Whatch this TED talk about immigration

 Whatch this story about immigration!!

Countriside or city?

The case for living in the countryside

Big city glamor? Balderdash. Try big city cost. If you want to live like a king (or at least be your own landlord), move to the country.

1. It's cheap. You have to actively try to spend more than $20 on a meal, even a good one. A movie still costs single digits. No one has a clue or cares what brand of clothing you're wearing, let alone whether your shoes, purse or belt are this year's season or last. And did I mention housing? You can live in a real house with multiple bedrooms, multiple bathrooms and a garage. Maybe even a pool. And you can own it for under $200,000. Yup, you read that right. I didn't leave off any zeros.

2. There's space – for you, for your dog, for your kids, between you and your annoying neighbors. An ad on the NY subway sums up: "Raising a baby in an NYC apartment is like growing an oak tree in a thimble." In the city, you live on top of each other. Your kids and your dog barely know what grass is. In the country, you have something called a yard. You run around, kick a football and chase fireflies. You go sledding and build snowmen on fresh snow that hasn't been trodden by hundreds of others. You can actually identify constellations because you see lots of them each night. You are fascinated by a lot more interesting animals than squirrels, and your dog acts like a dog, you don't have to carry around bags for its poop.

3. There are no billionaires. And frankly, few millionaires. To put it another way, there's a lot less income inequality. Since the cost of living is much lower, even those on the median family income (about $50,000 in the US) can have a decent life. You don't feel poor as you do in big cities where even those earning six-figures still believe they're "just getting by". In the country, you aren't constantly aware of your socioeconomic status. You worry a lot more about the weather.

4. You aren't reliant on public transit. You don't have to push your way onto an overcrowded subway car only to find yourself squashed next to someone who smells or elbows you. You aren't late because there's been a delay and some robot-like voice has to tell you about it over and over on the speaker. You can drive yourself where you want, when you want. Even if there's traffic (and there isn't much outside of cities), you can usually find another way to go. You are in control, and there's plenty of (free) parking.

5. You don't get suspicious when people are nice to you. People say hello and "how are you" and generally mean it. You go to the grocery store and have a decent chance of seeing at least someone you know. Your doctor actually calls you back the same day you call with a concern. People don't size you up constantly based upon your job, social status or income. Volunteer work isn't something you do for your resume. You feel a part of a genuine community, not just one peon out of millions.

The case for living in the city

The countryside? It must be nice if you're retired … or dead. If you want to have a semblance of a social life and like to do wild things like, oh, going to the cinema on a Monday night, the city is for you.

1. Walking. It's a thing. Forget about having to spend a quarter of your paycheck on a car. Forget about feeding your second-hand beater gallons of earth-destroying gas on a weekly basis. And (unless you live in LA) forget about spending two hours a day stuck in traffic. Living in the city means that walking is often an option. And if it's not, commuting by public transport makes you feel like you're part of the world: you and others are on the same boat, so to speak, taking time to pause and read, or listen to music, before reaching work or going home. And, from London to Paris, Amsterdam to Vancouver, chances are you will be also be lucky enough to be able to bike everywhere – making you both fitter and happier.

2. You will never be the underdog. As Daria would tell you, it sucks to be the odd one out. If you're a goth, head to London's Camden Town, which will love to have you. You like playing in all-female netball teams? You'll find a club. Love mushroom-hunting? Start your own group. In Sydney, where I live, my local park alone is the home to joggers, skateboarders, tai chi lovers and tight-rope walkers. There's something for everyone. And kiss bigotry goodbye, too: if you're gay, you will easily find both a welcoming environment. And better dating prospects.


3. The entire world is (almost) on your doorstep. I don't know about you, but it would be a shame to die on the way to the hospital – or give birth on the side of a road. Which probably won't happen in the city. You can order anything from online stores and – miracle! – receive it the next day. Museums, galleries, libraries are easily accessible, a lot of them free. And food: enough said. Who likes to have the choice only between a grim pub serving dismal burgers or fish-and-chips and the local Subway branch at the back of a derelict mall? Not me.

4. It teaches you tolerance. The world is a diverse place – and in the city, you learn that fast. There's a reason New Yorkers are considered to be the most thick-skinned people on earth: nothing fazes them, because no one has time to be fazed and they've seen it all anyway. Someone is rude to on the subway? Move along. Someone cuts you while queuing in the supermarket? Get ahead and get even. But cities also teach patience and empathy because, after all, you're all in this together. Compromise is in the very fabric of city living. Neighbours complaining about your Saturday party? You have to reach an agreement. People who don't act, think, or speak like you do? Kids who annoy you by listening to rap music in the bus? They share your space, too. And you, theirs. It's an imperfect and fragile microcosm, which, no matter its many drawbacks, seems to work. Almost like magic.

5. The countryside is not like living in Gilmore Girls. If you think the countryside is like living on the idyllic Gilmore Girls' set, you're mistaken. Nor are you likely to live the Good Life, a la Helen and Scott Nearing, who fed themselves thanks to their homestead until they both died. True country-living means backbreaking work, including thankless chores performed before dawn. Here in Sydney, I pop to the corner shop to get eggs at midnight if I want. And if you're not a true back-to-the-lander living on a 120-acre farm in the middle of nowhere, you then have to live in a community where everything you do will be scrutinised. Privacy will be hard to maintain. No such thing will happen in the city, where people couldn't care less whether you like to walk around with your pet snake, like to wear mini-skirts in sub-freezing weather, or sing Bryan Adams' Everything I Do I Do It For You out loud while on your way to buy a baguette. Short of becoming a hermit, if you're a private individual or an introvert, city life is for you.

Phone snubbing!

Scientists: How ‘phubbing’ (or phone snubbing) can kill your romantic relationship

It's the ultimate modern-day snub. When you're at a fancy dinner, and all of a sudden your date responds to a text. When you are having a serious conversation and the love of your life keeps glancing at his smartphone. And don't forget when you're in bed and your partner carefully adjusts his iPhone on the nightstand so that the screen is visible — "just in case."

    In what may be the first formal study of the impact of phone snubbing, or "phubbing," researchers at the Hankamer School of Business of Baylor University surveyed 453 American adults in the United States about the extent to which they or their partner use or are distracted by cellphones while in the company of a romantic partner and how this behavior impacts relationship satisfaction.

    What they found doesn't bode well for the many of us who have our phones practically glued to our bodies.

    Researchers James. A. Roberts and Meredith E. David identified eight types of phone snubbing behavior that have become common in today's world. They are:

• During a typical mealtime that my partner and I spend together, my partner pulls out and checks his/her cellphone.
• My partner places his or her cellphone where they can see it when we are together.
• My partner keeps his or her cellphone in their hand when he or she is with me.
• When my partner's cellphone rings or beeps, he/she pulls it out even if we are in the middle of a conversation.
• My partner glances at his/her cellphone while talking to me.
• During leisure time that my partner and I are able to spend together, my partner uses his/her cellphone.
• My partner uses his or her cellphone when we are out together.
• If there is a lull in our conversation, my partner will check his or her cellphone.

(Any of this sound familiar to you?)

Writing in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, the researchers noted that  "the ubiquitous nature of cell phones makes phubbing… a near inevitable occurrence."

    The researchers found that those whose romantic partners had more "phubbing" behaviors were more likely to experience conflict in the relationship and have lower levels of satisfaction.

    “When you think about the results, they are astounding,” Roberts said. “Something as common as cellphone use can undermine the bedrock of our happiness — our relationships with our romantic partners.”

The researchers explained that "when one partner allows technology to interfere with time spent with their partner, it sends an implicit message of that partner's priorities."

    An even more surprising finding in the study was that the consequences of the behavior can extend beyond the relationship itself — and into a person's greater well-being. Nearly half of the respondents in the survey said they were phubbed by their partner with 22.6 percent saying it causes conflict and 36.6 percent reporting they felt depressed at least some of the time.

    “What we discovered was that when someone perceived that their partner phubbed them, this created conflict and led to lower levels of reported relationship satisfaction,” Roberts said. “These lower levels of relationship satisfaction, in turn, led to lower levels of life satisfaction and, ultimately, higher levels of depression.”

Chester Trip

For information about the Chester Trip scan this QR code! 

First Clinton/Trump debate

Inmigration and family

Gibran Khalil Gribran´s poem on marriage

As promised, I post here the videos and texts we saw in class. The first is Khalil Gibran´s video

The museum of broken relationships

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chomsky on love

Noam Chomsky is perhaps the world´s most respected intellectual. He is the father of generative linguistics and a political analysts. Apart from this, he has also written on education and other matters. And not only this, he has also spoken on issues such as love. Have a look!

Shakespeare

As I told you in class, Shakespeare is perhaps the most famous author in the English literature. I post here the poem and the video we saw in class.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate; 
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, 
And summer's lease hath all too short a date; 
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, 
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; 
And every fair from fair sometime declines, 
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; 
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
 Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; 
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st: 
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 

TOPIC 0: RELATIONSHIPS

As promised, I post here the article that we saw in class. Remember that in the RE-VÁLIDA test you will probably have to face a real text. This text was taken from one of the world´s most popular magazines: THE NEW YORKER.

 July 4th, 2011

For many people in their twenties, Internet dating is no less natural a way to meet than the night-club line. In the fall of 1964, on a visit to the World’s Fair, in Queens, Lewis Altfest, a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air display called the Parker Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked and whirred at the job of selecting foreign pen pals for curious pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire, fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match. Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. He called up his friend Robert Ross, a programmer at I.B.M., and they began considering ways to adapt this approach to find matches closer to home. They’d heard about some students at Harvard who’d come up with a program called Operation Match, which used a computer to find dates for people. A year later, Altfest and Ross had a prototype, which they called Project TACT, an acronym for Technical Automated Compatibility Testing—New York City’s first computer-dating service. Each client paid five dollars and answered more than a hundred multiple-choice questions. One section asked subjects to choose from a list of “dislikes”: “1. Affected people. 2. Birth control. 3. Foreigners. 4. Interracial marriage,” and so on. Another question, in a section called “Philosophy of Life Values,” read, “Had I the ability I would most like to do the work of (choose two): (1) Schweitzer. (2) Einstein. (3) Picasso.” Some of the questions were gender-specific. Men were asked to rank drawings of women’s hair styles: a back-combed updo, a Patty Duke bob. Women were asked to look at a trio of sketches of men in various settings, and to say where they’d prefer to find their ideal man: in camp chopping wood, in a studio painting a canvas, or in a garage working a pillar drill. TACT transferred the answers onto a computer punch card and fed the card into an I.B.M. 1400 Series computer, which then spit out your matches: five blue cards, if you were a woman, or five pink ones, if you were a man. In the beginning, TACT was restricted to the Upper East Side, an early sexual-revolution testing ground. The demolition of the Third Avenue Elevated subway line set off a building boom and a white-collar influx, most notably of young educated women who suddenly found themselves free of family, opprobrium, and, thanks to birth control, the problem of sexual consequence. Within a year, more than five thousand subscribers had signed on. Over time, TACT expanded to the rest of New York. It would invite dozens of matched couples to singles parties, knowing that people might be more comfortable in a group setting. Ross and Altfest enjoyed a brief media blitz. They wound up in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune and in Cosmopolitan. The Cosmo correspondent’s first match was with a gym teacher. One of TACT’s print advertisements featured a photograph of a beautiful blond woman. “Some people think Computer dating services attract only losers,” the copy read, quoting a TACT subscriber. “This loser happens to be a talented fashion illustrator for one of New York’s largest advertising agencies. She makes Quiche Lorraine, plays chess, and like me she loves to ski. Some loser!” One day, a woman named Patricia Lahrmer, from 1010 WINS, a local radio station, came to TACT to do an interview. She was the station’s first female reporter, and she had chosen, as her début feature, a three-part story on how New York couples meet. (A previous installment had been about a singles bar—Maxwell’s Plum, on the Upper East Side, one of the first that so-called “respectable” single women could patronize on their own.) She had planned to interview Altfest, but he was out of the office, and she ended up talking to Ross. The batteries died on her tape recorder, so they made a date to finish the interview later that week, which turned into dinner for two. They started seeing each other, and two years afterward they were married. Ross had hoped that TACT would help him meet someone, and, in a way, it had. After a couple of years, Ross grew bored with TACT and went into finance instead. He and Lahrmer moved to London. Looking back now, he says that he considered computer dating to be little more than a gimmick and a fad. The process of selecting and securing a partner, whether for conceiving and rearing children, or for enhancing one’s socioeconomic standing, or for attempting motel-room acrobatics, or merely for finding companionship in a cold and lonely universe, is as consequential as it can be inefficient or irresolute. Lives hang in the balance, and yet we have typically relied for our choices on happenstance—offhand referrals, late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute. Online dating sites, whatever their more mercenary motives, draw on the premise that there has got to be a better way. They approach the primeval mystery of human attraction with a systematic and almost Promethean hand. They rely on algorithms, those often proprietary mathematical equations and processes which make it possible to perform computational feats beyond the reach of the naked brain. Some add an extra layer of projection and interpretation; they adhere to a certain theory of compatibility, rooted in psychology or brain chemistry or genetic coding, or they define themselves by other, more readily obvious indicators of similitude, such as race, religion, sexual predilection, sense of humor, or musical taste. There are those which basically allow you to browse through profiles as you would boxes of cereal on a shelf in the store. Others choose for you; they bring five boxes of cereal to your door, ask you to select one, and then return to the warehouse with the four others. Or else they leave you with all five.