside for not looking “correct”, in apple growing, diversity is encouraged, to the point that you can have an apple variety like Honeycrisp that’s patent was worth millions dollars. In a world where every banana is a Cavendish banana and every avocado is a Hass avocado, it is truly a wonder that we can have our choice between a Honeycrisp or an Empire or a McIntosh or a Golden Runner, which I had never heard of but tried at Apple Fest. It was also really interesting to hear about the apples that Cornell is working on developing like Rubyfrost and Snapdragon, and the kind of marketing strategies that go into naming an apple variety. It was also great to talk about the important of migrant workers to apple farms. I actually took a class on U.S. immigration and migration, and we talked about exactly the same thing: how there is a huge desire for migrant work in agriculture that simply cannot be met by the native population without huge culture shifts. It was great to actually address that.

CRISPR

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The table talk on genetic engineering was really interesting. We talked about the benefits of genetic engineering to everything from research to medical treatments. I really liked to hear about precursors to the revolutionary CRISPR method of genetic engineering and why they were less efficient and cost effective. Since I have just been getting into and learning about these kinds of techniques in the past year, it was interesting to hear firsthand about how CRISPR has really transformed the field in a way that wasn’t obvious to me. It was also great to hear about some of the possible ethical hazards of this kind of work. While right now, the high fatality rate of organisms developed using CRISPR has been to prohibitive to use extensively on humans, it’s interesting to think how it might be applied in the future, and the huge ethical problems of being able to effectively buy your way out of having a genetic problem or disease. Overall, it’s great to take stock of how amazing CRISPR and other forms of genetic engineering are and how crazy it is to live in a time when such things are possible.

Barbra McClintock Went Here

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The tour of the botanical gardens was so informative. I have been running through the gardens to get to the trails in the arboretum, but I never realized that the field I’ve been running through was where Barbara McClintock grew the corn that helped her discover transposons. I also never knew that Cornell owned a quarry that a lot of the stone in not only the botanical garden but also in buildings like the Gothics came from. It was great to learn more about both the plants and Cornell history while enjoying the beautiful gardens and weather.

Economic Solutions to Social Problems

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Dr. Kutela’s research into the effects of income variability on a family’s ability to send children to school was really interesting. I never even knew that that type of research would fall under economics, so it was really fascinating to hear about how different economic pressures, such as income variability and loan availability, can have such staggering social effects. It was also interesting to think about how these social issues could possibly have economic solutions, such as making loans more available and improving investment from mostly private companies. I had always considered it more of a government responsibility because I’m coming from an American perspective where we usually rely on government intervention to right these kind of social and economic inequalities. It’s interesting thinking about how to solve such problems without a strong central government, especially since when the U.S. faced similar problems, they were solved by government-backed insurance policies, instead of loans.