Author: Seung Lee

Study Paul Ekman

After reading the chapter Empathy, I decided to study Paul Ekman.  I went to his website. (www.paulekman.com) First, I briefly read his biography, then I moved on the training section.  Sadly, I had to purchase a training program to learn how to detect the facial expressions, so I just moved on.  I looked through his current projects.  There were some interesting projects like studying body languages of different countries in the world and making emotional profiles.  Then, I read some of his news articles and watched some videos, but they weren’t really interesting to me.  I found out that the TV show “Lie to me” is based on the true stories of Paul Ekman.

As a result of spending some time studying Paul Ekman, I learned that there are people who are really passionate about their field for more than 50 years.  He spent more than half of his lifetime studying facial expressions and detecting lies.  I can never imagine myself doing the same thing for over 20 years, but he did it.  I think he’s a really great scientist and human being because he’s so passionate about what he’s doing.

http://www.google.com/imgres?num=10&hl=en&biw=1366&bih=653&tbm=isch&tbnid=rT3gCsvNmYAeeM:&imgrefurl=http://www.hulu.com/lie-to-me&docid=AzOvyZ8vLzod7M&imgurl=http://assets.huluim.com/shows/key_art_lie_to_me.jpg&w=900&h=350&ei=xX25TpT5JeW22gXtlOWpCw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=139&vpy=146&dur=100&hovh=140&hovw=360&tx=227&ty=96&sig=115085359848834604841&sqi=2&page=1&tbnh=77&tbnw=198&start=0&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:12,s:0


20-10 Test.

After reading the meaning chapter of Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind”, I performed one of the exercises called “Take the 20-10 Test”.  This test is basically asking yourself what you would do if you had $20 million or only 10 years to live.

If I had $20 million in my bank right now, I would keep $19 million in the bank and take $1 million cash out of the bank.  Then, I would go to the mall and buy a new laptop, clothes, and everything I wanted to buy.  After that, I would ask my mom and sister if they want to go to Korea with me.  Then, I’ll fly to Korea to visit my family and give them money.  After that, I would go to California and buy a nice house and live a bay life.

If I only had 10 years to live, I would be really depressed and hopeless.  First of all, I would drop out of GT because it would take me 4-5 years to graduate, but I don’t want to spend 4-5 years in school when I only have 10 years to live.  Then, I would find something fun to do and do it every day until I die.  I feel like I would travel around the world, but I can’t afford it.  So, realistically, I would go back to Korea and spend some time with my family.  Then, if I am still healthy, I would try things like sky-diving and mountain biking.  If I’m sick, I would lie on the hospital bed or stay in my house and watch TV or play games.  When 10 years are almost gone, I would write my last will and be ready to die.


Photo finish

For this assignment, I decided to “play Photo Finish”.  I found this picture on Google by searching for “random picture”.  It’s just a picture of a pilot getting random screening, but I’ll make a story out of this picture.

Jack Wilson was an elite pilot working for American Airlines.  He had a secret that no one else knew: He was a spy sent by Saddam Hussein before he was caught.  He was always ready to commit suicide attack on the U.S.  One day, Hussein ordered him to explode the airplane with the politicians inside.  Jack decided to bring a gun into the airplane, so he could kill his co-pilot.  He was screened, but he hid the gun well and passed the screening test.  He successfully achieved his goal and died on the airplane.

 

 

 

Picture : http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/random_screening_at_gates.shtm


Choose any chapter of Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” and do one exercise.

For this make-your-own-homework assignment, I couldn’t come up with something creative, so I just decided to use our textbook, A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.  I started with eliminating which chapters I already read, then I looked through the chapters and searched for interesting activities.  In the  chapter “Design” and “Story”, I couldn’t find anything interesting.  However, in the chapter “Empathy”, I finally found an interesting activity: Test yourself.  It interested me because I felt like I needed to know myself better.

I started with “Spot the Fake Smile” test.  (www.tinyurl.com/2u7sh) Surprisingly, I got 16 out of 20 questions right.  I didn’t know I was that good at spotting the fake smile.  It was kinda of weird looking at the people faking smiles… because they looked retarded.  Anyway, I moved on to the next test: “Mind in the Eyes Test”. (www.tinyurl.com/ckrj3) On this one, I scored 24 out of 36.  It said most people score between 22-30, so I’m average at guessing people’s expression from looking at their eyes.  As a result of these two tests, I learned a bit more about myself.  I also had fun while taking these tests.

 


Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates

When I thought about who are the most influential people in my field (Computer Engineering), the first person who came to my mind was Steve Jobs.  Even though I’m not a huge fan of Apple, I appreciate all the achievements Jobs has achieved.  He founded Apple in 1976 and led a huge sensation of Apple II in 1978.  He invented Macintosh, which was not so successful at the early years, and he was fired from Apple in 1985 because he still wanted to invest more on Mac.  From 1985 to 1995, he worked at the NeXT company, which wasn’t successful either.  He came back to Apple in 1995, and, since then, as most of you know, Apple invented a lot of great mobile devices and computers like iPod, iPad and iPhone.  Unfortunately, he died on October 5th, 2011, and a lot of people were deeply saddened because the world has lost such a great innovator and visionary.

The second influential person in my field is Mark Zuckerberg.  I didn’t really know him until I watched the movie “The Social Network”.  Even though I had a Facebook account and seldom used it, I had no idea who founded Facebook and the story behind it.  After watching the movie, I learned once again that literally everything in this world is made by someone and there’s always some behind story.  Nothing is here just because it is here.  But everything is the result of someone’s hard work and struggle.

Mark Zuckerberg was born in 1984 in New York to a dentist father and a psychiatrist mother.  His father taught him a programming language when he was 12 years old.  He was very interested in programming and showed his talents since the early ages.  He developed an early version of the music software Pandora when he was in high school. (Wow… I really had no idea about this…)  He was also interested in fencing and literature, but his best interest was in computer.  He was offered a job by AOL and Microsoft, but he went to Harvard University instead.  At Harvard, he was famous for his programming skill.  It was there where he founded Facebook.  He dropped out of Harvard and moved to California to devote himself to Facebook in 2005.  Everything went well for him, except for one thing.  He was accused of stealing the ideas from the creators of Harvard Connection.  The lawsuit was eventually settled by 2011.  The movie “The social Network” was made in 2010.  It was about the story of Zuckerberg from when he was at Harvard to the early years of Facebook.  Zuckerberg later said about the movie: “So there’s all this stuff that they got wrong and a bunch of random details that they got right.”  He said many things in the movie are fictional and only made to draw more people’s attention.  In conclusion, he’s still a CEO of Facebook, and Facebook is still one of the top social networking websites.

The third person is Bill Gates.  He is definitely one of the most famous people around the world and the most popular person in a computer industry.  He was born in 1955 in Seattle, Washington.  He was raised in an upper-middle class family and showed his interests early on programming and board games. He went to Lakeside School and met Paul Allen, who will be his partner for a long time.  He and Allen worked together and discussed about programming.  After the graduation, he went to Harvard University to be a lawyer.  There, he found himself more interested in computer than law, and, few years later, he decided to leave Harvard to work with Allen.  In 1975, they founded Microsoft while working for the company called MITS.  At the early stages of the company, they wrote codes for the other computer companies and became somewhat successful.  In 1980, he developed an operating system for IBM’s new and upcoming PC.  Microsoft then grew rapidly.  The first operating system was MS-DOS.  Five years later, he developed Windows system.  Microsoft kept dominating the other companies in the software industry.  Now, 82% of every computer in the world is running on the Windows operating system.  In 2006, he stepped down from the position of the chairman of Microsoft.

 

http://www.batangastoday.com/steve-jobs-in-%e2%80%98new%e2%80%99-apple-logo-goes-viral-on-twitter-photo/17577/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/

 


Computer Engineering and my personal history.

Ever since I got my first computer back in the late 1990′s, I’ve always enjoyed spending time on the computer.  My family was probably the only one in my neighborhood who had a computer at that time.  My friends always came over to my house after school to play the game with the rabbit with a gun killing the birds.  That was when I was in the 2nd grade.  As time went by, almost every family had at least one computer when I was in the 5th grade.  In my elementary school, we had a computer class every week.  Back then, no one really knew anything about computer, and I was the one people came to get help with their problems.  I didn’t really know any better, but my friends thought I was a computer genius. Since then, I’ve been interested in computer, so I chose Computer Engineering as my major.

As of now, I’m not quite sure exactly what I want to do in the future and what kind of a job I want.  When I was in high school, I wanted to get a job in the game industry.  One day, I talked to my parents, and they asked me if I wanted to make and play games for my whole life.  The answer was no.  However, there’s really nothing else that interests me more than games.  So, there’s still a chance that I get a job in a game company, but I can’t say anything for sure right now.  I hope to find it in the next three or four years at GT.  By the time I graduate, I should have a fairly good knowledge about my major, and I will hopefully have chosen my career.  Right now, I don’t really have any idea what I really want to do in the future, but my dream job is working in the office and making lots of money consistently. Of the cases in the Dr. Hunter’s e-mail,  I fit into the fourth case : I don’t care what I am in the future. I just want to make money and enjoy life.

 


Update on the Invention Mobs project.

Our group was originally going to make a comic book with pictures of dead people, but we decided to change it because it would be too much work and too hard to fit all the pictures into a good story line.  We are still using the pictures, but we are going to create a blog of those pictures and add the comments to each picture.  The comments will be about what people would think if they were looking at their dead body as a ghost.  We are trying to make people think about how precious their lives are by making them think about what if they died right now, what they would think, whether they would regret their life or not, and what they really want to do before they are dead.

For example, here is a picture of me pretending to be dead.  I post this picture with a description about how this guy died, why and things like that.  Of course, I just make up all those.  Then, I want EVERYONE who reads this post to reply about what they would think if they were this guy.  We are going to use your comments in our project.  So, be creative and don’t be afraid to reply.

.

Name : James Johnson

Age : 21

Cause of death : He fell down from the roof.  He committed suicide because he failed every class he took.

If you were this guy, and you are looking at your dead body as a ghost, what would you think? What would you regret most? What would you want to do most if you were alive?

Please reply to this and thank you for reading it.


Play

I read the chapter Play of the book “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel Pink.  It was about how playing games and being joyful help us being emotionally and mentally healthier.  It also said that laughter is a really huge factor of our emotional health.  After reading it, I took the “Left Brain Right Brain Test.”  <http://www.squidoo.com/braintest#module4175009> Here is my test result:

Auditory : 31%
Visual : 68%
Left : 68%
Right : 31%

and the link to the analysis    http://mindmedia.com/brainworks/summary.jsp

I was surprised how correct the result was.  I’m more of a left-brain thinker than a right-brain and a visual learner than auditory, as the result above shows.  The analysis was even more interesting.  Almost everything precisely described my characteristics.  It also recommended me to be an engineer, which is what I’m trying to be!

So, if you are reading this, I recommend you taking this test and see how correct it is.  It takes 5-10 minutes, and it’s amazing how it finds out your characteristics with just 20 questions.

 


Symphony

For Friday, Sep. 9th, 2011, we had to read the chapter Symphony in the book “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel Pink and do one of the Symphony activities.  The chapter explained how important symphony is and how we can improve our ability to see symphony.  Symphony is all about relationships and seeing the big picture.  Seeing the big picture helps us invent something new.  Creative people see two seemingly unrelated things and create something new out of them.  We can improve this ability simply by drawing or listening to the symphonies.

After reading the chapter, we had to do one of the Symphony activities.  I chose to do “Follow the Links.”  First, I started at http://www.uroulette.com/, which is provided in the book to start from.  Then, I clicked the first link, http://www.gwu.edu/, so it would be completely random.  It was the George Washington University website.  I kept clicking random links to move on to another site.  I went to http://www.facebook.com/pages/GW-Alumni-in-Twin-Cities/129203383821319.  It was the university’s Facebook page.  I started looking for a new page, and I went to http://www.wjla.com/live/.  It was ABC7 channel’s live streaming website.  I watched the weather forecast for awhile then moved on to http://forecast.weather.gov/wwamap/wwatxtget.php?cwa=lwx&wwa=flash%20flood%20warning.  It was the National Weather Service website.  I read through the flash flood warning locations.  After that, I went to http://www.commerce.gov/about-department-commerce.  It was about the U.S. Department of Commerce.  I didn’t want to read it, so I moved on to http://www.usa.gov/.  It was about the U.S. Government, and it provided a lot of services for the U.S. citizens.  I went from the GWU website to the U.S. Government website.  It was fun, and I also learned that there is a relationship between any websites and we are all connected.


Friday

Last Friday, my group and I talked about what we were going to do for the invention mob project.  We talked about making a song like Ze Frank did, creating a short clip and making a comic book.  We decided to make a comic book using our real life faces.  Then, we came up with a storyline about a detective investigating a crime scene.  We were randomly assigned roles and discussed about what the first page would look like.  This is how far we got on the first day.