December 3rd notes

Prepare your presentation for next week. Ask me any questions.

Write a blog post about WALL*E (150 words). If you want to read the script, it is available at
http://disneystudiosawards.movies.go.com/wall-e_script.pdf
It is 94 pages long.

Write a blog post about chat-bots.

Priority Seats

I got pregnant when I was busy job hunting. When I found it out, I had to think lots of things because I wasn’t ready for a baby yet as I was still young. It’s really early to have a baby and I was worried if I could be a good mother. You have to take responsibilities, and you can’t abandon even if you get tired of child care. When I was 8 weeks pregnant, I found out that I was having twins. It surprised me and actually I am shocked, but finally I’ve decided to get marry and keep the twins.

Pregnancy life had begun since then. I had to go to school 4 days a week until July to get the rest of my credits to graduate. I chose afternoon classes so that I didn’t have to get on rush hour trains. Luckily I didn’t have heavy morning sickness but throughout the pregnancy term, I always felt tired and lazy, and my stomach got bigger fast as twins grow, so I began to use priority seats on trains.

I hardly used priority seats until I get pregnant, but I noticed some things. What I’ve found there, was I couldn’t sit on priority seats when I wanted to use it. Many non-disabled people were using priority seats as if these were not priority seats, and even if they noticed that I was pregnant, they just ignored. People just sleep or pretend not to notice that I’m pregnant. Of course many people gave me seats, but when I looked around, I found that many old people couldn’t sit on the seats either. It was sad that the priority seats were actually not existing to whom really want to use.

I didn’t know how it is tough to keep a baby in your stomach. Pregnant women look healthy but it is our misunderstood. I shall be kind to them, and when you find a pregnant woman, I hope you will give your seat for her.

Misunderstanding

Sometimes we have wrong images and ideas of people, because of stereotypes or prejudice from mass media. Most of us have some kind of it. For example, everybody thinks American people are big and fat. They always eat junk food and snacks. However those are not true. There are American people who are not big, not fat. We don't know who they are, until we really see them.
Nowadays a lot of black people are active in entrainment, business, and sports, for example baseball players, basketball players, singers and actors. Some of them are very popular and famous. They are also making money. For that reasons, outwardly it feels like white people treat them as normal and accept them. However this is not true. A few years ago in a Soccer game, several members of the audience sang a very discriminative chant for black people. Some of players couldn't keep playing. Even if known hooligans are prohibited entering the stadium, this kind of thing is happening sometimes. From my experience, I have traveled in 5 or 6 countries, and seen a lot of people who are from Europe and the US, but I have never seen black people at all. I think this means that there is still discrimination and they cannot get a good job like whites do.

Most people watch TV everyday. After September 11, lots of TV shows and movies were made which were against terrorism. I saw some of them and felt all Muslim people are like that. They go to mosque everyday and pray. They might attack even if they lose their lives. When I went to Malaysia, I saw a lot of women who wore turbans. This was not the first time to see people like that, but I felt something. Also at that time, Muslim people were in Ramadan, they don't eat anything until sunset. I heard about Ramadan before I went to Malaysia, but my image of Muslim people was made up by TV or magazines, so unconsciously I was afraid and avoiding them. It's hard to accept, because most Japanese are not religious. However when I saw them, my image was totally changed. They are just like us, except they are religious.

We should know that mass media might be able to control information, news and stories. Also we should be aware that they are not always right, and they are not always telling us the truth. We too easily believe everything the way it is shown on TV, even if it is not true. This might give us wrong images and ideas of people. We have see carefully what is going on in the world, what is happening, and what the truth is.

Essay Collection 2008

Here are links to some of our essays:

Is "Navi-time" really convenient?
http://www.wendyseminar.blogspot.com/
http://wendyseminar.blogspot.com/2008/10/200810-essaynavi-time-is-really.html

Photography
http://b-seminar-blog.blogspot.com/

Bridge of Word
http://tickey-land.blogspot.com/
http://tickey-land.blogspot.com/2008/11/bridge-of-word-my-essay.html

Nothing is so good as daily life
http://no-ko-no-ko.blogspot.com/2008/10/nothing-is-so-good-as-daily-life.html

Hip-Hop History
http://brookazuto.blogspot.com/
http://brookazuto.blogspot.com/2008/11/hip-hop-history.html

Plus two others I will post.

General links for students of English

These are very popular links for students learning English as a foreign or second language. Have you ever visited these sites before? If not, please check them out!

http://www.eslcafe.com/

http://www2.gsu.edu/~esljmm/methods/JMlinks.htm
http://www2.gsu.edu/~esljmm/methods/teaching.htm

http://iteslj.org/links/

The following list of links were all listed at Ohio University. It's a good list!
http://www.ohiou.edu/linguistics/esl/activities/index.html

http://english-zone.com/index.php
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/quiz_list.htm
http://a4esl.org/
http://www.englishforum.com/00/interactive/
http://www.better-english.com/exerciselist.html
http://wwwedu.ge.ch/cptic/prospective/projets/anglais/exercises/welcome.html
http://www.smic.be/smic5022/Onlineexercises.htm
http://www.englishlearner.com/tests/test.html
http://www.eslpartyland.com/quiz%20center/quiz.htm
http://www.lapasserelle.com/lm/pagespeciales/half.baked/halfbakedtests.index.html
http://www.edict.com.hk/sitemap/index.htm
http://www.eslus.com/eslcenter.htm
http://www.manythings.org/
http://www.englishlearner.com/tests/index.shtml

Travel on the internet

Wikitravel
sample page: Panmunjeom
Also available in Nihongo.

World 66
sample page for Los Angeles

lonely planet
sample page for Los Angeles
click the words on the left for more pages
Lonely Planet Thorntree (traveller's forum)

realtravel

travelpod
one sample page by a user


travelblog
sample blog Mark-Kate
sample entry

MyTripJournal
sample journal bear-out-there
sample page

travelfish
sample page for Chiang Saen

Tales of Asia

world wikia travel

virtual tourist
sample member's page
sample member's map

trip advisor

Global Wanderings

Essay Contest 2008

Here is the schedule for the essay contest:
September 24: Back to school! How was your summer? What did you do? Turn in the Rough draft of your essay!
October 1: Teacher returns the first draft or student turns in first draft late.
October 8: Second draft of essay due.
October 15: Return second draft to students.
October 22: Final Draft from everybody due today.
October 29: Distribute copies to everybody or post all essays online.
November 5: Finish reading all essays, last day to vote, choose class representative essay(s), watch US election results!?

Project to explore photo hosting and sharing sites

We are BACK!…… at a new time and day.

At the end of the last academic year, in December and January, we had a project to make a small Flickr site as a project and use it to give a short Show-and-Tell style presentation. (A picture is worth a thousand words.)

I wasn't very happy with the results for a few reasons:
Two people never showed up, didn't give a presentation.
Some people had very few pictures.
Some people had few or no tags.
Most people did not create any sets (albums).
Often there was no organization or ordering of the photos.
Many pictures have no English titles, captions, or descriptions.
No profile picture. (Put something there.)
No profile. (Write a little something.)
No comments. (Link to other students and make a few comments on their photos.)
Sites were not public. (Too much privacy! I don't think it is so dangerous. But you could make your site only for contacts or friends, and then invite us to be your contacts or friends.)
No badges. (Try making one and put it on your blog or somewhere else to direct people to your photos.
No favorites. (You may find some photos taken by other people which you love. Mark them as Favorites and they will appear on your page of Favorite photos.)

We are going to do this project over! Our goal is to demonstrate that we understand, and can use the various features and even teach others how to use them. In fact, if you finish, please help teach another student how to use these features!

In addition, this time we will compare 2 different photo hosting services. In order to do this, you will have to make a second photo site at any othe rphoto hosting site. It doesn't have to be an English site; it is OK if the site is available in Japanese. We can still use it and compare it with Flickr, using English. Here are some suggestions:

Picasa
It is owned by Google, and if you have a Blogger account, you can use you Google ID to log in to Picasa as well as Blogger, Gmail, and other Google services. Today, I showed you my Picasa web albums. Picasa gives you one gigabyte of free photo storage. Privacy controls are not very sophisticated, however. Photos are kept at the original size.

Facebook
It is social networking plus photos. The photos are downsized to about 600 by 450 pixels. You can upload 60 pictures in each album. You can have unlimited albums. Free. I showed you my Facebook pictures today.

Others
There are many others. Explore and find a good photo hosting and sharing site! Try to read about it first.
Photobucket
Smugmug
Fotki
Zooomr
Photoshop Express (only available in the US?)

Here is a useful link which reviews 7 alternatives to Flickr: (late 2007)
http://www.photographybay.com/2007/12/03/flickr-alternatives/

More alternatives:
www.photographybay.com/2008/02/11/45-photo-sharing-sites/

Q. What is the minimum number of photos you would need to upload to evaluate a site?
A. You would need to have enough photos to make a few sets or albums. Probably 9 or 10 is enough.

You can use the same photos for the two sites if you want, and see which site makes the photos look better.

If you don't have any pictures to use, take a walk around the campus, go to Tsutsuji Matsuri, or visit the pond on the Tokyo University campus, about 10 minutes walk from us.

Another consideration is the uploading process. Some photo sites let you upload by e-mail or directly from your cell-phone! If you can find a site which lets you do that, it might be easier.