I think the meaning of “being political” means that oneself is relating to the government or the public affairs of a country. I believe that “relating” means a person is having its own stance on political issues or at least being aware of them. I consider myself a very political person because I have a very strong stance in terms of politics. I continuously expose myself to political issues in order to learn new perspectives and also gain broad perspectives on different issues.  Also, now I am available to participate in voting since my birthday just passed. This forced me to be more aware of political issues and have a solid stance. Therefore, I am a political person.

I don’t think that EVERYTHING is political but the majority is political or at least related to politics.  For example, let’s say I am choosing a movie to watch among other movies. The action of choosing a movie is not political, but the choices I have are affected by politics. If a movie is related to politics or targets the country’s politics, it will be banned that the movie won’t be at the box office. Also, in China, all information, news, social media, literally everything is under control that they could be filtered or banned. Thus, it is very likely that everything is political. There are only minor things that are not affected by politics.

Based on the political quizzes, the results show that I am neither left-sided nor right-sided. The political compass shows that I am at the very center and slightly left-sided libertarian than right-sided authoritarian. The other quiz shows that my total political bias is 33% which is below the average score and I’m less biased than 65% of the people. Also the nolan chart shows that I’m a moderate person, but on the totalitarian side. These results explicitly show my political stance that I’m neither left-sided nor right-sided and pushing both libertarian and totalitarian characteristics. This is actually corresponding to my stance that I value freedom under restricted rules, where the rules have more power than freedoms.

The documentary, The Social Dilemma, presents the impact of technology development. As presented in the documentary, it says that as the technology develops the side effects will become more significant. Currently, those negative impacts already exceeded the positives that it is almost impossible to get advantages the technology development.  This such circumstance will get even worse from now on if people continue this path without giving an effort to change it. In the documentary, the experts who worked for Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter states that technology development is actually causing harmful effects. They use social media, social platforms, as an example to show the harmful effect of technology development. In the beginning, Aza Raskin says “If you are not paying for it, then you are the product.” This genuinely shocked me that it completely changed my point of view. I’ve never considered why Instagram and Facebook are free before, but now I realized that they were free because we are watching advertisements. The documentary also shifted my perspective regarding the algorithms. I thought algorithms are so helpful and useful that it gives information that is only related to my interest. However, after watching this documentary I recognized that the other side of the algorithms is actually limiting my perspective and narrowing it down. And this is the part where people get addicted, as the algorithms recommend the things that one’s interested in. People will tend to spend more time on it and will be much harder to get off from it. This significantly affects the Gen Z generation because they are born in a time where smartphones and the internet are ubiquitous. Thus, as they start to use social platforms, they will get much more addicted to it than adults because they have a lack of self-control.  Also, their life will be totally based upon the notifications from the platforms. I totally agree with this because I feel like I’m also in that process of getting addicted to social platforms and it is very hard to get away from it.

As the technology developed, we are able to have more access to various sources, we can even establish a border perspective too. But the point is that as there is more amount of information, the amount of disinformation, deliberate misinformation and manipulation drastically increases as well. In my group, we came up with a resolution that using OPVL is an effective way to distinguish between information and disinformation.

The topic of this debate was “Ignorance is bliss.”

The pros side argued that ignorance is a bliss that can lead to improvements in people’s mentality, especially in patients. For the evidence, they talked about the placebo effect. It is a phenomenon that the patients get better after they are given a placebo. They also stated the positive effects of not knowing something. For example, they used the example of a situation in which adolescents exposed to extremely explicit content are likely to have harmed their mental development.  In contrast, the cons side argued that “ignorance is not bliss,” stating that ignorance is a backward step for mankind. To support this claim, they applied the examples of war and genocide and said that the pandemic situation worsened because of the people being ignorant.

In this debate, I would say that the pros side won this debate because they provided a sufficient amount of evidence to support their statements. In contrast, the opposite side was lacking evidence to support their claim and also those evidence were minor events that people mostly won’t experience it.

However, I personally fall on to the cons side because of their statement. I would strongly agree that “Ignorace is not bliss” because I feel that not being ignorant is way better than being ignorant. But, I also feel that in some particular cases, being ignorant is better than not being ignorant. Thus, I can conclude that being ignorant and not being ignorant have both strengths and weaknesses so that people can follow one of them for better result.

Define:

This is the picture which I get idea. Actually, I make this in my head. However, my purpose is tring to move the green arm to hit the switch but the total piece move left right inside the slot.

So I tried to make other slot at the opposite side like this picture.

Plan

I used fusion 360 to skecth my project. First, I used the base skecth which Mr. Beatty gave me, and I changed the scale and add the slot which shape is ellipse. Also, it was hard to change the hole to the size which I want.

Crate

Finally, I print my board and other components. But, I had to print several times because one of my components was to small and weak. Also, in fusion 360 the hole inside the component was to big so it overflow. Moreover, it keep brake again because it was weak. However, I thought I finshed my machine, but the board did not work. Even I didn’t know the reason. This was really hard to me to fix it, but Mr. Beatty fixed it.