I. Talks Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen
II. MUST SEE: Check out the African American Lives 2 website for insights into family following the forced migration and separation of black families that are the by product of slavery in America. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aalives/videos/index.html
III. TWo Scenes from HBO's Big Love (polygamy)
QUESTIONS: What are other forms of marriage or family that are NOT mentioned in the Kottak chapter? For instance, miscegnation or green card marriages.
Read the chapter on Life without Fathers in Spradley text.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
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2 comments:
What's most interesting about the TED talk is Rosling's focus on the MANIPULATION and UTILIZATION of data, and not necessarily the collection or breadth of it. He stresses the need to further separate datasets and avoid bunching statistics like the child mortality rate in Africa instead of individual countries, but what's most interesting is his ability to manipulate the data in front of him and extrapolate it effectively.
What's most fascinating about our modern times, to me at least, is not only our ability to accumulate, gather, and store astronomical amounts of data, but our increasing ability to utilize and search through it effectively.
Entire companies exist solely because of the need to manage and effectively utilize data. Adobe Systems is revolutionizing offices across the planet, allowing them to go paperless. For instance, I can find every mention of a person's name in 12 years of contracts within a couple of seconds. To a person who's spent hours working in the annals of a document archive, the ability to so quickly and effectively search would be awe-inspiring.
The future of data utilization is exciting. You think Google's search platform is cool? Try artificial intelligence. Imagine a system in which you can, literally, ask a program to build a bar graph comparing fertility rates in Sub-Saharan African countries between the years 1995 and 2025. Even better, a program like this would somehow "know" how to not only find the data, but build something meaningful from it in just a couple of seconds.
Rosling is spot on when he points out the need to "see" data and the problems associated in gathering it. In an increasingly information-saturated world, utilizing disseminating data appropriately is just as important as gathering it.
I was very surprised that the exact same you tube videos of Big Love chose by the professor were the same videos I first watched when I prepared for my presentation on Chapter 7. Polygamy is fascinating, but it is not anything new or shocking. People have been practicing polygamy for decades in so many different countries. Although polygamy is not traditional for western societies, we should not criticize and place judgement on what is unknown to us.
*****Tamara
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