Categories

Polls

Week 5, Blog Entry #1
Zain Nensey

4. Polls help determine public opinion on a subject. Our obsession with polls is to help us go with the flow, since the general consensus today is to go with the flow as to seem more normal. For example, look at the public opinion polls that our President goes through seemingly every week. People on TV analyze this to see where the public stands so they can make themselves look good, because when they make a correct prediction about something, it raises their expertise in, once again, the eyes of the public. It works similarly with sports polls. Often, at the start of a season, the football analysts will pick a certain team to make it to the Super Bowl, because they made what seemed like the best moves in the off-season (i.e. picked up a top-tier free agent, made draft picks that improved the team, and did a few other things.) Then if the team does well, they will shout their picks to the world, and try to make themselves look good. If not, then the analysts will essentially disavow themselves of their picks and jump onto a bandwagon. People obsess over these polls and use them to help prove their point. Opinion polls, such as Gallup, do have a good purpose because it can be used to help sway politicians, since they seem to have a tendency to want to please their voters around election time. However, opinion polls really are not good for anything else.

Winter summary

Zain Nensey
Week 4, Entry 2

4. My winter break was a boring one- I did virtually nothing but work and relax, despite how contradictory that may seem. I sold quite a few knives in my sales work- about $3000 worth, which was pretty good for me. In a way, that work was relaxing as well, because it is such a fun job. Add on the fact that I got a bunch of doctors as recommendations at the end of the break, and I have been making some serious money since. It is a fun way to make a living for a college system. The time I spent when I wasn’t working was also fun in the way that most things are fun- I played video games, sometimes against friends, and occasionally went out with my friends and played football. It was, overall, a rather enjoyable, especially because I’m a fanatic football fan, and often dissect plays from the comfort of my armchair, especially when the offense comes out onto the field. All the shifts and changes make game a complex yet entertaining game, since they can so often result in game-changing plays. People often call football players stupid. That most certainly is not true-football is like a mixed course of history, psychology, and study skills. A stupid person most certainly could not be a good football player. It is not history in the traditional sense- it is history of a group of people who have come together with a common goal- to be better than the other team, and to be better by doing certain things. Psychology helps figure out how a person can work- in any thing, if a person can get inside your head, its over. Roger Federer wins not just because he is a fantastic tennis player- he wins because he can intimidate any one on the other side of the court in a way that no other athlete can. Study skills are important in the other two aspects of football because without knowing what to look for, why do you bother looking? Stuff like this is what made my winter break interesting.

Official history vs. history in art

Zain Nensey
Week 4, Blog Entry #1

1. Both official history AND the history reflected in art are important. Official history is the statement of cold, hard, facts, the story as the story is supposed to go. The official history is intended to give us an idea of the situation and how it happened. Yet there is a flaw with official history- it itself is a form of art that is influenced by the people who wrote it. The cliché goes that the victors write the history, which is true. I recently read a book in which a great hero is transported to another dimension, a dimension where he is one of the greatest of villains, a man so evil that only his master can outdo him in cruelty. He defects to the other side, which slowly falls apart after its leader is captured, and the villains of the story take control of the government. The moment they do, the side of good is immediately relegated to being considered a terrorist organization. They are continually lambasted in public, especially our dimensional traveler, who is seen as a traitor by the government. In the end, our hero is forced to turn to strike down his former master because the man was about to take the role of the head of government and chief of state, becoming all-powerful in essence. Although not alone, he has very few people on his side, and they are the last people he would choose to send out on combat missions. Only his win allows the dimensional traveler have the story go his way once again. The story, however, does not show the form of history as art. History as art revolves mainly around a commentary of the social life of an entire country at the time. Stories can be great commentaries about our society. One of my personal favorite examples of this is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. When I read it, it seemed that the Ministry of Magic was an awful lot like our own government here in the United States- it had a leader who refused to believe there was a problem, a defamation or outright indifference towards those who were willing to point out the problem, and a problem that the current people in power are completely unable to solve, or are unwilling to solve it, though the real world trends towards the former, whereas the book trended towards the latter. Official history has it’s uses, but it can not always be relied on.