The brush of your steps.

Sometimes, it amazes me how powerful words can actually be. There's true beauty in the methods we use for communication, which raises even bigger questions about why we are here, and the things that we are doing in this world. Perhaps we aren't doing anything. Perhaps we have some greater meaning. Or maybe we are just the toys of some evil god somewhere. I don't really know, but I think I realized today, I don't really care. Whether its communicating, or expressing what we did today in poor or great manners, words are just a means of describing. They can stir emotion, and move the world, but alone, they are nothing but useless symbols and drawings. We, human beings, give them meaning. So, what is the true purpose of us as human beings in this earth? I have thought of so many things and I can't help but think that happiness is often posed as the answer. Sometime in a few years people usually want a family, a significant other, and children, others want to see ev...

I need to figure out what the next big thing is going to be. Let's sit back and think in the last 10 years, what has become famous on the Internet. Immediately, my two most visited sites are Facebook, and Google. Facebook is a very social company that aims in connecting users, and creating links between them. They have done exceedingly well in building connections with the concept of 'friends', but a bit more poorly in terms of actual interactions with people, Facebook chat isn't very personal and messages and writing on people's walls are not the best of interactions. Google in contrast has focused mainly on search on the web, and advertisement. Search is really about organizing the web's information, and advertisement is, well, a smart way of making money. So, the two biggest things that have come out of the Internet are a social component, and an organization component. What else is there? We could include things like Wikipedia, which is a subset of the or...

Today I had a fun adventure where I had to save every penny possible to get from the San Francisco Airport (SFO) to my cheap hotel in Mountain View. I wanted to do it in under 10 dollars, with the hotel running me about $100.00 I thought. I succeeded for the most part, but there were some mistakes that I felt in the future I could improve. So, this was my adventure. The first part was pretty plain and simple, I left SFO through BART ($4.00) to Millbrae, and then took Caltrain ($4.25) to the Mountain View stop. Upon arrival, I walked around 25 minutes to the hotel I had previously looked up. It turns out it was sold out when I got there, which shoved me a bit out of my comfort zone, walking with my luggage at midnight around Mountain View. It scared me a little, and that was good, it's always good to get scared, and learn new experiences. From there I walked maybe a minute next door to a Comfort Inn, which happened to also be sold out. The experience however, was completely diffe...

Very recently one of my friends posted a response from a post which I decided to read. It turned out to be a response to an article called 'I'm christian unless you're gay.'. After I read the response, I was pretty much brought to tears and decided to read the article and wow, I am incredibly emotional. What an amazing article, that truly makes you think twice about the way you treat people, and the way that we treat others. Please read:  http://www.danoah.com/2011/11/im-christian-unless-youre-gay.html I am pretty much speechless, take care and have a good night, Daniel.

I met the Invisible Children group back in 2005 when they came to my High school and promoted one of their first videos. I was sincerely touched by this group who had gone to Uganda, and encountered atrocious crimes and was trying to bring them to light. I never heard much of Invisible Children since then until two days ago, when everything went crazy. Hence, I was writing my original post out of rage more than reason, so sorry about that. I have read the articles you have posted, and did some more research. Upon relooking at some things, and doing some comparisons between Invisible Children, who spends ~80% of their revenue in program expenses, in comparison to Red Cross which spends about 90%, it made sense to me. Invisible Children spends about 16% in Administrative expenses, when the Red Cross stays about at 4%. This sounds shocking, but when you think about it, the Red Cross CEO gets a million dollar salary, and the Invisible Children founders get about 89,000 (both which I w...

                This chapter covers a lot of technologies that allow us to improve learning in the classroom. Some of the key components that a lot of the technologies seem to focus on are: ·          the understanding of what the student knows before the interactions, ·          what erroneous preconceived notions he has (conceptual barriers), ·          and implementing methods that experimentally have shown to tackle these conceptual barriers and achieve basic learning. These technologies have different uses and applications in learning, which is generally not attributed to the development of new learning theories, but rather to the core benefits of technology in general. Firstly, communication is one of those huge benefits new technology has brought along. One of the benefits of that in education is in the pos...

This chapter addressed the effectiveness of teaching in three common fields in elementary, middle, and high schools. These fields were History, Mathematics, and Science. It was very explicit and provided examples on how being an effective teacher does not mean that one can teach every field, and that the most successful teachers are actually incredibly resourceful and proficient in their field. Further, their skills are tailored to the specific field in which they teach. They retouched on some examples of History we had seen before, and how it can be a field to learn facts in, or a field where you study and interpret certain events in order to deduce what actually occurred in history. The example of Bob Bain struck home quite quickly in the sense that I was really disappointed in my experiences in History throughout school. I had never experienced a professor like him or Ms. Kelsey, whose strategies seem to actually engage these students in a historical adventure which I now seem to...