G Angara - INT 101

 - Stay at home mom of three, Angie Bachmann was so bored that she made a deal with herself that if she could make it to noon without going crazy or eating the cake in the fridge, she would do something fun. She went to a riverboat casino.  - It became a habit to go to the casino once a week on Fridays, a reward for getting through the week. She got so good at it that she was able to buy a week's groceries and treat her family to dinner, and the company was sending her coupons.  - Bachmann's parents got sick and she began having to travel to see them. The times she was home felt lonelier than ever and she began visiting the casino more and more to make up for it. She was so good she was walking away with thousands when she was winning. People were sitting with her to learn from her, and the casino gave her a line of credit so she wouldn't have to carry so much cash around.  - She started borrowing money from her parents in order to be able to pay the bills. She ended...

 - A social movement usually needs three parts: starting because of social habits of friendship, growing because of the habits of a community, and it endures because leaders give participants new habits.  - Before Rosa Parks, many other black passengers had been put in jail for refusing to give up their seats. None of them started a boycott or protests. - Parks was involved in a lot of her community and was deeply respected. Her arrest sparked social habits (friendship habits) and ignited the initial protest.  - Weak tie acquaintances are important because they let us know information we might not have gotten to know otherwise.  - In adult life, peer pressure is how businesses get done and communities self organize.  - Doug McAdam tried to figure out why some people participated in Freedom Summer and others didn't, when everyone knew the risks of it. His hypothesis that those more self centered stayed home was wrong, because his analysis showed that both self ce...

 - Pole, a statistic worker at Target was asked to figure out which of Target's workers were pregnant from their buying patterns, because pregnant parents buy a lot of things, and workers are able to sell more to them.  - If people see healthy food in the front of the store and finish their grocery shopping first, they are more likely to buy junk food later in their shopping trip.  - Each person's shopping habits are unique and don't typically overlap.  - Target uses their credit cards to be able to predict customers' spending and shopping patterns. They will guess what else you might buy but not at Target and ship you coupons for those things to try and get you to buy it at Target.  - People's buying habits are more likely to change when they're going through a major life event. When people are going through a divorce, changing a household, getting married, etc, they are vulnerable to interventions by marketers. Pregnant women are gold mines for this reason....

 - Rhode Island hospital had a gap between physicians and nurses, with the nurses feeling unappreciated and undervalued. The nurses had habits to avoid physician arrogance. They color coded doctors based on their personalities, and developed habits to make sure patients underwent procedures properly.  - An 86 year old man had a hematoma and was taken to Rhode Island Hospital. A neurosurgeon in the middle of a routine spinal surgeon was paged and he told his assistant (a nurse practitioner) to get the man's wife to sign a consent form approving surgery. When the man was wheeled in, they found that the consent form didn't say which side of the man's head the hematoma was on, or which side to operate on.  - The surgeon said it was the right side of the brain, ignored the nurse's protests or suggestions to recheck, and began operating, only to find out that they were operating on the wrong side of the brain. The surgery took twice as long, and the man died without ever rega...

 - Travis Leach grew up in a family where his dad was a functional heroin addict, and he and his siblings were used to it. When his dad overdosed when he was nine, his older siblings were used to it and knew what to do.  - He dropped out of high school at sixteen, and started working part time jobs, but would lose control when people were rude to him. He got a job at Starbucks, and learned how to control his temper and got a hold of his life. He is now a manager of two different branches and makes a decent amount of money.  - Starbucks focuses on training it's employees to remain focused on making people happy and putting their own emotions aside. It teaches them willpower, and how to stay focused on their job.  - A study on four year olds and marshmallows made people assume that willpower is a skill. However, Mark Muraven decided to question this further, because he realized that unlike normal skills, willpower doesn't stay constant.  - Muraven conducted an exp...

 - Alcoa was a company that manufactured Aluminum, and was one of the largest companies on earth. However, investors were concerned because the management had made misstep after misstep. In 1987, the new CEO was announced: Paul O'Neill, which caused concern, because no one had ever heard of him.  - O'Neill talked about worker safety in his speech to the crowd. He told the crowd of investors that he intends to make Alcoa the safest company in America, confusing the crowd because CEOs would normally talk about lowering costs and increasing profits.  - Investors, concerned, began to pull out their money, which would go on to be the worst thing they ever did, because within a year of the speech Alcoa's profits would hit a record high.  - O'Neill wasn't sure if he wanted the job when it was offered to him, and made a list of what his biggest priorities would be if he accepted the job. He had made a name for himself throughout his career as someone whose lists "alway...

 - Tony Dungy was a football coach whose dream was to coach an NFL team, and he had many prospective interviews but was unable to get many jobs because his technique was to focus on players' habits. He finally got a job coaching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who were one of the worst NFL teams.  - Golden rule: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it  - Dungy doesn't bother with obscure plays or complicated moves like other coaches. He just makes his players drill the same basic plays over and over again until they can do it better and faster than the other team.  - Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was an alcoholic who went to a hospital for drug and alcohol addictions, and he was given belladonna (a hallucinogenic drug) which caused him to have intense pains and hallucinations and he had a vision that he saw "god" and that he was in a new world when he regained consciousness.  - AA has a very high success rate, and it's twelve ste...

 - Hopkins, an "ad man", was convinced to take on Pepsodent toothpaste. This became a great financial decision, because Americans, who had previously had high dental hygiene issues and did not brush their teeth, were influenced to start using the toothpaste by his ads. Hopkins said he was able to do this because a craving is what powers the habit loop.  - Hopkins found a cue that would help influence people to buy the toothpaste. He chose to focus on tooth film, something that is natural and everything has and toothpaste does not actually help with. However, he chose to market Pepsodent as a beauty product that would get rid of the film.  - Hopkins says that basic human psychology is to give people a simple and obvious cue, and a clear reward for following it.  - In 1996, a team at Proctor & Gamble were designing the ad campaign for one of the company's most promising products and they were at the brink of failure. They were marketing what would eventually become...

 - In the beginning of the chapter, a man named Eugene Pauly (E.P) is introduced. E.P had a disease which affected his memory. He was unable to remember things for more than twenty minutes, and thought he was two decades younger than he actually was. However, scientists found that he was able to continue to build habits. For example, if you asked him where the food was in his kitchen, he would say he didn't remember. However, if you asked him to get something from the pantry, he would be able to do so without problems.  - Basal ganglia is what controls habits. In rats, every time they explored a maze, the first time their brains would be working at a very high speed, but the more times they explored the maze the less brain activity there would be. The basal ganglia is central to storing habits and recalling patterns.  - There was a past study on a man called H.M, who had seizures. A physician who wanted to help him cure the seizures proposed sucking out some of H.M's hipp...

- In the prologue of the book, the author begins by talking about a woman named Lisa, who was able to turn her life around when she decided to focus on stopping smoking. Charles Duhigg, the author, details that this, to Lisa, was a keystone habit, meaning that when she focused on changing this one habit, she was able to change multiple other parts of her life.  - Duhigg says that all life is just a mass collection of habits, from how people brush their teeth in the morning to what they do after work.  - The book is broken down into three parts, habits in individual lives, habits of successful companies and organizations, and the habits of societies. Duhigg says that each chapter revolves around the idea that habits can be changed if people understand how they work.  - Duhigg grew interested in habits when he was a newspaper reporter in Iraq. An army major whose job was to stop the protests in the small city of Kufa, first analyzed recent riots and found a pattern. Then, h...

 Part 1. Build Your Stand  - What would I do if I knew I only had one year to live?  If I knew I only had one year left to live, I would want to travel. I would want to see different places like London, Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, or Paris. I would want to look at all the different cultures around the globe and learn what little I can from them in whatever time I have left. But I would also want to spend as much time with my family and loved ones as I could. I would want to go visit them, or have them accompany me as I try to visit all these places. I would want to make a list of all the things I wanted to do, and try to cross off as many items as I could, even the silly ones like going sky diving or getting a tattoo. I would want to be leaving some kind of mark on the world after I'm gone, whether that's by making sure my family knows how much I love them, or by some kind of broader impact like writing a book. I would use my last years to tie up all my loose ends, with...

As I was reading the excerpt from the old women's handbook, I was struck by two things. First, how unfair it was that these girls were expected to live by these rules, when I'm sure that their male counterparts would have much less restrictions placed on them. Second, it was apparent through the beginning of the text when they talked about privileges and "freedom of life in a large group", that the the people who wrote this genuinely believed that they were offering the female students more freedom than was necessary. I can't even begin to imagine what it must have been like to live in a time period like that, where it was normal and expected for women to be under more restrictions than men, and for them to show "ladylike behavior" and accept their restrictions. I'm also currently living in Boone Hall, which is part of the M.E.P, which was referred to in the text. This made the stark differences in our situations even more apparent, because the women...

 I think that when you are in a situation like the people of Omelas are, where one child has to continuously suffer so that everyone else can be happy, that it is an unfair situation. I would want to save the child, even if that meant that I would be dooming everyone else to feel less happiness and to feel guilt and pain, and other emotions that make us sad. I believe in the saying that people in a family or in a community are really only as strong as their weakest person, and in this case the weakest person is the child. The child's continuous suffering cannot be permitted to continue, because it is inhumane and terrible to allow a child to suffer like that at all. Even if what the people of Omelas tell themselves is true, and the child will never fully recover, I think that is in fact all the more reason to bring the child out and attempt to right the wrongs done to it. 

 I think these teachers are generalizing the experiences of everyone they're talking about. When they talk about the "Black experience" and the "White experience" as though they are completely separate things they are adopting an incredibly close minded perspective which doesn't allow for any kind of growth. In fact, I think having white suburban males listen to rap music and like rap music broadens people's perspectives on others, making it easier to form connections and lose racist tones. I believe that the teachers in this interview are not fully seeing the bigger picture, which is that it can be good for different cultures and people to mingle without stereotyping anybody. 

Watching the video, I felt horrified at the state of the square, and the fear that the photographer was feeling as he tried to capture it. Seeing the "tank man" stand up to the government like that makes me think that there are people in the world who truly know what they stand for, and when they have to make a stand. At the same time, I also admire the photographer's bravery, because he also chose to risk his life by going to the square and taking as many photos as we could. I think both of them showed incredible bravery that day. I don't know what I would stand for in that way. As much as I believe in something, I don't think I could risk my life the way "tank man" did. I have never been in such an extreme situation, and I don't know what I'd do if that ever happened to me. As much as I want to, I don't know if I could display the same bravery that "tank man" did. 

 Geetanjali Angara, daughter to Manjula Rao Rojukhirdu and Satya Ramana Rao Angara and sister to Meenakshi Angara, has passed away at the young age of 18.  She was beloved by her whole family, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and her dog, Max. If she were here she would want it to be mentioned that she loved them all just as hard. Geetanjali was born on June 13, 2007 in Indore, India. The first child in her family, she was immediately showered with love and adoration. Throughout her life, though admittedly short, she had lived in Hyderabad, Chennai, Chicago, Long Island, and finally, Cumming, Georgia. Before her death, she had been enrolled at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.  Her love for reading could be matched by none. You could always see her with a book in hand, rapidly absorbing every word. Her at home library of more than 200 books is another thing we'll have to figure out what to do with now.  Geetanjali's second great love was music. Born into a...

 1. I am someone who loves to read. 2. I am nervous about this semester. 3. I am excited for all the new possibilities for the next 4 years. 4. I am someone who lores . 5. I am missing my family. 

 In the poem Ithaka I think the speaker is talking of the different parts of life, and how important it is to stay positive. As someone who struggles with stress and anxiety, the poem's main message of enjoying all the good along the journey resonated with me. The speaker mentions early on that if you keep a positive heart the "monsters" won't come and bother you. Since staying positive can be difficult for me, this message touched directly to something which would greatly benefit me. To me, this poem's exploration of themes such as enjoying the good in life made it more meaningful.