Professor Wangare Muta Maathai- Environmentalist.

 

Professor Wangare Muta Maathai- The Environmentalist of a life time.

Visual Symbols in My Life

The visual symbols that I have always found fascinating are the universal visual symbols of cultural values or meanings. This is because as much as they are amazing they are highly functional especially in conveying deeper meanings. Moreover, they are expressed in the most sincere and purposeful way yet from individual to individual, group to group, community to community and country to country they may as be varying as day is from night.

Flicker Image by Don McDougall

Culture is the glue that holds a people together and universal cues that are concerned with us as human due to our culture. We can never touch or feel these cultural visual cue but we always see them and appreciate them. Some of the things that we all identify with are as follows:

1. Dressing -Human present themselves in a decent manner by dressing up. The dressing might be different from one community to another within a country, one country to another or from continent to continent. People from African countries might dress up in traditional or national dresses while the westerners will dress up in suits. However the dress type depends on the occasion as well.
2. Food- This is the most fascinating thing. When in travel it one of the things that people complain about is the food they are not used to. But if you are traveling that is what is making it different. You have have cross the cultural food boundary to one that is unfamiliar to you. So food types and the way different foods are made, is the culture of a place. Serving the food is also different, while some culture

   

   Flicker Image by jebrandt99

   sit around the table or even floor and eat from one plate some serve individual plate to each person.
3. Salutations- In the western world, the thumb up is the magic acknowledgment of another person and it means that everything is fine. However, in some regions, you will be lucky if you get it because it means something else. Also the shaking of hand is a big thing in the African countries and in the business would.
4. Language-This is where it all starts. Visual cue are exhibited in the look, handmovements, gait, distance from each other, voice intonations and so forth. We all have different

   

   Flicker Image by squareintheteeth

   languages as well which adds to it.
5. Conflict-In some culture conflict can be considered a good thing, opportunity for learning and growth and therefore can be tolerated. In other cultures it is the vice vaser and those in conflict have to save face for each other by handling the problem quietly. In these communities collective responsibility is taken for the problem and so the community is involved in solving the problem. This is particularly seen in African cultures while the western culture embrace the individualistic manner of solving problems.
6. Business- In the business world it is all the same in terms of meetings, and presentation. Some differences occur in terms of facial contact, handshake and exchanges of pleasantries. In the Chinese business world when given a business

   

   Photo From Flicker

   card, you gaze at it for a while and put it on the tables and keep looking at it from time totime to show how responsible you would be taking care of there interests here in theUS. On the other hand, business from the west must just say thank you and put thecard in the pocket.
7. Other cultural aspect of life that have been interesting are way of Religion, different Dances in different regions, the Architectural differences and similarities and the differences in the way they view Art. 

The Sysbols of a Culture Vlog

Multi-Cultural Food & Arts Festival from Northern Visions/NvTv on Vimeo.

The Power of Visual Language Taken a Notch Higher.

This is for sure a world of visuals. Virtually everything that we learn is perceived visually. Have it occurred to you that is the way that babies learn language, not verbally but visually! In the video I have shared with you here, "MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn".

Actually a language is highly situational. This means that you cannot easily and successful, for example, learn and master Spanish language while in The US. To do this  easily, you need to buy a ticket and travel to Mexico actually stay there for a while to learn Spanish. This is because language is embed in culture and culture can not easily be defined, though it is highly visual. We can see culture around the house, in the way buildings are constructed, people's dress, both visual and verbal languages, what people trade in, how they form relationships, how they marry, in the food they eat and so on. Yet, all these can not be definitively stated in two or three sentences. However, it creates the vital environment filled with visual cues that are essential for the learning of verbal language. This context is very important, the crying of the baby shows that some adult person is going to be in trouble, unless he or she gets things in order.

Simply stated, Deb's research suggests, for example most kitchen vocabulary can be learned by a baby easily when they are in the Kitchen, and so are the bedroom, sittingroom, dinning room, bathroom and so on. This is basically due to how critical visual cue are to the learning process.

The Globes at UNI Rod Library Visually Communicate

Is there anyone that still uses globes? I was fascinated by the globes at The Rod Library. I decided that since they attracted my attention so much, I was going to talk about them.  Globes are very important in communicating as to how our living earth looks like. Just how we came to our realization that the earth is round, is a mind boggling historical event depicted in these special balls, inspired by the shape of The Living Earth. Special thanks to Gretchen Gould for the unique collection and showing me around.

The globe also is a very important visual for

teaching. It does not loose value yet as a teaching tool and not even soon. The fact that it is tangible even makes it better. It can be used to illustrate the masses of waters, the mass of land, vegetation, and  deserts. At The Rod Library, the globes are are pieces of art radiating the aesthetic value as much as the functional  value to direct library users to the maps cabinet on the second floor of the library. The globe on the top right had a spot on it that was worn out due to people touching it, on the spot of  the city of Chicago. It downed to me that Chicago is a very popular city here at UNI, by the way the city Chicago on the globe by the main entrance of the library was scratched out. I was expecting Des Moines would be more popular in Iowa, since it is the our capital city.

The Globes communicated loud and clear what kind of information that was in the cabinets they were sitting on. In the cabinets there were even state highway maps and city streets maps.

To signify the importance of the globes there were signs around them, warning against carelessness.

On the other hand, there were a few shelves of atlases. I believe that the atlases left  on the shelves are still very important. However,

the advent of the internet and especially The Google Maps brought about  a huge change.

The interactive maps outperform atlases by far and thus reduce the use of them. In terms of state streets, the GPS has brought about that change were maps are unnecessary.  GPS and Goole maps provide real time information of what is on the ground and can, in fact, not only tell you your location but also inform others of your exact location too.

Source: Garmin nuvi 885T GPS Navigation by ComputerTV

Credit to  

Rod Library UNI

and

Gretchen Gould

 On the other hand, atlases only provide historical information. Globes still serve not only historically valuable information, but also are instrumental for educational purposes of the nature of our home, The Living Earth. They are very rare to see though.

The English Language In 24 Accents

Communication can be hindered by many things. This video demonstrate one way in which the language in it is inadvertently crafted, and truly not meant to harm any individual at all. Accents are natural. Although this video is a inappropriate to a certain extent which the presenter realized and apologized for, it is very educative. One of the lessons we learn in this video is that:

1. People form the same geographic environment communicate effectively among themselves given their accent.
2. That accent hinders effective communication given people from different geographic environments to a certain extend.
3. That accent is among a people and not a nation or even country. Given a certain country, there can be a variety of accents as there are individual people. 

Fun Wedding Raining in Visual Cues

Talk of weddings? This is one style wedding I would like to have. Just one problem though! all my friends are really boring, my wonder is that, are they going to dance like this for their buddy? Pretty finicky eh? I have seen and been to many wedding ceremonies and each one of them was different.

One of the weddings that I attended was very acrimonious, filled with side shows. The bride, lucky for her!, was being claimed by two men each one saying that she was her lover. On the other hand, I thought that the bride was not being lucky at all, rather fluky. The wedding was abruptly halted by a man who intruded the wedding and claimed that the bride was a run away wife and that they had not rapped up their marriage officially. The invited guests broke up and huddled into small groups some amused and others frightened

At this wedding, everything was totally the reverse of the wedding in the video shown above. I do not know if it is okay to say that the two weddings were a perfect show of positive and negative nonverbal cues reflecting happy and unhappy feelings.

Figure Ground Video

I found this YouTube video interesting. There rare so many examples of figure ground expressions reflected in it. I would like you to take all the time you need to figure out the number of objects or people's face you can see in the images. Here you go!

Mudash's Tech Insites: Julius Fast - Body Language Chapter 7 - The Silent...

Mudash's Tech Insites: Julius Fast - Body Language Chapter 7 - The Silent...: "Julius Fast - Body Language Chapter 7 - The Silent Language Of Love pdf (recommended by David DeAnge"

Killing us Softly: Objectification of women

Commercials are meant to sell products. It is a reality from the many commercial that we have seen that and we will continue to see, that companies will do whatever it takes in order to sell. These companies are profit driven and the do not care about the customer at all, but the financially well being of the company.

Having this in mind, they have directed their commercial to the most vulnerable, the women. They know that probably they get convinced easily, they like shopping, they have the money and they will really buy. This has also been fuel by the perception that an ideal attractive woman will stay current with every fusion that hits the market. And so almost every product that hits the market is introduced to the market with the a slender, baby face very beautiful woman in all manner of compromising angles. Of course the images that are portrayed are not real but it is amazing how they are adored. This can be done live too! Remember the case of Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake at the Superbowl 2004? If you do not, here is a sneak pick into it.



To look that beautiful, these models undergo rigorous scrutiny and makeup procedure that is themselves dehumanizing. This is another high level real form of objectification, where apart from just facial makeup, they undergo body face-lifts such as facial, breasts, and "booty"; parts of a woman's body that closely attract attention to many man and also women of like minds.

I agree with the video below on the issue of women objectification. The most part of the stream is filled with examples of belittling, demeaning and degrading to women with a commercial purpose as the driving force. However, subliminal messages pushed the negative points at home, which I think the companies behind the commercials believe in.



I would like to mention that we all have a role to play as educator, parents and responsible adult:

1-We should accept that this content is meant for adult and should be watched only by adults.

2-Every adult has rights, freedoms and choices to make and that whatever they choose to do is non of others business.

3-All of us have a responsibility almost like mandated to keep kids free of such material.

We also have to exercise a certain level or sense of intellect and responsibility. I mean that even if through your upbringing this is all you've always seen, you should be able to separate what's  business from real life. This is a call you should easily make as an educator.

Most of the times women play into this kind of trap slowly. Being an adult we do adult things, but that does not mean that one has to be degraded. Sexually is very good, it is natural, necessary and has a purpose in life. The only thing is for adults to be adults and know when to perform it with respect and privacy it deserve and with the dignity of the actors in in mind. On the flip side, it turns into an immoral thing such as pornography, child abuse, objectification and the like.

We should always remember that models are in business and that is the way they make a living. That we should be smart enough to know this, instead of playing into it. We should develop high self esteem, love ourselves just as we are and know that as adult, sex is ours. No matter how we look, and so long as we have someone to share with, it does not matter how one looks but how kind, loving, caring, sincere, respectful and responsible they are.

Fun way for Sending Email

Smileys have recently been apart of our electronic discussions especially text messaging. Listening to people, it is like nonverbal communication is confined to verbal language only. Nonverbal cues can also be seen in written communications.

Ever heard of IncrediMail? This is a new and fun way of sending emails to friends, family and even for business purposes. It is action packed with 1000 smileys and other features that are meant for email personalization. The best thing of all is that it is compatible with any other email services. Please, check this out!

Effects of Visual Sybols in my Daily Life

Visual Symbols are not something that can be wished away. They are all over the place; every movement that anyone makes is enforced by a variety of symbols. It would be a very boring place the world over without symbols while communication would be deficient. Nonverbal cues, communicate a world of differences. We communicate constantly by sending signals to various people. Everyone interprets the signals differently. For example men might interpret a lady's smile as, "she like me ha! ha! ha!!!!"
Although visual symbols exist in every segment of life, I will dedicate my blog writing this semester to nonverbal communication. There are about seven ways that we communicate non-verbally as explained in the PowerPoint. However, the world is full of other useful symbols such as
the most well-known of Taoist visual symbols, the Yin-Yang image

that portrays the mutual interdependence of all mentally-constructed pairs of opposites. It is also known as the Taiji Symbol - we see the colors white and black each containing the other. According to the principles of Taoist cosmology, the same is true for all pairs of opposites: right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, friend and enemy, etc. These are common meanings of symbols that make communication easy and effective.

Hi All of You

I would  like to welcome you to my blog. I hope you find something useful. Please feel free to leave comments. Thank you.