Agreement with Chagnon

I agree with the way Chagnon states, "I had to become like the Yanomamö to be able to get along with them on their terms: somewhat sly, aggressive, intimidating, and pushy." I don't think there was any other way he could have successfully made it through. At first, his statement seemed ignorant because the Yanamamo are described as violent and dishonest individuals by someone who sees them as completely different creatures. Chagnon even calls them hideous and unbearable. Later on, he does realize that if he had not changed the way he reacted to his belongings being taken, he would have always stayed as a victim of robberies and insults. The reason the Yanamamo accept Chagnon is because he has chosen to be LIKE them. The way he responded before by not yelling or threatening, led them to take advantage of him. It is survival of the fittest and the Yanamomo proved just that. Therefore, the Yanamamo are intelligent individuals who use their clever ways to survive every day. Instead of taking Chagnon's statements as derogatory and inappropriate, it makes more sense to see them as qualities. Even Chagnon himself adapted the positive attributes such as slyness and intimidation. These type of situations still exist in the world today. For example, my brother is a Pakistani-American who is currently living in Pakistan. It has been 1 year and 6 months since his move of which 1 year has been spent dodging scams and threats from local Pakistanis. They did not feel as if he belonged there because he was an American and to them, not Pakistani. My brother was threatened and he was sold expired items at the store, taken money from, given fake tickets, taken advantage of financially, emotionally, physically, and mentally. After a year though, after him defending himself and fighting back and finding his own ways to make money, the people there are finally starting to accept him because they know he is aware of their ways. This is just a small example that I can talk about with experience. There are hundreds of similar situations that lead people to become more aggressive and intimidating to survive, which is ironic because these terms are often seen as negative remarks and insults.

Issues

What issues would you like your US Representative and US Senators to focus on in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate? Why are these issues important? Give local/state and national issues. Examples could include local air quality, crime, funding a college education, and war just to name a few. To respond to this discussion topic you must have knowledge of the issues you are suggesting. Use the web links provided to assist you. Refrain from using or referencing political pundits (folks with TV or radio shows) or the editorial sections of newspapers.

Issues regarding sexual preferences dealing with not just legal matters, but society as a whole, have become extremely problematic in the last few years. Government officials are concerned with same sex marriages and how removing or keeping the ban affects the laws of the U.S. within the Constitution. Meanwhile, the issue affects anyone and everyone, especially children and their education even more. There are individuals advocating a change in the school’s curriculum to address, “bullying, respect, and acceptance.” The aim is to inform children as young as 5 years old about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Obviously, parents are enraged at the fact that strangers can be given the authority to decide their children’s belief and value system. A recent board decision of 3/2 now allows the enforcement of elementary schools in Alameda, California to teach children about such critical issues. Parents of Unified School District who think the topics should be discussed within the families have been called advocates of anti-gay slurs and individuals who refuse to prepare their children for the world they are living in. It was unimaginable once, but the school board is no longer looking for the best interest of the children, but their own reputation, in order to avoid looking “not prepared” and “intolerant.” Parents have been refused from taking their children out of the classes that teach about LGBT, leaving kindergarten students to ponder about why they are reading about books with two men raising a student just like them. This issue is only going to become more universal as parents rights will be stripped off from deciding what their children should learn and believe in. As more states are allowing gay marriages, TV media displaying same sex relationships, more children are at risk for being taunted for having “fags” as parents. Yet, at the same time, does this mean parents lose the right to control their children? According to the California District Board, apparently so.

Reactions

Studying reactions to strange experiences such as suicide bombing and discovering that cultural assumptions (of the person reacting) are partially responsible for those reactions deserves the most attention. This reflection on our reactions to strangeness is critically important in the world we live in, where people fail to realize the roles their hollow judgments can take on. Without the right knowledge about a culture's values and its traditions, analyzing it by using your own cultural values becomes inevitable. For example, without learning about a country's political, religious and economical status, it becomes difficult to understand the concept of suicide bombing. Questions such as, "Is there a religiously motivated terrorism? If so, how does it differ from other cruelties?" become critical (Asad 2007). Instead of obtaining such information, people make comparisons to differentiate themselves from others, such as suicide bombers in this case. Once a person sees another as different, then labeling the actions of other people as strange makes sense to them. People think if what they do is familiar, then what others do is strange. Therefore, depending on assumptions will only create more gaps between people, causing more panic and giving birth to more "strangeness." It is also important to realize that understanding the strange requires time. The strange isn't the only thing analyzed, but so are the reactions of people that are reacting to all that is strange.


Asad, Talal. On Suicide Bombing. 2007. New York: Columbia University Press.



Laayla Muhammad

Bio Exam Essay.

BioSci 315

Take Home Essay Questions - Set 2 Name:_Laayla M. Tariq

Download this MS-Word document. Fill in your name at the top and type your answers below. Save the questions and your answers as an MS Word document with the .doc file extension (not .docx). This assignment is due in the D2L Dropbox on Sunday, 04-11-10 at 11:59pm.

A. For 5 points, correctly answer only one of the questions below (use as much space as needed):

Pts
1. Progesterone is known to activate transcription of the ovalbumin gene in chick oviduct.
2. You isolate Chromatin from untreated and progesterone-treated oviduct cells
3. Digest it four different times with deoxyribonuclease I (DNase I).
4. After you purify the DNA from the digested chromatin samples, you denature the DNA and “spot” equal amounts from each extract on filters.
5. The filters are exposed to denatured, radioactive ovalbumiun gene DNA (the probe), allowing it to hybridize with any ovalbumin gene DNA (the target) remaining after digesting the chromatin.
6. After making an autoradiograph of the filters, the following results are obtained:


2.0 a. State the hypothesis being tested in this experiment.


Progesterone is a hormone that activates transcription and therefore experimentally digesting progesterone treated oviduct cells with deoxyribonuclease I (DNase I) will result in denaturing of the DNA overtime, compared to the DNA from digests of chromatin from untreated tissue.






3.0 b. Explain these results.

The autoradiograph is an “X-ray photograph made by bringing an object containing radioactive material into close contact with the emulsion on a film or plate” (YourDictionary). When the chromatin is digested with DNase I, it becomes radioactively active. The autoradiograph results reveal that chromatin from progesterone treated oviduct cells digested with DNase I will contain DNA that will denature or structurally breakdown in order for transcription to take place since progesterone is known to activate transcription. We can see this because as time goes on, from 2 minutes to 20 minutes, the equal amount of “spots” from each extract is no longer equal because the treated cells are denaturing overtime and the spots are becoming lighter and smaller. DNase I is therefore, acting on the progesterone treated chromatin, which it cannot do with non-treated cells because chickens do not carry high levels progesterone, besides the low natural amount their bodies carry. The low initial amount of progesterone, which is a natural sex hormone, is not relevant to the fact that sample B was additionally injected with “more progesterone.” The denaturing is independent of the initial amount and is dependent on the overall level of progesterone in the samples. Therefore, progesterone does activate transcription of the ovalbumin gene in chick oviduct due to the results shown in autoradiograph.


"Autoradiograph." Dictionary Definitions. LoveToKnow, n.d. Web. 2 April 2010. .


B. For 5 points, correctly answer one of the questions below (use as much space as needed):

Pts
1. Consider the 10nm fiber and solenoid extracts from rat nuclei shown below:



You have purified the proteins from each of these chromatin extracts. After running polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of the purified proteins and staining the gels, you see the following:



5 Explain these results.

The purification of the proteins from both of the chromatin extracts (of rat nuclei) being run by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of which the gels are then stained, provide very similar results when compared to each other. The proteins purified from the 10 nm fiber chromatin contains H1, 2H3, 2H2A, 2H2B, 2H4. The proteins purified from solenoid chromatin contain all that but H1. First of all, we are told that the image on the right is of 30 nm solenoid chromatin, obviously longer than the 10 nm fiber. With the way gel electrophoresis works, the migrating proteins are divided into individual sections related to their gel mediated mobilities (Garfin 201). These denatured proteins are coated with a negative charge and end up having an overall negative charge with similar charge to mass ratios. Therefore, the rate of these proteins migrating depends solely on the size. The smaller the protein, the longer they will be able to migrate to the top, being able to travel through the many holes of the gel. The size of the pores of the gel is hard to measure, yet it is defined by the size limits of the proteins (Garfin 201). Therefore, these results make sense, with proteins purified from solenoid chromatin not being able to pass through the H1 gel hole due to the bigger size, compared to the proteins purified from 10 nm fiber chromatin, which were able to migrate through. This could be supported by the fact that the proteins from the solenoid chromatin had higher levels of salt in them. As salt decreases, protein solubility increases, and therefore, the proteins would be able to dissolve and migrate through (Young 1). On the other hand, as salt increases, such as in 30 nm solenoid chromatin sample, solubility decreases, which justifies the fact they weren’t able to migrate to H1.


Garfin, David. "Gel Electrophoresis of Proteins." Essential Cell Biology: Cell Structure, A Physical Approach 1. (2003): 197-268. Web. 11 Apr 2010. .

Derek R. Young. Introduction to Biochemical Engineering Term Project. 1994. .

Parody. Analogy.

The parody exercise caught my eye because it had a bit of humor in it. The actual definition of parody is "A literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule."(Free Dictionary, 2009). Homer Simpson was next to all the artifcacts of the "Spirits of the Sepik". This seemed out of place, and demanded the attention of the reader to find out the message behind this. The significance of this image is that it allowed the reader to look at history with a new perspective. It allowed humor in; which is something that isn't common in historical literaries. A reader may ask themselves "What did the people of Sepik have in common with Homer Simpson? The beauty of this question is that it's left up to the reader to decipher why this image was choosen. The hypothesis I had about humor may not have occured to another reader, or vice versa. If a person really looks into it, that presents a strong image. When it is left up to the reader to figure out, it opens so many doors instead of specifically telling the person what to look for. The same goes for ethnographers. As mentioned in class, it is their job to observe scenes they have never seen before. They interpret everything as they see fit, which is going to be different than what someone else sees. The picture of "Spirits of the Sepik" does exactly that. It is up to the reader to decipher, and up to the reader to come to the conclusion as to why Homer Simpson is in the picture.


Analogy is finding the similarity between two things with respect to their existing features.
People use analogies to understand all sorts of differtent concepts in life. We even use analogies to successfully live everyday as Abraham Lincoln publicly stated, "We know nothing of what will happen in future, but by the analogy of experience" (Lincoln 1839). In the exercise, the first image is of a boy stepping out of a window. We aren't shown where the window is located nor the reason why the boy isn't using a door. The second image is of a puppet holding the strings himself, thus controlling his own actions. Both images can be anologous of each other if we assume that in the first image, the window represents restrictions and captivity and the boy jumping out of it represents freedom and gaining control of one's own life. Thus, the second image can also represent freedom and choice as the puppet is the controller of his own life. Just like how I compared the two images due to their similarity, ethnographers can also use visual perceptions, cognitive thinking and prior life experiences to relate different situations and actions. Ethnographers rely on the critical technique of using analogies to understand and relate to different cultural lifestyles.