In Class Experience: Mix tape

On Monday the class shared their mix tape and I was impress with most of them. It seems like everyone put time and thought into their mix tape. I felt that the mix tapes were made for people that were important to them.

Mix Tape Reflection

The Mix tape was another interesting project that Scot assigned. The mix tape was a challenging project for me, because I don't really listen to music, and in addition that person I was making my mix tape for does not listen to what I listen too. Also another challenging aspect to this project was transitioning songs, which songs to include, word selection of the artist, style and genre of artist, but more important to me the beats and tempo of the songs. My theme was to remind my girlfriend how much I love her and miss her before she goes to sleep and wake up in the mourning. I wanted to do this because we've been together for 3 years now. In some relationships it tends to get dry and sometimes your partner does not feel that you love and appreicate them as much as you did when you first met. I wanted to make this for her so she knows how I feel about her and that my love for her is growing. Most of the songs on the mix tape were slow to moderate speed because I wanted her to be able to fall asleep listening to this kind of music. Also half of the songs told her how much I missed and needed her and the other was how much I love her and the things that I would do for her. Also the songs I selected were not in English. Selecting the songs were the most challenging part because I don't listen to traditional Hmong music so I decided to include modernize Hmong boy bands, and two songs that I thought she would like. Also another tricky obstacle to making the mix tape was which songs should go first to second to third and to last, just not the first and the last song mattered to me. I wanted to take her on a journey in my head and how I would say things to her. At the same time I wanted to make sure that the songs had similar beats, speed, and style. I ended up using two to three songs from the same artist to keep the meaning and the mix tape to sound smooth and consistent with the theme. The artists I used tended to make a song on how much they miss the person then told them how much they loved them so it worked out for me.

Not only this project but Scot has taught me for the whole semester to become a better person. Meaning that this project and Scot has challenge me to perform ways of communication that I am not used to using. The project has taught me that there are a lot of ways to communicate and that it is really hard to say what you want. On a serious note, the project has taught me to carefully listen to music and extract the meaning of the songs. Also the mix tape has taught me that when you are communicating your idea to another person every word you use is important, when you use the word, how you use the word, and the style that you use to make your piece plays into the impression that the reader receives.

Mix Tape

I'm in my room thinking about the mix tape project. I'm not sure who should I create it for and what songs should I put on there. The mix tape project is so hard to make. Thinking about it makes my head hurt. There are so many factors to consider for the best mix tape. Plus there are so many songs from so many genres that I like. Also I never listen to only one genre. The problems that I am having is: who to make it for, what genre of music, the meaning to the mix tape, the meaning of the songs, the artist, artist style, genre that person prefers, and transitions.
I think the problems I will be facing next is what the order of songs go in and does each song belong in the mix. Back to work.

Smashing and Mashing Sampling Projects

Smashing and Mashing the sampling projects was a tough challenge. I thought that the projects were insightful and amazing. Not only that most of the projects were very creative and well thought. I felt that I understood most of arguments that the projects were making. I took what I thought the projects were saying and made then say what I thought. There were some projects that looked similar so I cut and paste those projects in the background. Also there were other projects that had very creative ideas and I used those to transcend the message. In conclusion the background of my mix sampling project was a lot of copyright and creative copyright signs and symbols, and then I incorporated the superman, comic strip, and judge ideas to illustrate the copyright.

Sampling Experience

Sampling was a challenging, interesting, and frustrating experience. The challenging parts of the sampling experiment was : the topic, pictures to include, finding the pictures, placing the pictures, and getting the right idea across to the viewer. Then came the interesting and frustrating experience when I had to crop, resize, and clean the pictures. The interesting experience about this sampling project was formulating my ideas into images. The frustrating and painful experience was finding the pictures, cropping, and cleaning the pictures.
The sampling experiment that I liked more was the one where you could use Google. There was an unlimited supply of pictures that you could use for your collage. The second collage was painful. Either you drew the images or found them in the public domain. Even though it was painful, I felt that the 2nd experiment best captured my argument. The second collage forced me manipulate arbitrary pictures to say what I wanted about authorship and copyright. The experience has taught me that being an author is very hard. Especially the second experience, it has taught me that coming up with your own thing takes a lot of talent and creativity. Also I learned that copyright protects the author's idea and creativity. Authorship and copyright are very simple concepts, but has very powerful meanings.

Sampling Project

In class Wednesday we learned how to use fireworks to create our collage, but I think I'm going to use Photoshop because I am more uncomfortable with Photoshop. I think that this project is going to be fun.
Lawrence Lessig brings up interesting points in his book, like: copyright, creativity, piratically, property, lawsuits, and personal stories. The book is very interesting too. Lawrence's book also brings up mixed feeling. To be honest I don't know what to feel sometimes when reading. I'm not sure whether or not I should agree with big corporations or sympathize with the individual. He makes very good points for both sides of the agreement. But I tend to go with the underdog so I usually sympathize for the struggling individual anyways.
I have a funny feeling that my sampling project is going to convey a weird message to the reader after reading Lawrence's book.

Plagerism Reaction

I had fun trying to find out where my fellow students plagiarized. I had a method to sniff out plagiarism. I would read their paper and any place that a sentence seem to be well structured or written then I would look it up on Google.com. Also most plagiarized sentences were longer than student students and in plagiarized instances there were slight changes in vocabulary. Also I noticed that if there was a common word used throughout the paper the word was a word used by its source excessively. Another strategy that I used was to was to type in their thesis onto Google.com, because I figured that if you were to be plagiarizing then there would a good chance that you would have the same or similar thesis. Lastly I combined all the knowledge above and tried to analysis the writing style of each classmate. I found myself to be effective at finding an instance of plagiarism the first time I searched Google.com. It was an interesting experience and I learned a lot from this experience. It's way easier to write your own paper then trying to conceal your writing with someone else voice because I spend more time trying to hide the evidence.

Plagerism

I found plagiarism fun and entertaining; and before writing the paper, I felt that plagiarizing was going to be easy. All you had to do was copy some one's text and then use some synonyms, paraphrase, and hope you did not get caught. Then I made an effort to make plagiarism more interesting, because I remember Scott saying that points were going to be awarded to the best plagiarist. At this is the point I felt excitement, I wanted to challenge my writing abilities and determine if I could manipulate my writing style with some one's writing style to make the paper sound smooth. Also I wanted to challenge my classmates' ability to read, find, and figure out some one's writing style to determine where plagiarism was located, but most important to challenge Scott. This is the part that toke me the most time. I googled most of my sentences and carefully crafted my sentences not to have any word order or structure as the person I was trying to plagiarize, but I did leave some clues so my classmates could find where I plagiarized. This assignment seem more like a challenge and a game to me more than anything else.

Catch Me If You Can (2002) - Leonardo DiCaprio

Just say I thought of the assignment as "Catch Me If You Can" and me starring as Leonardo DiCaprio, and every in the class as the FBI. I didn't feel as though I was doing a bad thing because our intent in the first place was to plagiarize. I did feel guilt when I finally put my name on the paper, but the plagiarism was an entertaining experience and a challenge to our ability to write.

Ghost Writing

The person that I am ghostwriting for is my roommate Lee Xiong. Lee Xiong is my best friend in college and we always talk about life, school, philosophy, and anything that you can think of. I thought that ghostwriting for my best friend would be easy since we share most of our secrets. The paper was written about the independent business that he recently joined. I wanted to learn more about it so I decided it to write about the business so I could get a better understanding of it.

We talked for a couple of hours about his independent business, and discussed what he feels that is most important about the business. Then I went to do the writing after I had read his Philosophy paper. I thought that after reading one of his works I nailed down his structure and his writing style because we were so close. As I was writing the paper, I did not consult Lee, because I felt that he would have the same thought process and style as I did, well that’s what I convey. When I was a third to a half of the way done and I decided to let him read what I had so far he said, “That’s not even like what I would say at all. I wouldn’t put it in this way,” then I was stuck, I could not do anything. I strapped what I had had and started over. I didn’t know what to do, everything that I had was wrong. I found out the hard way that we writing differently. I believe that I am a very structural writer; my writing is more academic and wordy than his. Lee’s writing is different from mines, he doesn’t have long sentences and he has a lot a small paragraphs. This paper was really hard to write, after a while I got back to my writing style but kept his way of thinking of the paper.

Ghost Writing- Ethical or Not

A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, or reports which are officially credited to another person (Wikipedia). Another way to look at ghostwriting is professional plagiarism who is influenced by money and legally sells his skills and ideas to another person. The speaker on Wednesday prose a good question, Whether ghostwriting was ethical or not? And would you ghostwrite for someone else?
I believe that ghostwriting is ethical, and if there was a job opening I would take it. Ghostwriters help articulate a person's ideas and thoughts because that person is incapable or unable to. For example, if a foreign woman needed her medication but could not because she could not write in English, and someone wrote her needs for her then ghostwriting would be doing a good thing. Then a counter example, if a woman who is on crack and dropped out of high school because she lack motivation could not write her medication and someone wrote her needs for her then ghostwriting would be doing a bad thing. There are more example of controversial topics: gun control, atomic bomb, abortion, and etc. These subject (things) aren't at fault but the people who uses these elements are, because each of these elements can be use for good and bad.
Ghostwriting is in essence same as writing, sharing Barthes idea that writing is a neutral element, and then extend that idea to ghostwriting. I think if there were to be any controversy of ghostwriting it should be the intent of that person hiring the ghostwriter and how he/she will use the ghostwriter. Therefore the people hiring the ghostwriter is liable for what the ghostwriter writes because ultimate the employer will be using the text.

8 Mile

I've always wanted to watch 8 Mile but I could not find any time to watch it. So I thought if I did my analysis of the rap artist Eminem then I could kill two birds with one stone.

I felt that 8 mile is a fair portrayal of Eminem's life, in the sense that it has a corollary theme to his music and stories told over media. The movie 8 mile is about Eminem's struggle in the rap world and his personal issues and trails. For example, his song "Super man," starts out as Eminem talking to a girl and it seems that he is in love with her and then a few seconds later he rejects and denies her because he does not know her intention. This idea is drawn from the example in the movie when he falls in love with Alex, and he really likes this girl, but after the second time they met he has already had sex with her. Later on in the movie Alex is caught by B-Rabbit (Eminem's Character) having sex with one of his friends. Another example of corrrelation between his work and his life story is the free style rap battling that is done in the movie. Before Eminem became rich and famous he use to freestyle battle himself. These are just some of the example drawn from the movie, but if you ever have time you should watch this movie.

More Thoughts of Roland

Roland Barthes's article, "Death of the Author" presents an intriguing and philosophical theory that once an author writes his/her ideas onto paper then the author dies and writing begins. This is my theory from Wednesday's discussion: writing is such an abstract idea in itself that once an author writes his/her ideas, their identities become lost because of the numerous ways their writing can be interepted. For example, lets back to the example given in class, when we see a tree we know that it's a tree. But when we see the word tree so many things come into mind, whether the tree is a apple tree, orange tree, oak tree, the design, the texture, the color, and etc. There will be no way that the reader will ever know what the author intend or implied in his/her writing. "The voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins."

Bloging 100

Blogging is a unique way that the any one person can express their feeling, thoughts, and ideas to the mass at a low cost or at no cost. Blogging is user friendly and anyone can learn how to use and create their own blog, also there are sites that let anyone create free blogging page, such as blogger.com.

My name is Michael and I am a 3rd year student currently studying mathematics and economics.