Author Archives: rgc94

How do we move?

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Today,  I attended a Rose Cafe talk in which the topic discussed was how gender effects transportation habits. This is something I have never thought about before, as I always thought people are so different that personal preference would not be as easily modeled as it is in reality. The main focus of the talk pertained to the problems women in the developing world face with respect to transportation. In the industrialized world, many families have two cars or easy access to public transportation, so the issues are not as great. However, in the developing world, most families have one car if they have one at all. Due to this fact, the public transportation system is over crowded and inefficient. The crowded nature of public transportation make it a breeding ground for harassment for women especially. Therefore, the biggest problem is twofold: making transportation more accessible, whether it be public or private, and helping women feel more safe on public transportation.

There is not a one-size-fits-all solution to these big problems. The first step in my estimation is to lower the barrier of entry for privatized transportation. Recently, the Indian government banned a form of taxi service common in the village area. This has caused even more people to flood public transportation and exacerbated the preexisting problems. If there are more private options, not only will less people rely on public transportation fixing the crowding problem, but the cost of private transportation will drop based on economic theory. This is what we are seeing in the industrialized world with Uber and Lift coming into prominence. While this would help with accessibility, it does not guarantee the improvement of women’s safety. Some ideas to combat that are harsher penalties on assault or more serious harassment or simply educating the public on acceptable behavior. This problem has much more gray area in both the definition and potential solutions, but it can be muted with some basic measures.

Hydroponics: The New Way to Farm

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A few days ago, I went to a talk given by Erica Hernandez, a PhD student conducting research in the area of hydroponic agriculture. Erica talked a lot about the different methods of hydroponics and the pros and cons of each, usually involving a progression of amount of water, electricity, and labor required. She also mentioned how different levels of lighting can effect the way plants grow in greenhouses and how hydroponics tries to correct that. I did not go to house dinner that night, so I did not get to try some hydroponically grown lettuce, but everyone remarked that it tasted the same.

The field of hydroponics is groundbreaking in that it allows barren land to become hubs of agriculture. Since the environment is completely artificial, it doesn’t matter where the crops are being grown. This is a huge innovation for places like Africa and the Middle East, where the land is less fertile and, thus, more time and labor must be spent on agriculture. If hydroponic greenhouses are implemented in these areas, it will be easier to grow crops and those societies can develop further into modern times. For all the charity work that can be done to better the lives of people in poor situations partially due to geography, hydroponics look to be the key to aiding these areas in joining the first world in terms of quality of life.

The Origin of Modern Action Movies

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Recently, I attended a Flora’s Film Friday where we watched Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. This movie is considered one of the best action/thriller movies of all time and, while watching it, I noticed a lot of classic tropes of the genre that actually originated from the film. The general structure of the movie followed a template where the main character is thrust into an unusual situation, then he learns background info, then he confronts the antagonists and loses, then there’s a love affair, then there is the climax where the protagonist wins. This template has been used by countless action movies to this day, whether it be a James Bond movie or a Marvel superhero movie. Additionally, the use of a sidekick as a love interest is cliche in modern movies. However, it Hitchcock was one of the people who first made this trope commonplace. I am one who gets bored of these cliches, so watching the movie initially was a bit boring. However, the more I thought and reflected on the film, the more I appreciate how it shaped the cinematic world for the next 50 years.

Can Science be Fake News?

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Yesterday, I attended a talk given by Dan Schwarz, a Cornell professor and expert on the New York Times, on fake news. The bulk of the talk was on where news sources get their news and what fake news entails. However, the part that stuck out to me as most interesting was the concept of scientific debates and whether that can be considered fake news. And while this may be an unpopular opinion, I believe that it is incredibly important that all sides of a scientific debate are published in order to ensure the most accurate perspectives bubble to the top.

The biggest misconception about science is that it is the business of proving truths about the world. In fact, science is all about disproving falsehoods. When a researcher comes to a conclusion, there are one of two choices. Either they reject the null hypothesis or fail to reject the null hypothesis. This language is very specific, as it is to be made clear that nothing was proven in the experiment, just things were disproved. The most absurd example to drive the concept home is gravity. We all think of gravity as a fact of life because, well, how could you not? However, there is no way to explicitly prove gravity, but rather it simply cannot be disproved. This distinction is key for more controversial scientific debates.

And this is what brings us to the more interesting example brought up during the talk, climate change. Regardless of what you feel about the issue, there are many sides. And in order to reach a more accurate conclusion, as many of these positions as possible must be made public so that we can reject as many null hypotheses as we can. As soon as the position is that we must stop investigating the world because we know the truth, that is when the position loses its grounding in science. And if a hypothesis is faulty, then it can be easily refuted and thus rejected. Scientific “truth” occurs when a hypothesis is so good that it cannot be rejected regardless of what is tried. If we don’t have every position on the table, we can never properly assess whether a hypothesis is good enough to be thought of as a fact or if it should be rejected. So, it is important to see all sides of an argument, no matter how absurd it may seem, because it only takes one breakthrough to disprove everything we thought we knew.

Does a Good Speech Require Good Speaking Skills?

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This week, I attended Flora’s Film Friday, where we watched The King’s Speech, an Oscar winning movie from 2010. The movie is a dramatized account of King George VI’s speech troubles and his interactions with his speech therapist. The movie especially spoke to me since I, like the king, had a stutter as a child. While I went through speech therapy at a much younger age than the king and ultimately overcame my stutter entirely, I still remember what it is like to want to say something and have trouble getting the words out. This pressure and anxiety must have been amplified a seemingly infinite amount being the king versus being a regular elementary school student like I was.

More so than the personal connection, the movie got me thinking whether one needed to have a great speaking voice or speaking skills to deliver a truly great speech. And as crazy as it sounds, I don’t think it is necessary. There are certain underlying qualities that are behind great speeches. There is the message, the connection, and the delivery. However, the delivery does not solely hinge on the speaking voice. It is about body language, eye contact, and confidence. If one has a lisp or stutter, as long as they deliver their message in an engaging way and their message is worth listening to, then their speech troubles will not be a huge factor. In fact, one can turn their speech troubles into an asset. In 2015, a contestant on the reality TV show America’s Got Talent named Drew Lynch was a stand-up comedian with a severe stutter. Rather than letting the stutter hold him back, he was upfront about it and spoke with confidence despite the struggle to get the words out. His confidence lead him to 2nd place on the show and a successful career as a comic since. While being a comedian and being a politician like King George VI are two very different domains, they both revolve around public speaking. And the way I see it, public speaking is more of a confidence game than a “can they get the words out” one. In King George VI’s first war time speech, he had some stumbles, but his confidence behind the delivery prevailed, making it one of the most iconic speeches of the WWII era.

Should We Defend The Guilty?

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Earlier today, I listened to Judge Scott Miller talk about what he referred to as “the craziest case he’s ever heard”. I will not go into the details of the case because I don’t remember if he said it was public, but it did involve a kidnapping where Judge Miller, a criminal defense attorney at the time, believed his client would be found guilty based on the evidence presented. Judge Miller brought up a great question for everyone in attendance: should you defend people that you believe to be guilty? On a legal level, the answer is unequivocally yes, as the 6th Amendment to the Constitution grants all US citizens the right to an attorney. However, the looking at it through the lens of personal morality changes it for some. After some reflection, I believe it is still necessary to defend anyone, whether or not you believe them to be guilty. Whether someone is guilty is a judgement call based on evidence. What you may see as evidence without a reasonable doubt another may have doubts about. Just as this question gets tricky when viewed through the lens of morality, juries must look at cases through the lens of morality based on the evidence presented. As the evidence of Judge Miller’s case unfolded, it became clear that there were doubts about whether the accused kidnapper was guilty. In the end, he was ruled to be innocent by the jury. In a court of law, the truth tends to win more than not. If you are to defend someone who you believe to be guilty, the evidence will speak for itself. The 6th Amendment is there to help those who you believe to be guilty who are actually innocent and protecting those people is the most important function of any court of law.

Do We Remember Everything Today?

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Last week’s Flora Film Friday featured an episode of Black Mirror entitled “The Entire History of You”. The basic premise of the episode is that people possess a device that allows them to play back any moment of their lives as many times as they would like. This device acts like an external hard drive for the brain, keeping every memory on permanent file when the brain cannot remember everything.

Before watching the episode, the GRF running the event asked us if we would like to have a device where we could store every memory in our lives. At first, I had some mixed feelings about the device’s premise. It could be helpful for schoolwork and remembering small things like names and faces. However, it could lead to an obsession over all of our pitfalls (similar to what happened in the episode). As I thought about it more, I realized we already have a modified version of this device. In fact, you are reading this post using it right now. The Internet (and any device with access to it) is our external memory source. It is where we store all of our pictures, work, conversations, almost everything. If you ever want to think back to a text conversation from a week ago, you can just scroll up and read it word for word. If you want to see other people’s memories, just go on social media and see any moment from your friends’ lives. While the parallel between the device in the episode and the Internet is there, the Internet is still not as advanced as the device. In order for something to be saved online, it must be done manually, meaning our short term memory must supplement it. I don’t think we are built to handle the emotional strain of remembering everything. That is why I feel that the Internet is a safe compromise of the device. It allows us to choose what we remember forever, avoiding obsessions over the negatives and truly dangerous consequences.