Reflection on Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

In my opinion, some ability and a positive attitude is required to preform a difficult task. In Renee`s situation, she had a poor mathematical ability but she was very determined to solve the simple problem. She took twenty-two minutes to figure it out, when most people would have given up after a few minutes, she perseveres to finish the problem.

    I have experienced that you need  ability and a positive attitude several times in my life. The first, was all the way back in 4th grade learning long division. My teacher taught right out of the book and I am more of a visual learner so I didn’t understand how it worked and it seemed like magic. After spending hours on homework and not understanding it, I asked my mom for some help and it took multiple explanations and several hours. The final explanation was a hands on approach using real life situations. I started out with a 4th graders knowledge of math and a strong want to learn and I ended up with a skill that I would use for the rest of my life.

    My mom had an experience where this skill is useful. She is in the final steps to becoming teacher and has been working on it for years. The hardest part for her was passing the elusive CSET. Altogether, she took it six times, changing he study habits each time. The final time she took it, she passed and thought it was a miracle.  It was because she had the attitude that she could succeed.

    I recently read The Unwanted by Kien Nguyen, in it he spent many years trying to escape communist Vietnam. Once he finally got an opening to leave, there was so many hoops to jump through and he patiently gathered the required papers. When he finally had only one paper to get signed, the official made him comeback for five days. Everyday he came back and waited showed his positive attitude to save him and his family.

Qfwfq Characterization

Thesis:Q is often misunderstood by other people and  often misunderstands people

Lll and Q were engaged and Q thought that it would be a good time to introduce Lll to his uncle, N’ba N’ga. Even though she is more evolved, she agrees with uncle N’ba N’ga`s ideas and decides to dump Q run off with N’ba N’ga.  

“Marry him. Be a fish with him. And bring some more fish into the world.”
    Q shows that he completely misunderstood Lll’s feelings about uncle N’ba N’ga and her feelings about him. She liked his old fashioned ideas about “everyone used to be fish and they still should be fish”. Q’s insecurities about Lll’s reaction to his family eventually led to the breaking up of him and Q. Q tried to win Lll back but she had too much propaganda from N’ba N’ga.

    Lll was talking to Q about how he is a freak because he is in between two species. He is very insecure about his place in evolution because of all of the stuff N’ba N’ga said.
“She considered me at a halfway stage, a creature not at home in one world or another.” (land or sea)
    Q doesn't realize that he doesn’t have a chance with Lll because N’ba N’ga is so much more charming and he can talk Lll into believe what he thinks. Q is not confident enough to persuade Lll to stay a land creature with him.  

Q was running and he got caught by the ‘New Ones’. They weren't sure what he was and they were too ignorant to realize that he was a dinosaur.

“You looked like as if you’d just seen. . . . a Dinosaur! And the others laughed. But in that laughter I sensed for the first time that there was a hint of apprehension. Their good humor was a bit forced. Then one of them turned seriously and said: “Dont say that as a joke, You dont know what they are”
    The new ones immensely misunderstand Q and all of the dinosaurs. Most of them think of them as a kind of mythical creature and some of them are smart enough to realize that they would be a major threat to the new mammals. The idea of dinosaurs was so skewed to the new ones that they couldn't even recognize a real dinosaur in the flesh.

Response to Vics post about him being scared of the doctors office

I was looking at blogs on google reader and i came across Vic`s six-year-old impression of the doctor`s office. It is interesting because he has a similar reaction to the doctors as i did when i was his age.

“Things shifted as scary became horrifying. The doctor came out of his little work room and brought me into his examining room. I resisted by telling him to wait for my mom to bring me in, but I supposed it was fine. It was, until he started talking to me. I was speechless and too frightened to talk thinking that if i said something wrong, he would possibly shoot me. I trembled with fear and then came this one shot. “

    The irrational fear of the doctors office is common among little kids these days for fear of a shot. Shots at the doctors office are meant to MONITOR the patients` health and not meant to scare little kids, but they get wrong impression from the pointy needles and huge tongue depressors. The reason that kids are afraid of the doctors office is because they aren’t certain of what will happen next. If doctors spend a little bit of time explaining the procedure then the patient will be more at ease during the visit. The comfort of parent accompaniment can make the experience much less traumatising. Another thing that can help ease the STRESS of the getting a shot at the doctors office is having a skilled shot giver, it is their JOB to make the shot quick, easy, and painless.

    Another quote i found from Vic’s blog paints a clearer picture of what thoughts go through young patients heads.

“Rumors or the truth, are always talked about by kids when they return from a visit to the doctor's. The most frightening thing is the shots that has no escape but to take them. “

Stories told by other kids that had been to the doctors before can skew a little kid’s idea of what the doctors office is actually like. The lies told by tricky kids can really scare people like Vic and make them scared of shots and the doctors in general.   

Reflection on Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs

In Stephen Jay Gould`s essay, he discusses three scenarios that possibly caused dinosaurs to become extinct. Two proposals, Sex and Drugs, are quickly disregarded as plausible because of lack of evidence. Sperm cannot live at temperatures above 96 degrees Fahrenheit or below 92 degrees Fahrenheit, that is why they are stored outside the body. In the essay, a scientist speculates that dinosaurs became extinct because the males became sterile from not being able to regulate their body temperature. This is disproved because a dinosaur is so big that it would take a very long time for it to heat up or cool down especially because of the temperature being balanced between night and day. The idea that dinosaurs became extinct by overdosing on “drugs” or angiosperms is based on the fact that unlike mammals, dinosaurs couldn’t taste the difference between food and poison and their livers couldn’t detoxify them. This idea cannot be tested or proved because we don’t have samples of dinosaur tastebud or livers to see how they would react to the poison.
    It is extremely important to have good evidence when doing a science report or supporting a hypothesis. If there isn’t any facts supporting the data in a theory, then is simply an idea that has no merit. Advertisers get away with “faking” evidence all the time in infomercials. For example in the Shamwow commercial they claim it takes no time at all to clean up spills and they show a clip of the towel cleaning up a spill in only a second. When I saw a booth at a fair it was a completely different story, it took quite a while longer and was more labor intensive. People believe these scams due to clever marketing which includes persuasive pitchmen (such as Billy Mays), catchy jingles or sayings, constant repetition, and the correct demographic.  Pitchmen are good at selling things because they have a loud voice and a believable smile. They use those tactics to lure people into buying unreliable products. After watching some tv, most people have at least a few jingles of products stuck in their head, when they go to the store they will remember the product from the tv and be more likely to buy it. While watching C-span, an elder person might see a LifeAlert (an emergency call button) commercial and feel that they need it because of testimonials by people in their age group.

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Response to Karissa`s post Disney Channel: A path to Failure

This quote was taken from Karissa`s blog post titled Disney Channel: A path to failure. The name of this post was the first thing that caught my eye. I thought it was very interesting that she had the same idea that I had about Disney Channel.

I remember when Hilary Duff was like the Miley Cyrus of today... The only reason that Lindsay Lohan is still talked about is because she's a mess and is on all kinds of drugs. I guess my point in writing this is to state my opinion that most acting careers that start on TV stations like the Disney Channel don't tend to last too long.
Also, from what I've seen from watching TV, once you've been on the Disney Channel or some other teeny bopper TV channel it seems like it is very hard to break away from the little kid image that you begin with. For example, Miley Cyrus started acting in Hannah Montana when she was about only 13 or 14. Now, I think she is almost 18 and is trying to perform for a different aged group audience.

My sister is an avid Hannah Montana watcher and she has mentioned to me that the structure of the show has changed as the series is winding down. In the show she started as a younger teen and now she has moved on to a senior in high school and after this season, Hannah Montana: Forever, the series will be over. As stated in the quote, the Disney channel stars` careers end soon after the teenage years. When Miley Cyrus`s television show is over she will probably not try to cater to kids in her songs, music videos, and concerts because her contract with Disney would be over.

In Karissa`s examples of former Disney stars she states that Lindsay Lohan was a drug user and we just don’t hear about any other old star because i think Disney keeps them famous and gives them ways to promote them.

Alex Noble

Victor Liang

Con Abortion Opening Statement

Abortion is the act of killing a baby before it is born. When aborting a baby you are destroying a defenseless child. We are very against the slaughtering of human beings and think it should be stopped as soon as possible. It is forbidden by the Sixth Commandment of the Bible’s Old Testament, “thou shalt not kill”(Exodus 20:13), and the Hippocratic Oath, the oath doctors take to swear that they won’t abort a baby.  Abortion is a waste of babies because over two million couples are waiting to adopt kids and only 134,000 babies are available for adoption. For people that aren't able to have babies it is very sad to know that there are possible babies to adopt and they are being killed. Abortion is eroding America’s potential for future heroes, great presidents, scientists, athletes, and other occupations necessary for the nation’s success.What if some of the mothers of great leaders of America got aborted? Abortions also increase the chance of women developing breast cancer. When pregnant, the levels of estrogen increase, leading to growth of the breast. This is a preparation for the baby’s milk. When the baby is aborted, the process is stopped, and immature cells are left in the woman’s breasts. This results in a greater risk of mutating cells that lead to breast cancer.(Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, the Catholic Medical Association, and the National Physicians Center for Family Resources)