Author Archives: Marisa Daugherty

Outside event response

Before we left for spring break, I went to one of the entrepreneurship lectures in the international center. A woman came in and talked about a company that she had started to read books to kids in developing nations. The organization is called We Love Reading and it was started by Dr. Rana Dajani. They are a grassroots organization that started with Dr. Dajani reading to a group of kids at a local mosque and has grown into so much more. They train people to read to children as a way to keep them interested in school and academics. This program is in 55 countries all around the world, from Syria, to the United States, to Uganda. We Love Reading is an amazing organization that reads to children and distributes books. They have also written their own books on issues such as the environment and religion. I don’t remember the exact numbers, by Dr. Dajani talked a lot about the huge impact that it had on the children and how much they loved coming to listen to her read every week.

Reading response 4/20

I thought that the first short essay was the most compelling. I think that a lot of times, people have good intentions but may not know the best way to direct those intentions. I read a book called Half the Sky for one of my other classes and it said that oftentimes people coming into a community do not know the best ways to help that community. They may assume that sending money will solve the problem when there is something deeper than just an issue of money. I went to one of the entrepreneurship lectures before spring break and the woman who spoke talked about starting a program that reads to children. Not only does this help the children emotionally and intellectually, but it also helped them stay in school. It got them excited about reading and learning which fostered their love for school.

This also reminded me about the doing good better discussion that we had earlier in the semester. It is sometimes hard to figure out what the best way to do good is. It takes work, and you have to actually try and figure out what the community really needs. Throwing money at a problem is not always the best way to fix it. We talked about the seesaw pumps that were a huge failure. People came in and thought they knew how to solve the problem when they were really just creating more problems in the long term. Though people often have good intentions, there is more effort that needs to be put in than just inserting yourself into an issue and assuming you know best.

Education 2008

This is one of McCains commercials that is fighting Obama’s stance on education. It is talking about how Obama’s only accomplishment in the education area is teaching kindergartners about sex. With the last article that we read on skewing stats, I want to know where they got that information. Though I agree that teaching kids that young about sex may be a little premature, I think that the sex education system needs to be overhauled and updated. This was my favorite ad because I felt like it really had no substance to it. I mentioned in the last blog post how I tend to prefer the funny ads, I thought this ad was almost laughable. It said nothing besides that Obama is bad. I understand that that tends to be the point of the opposition ad campaign, but I thought this one was more empty than a lot of the other ones I watched.

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/2008

 

Favorite ad

This is my favorite ad because its funny. I am a big fan of the funny ads especially with everything going on in the world right now. Its lighthearted, amusing, and kind of dumb but it gets the point accross. It depicts a game night with a sloth who is drawing really really slowly. The people are guessing all the different things the sloth could be drawing and all of them are wrong. At the end of the allowed time to draw, we are told that the sloth is drawing a bike. The punch line for the ad is that as long as you can count as sloths to be slow, you can count on Geico to save you money.

One of Geico’s more famous slogans is Geico can save you 15% or more on car insurance, but after reading the article on statistics and how you can manipulate them, I’m not sure how realistic that actually is. I knew before that stats could be manipulated but I had no idea to what extent they could be changed. Though this ad is funny and I laugh almost every time it comes on the tv, I would be curious to know what the true savings rate is for everyone.

4/8 reading response

I think that the Harvey questions are super important when you are leading a group. One that I was particularly interested in was the Why do we care question. I think that that is something that a lot of people don’t look at when they are leading. They either don’t know or can’t effectively communicate to their followers why they care about doing something that the leader tells them to do. With COVID-19 it is pretty clear why people are saying to stay inside and social distance, its to save lives, but not every problem in the world is that straight forward. There are nuances and different opinions that go into it. A lot of politics is trying to answer why. Though it may seem like they are trying to decide how will we get there, but they are arguing why people should care about different things. The republican party is trying to share why everyone should care about protecting the second amendment and the democratic party is trying to explain that guns now are different than guns during the revolutionary period, therefore, the rules should be different.

I was thinking about this when I was reading the Bezio article. Back in Shakespearian times, kings did not have to explain themselves to anyone and there was no one holding them accountable. This is why there were so many issues with monarchies not doing what was best for their people and doing what was best for themselves and their nobility. I’m not sure if that was because they didn’t have to explain themselves to their followers or if they really only cared about the high-class people, but it still lead to lots of issues in countries with monarchies.

4/6 blog post

I thought that the first article was really interesting. Though it can be shocking, I like learning about how the history that I thought I knew is all wrong. (#thanksJepson) It’s especially interesting because I am from Virginia and we have to learn a lot about the Native Americans that inhabited Virginia before Europeans arrived and screwed everything up. I always thought that Europeans had come to North America and created Jamestown without really interacting with the people already living there. Looking back, this was a naive and clearly wrong description of what happened, but we were taught a very whitewashed version of history that I am still trying to fix in my mind. I thought the numbers that the first article gave us were crazy. They said that 10 million people inhabited the area that is now Mexico and after Europeans arrived and basically waged war, that number went down to 1 million. And a lot of those 1 million native peoples still alive ended up dying from disease brought over from Europe. I was never taught the negative effects of colonialism until a lot later in my education and even then it was still more rose-colored then what actually happened.

I think that the idea of whitewashed history is also seen in the second article. though I am from northern Virginia and not Richmond, I still had years of state history education and I had never even heard of anything that this article was talking about. It talked about how African American people registered to vote quicker and more than white people and that made the white people upset. They were afraid of the African American population ‘controlling’ the city. To retaliate against the increase in African American voters, white people tried to annex areas with predominantly people of color. They tried to group them all together so they could minimize their power. In school I never learned about any of this, I was taught that the VRA was passed and everything was sunshine and rainbows for the most part. There was some violence but they did not tell us about this systemic abuse of power that happened. And I’m sure that Richmond was not the only city that had issues like this. I just think it’s shocking how history is recorded and whose story it depicts, because it definitely does not tell everyone’s story.

Stanford prison experiment

I think that experiments like this are really interesting. It is fascinating to see how people will respond to power, both having it and not having it. The fact that the guards got so violent and aggressive so quickly is baffling to me. Since we cannot redo this experiment, because it turned out badly last time, we must look at other examples of situations like this. During my junior year of high school, I took a psych class and we talked about this also. My teacher said that something like this happened in real life in a US military prison in the middle east. I don’t remember the name of the prison but situations like this arise more then I expected when I first learned about it.

The psychology behind things like this is really interesting to learn about. Just watching how people respond differently to different situations is fun for me. All of the cognitive and chemical reactions that go into making choices and responding to stimuli in the world around you, and how tiny changes in those things can change your whole outlook on life. It’s also interesting how we define heroes and villains. There was the prisoner who went on a hunger strike could have been seen as a hero but instead was seen as making a fuss.

Response 3/23

Honestly, I thought both of these readings were dry and somewhat boring. I think they had a lot of good information though. After reading the second article, I was confused about the interaction between different types of observation and leadership in small scale societies. After thinking about it a little more about the topics, I came to the conclusion that in order to evaluate the effectiveness of leadership in SSSs and subsequently LSSs, one must know how to observe those societies. I did not know that there were so many different kinds of observation and how informal some of them are. I don’t really think about how I am observing the world when I am going about my life.

I thought it was interesting how in the first article it talks about naturalistic observation. I interpreted this as just being aware of what is going on around you. The phrase naturalistic observation sounds so formal but it really just means paying attention to the world. Its interesting to think about how we are always observing even if we don’t think we are. I would be interested to know what the most used form of observation is in the leadership studies world. I think it would be mostly retrospective case studies but I think there is a lot to be learned by studying what is going on right now also so Im not sure.

Game Theory response

I honestly thought that this reading was boring. I didn’t find it super engaging but it did make me think a lot about compromise. It talked a lot about finding the Nash equilibrium and how both parties have to want similar things. I think this ties in a lot with the idea of compromise. Is the idea situation one where everyone is happy or where no one is happy. I think that the answer is when no one is happy. It’s nice to think that humans are able to find solutions that make everyone happy but we are just not. It’s not in our nature, especially on a large scale. I believe that when people are actually compromising they are giving up things on both sides. This is very important for things like politics and stuff because people need to be willing to give up some things to achieve anything. I think this is why rock paper scissors makes us so happy. It makes us feel like anyone can win and has a fair shot at winning. It makes us feel like we are not losing even though there is a 50% chance that we don’t get what we want.

Reading response

I don’t agree with the first article at all. I agree with the fact that sometimes medical professionals may not recommend what the patient wants, but there is a reason why we trust their opinions. Medical doctors have been to medical school and they are extremely knowledgeable about medicine. In the article, there is an example about Danny who wants insulin but his doctor recommends diet and exercise. In this example, I believe that Danny should have a conversation with his doctor. I think that doctors want what is best for the patient and if you really want something different then the doctor is initially recommending, talk to them about your options.

I do agree with the second article on the other hand. I think if a law is blatantly unjust and discriminatory that citizens have the obligation to not listen to that law. Just because it is a law doesn’t always mean that it is morally just. I generally tend to not trust politicians to make decisions that are best for their constituents. Of course, there are exceptions, but in general, politicians are bought by organizations with the financial resources to fund their campaign. The NRA for example, has given a lot of money to certain politicians and I think that that means that they are no longer making choices that have the best interest of the people in mind. In this situation I believe that the people have an obligation to disobey those laws.