Understanding Cultures

The most important of factors when working with or among people with backgrounds different from one's own is the necessity of an open mind. It is vital that the person be permanently ready to learn and respect new insights into a people's or person's cultural rules, traditions, behaviors and beliefs. These things should not be learned through force but through desire. Additionally, one should be ready to act upon these insights. Whether that is by wishing locals during one of their festivals or participating in the festivities.

Along with understanding the social side of things, to work competently one must also acknowledge the different engineering ideas and be able to analyze them with respect to the various cultural factors and form links between the two. This may very well affect the ease with which a person is able to work in a culturally different environment with confidence.

My guitar (because I couldn't think of anything else)

Alright since I don't really care for Halloween and can't think of anything else to write about, I decided to write a review of my electric guitar. There's a lot of technical information in here that no one will really care about, I'm just writing because I can't think of anything else.

My guitar is an ESP LTD MH-401 QM. It has a "superstrat" style archtop mahogany body with a red quilted-maple top finish. The neck is a maple neck with a set-through neck joint, 24 XJ frets, a rosewood fingerboard and a thin u-neck contour. The bridge is a Floyd Rose Special, which is a licensed version of the original Floyd Rose bridge made by Schaller. Tuners are made by Grover. The hardware is black nickel, with a master volume knob, master tone knob, and a 3 way pickup selector. The pickups themselves are active EMGs, with an EMG81 in the bridge and an EMG85 in the neck.

What I really like about this guitar is the playability. I shopped around for a long time for a guitar and was not really comfortable with many of the guitars I had played, until I laid my hands on the MH401. It is an absolute pleasure to play this guitar. The U neck contour fits my hand perfectly, and the fretboard feels like butter under my hand. The weight is balanced perfectly, so it is very comfortable both standing up and sitting down. The archtop also somehow contours to my hand perfectly, adding an extra level of comfort. However, the set-thru neck joint is what really sets it apart from other guitars in its price range. Normally with a bolt on neck the neck joint gets in the way when soloing on the higher frets, but with the set-thru joint the neck is essentially one with the body, and the joint fits the curvature of your hand perfectly.

I'm also a fan of the aesthetics of this guitar. The red quilted maple finish is absolutely stunning - it looks like the bottom of a lake, and at certain angles it almost seem to shimmer. I have gotten compliments on the finish of this guitar at almost every show I have played.

The one thing that I don't like about my guitar is the Floyd Rose bridge. It makes changing the strings a lot more complicated and time consuming, and doesn't let me change tunings without doing a lot of setup. I like to change tunings a lot, and right now getting a Floyd Rose doesn't really seem like a very wise decision. I am also not a very big fan of the EMG pickups, even though I used to like

Overall, I am very happy with my guitar, it was well worth the money I paid for it.

Encountering Other Cultures

The three cases from Development Anthropology looks at examples of global competence, how another region makes decisions and discusses how technology connects different cultures. Global competence is important especially in today’s society. Projects are now done by people from diverse backgrounds and being able to understand others cultures is key. The first case illustrates this. One doesn’t have to automatically know a country’s language, but rather be able to know distinguish characteristics before arriving. Knowing that in Arabic, Tunisia is both the same word for the country and the city of Tunis would have been helpful for the travelers. Learning about how other cultures base their decisions on is essential for engineers because it shows what that culture values. With this, we can see why engineers in other parts tackle a problem. Lastly, as technology continues to grow, the world becomes smaller. Technology is making the sharing of ideas easier and is connecting cultures in a behind the scenes way.

The steel axe

The document we read showed us how seemingly small, insignificant object, rituals or discrepancies in a culture can actually play a big role in said culture, and can be crucial aspects for newcomers to know. For example, in the case of the Yir Yoront, an Aboriginal group residing on the west coast of Australia, the introduction of a single technology, the steel axe, completely disrupted their entire social fabric, structure, and hierarchy. The stone axe, which was the axe the Yir Yoront used before the steel axe, was a symbol of power, responsibility, and manlihood. Axes were crucial in the trading links with other societies; axes had myths and stories attributed to them. Their entire society was built around the stone axe. However, when foreign missionaries introduced the steel axe, all of it came undone. Since steel axes came from missionaries, the Aborigines formed closer, unorthodox relationships with the "white man" that did not sit well with their traditional trade relationships. Steel axes were also easily available to both men and women, and thus stone axes began to lose their value as a symbol of manlihood. Steel axes had no myths or legends attributed to them, and thus the axe began to lose its value as a cultural symbol. The result of this was a complete crumbling of the Yir Yoront's social system. The missionaries' purpose with bringing the steel axe was not to cause harm to the Yir Yoront, but to help them, to give them better tools to help better achieve goals they had set for the Yir Yoront. However, they had no idea that replacing the stone axe would have such a devastating effect.

Looking at this from a modern day perspective, given the increasing globalization of the planet it seems unlikely that the introduction of a single object could bring down an entire culture. However, as global engineers, we still need to be aware of such cultural objects when working with different cultures.

Halloweekend

This week was another stressful week at Purdue. Exams and projects and meetings and thinking ahead and sometimes I just need more hours in a day! But on the brightside, Halloweekend is finally here!! Thursday night, I went to Theta Chi’s Haunt the Acres and it was actually scary. My friends and I did not think it would be scary. Why? Because it was just in a house; how freaky can they make it, right? WRONG! It was modeled after an asylum and the boys of Theta Chi and girls of Delta Zeta outdid themselves. People were jumping out of nowhere, masked men were following you, someone with a chainsaw made an appearance and there was even a girl pretending to be the girl from “The Exorcism of Emily Rose!” Add fog machines, creepy background music and flashing lights and my friends and I were doing our best to get through the house as fast as possible!

But anyways…

I have decided Saturday mid-mornings will now be productive. Usually I reserve all school related work for Sundays but I’m turning over a new leaf. So this morning after slowly waking up (Friday night was a late night), I walked over to Subway for breakfast with some friends and watched the football game. At first, I was torn. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to root for my state or my school. Every time Michigan scored I sang the fight song but every time Purdue had a nice play, I did the whole “Boiler Up fist pump” motion. But, towards the end of the game, I just gave up and watched the game. Now I get to do homework and look forward to Halloween parties and costumes. Yay Halloweekend!

Highlights From the Past 48 Hours:

-witnessed a hawk attack a squirrel not even 7 feet from me

-rode the Nightrider Friday night after a costume party (the scene looked like something from an LMFAO/Katy Perry/ Ke$ha/Lady Gaga music video

-got a package from home

Halloween

Halloween is coming on this weekend and I am looking forward to it. I saw many posters about the parties on Friday and the activities seem awesome. In my mind, Halloween likes a pumpkin party. I saw many scenes in the movies and animations. There are some famous tradition, such as Trick-or-Treating, jack-o’-lanterns and costume parties. I don’t the origins of Halloween and those traditions, but this holiday seems great! Wal-Mart began to sell the pumpkins few weeks ago and I saw many students buy it. I hope I could see some of the jack-o’-lanterns around my dorm on the weekend. To be honest, I think the “face” on pumpkin is weird. It looks like a ghost is laughing to you. The pumpkin becomes stranger when the night comes. There are candles in the pumpkins and the orange lights make the faces seem stranger. I can image what will happen if I encounter a people with jack-o’-lantern in the night. I must scream and that guy might be scared by the scream. I made a jack-o’-lantern with my friends last weekend. We tried our best to make the face looked funny. It’s not as easy as we thought before. One of us cut his finger, but the pumpkins are pretty.

Another thing attracts me is the costume parties. When I watched the Gossip Girl, I thought the parties are crazy and amazing. We didn’t have any costume party, and it seems strange if someone walking on the street wears strange clothes. The situation is completely different here. I saw many interesting clothes on the street. I remembered a guy wearing the dress of lady dancer and his female partner wearing the clothes of superman. The Halloween costume parties impressed me because many people choose to dress up as witches and ghosts. I guess the party is awesome. I’m looking forward to the Halloween night!

Week 11 holism

The article talks about the holism and there are three mini-cases about different cultures and the connection. I agreed with the statement that “technology in any society is intimately connected at many points with other cultural subsystems” and the connections are always there even in a different societies. As I learnt on the history class, the development of technology leads the changing of the social structure. And change in other field, such as social status, economy and lifestyle, will be followed. The situation is the same in the world. I think it is a good idea to use holism. Although the cultures are diverse, people can find the connections between them. Another thing is before people try to study a particular factor of a culture, they need to know more about other background. Otherwise, the study will be extremely difficult. Like people read a novel written by a foreign author. Although readers can understand the words, sometimes they can’t understand the meaning of the story because of lacking the knowledge of culture background.

Identity

The two chapters from Intercultural Competence brought a flashback of my psychology and sociology classes in high school; two of my favorite classes. The area I find most interesting was under the topic of Identity Inclusivity where it discusses in-groups and out-groups. It looks at how people have the tendency to automatically categorize themselves and others as "us" and "them." Dividing others into groups is the early stage of forming stereotypes; assumptions about the individuals within the groups are made. With this, the question of identity starts. Identity is such a vague subject to talk about that it has many branches. I believe the best way to describe identity is by using the terms multicultural identity and hybrid identity. Multicultural identity refers to a person’s mindset of not committing or being committed a single culture. Hybrid identity is when a person’s identity is a combination of past and current cultures experienced. To me, identity is a person’s personality. Identity encompasses a person’s beliefs, experiences and sometimes genetics. No two people can have the same personality so no two people can have the same identity.

exams month

Many friends around me talk about the coming exam weeks and every time they talk about the exams with me I will tell them that I’m preparing for my exam month. I have one exam every week since last Monday and the exams won’t stop until the week before Thanksgiving. The worst thing is I need to do the review every weekend! I prefer to have all the exams in the same week so that I could have more free time to do my own things. But now my friends have exams on different days with me. We have few time to spend together even during the week. Another homework bothers me is the project of ENGR 131. It takes lots of time and my team always spends 2 to 3 hours on it. As the professor saying, I hope I can get lots of experience when I finish it.

One of the exciting things this week is the project in English class. We are working on the community project in English class this week. This assignment is attractive. I never thought one day I need to create a video and design a website on English class. This is the first time I tried Movie Maker. It’s much easier than I thought. I saw some of my friends making videos before and those videos were always used on the graduate party. I couldn’t remember how many times I cried because of those videos. When I collected the pictures used for the videos, these pictures remained me of the days the classmates stayed together. Each picture has a story. Most of the photos were taken during the travels and parties. The oldest one was taken almost 8 years ago. Compared with the latest photo, everyone changed a lot. The hairstyles at that time were funny. I can’t stop laughing. Thanks to this assignment, I have a great chance to recollect the memories.

Stereotype

I found that the statement about stereotypes is interesting. I agree with the argument that “Each of us is exposed to stereotypes starting at an early age.” and “stereotypical thinking tends to be very rigid and difficult to change.” I have realized how rigid the stereotypes are by my own experience. There are some Chinese characters that I can’t write them correctly even if I tried hard to remember. One of these characters is “嫩” which has a “攵” on its right side. I once wrote “负” instead of “攵” when I was only around 6 years old and without any reason after that time I always write this character wrongly. Even now I need to think carefully before I write this character and most of the time I make the same mistake although I know the character I wrote seems strange.

Community Multimedia Project - NOBE

A community is essentially a group of people acknowledging a certain commonality between them. Additionally, the members of a community tend to communicate with each other and occasionally meet each other for official or social events. One of the key factors that makes a community is a central leadership which is responsible for managing the functionality of the group.

The community I chose to address for the purpose of this project is an on-campus organization at Purdue that I am deeply involved with: The National Organization for Business and Engineering. It is an organization devoted to giving engineering students a background in and an idea of management and entrepreneurship. It also works to give students in the Krannert School of Business at Purdue an idea of the engineer’s mindset and thought process. It does this by helping members communicate with one another through various community-organized events. On a more professional level the society organizes talks, infosessions, seminars and case-studies for members with various large organizations including DOW Chemicals, General Electric and Arcelor-Mittal. At the same time we have social get-togethers with other like-minded organizations on campus.

Over the course of this project I intend to use the brochure and public service announcement to divulge this information as efficiently as possible to current and perspective members of the Purdue chapter of NOBE. Along with expanding membership on a local level we are also trying hard to increase the ‘national’ aspect of this community by getting more schools to join the initiative by either converting existing local organizations in their institutions or by encouraging them to create new student-run organizations of this form. I hope to also include that information in the PSA I create.

Being an engineering student coming from a family with a strong business and commerce background, I find it in my nature to see business and engineering as one. And as an active executive board member of this community I also feel that it is my responsibility to spread the message that this organization is attempting to propagate.

An Update on my Community Multimedia Project essay

The community I chose for my project is my floor's flag football team. So far, the first part of the project (the essay) is coming along nicely. For brainstorming, I did what I was most comfortable with and just wrote down everything I could think of about my community, and went back and noted down/highlighted the things that I thought would be useful for my essay. I noticed that one of the problems of my community was that there is no easy way for the whole team to communicate with each other - we mostly use sheets of paper taped on the wall next to our RA's room, as well as a whiteboard. I felt that a website would be very useful as a solution to this problem, and I plan to use the website I will make for this project as the actual website for my flag football team to communicate more easily. I also noticed another problem with the community, which is that after the regular season is over, we might not get to play again together next year. So far my challenge has been choosing between the two problems I have noticed, and I will look to address this challenge in my draft.

Medieval Siege Engines

The article talks mainly about medieval siege engines and the advancements in siege engine technology. The discussion of siege engines focuses mainly on the advantages of the counterpoise engine, which uses gravity and a counterweight to launch projectiles, and how its structure is superior to the more ancient torsion siege engine. For example, a counterweight engine has a smooth projectile arm action, which is a lot more effective and less damaging to the engine than the jerky, inconsistent action of the torsion engine. The article also briefly discusses how the improvements in siege engines spurred improvements in the strength and durability of castles and castle structures. This is one of the reasons medieval age castles still stand today - because they were built to withstand projectiles launched at high speed by the most advanced siege engines of the time.

community

I think community is a great of people stay together because of something in common. There are many different targets of community, such as learning, gaming, basketball team and so on. Now, the community online is very popular. I can get information from those communities and chat with people. The community I like most is QQ group. This is a function of QQ. The QQ users can create several group. The founder takes charge of inviting friends into the group and he/she has the right to force the members to leave the group if they don't obey the rules of the group. There will be two or three administrators in a group and they have the same response as the founder. When people want to enter this group, they need to send a requisition to the founder or the administrators and they will decide whether to invite them into the group or not. The group is like a chatting room. Members chat with each other . They can share resources by uploading and everyone in the team can download the resources. There is a common blog for the group. Everyone can use it to write something. In addition, there is a common album, members can post pictures or videos. Most time, the blogs and pictures are about group activities. On the upper right corner of the dialog, there is a small frame used for posting the schedule of activities or some information. Group members can see this frame immediately when they get online.

I am used to create a QQ group when I am in a new community. No matter it is in real world or online. It can help me to keep contact with those people and it's convenient for us to chat with each other and share experiences.

Week 9 Great structure in the Middle East

 In my mind, the most famous ancient structures in the Middle East are the Pyramids in Egypt. The first thought of the pyramid is old and mysterious. The pyramids are on the west bank of Nile because Egyptians believes the West is to enter another world. Their graves are precisely the junction of two worlds. Built 4,000 years ago, the three great pyramids, in the Egyptian desert remain the greatest buildings ever constructed. The pyramids were built under the orders of the Egyptian leaders. The Egyptians started constructing them after 2700B.C. and were built as tombs for the pharaohs. The most well known and the largest pyramids of Egypt is at Giza which is said to be the largest ever built. It is hard to believe ancient builders can build these massive structures without modern machines. I think this why we can identify the pyramids as an early monument of human greatness.

How Weapons Have Affected Structures

The pages from "Five Machines that Changed the World" discussed trebuchets. A trebuchet is a siege engine that was used as a weapon. With it, heavy objects could hit structures from thrown at far ranges. As time went on, weapons became more and more powerful. Because of this, buildings began being made sturdier. This building practice has thrived in the culture, making buildings in the Middle East some of the structured in the world. Engineers in the area have learned how to build structures that are strong and can withstand almost anything. Also, natural disasters of the Syria and surrounding areas have had a role in infrastructure. Dust storms, sandstorms and soil erosion have forced civil engineers to analyze the ground work of buildings with extra care. Thinking of ancient structures such as the Great Wall, the Pyramids of Egypt and the ruins in South America, we see how remarkable the early engineers were.

Week 7: Asia

My impression on Asians is a people focused on structure. From what I have read and experienced, Asians value family and put them on a high pillar. To me, this must be because of their belief of how all relationships are interconnected and a person’s first relationship is family. With these relationships come responsibility; giving me the impression that Asians are very accountable. I think Asians believe Americans to be a self-centered culture. The United States has an image for “make it or break it” place. Some cultures believe that Americans have it easy and not too many people work hard. As for engineering, Asia is a developing quickly, bringing in new ideas. The idea of feng shui makes me think of it as an early form engineering. The article written by Richard E. Nisbett, states that a feng shui master “takes account of a seemingly limitless number of factors such as altitude, prevailing wind, orientation toward the compass, proximity to various bodies of water, and gives advice on where to locate the structure.” Engineers today look at structures surrounding areas before building, being modern day feng shui artists.