Sara Inoue

     One business strategy I was stunned by was planned obsolescence, which is a technique that is certainly not sustainable, yet too common in contemporary society. The product is planned and designed by the manufacturers to have a limit so that consumers would come back. For example, Japanese houses are said to last around 30 years; however, it usually takes 30 years to pay back the mortgage of the property. Houses are designed to deliberately deteriorate so that people would keep buying new houses. The same goes with terminator seeds which I was completely unaware of. The DNA of the seeds is tinkered so that only one plant grows and is terminated. This strategy procedure creates a cycle so that consumers would have to come back for more. From these examples, I was able to learn how the efficiency of marketing concentrates on profit rather than the quality of products. Although businesses need their profits in order to grow, it made me wonder whether these houses are wo...

     "Top of the Pops", a British music chart television program by the BBC, was broadcasted weekly between the years 1964 and 2006. The host of the show, Jimmy Savile who was seen as an eccentric TV personality, had been sexually assaulting hundreds of people throughout his life. Surprisingly in his peak state of his career. It is sickening to think how many people he has mentally and physically damaged. According to a report from the Guardian, a female victim is believed to have told the Metropolitan police she was assaulted in Savile's campervan in a BBC car park. Nevertheless, no action took place and the police file cannot be located. Many of his other claims are unsubstatiated, which should have been disclosed when it was an ongoing situation.       After doing a quick search on Jimmy Savile, most of the articles did in fact delineate on his cases. There were articles that interviewed victims and the quick search became an hour long probing. I wa...

     We had an unusual class, where students were tod to spread out and a set of "rules" were displayed on the board. The activity "rules" were clear; yet, also broad in a way that changes could be made easily. Before starting, Mr. Paterson introduced this game as a means to scrutinize our creativity, which was probably one of the main reasons people started thinking in ways that could make their answers unique.  I found it interesting how Mr.Paterson showed us one common way of doing this activity by drawing a 3x3 circle format. This example became a big clue for the majority of students, which made them start off by drawing the same 3x3 circles.       I realized that the first rule, which was to draw 9 circles in a square pattern, did not specify the structure of the square. Therefore, I decided to set aside the idea of drawing 3x3 circles and drew 4 circles in one straight line. As long as there were four circles in the corner, I perceived it a...

     Today was quite different than our usual class. Tables were set up and we sat in groups of 4, with strange materials. There were 20 raw spaghettis, 1 yard of tape and string, and most mportantly a marshmallow. Having no clue of what was going on, Mr.Paterson assigned us a challenge, which was the Marshmallow challenge. Our mission was to build some sort of tower so that the marshmallow would be held on top. our group worked pretty well, in the sense that we started building the tower as soon as the 18 minutes timer went on. We started working on the base of the tower, so that the thin spaghetti strips would support the levels on top. I personally thought that the base woud be stable if we made it a square, but after a quick talk we realised that we should use the spaghetti strips wisely, as well as the tape. Cautiously taping the strips together, we found that the easiest way to make a tall, and strong tower was to tape more paghetthis to the bottom area, to strength...