Rumbling Air Conditioner

An age-old problem faced by people is trying to find a romantic partner to spend your life with. This is an issue that has grown more complex with the 21st century and many dating sites have risen to the challenge of helping people find "The One" like Match.com,  Ok Cupid,  EHarmony and my personal favorite Clown Dating (clowns deserve love too!). Another interesting dating company is the aptly named Smell Dating operates off the idea that "your nose knows" and that humanities oldest sense has the ability to sniff out a compatible match. The way that the service works is after paying a fee of $25 they send you a shirt that you wear for 3 days in a row, with no deodorant or perfume, you ship it back to them and they send you back 10 shirts that have gotten the same smelly treatment and you respond with which scents you liked. If there is a mutual liking of odors Smell Dating will then provide contact info. I'll be honest my first reaction was : I d...

So this week we will delve into proxemics, which is basically the study of personal space. Personal space is (as the name would suggest) is a very personal topic and is very subjective from person to person, and is especially dependent on someone's relation to that person. Proxemics is an element of nonverbal communication, and just like all types of communication, it varies from culture to culture. An article from the Washington Post written by Amanda Erickson summarized research published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology that was conducted among 9,000 people from 42 different countries. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/24/how-close-is-too-close-depends-on-where-you-live/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2d2c4edd34a4 This is what they found: These results were quite interesting but it also made me wonder more about how the United States and its melting pot-like nature could affect personal space among immigrant households over time. I ...

This week we discussed verbal communication, one might assume that verbal communication only refers to the spoken word, but you'd be wrong as verbal communication also deals with written language (like this blog post) as well as sign language. Something I've always been interested in is the difference between ASL and other sign languages because the name "American" Sign Language clearly suggests that there are more out there. A google search led me to several different results, one page claimed there were 20, another said 100, and yet another said 200. While I would love to find out more about all of these, I'll just be focusing on BSL (British Sign Language) in this post.  I found this video demonstrating the difference in the fingerspelling (aka sign language ABCs)  for each of the languages:  The starkest difference is that while the ASL versions are done with only one hand, the BSL signs required two hands for most of the signs (though both Cs looke...

So at the beginning of the semester (aka last week) when we went through the syllabus and came across the section discussing Team-Based Learning and RAP, iRat and tRat, the collective response of the class was: After taking it for the first time, I completely agree that its hard to explain so I'm not going to bother and I'll just skip the iRat ( the "i" stands for individual) and go right on to the tRat (the "t" stands for team). The tRat just involved going over the choices everyone made on the iRat and agreeing as a group on what the final answer the group would markdown. I have to go ahead and establish that I'm a pretty argumentative person ( while I'm admitting negative personality traits, I might also think that I'm always right) so I spent a lot of the time trying my hardest to convince my group members to go along with the choice I had, even when most people had a different answer ( if you're wondering, yes I was right). I bet ...

In this weeks class we began working in our assigned teams with whom we will be working with for the entire semester (or at least I think we will, I'm not sure if any rotation will occur) I was assigned to Group D. Meeting with my group was interesting, though we jumped right into the group activity so we didn't get  time to acquaint ourselves, but so far I think my group has at least 2 seniors, an I'm interested to see what dynamic this group will have between the younger and older members (I'm a freshman but this hasn't had an impact yet). Group Activity!: We were told to sort almost 30 different definitions of "Communication" into as many different categories as our group saw fit. My group had a rudimentary system of grouping, we just did it based on key phrases we saw in the definition like "social" or "symbol". These are the groups we sorted our into: My favorite part of the activity by far was when we got to go around t...