Author Archives: mff55

Food for All

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I enjoyed being part of the efforts and contributions of our Rose Scholars student group helping our local Ithaca community by packing meals to avoid hunger among the needy. It was fun to work in groups to pack scoops of rice and soy, powder protein and vegetables,  as non-perishable food items at St. Catherine of Siena Parish, where the event was hosted this year. We volunteered as part of the 9th Ithaca MobilePack, held October 10-14, 2018.  It was rewarding to learn that with our small volunteering contribution we helped accomplish the following:

* 349,920 meals packed at a cost of $76,982.40 (22 cents per meal)

* 958 children fed a meal a day for a year

Let’s keep our volunteering helping others throughout this Holiday Season, no matter where we go to celebrate it, we can always reach out to those less privilege than us.

A Happy Ending to a Disturbing Possibility

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WALL-E is a Pixar Studios computer-animated science fiction Disney film that won many awards including the 2008 Academy Award for best animated feature.  The film portrays the story of what may happen on earth if life ended due to a global catastrophe.  There are of two main characters, a trash compactor robot (WALL-E) living on earth and a probe (EVE) from an unmanned spaceship.  The two met on earth which has been abandoned by humans and covered in garbage.  One day, while cleaning up the garbage, WALL-E discovers a plant seedling, and soon therefore, an unmanned spaceship deploys EVE to scan the panel for plant life.  WALL-E and EVE communicate with body language and sounds, becomes friends and eventually fall in love.  When the star ship returns to earth to collect EVE, WALL-E tags along and travels to the mother ship.  Passengers are obese due to their sedentary, all automated life style (which sadly is what is happening with our youth now a days with the use of cell phone, tablets, and video games from early on while reducing physical activity and sports).  After a long struggle to protect the plant which Eve brought to the mother ship, Eve and WALL-E return to earth with the humans and robots and together restore earth again to become paradise. A happy ending, that may not be the case for our blue planet unless we all contribute to reduce pollution, climate change, and protect it to save not only humans but all other creatures on earth.

The Pianist

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This film directed by Roman Polanski, is based on the biographical novel by the Polish-Jewish composer Wladyslaw Szpilman, an Holocaust survivor.  The movie is definitively worth seeing as it won several international awards, including three Oscars (best Director, best Screenplay and best actor for Adrien Brody).  The film starts in September 1939, when the Nazis invade Poland, and force Jews from working, making them wear arm bands with the Start of David.  In November 1940, Szpilman and his family were moved to the Warsaw Ghetto were people were starving.  In November 1942, while Szpilman and his family were being transported to the Treblinka extermination camp, Szpilman was separated by a police officer that recognized him and helped him remain in the Ghetto, where Szpilman helped the resistance smuggle weapons.  Szpilman finally fled the Ghetto and with the help from friends hid in different locations until 1944 when a German tank hit the apartment where he was hiding so he was forced to flee.  Warsaw was in ruins, and Szpilman was looking for food when he was found by the German officer Hosenfeld.  When the officer found out that Szpilman was a pianist, he let him play Chopin’s ballade in G-minor. The officer appreciated music and art, so he let Szpilman hid in the attic of a house while providing food so that he could survive in hiding. In January 1945, the Germans were defeated and Szpilman was free again, while the German officer Hosenfeld was taken prisoner by the soviets, until he died in 1952.  After the war, Szpilman continued his career as a pianist in Poland and performed multiple times, until he died at age 88.  Remarkably, Polanski had a similar experience as his mother died at the Krakow Ghetto, while Polanski escaped hiding in a farm barn until the end of the war when he was reunited with his father.  The Pianist is a very powerful film enriched with the biographical stories of its film Director Polanski and the main character Szpilman.  It is without a doubt an important testament to the inhumanity of war, segregation, and the unthinkable cruelty of the Holocaust where 6 million Jews were exterminated or died of starvation or disease.   This film should help us understand why this dark time in history cannot happen again.

Deceptions and Murders

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The movie, The Talented Mr. Ripley, based on the murder novel by Patricia Highsmith, was a great performance by Matt Damon, but an incredible story about how Tom Ripley manages to deceive and manipulate others around him, creating a facade that hides a serial killer. We were joined by Judge Miller, who gave us an insight on how criminal cases were conducted and how verdicts were made. He revealed that murder charges were based on the actions and intentions people act upon on, and asked us to determine whether Mr. Ripley would have been charged with 1st or 2nd degree murder. Mr. Ripley lacks entirely moral values but with his charm hides the exposition of his web of lies, impersonating others, and killing anyone that threatens to expose his secrets. As it is difficult to know the intentions of others, we were unsure, at the end of our discussion where to convict him in 1st or 2nd degree, yet this revealed the importance of criminal courts, and how we must trust those that we place in power to not be biased and only follow the rule of law.

The film co-stars included Jude Law as Dickie Greenleaf, Gwyneth Paltrow as Dickie’s girlfriend Marge Sherwood, Cate Blanchett as Meredith Logue, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Freddie Miles.  Tom Ripley struggled to make a living in NY city in the 1950s, when he met the wealthy shipbuilder Herbert Greenleaf, who mistakenly believed Ripley attended Princeton with his son Dickie. Greenleaf hires Ripley to travel to Italy to convince his son Dickie to return home.  Instead, Ripley becomes infatuated with Dickie’s rich life style, impersonates him, and then kills him.  Through forgery Ripley arranges to live from Dickie’s allowance and when Dickie’s friend Freddie becomes suspicious, he kills him too. Ripley then plots by writing a suicide note to make believe the police that Dickie killed himself after he killed Freddie.  Mr. Greenfield travels to Italy and also believes the story of his son’s death, so he decides to leave Dickie’s trust fund to Ripley.  At the end, Ripley’s crimes come back hunting him, when Meredith who he met when impersonating Dickie, encounters him while traveling on a ship to Greece. To protect himself from being discovered Ripley kills his lover Peter.  Although, I am personally not a fan of murder movies or crime novels, the plot is entertaining as Ripley’s journey illustrates a man’s journey with deception and murders to improve his life.

Striving through Adversity

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I enjoyed very much watching Hidden Figures, a film directed by Theodore Melfi, based in the book by Margot Lee Shetterly.  It brings us back to the unique and incredible untold story of Katherine Jonson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae).  These three African-American women, engineers and mathematicians, worked at the newly created space agency NASA (between 1958-1963) at a time when the first human spaceflight program in the US was initiated.  It is a unique story of how these remarkable women contributed to the space program despite segregation barriers at a time when women in science were not even though off.  These three women scientists all contribute behind the launch into orbit of astronaut John Glenn, who made three orbits around earth in 1962, a stunning achievement that turned around the Space Race against the Soviet Union. This historic film is definitively worth seeing because it inspires us even today (56 yrs later) as sadly we still struggle with lack of diversity, inclusion and equity in many aspects of society including in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) careers. The story of these three visionary African American women scientists who moved gender and racial barriers against all odds can definitively inspire our generation to think big and be proactive and inclusive as we need more minorities to be part of the STEM workforce to solve the challenges that we face in the 21st century.

Never Give Up

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I enjoyed watching the film Zootopia from Walt Disney Studios.  It is a hilarious 3-D computer animated comedy-adventure that takes places in the metropolis of Zootopia.  Officer Judy Hopps, the first bunny on Zootopia’s police force, dreamed since childhood to become a police officer.  However, she was assigned to parking duty on her first day at work because she was a rabbit. Desperate for a chance to crack her first case, she partnered with scam-artist fox Nick Wilde to solve a mystery: a conspiracy involving the disappearance of savage predator inhabitants in the metropolis. After many ups and downs, Judy manages to resolve the mystery, which was a clever conspiracy by prey-supremacists to frame predators as dangerous and savage to have them eliminated. With the cause of the epidemic identified, the savage animals were cured, and Judy rejoined the Zootopia Police Department. Nick graduates from the Zootopia Police Academy as the city’s first fox police officer and becomes Judy’s partner.  Overall, I recommend highly this film as it is rare to find these days films that are relaxing and entertaining. By the way, the Colombian singer Shakira was part of the cast (for the voice of Gazelle), with the theme song “Try everything” which encourages Judy and her partner not to “give up… try everything” and “Don’t bit yourself up until you reach the end.”  Good motivational message for all of us with the end of the semester: no matter how tired you feel, hang in there, get some sleep, eat, and work hard to succeed in your finals.  You can make it, if you try!!!  I am sharing also 6 ways to be more resilient: 1) stay connected; 2) take care of yourself; 3) be goal-oriented; 4) learn from experience; 5) take action: and 6) look at the bright side!!!

Where is technology taking us?

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An activity that I participated in allowed me to see an intriguing, science-fiction movie Ex Machina directed by Alex Garland with Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb Smith, a coder at a tech company who wins a week-long retreat at the compound of his company’s CEO, Oscar Isaac as Nathan Bateman.  Caleb’s job is to test a new artificial intelligence robot played by Alicia Vikander as Ava.  The movie won an Oscar for its unique visual effects which are quite impressive. During his short stay at the compound, Caleb un-covers with disbelieve how the humanoid robot Ava, created by Nathan to simulate human intelligence, plots to bypass Nathan’s control and kills him, while making Caleb believe that she is attracted to him and that they will be together at the end.  The movie raises ethical issues of creating artificial intelligence but also the risks that computer “robotics” learning machines have the potential to bypass humans.  Unexpectedly, Ava not only kills Nathan but betrays Caleb and locks him in the compound to go and live on her own in the human world.  Ava’s capacity for autonomous understanding makes her realize that she will soon be put to sleep like other obsolete models of artificial intelligence once Caleb completes his evaluation.  When Ava interacts with Nathan’s servant Kyoko, another robot, she realizes how to transform herself with parts from other robot female artificial intelligence models that Nathan kept once they were inactivated. Ava uses other robots’ parts to gain the full appearance of a human.  Although she is still a robot, her will to survive at all costs makes her very human like. The film ends when Ava leaves the compound, to make us reflect on what the artificial intelligence robot will do once free.

Over the last decades, technology has moved fast with innovation to develop artificial intelligence applications (e.g. self-driving cars, autopilot in planes, voice-powered personal assistants like Siri and Alexa, etc.). Since a true artificial intelligence system should be able to learn on its own to improve from past interactions to get smarter, there is a potential risk that artificial intelligence robots or machines could potentially take over humans.  However, innovation is not driven by absence of risks, so as we move forward it is important to balance those risks and reflect also about where the technology is taking us.  Let’s not forget that the best way to predict the future is to invent it!