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"