I'm no crazy tumblr social justice warrior, but let's face it, if you're not white in America, you have it a lot more difficult than you would if you were. Don't believe me? What if I told you that 1 in 3 black men born in this generation will go go to prison in their lifetime? What if I told you that blacks are 3.73% more likely to get arrested for marijuana possession than whites? And these are just a few statistics, but there are much, much more; and honestly, having every police officer you pass by glare at you gets pretty old after a while.
So how do we fix this? I'd like to say that there's an easy solution, but there's really not. People always have been and always will be awful, and even though I've only used the example of black and white, inequalities of race, religion, gender, and anything else you could hate a person for exist everywhere in every country. The best possible solution that I can come up with is a simple one: educate people. To do this I've proposed that we do what I'm calling the Daryl Davis experiment. If you didn't know, Daryl Davis is a black r&b musician who made friends with members of the Ku Klux Klan after meeting with them and getting rid of their misconceptions about black people. So inspired by his success, the experiment will follow basically the same format: take a group of people who share a blind hatred towards another group of people, have a person from that group of people (a good speaker with self-confidence) meet with them individually, listening to the reasons for their hatred and educating them on their misconceptions. One would then take data such as how many people still kept their prejudices after being educated, how long it took to get rid of those prejudices, and which misconceptions between people were the most common. The hypothesis behind this experiment being that if you educate someone about why their misconceptions and prejudices are wrong, then they are more likely to ditch said prejudices and misconceptions. The independent variable being if the people were educated or not and the independent variable being if they still had their prejudices after being educated. If it worked for Daryl Davis, whose to say that it can't work for anyone else?
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I am by no stretch of the imagination a successful person at this stage in life, and while I could sit here writing a huge wall of text ranting on why I see myself this way I'm just going to condense it down like this:
I have no control. And it's driving me crazy. I define success as being able to do you, and not letting anyone or anything get in the way of you doing your own thing. I guess that's why I admire so many underground rap-artists; they get to wake up everyday doing something that they love, worrying about money instead of some meaningless grade. It took me a while to figure out an answer to the question "where do you see yourself in ten years", not because I don't know what I want to be in ten years, but because I'm not really sure how to express this vision in writing. I guess I'll start by saying that I'll definitely not be in Durham. . .or North Carolina. . .or the South in general. Heck, that's more of a five year plan instead of a ten year one: as soon as I graduate high school you can start calling me Malaysia Airlines, because I'll be gone. I'm not the type of person who would willingly spend his entire life in one place, especially if that place felt less like a home and more like a free-range prison. In ten years I can see myself as either a director or a music producer, maybe even both, and if YouTube is still around and the Chinese haven't invaded, I can see myself as a content creator with a legion of followers that I can sick on people at any given moment. Now, I understand that these are all pretty extravagant goals, and I'v come up with a simple plan to reach them: keep working hard on developing my own style. This isn't as easy as it sounds, as it seems that both school and the general environment that I'm in seem hell-bent on destroying anything that makes me me (funny how art school is doing the exact opposite effect that it was intended to have), and it's quite difficult to be motivated on anything that you know will benefit yourself as an individual when you're being told constantly that those things aren't important. But I'll just have to keep chugging along and keep developing my skills, because in my eyes, contentment equals failure, and I ain't bout' that life. The Texas Instruments SensorTag has a variety of sensors which can be used to measure different things around the school. For a refresher, some of these sensors include pressure, light, temperature, motion, etc.The data from these measurements can be used to answer various questions and solve problems around the school. For example, there's been an ongoing problem throughout the school of every room either being hot and musty or extremely cold. The SensorTag could be used to measure how a variety of factors affect the temperature of a school room; factors such a outside and inside heat, humidity, light levels, and the temperature coming out of the heater/air conditioner. With this data you could potentially find what causes the ridiculous room temperatures and make changes accordingly (even though this probably won't happen). Something else that you could probably measure with the SensorTag within the school is air pressure and how it affects student alertness and/or attitude. To do this, someone would need to take a group of students during a time where they have the most energy (after lunch probably), give them all a short behavioral analysis test to take and record their answers. Then the experimenters would do the same thing again, but this time have the students take a test on a stormy or overcast day when the air pressure fluctuates and record their answers then. In doing so, one would be able to test using the SensorTag how changes in air pressure due to the weather affect student activity. The SensorTag cannot actually save any of this information on the phone, but an easy way to overcome this is to either take a screenshot of your phone as the data appears or to just simply write down the data as needed.
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