Month: June 2020

When it comes to creating good habits, it can be very difficult. However, there are a few strategies to use when it comes to motivating yourself or others. As often as they are used, warnings simply don’t work. When it comes down to it, people just keep doing the wrong thing even after being warned. What is really required is fear. It may sound a bit troubling, but it works. The next strategy is rewarding yourself or others when they perform good behavior. People may warn against constant rewards for it might instill a need for a reward, but rewarding good behavior will encourage it. A third strategy used for encouraging good behavior is social incentives. Seeing a person do something good will inspire and encourage others.

When faced with a situation that is both scary and different, the first natural instinct is not to fight; the very first natural instinct is to find a way to escape. Though in reality many people tend to freeze up before running away, fighting is still a very last resort. Even during school shooting drills, the last thing recommended is to fight the attacker. The first thing recommended is to find a way to evacuate. Therefore, being faced with a scary situation will force a person to rationalize and be resilient. It is the same with threats. A threat is scary, so it will cause a person to try rationalizing and avoiding going against the threat. Everyone is different, but most people wouldn’t directly go against a serious threat on purpose. Personally, threats are either scary or unfavorable so I very much tend to focus on the task at hand rather than risk the threat.

Which leads to the next strategy: rewards. Anybody would do something if it had a good reward. Why should it be different for behavior and habits? Constant rewards are acts of encouragement that will continue to keep a person behaving and doing the right thing. It also allows for a momentary peace; the feat was conquered so now you are rewarding yourself. Depriving someone of a reward when they do something potentially difficult will decrease the chances that they would want to do that same thing again. Rewarding someone will show a person that they have what it takes to do the task at hand. Having an active reward will take the mind off the difficulty of the task and inspire the person to continue. I know for a fact that I respond better with rewards, though my mother taught me not to expect rewards in life. This is true, but when it comes to rewarding yourself, it is extremely helpful to go the extra mile.

The last strategy in terms of aiding good behavior and habits is social incentives. For example, seeing someone at the gym posting a picture will inspire the person to also go to the gym. Even if that person ultimately decides not to go, there will be a big urge. Seeing someone do anything and being successful at it will inspire a person to do that same thing. Countless times, there has been a person on the news and we all thought to ourselves, “I am going to be like them one day.” It will inspire a person to do the work necessary to achieve the goal that they set for themselves. When it comes to actually doing the work, that is where the other two strategies come in handy. I play tennis and I watch successful tennis players play all the time and it inspires me to improve. Not just a little thought but a constant recurring thought that drives me to work harder.

Good behavior and habits are to achieve; bad habits are even harder to break, but they are not impossible. There are so many strategies that it can be overwhelming when attempting to make a change habit or behavior-wise. However, these three strategies are very helpful when it comes to narrowing a target, focusing on the target, and ultimately reaching that target. It also helps that these strategies are not complicated. I use these strategies whenever I want to accomplish something. For example, business, which is one of my interests. Foremost, I would read about a successful business owner. Then, I would actively encourage myself to do the necessary work to stay informed. If I catch myself being lazy, I would threaten myself. In conclusion, I would set a reward for myself such as ice cream when I would do a satisfactory job in staying on top of my interests. I tested it, and I can absolutely say that this system works.

The story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker is a pretty interesting story. It begins with Mama, waiting for the arrival of Dee, her eldest of the daughters. She stands next to Maggie, who is shy and has burn marks on her body. As they await the arrival, the reader is given a background to the life of Mama and how she and Dee grew distant. Dee was smart and driven and wanted to get more out of life than Mama, and her ancestry had to offer. All of it came at the expense of Maggie and Mama. Dee arrives with Hakim, a barber, who turns out to be her boyfriend. Dee also goes by a new name, “Wangero” and wants her family to use it. Dee is more interested in gathering artifacts from her family than connecting with them. They go through the possessions of Mama in their search for some authentic items of her African American descent, which she wants to display in her house. Dee is somewhat rude when talking to Mama and Maggie. She gets to some quilts that were meant for her younger sister, and Dee wants them for herself. This results in Dee lashing out at Mama, claiming that she deserves the quilts more. Mama gives the quilts to Maggie, in which she asks Dee to leave, and she does.

The basic theme of the story is to respect your heritage and everything your ancestors went through. Dee has constructed a new heritage for herself and rejected her real heritage. She fails to see the family legacy of her given name and takes on a new name, Wangero, which she believes more accurately represents her African heritage. However, the new name, like the “African” clothes and jewelry she wears to make a statement, is meaningless. She has little true understanding of Africa, so what she considers her true heritage is actually empty and false. This was a story that was kind of hard to understand, but it was a good one.

The speaker taught us three principles that can help us change our behavior. After watching it, I was thinking about how can I use these three principles? These below are some of my thoughts.

Let’s create a hypothesis first, I am trying to improve my English so I need to change my behavior and make some goals achieved. The first principle is social incentives. Most people care about the “eyes” of others, when some people are doing something good but you are not, you will feel nervous. So I will find out how do other people improve their English and make a table or something that can show their ways. Then I will find a way that fits me. The second principle is the immediate reward. I used to make a big goal that takes me a long time to achieve, then I would give myself a reward. It made me give up halfway easily because it made me feel the pressure and I couldn’t feel happy during the progress. So the best way is to separate the big goal into some small goal. For example, I used to say I want to memorize 200 words a week, but now I will say I want to memorize 30 words a day. The second way even makes me memorize many more words but it works well than the first way. I can watch a show or do something I like after I memorize the words every day, instead of waiting for a whole week to get a reward. The third principle is progress monitoring. When we are trying to achieve some goals, we can not only focus on the result. The result is unpredictable, but we can control our progress. Focus more on what we are doing instead of what will happen if we doing that. Like maybe I memorize a lot of words that I don’t use them in my daily life, but I still keep doing that every day, I believe they will help me one day. And enjoy the progress of memorizing which can train my brain.

All in all, the three principles can help us a lot. But the most important thing I think is to act now instead of talk only and you must be sure you turely want to change your behavior, if you don’t sure, the best principle won’t change you.

Doing negative things because you enjoy it is a normal action that humans do. However, what is the most effective way to change someone’s behavior? Many adults may think instilling fear in children/teenagers work the best but studies show that it isn’t successful a lot of the time. Instead, there are 3 main points that contribute in changing someone’s behavior. We will be using procrastination on homework as an example.

The first element to this is social incentives. By seeing what other people are doing, you would want to do the same thing they’re doing, if not better. Many students procrastinate a lot normally, and having social incentives might mean having friends that tell you that they started on their homework or finished.

The second principle is getting immediate rewards. If you change your behavior, you will eventually get a long term reward, in this case, having better grades or understanding subjects more. Despite that, studies show that people would rather have an immediate reward instead of a bigger one in the future, as that one is still uncertain. To solve this, you could do homework efficiently for 1 or 2 hours and have a 10-minute break of doing the things you would do when you procrastinate.

The final detail is to have progress monitoring. Your brain is better at processing positive information than negative. So, by focusing on the good things that have happened, it’ll help you more in changing your behavior. If you begin to stop procrastinating, you can see how you have more extra time which you can use to sleep more, do more things you enjoy, etc.

By having social incentives, immediate rewards, and progress monitoring, changing your behavior will be less challenging. This could mean eating healthier, quit smoking, exercise normally, and a lot of others. You’ll be able to have healthier behaviors that will benefit you greatly in the future.

For me, like many others, I often have people who I look up to with admiration. I want to motivate myself to be better than them. I end up comparing myself to who I see on the internet or in real life and try to use that as a motivation to do better or to keep practicing until I am better.
However, this way may not be the best way for motivation, preferably for me in many cases. As I try to do better than my classmates or a person I know, sometimes it does push me into practicing hard. Let’s take basketball as an example. The point guard who has been playing basketball for many years is who I want to take as a motivation to get better, so I use her skills and compare them with mine. I practiced hard for months and maybe two years, but I am still not better than her. That is the problem. Maybe my goal of actually being better than her was way too ambitious. I should not use someone as a motivation to be better than them, but a motivation to be better than I am now.
You will never be the best at anything because there are almost eight billion people to compete against. The most important part of motivating yourself is not only receiving the reward, but the progress itself is the reward. For example, you have never tried weight lifting or doing cardio, and have recently started. In the beginning you want to give up but push hard to achieve your body goal. Not only is that final look the reward, but the progress of becoming stronger and being able to do something you were never able to do before itself is a huge reward. I don’t think the final outcome is the main focus, but rather the progress and your journey to what you have accomplished

Everyday use is about a family of African American people and about their daily life.

In the past, the main characters Dee, Maggie and “mama” had their house burn down for a unknown reason. Dee didn’t help Maggie or mama to get the fire down because Dee didn’t like the house, thinking it was too old.

The main thing in this story is when Dee wanted a quilt that was owned by Grandma saying that it was a valuable memory. The quilt was originally supposed to be given to Maggie, but Dee said that Maggie already knew how to make a quilt. Ironically Dee’s reason that Maggie already knew how to quilt just proves the fact that she thinks its just a quilt, meanwhile earlier, she said that the quilt is special and cannot be REPLACED. Furthermore, Dee came to their house in a fancy dress and jewelry, and after the encounter, Dee was a completely different person from who they knew.

I know its short but this is all i can think of.

Sometimes people say mice are bad because they cause infestations, sometimes people say mice are good because humans can study them and get more information. On May 7th, 2020, scientists who study neuroscience published an image of a mouse’s brain at Brain Science, an institute. Well, it’s not just a normal image taken randomly, what makes it so special is that it’s the most detailed image of a mouse’s brain.

There are many reasons why we study animals’ bodies. One reason is that people are trying to get information by studying the images taken on animals’ bodies. They do this because animals’ body structure, their brain, or their abilities are all similar to humans. “In the old days, people would define different regions of the brain by eye. As we get more and more data, that manual curation doesn’t scale anymore,” Lydia Ng, an Allen Institute researcher.

Another reason is that doing this will bring neuroscience to a new level. What I mean is that, the reason for taking this extremely detailed picture, it’s not just for humans to study. By taking this picture we can learn this skill on other things too. 

Compared to the image taken in the 90’s, this is a whole new change and upgrade of our studies of neuroscience.

Taking this picture helps us get information on animals’ bodies so we can learn ours, and the other thing is to get our study of science, either biology, chemistry, or physics to a whole new level.

In “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, a mother and daughter argue about whether they should use a quilt or hang it up on the wall. The quilt is made up of relics from the civil war. For example, it has a piece of a soldier’s uniform. The mother says that they should use the quilt as it was intended to be used, but the daughter thinks they should treat it as a relic of their African American past and culture. Another conflict in the story is one regarding embracing the past. The daughter is named Dee, but she later changes it to an African name. She thinks that black people in America should not use the culture of their oppressors, and stick to their African roots instead.

On the issue of the quilt, the daughter’s proposal is more reasonable. With so much history in it, it holds much more value as an heirloom. If it is simply used as bedding, it can only be seen by the person who uses it. But if it is put on display, guests can view an amazing piece of history. Besides, a quilt from over one hundred years ago would probably not function well anyway.

However, the daughter changing her name to be more African is disagreeable. It is established that their family has lived in America since at least the Civil War, possibly farther back. After years of slavery and assimilation, any African culture in their family is completely gone. It is obvious that the daughter is an American, so by changing her name she is assigning her self to a culture that she knows nothing about. Ignoring the skin color similarities, her and an African have nothing in common. In conclusion, the daughter has varying levels of disagreeably.

Researchers have been studying neuroscience on mice and have finally mapped out how their brain looks like. Normally, researchers would map the brain out by using tissues at a time. The way how the Allen Institute broke up the brain was by using 3-D pixels. After using the pixels, they connected them together and got the idea of how the brain of a mouse looks like.

The research team used an average of 1,675 mice to reassure that the diagram was accurate. You might be wondering, if it was easy to diagram how the brain of a mouse looks like. In fact, it is! The structure of the mouse’s brain is similar to the human brain. They can also be trained and breed easily.

The Allen Institute also compared their results to the 1900s era to sequence other animal’s DNA for the first time. This can help bring the understanding of neuroscience to a new easier level. In the future more generations in front of Gen. Z would figure out easier.

In the story, Everyday Use by Alice Walker, there are two different perspectives on how one can acknowledge their heritage. The two sisters, Maggie and Dee are shown to see their African roots differently. Maggie understands her heritage as something that keeps her close and attached to her ancestors. Dee on the other hand, views her heritage as merely materialistic. She see it as an aesthetic to be hung on the wall and shown off.

Alice Walker symbolizes their “culture” in the story with a quilt. The quilt was a very important family heirloom, that had been passed down from generation to generation. When Dee requests to keep the quilts for decoration, the mother says no, as she already promised them to Maggie. Dee responds by saying that Maggie would only ruin the quilts by putting them to everyday use. This shows that Dee only values the quilt as an accessory and an aesthetic. When Maggie gives up the quilts to Dee, she says, ” I can remember Grandma Dee with the quilts.” This shows that she values the quilts for everyday use, to keep her connected to her ancestors.

I personally think that Dee does not understand the true meaning of her heritage, because she thinks of the quilt as only a family heirloom. Unlike Dee, I think Maggie understands her culture, since she appreciates the quilt as something to connect her to her loved ones. In conclusion, heritage is not just a heirloom or an accessory, but a connection your past.