Sociology

Early Sociologists

1. Auguste Comte (1718-1857)

- between 1830 and 1854, he outlined his theory that man’s intellectual development is an evolutionary process

- he advocated the idea of positivism or the use of empirical investigation to understand social phenomena

- he believed that social physics or positivism would be the key to humanity’s ongoing program

- he classified the the existing sciences into a hierarchy, placing the social physics as the “queen of the sciences”

- he believed that sociology was the means by which a more rational and just society could be achieved

- to him goes the credit of being the father of sociology, having coined the term sociology (Timasheff 1967)

2. Karl Marx (1818-1883)

- he reiterated that political revolution was vitally significant in the evolutionary process of society, the only means whereby the improvement of social conditions could be attained

- he believed that social conflicts, struggles and strifes were at the core of society and could cause social change (Jesser 1975)

- he said that all history was branded with economic determinism, that all change, social conditions, and society itself were based on economic factors and that economic inequality has resulted in class struggles between bourgeoise (the owners rulers) and the proletariat, the industrial workers

3. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

- he defined social phenomena as social facts that have distinctive social characteristics determinants, and social facts as “every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint” such as customs, laws and the general rule of behavior which people accept without question (Timasheff 1967)

- individuals are more the products rather than the creators of society

- he paid greater attention to the characteristics of groups, particularly the cohesion or non-cohesion of religious groups.

- He advanced social theory along with social methodology with his classic study on the incidence of suicide as it varied from one population to another and as it was influenced by certain social forces

4. Max Weber

- he encouraged the study not only of social facts and social structures, but also of social action, the external objective behavior as well as the internalized behavior and perceptions of the behavior of others

- he believed that qualitative, subjective methods as well objective, quantitative methods should be used in the study if social actions

- he said the understanding human action can be done by examining the subjective meaning that people attach to their own behavior and behavior of others

- he contented treated that this could be treated objectively and scientifically

Theoretical Perspectives

1. Structural Functionalism

- referred to as the social system theory, equilibrium theory, or functionalism

- the structure of a social system has several interrelated interdependent parts, each with a certain function

- the component parts of a social structure are families, neighborhoods, associations, schools, churches, banks, countries, etc.

- social system can have both manifest (intended or recognized) and latent (unintended or unrecognizable) functions

- social structures exist in the society for the functions they have to carry out

2. Conflict Theory

- conflict is a constant aspect of social life which involved a wide range of groups or interests, such as age groups, sex groups, religious groups, occupational and economical groups, political groups, educational groups, etc.

- each of this group pitted against each other for wealth, power, and prestige which are limited and not available to everyone

- those who possess wealth, power and prestige fight to maintain the status quo

- conflict need not always be equated with widespread debacles but can involve ordinary life destruction between individuals and groups, neither must it be equated with the integrative and constructive feature of conflict lay in a state where people with common needs and interests unite to work for goals that bring about social change for their own welfare

3. Symbolic Interaction Theory

- sociologists who developed this theory believed that society is reflected in every socialized individual and that its external forms and structures are likewise reflected through the social interactions occurring among individuals at the symbolic level

- George Herbert Mead theorized that humans are set apart from animals because of their ability to use language and to create and acquire social institutions, societies, and cultures

- Social interaction with others enables individuals to acquire the beliefs, values, and language of the society to which they belong and to learn what is appropriate or inappropriate, what is right or wrong, who is significant, or what is beautiful in a society

- It provides the bases for decision-making or problem-solving

Source: Panopio,Cordero-McDonald, Raymundo, General Sociology: Focus on the Philippines 3^rd edition (1994), Ken Inc. Quezon City Phils.

Feature Song of the Month

Secondhand Serenade - Your Call

Artist: Secondhand Serenade lyrics
Album: Awake
Year: 2006

Waiting for your call, I'm sick, call I'm angry
call I'm desperate for your voice
Listening to the song we used to sing
In the car, do you remember
Butterfly, Early Summer
It's playing on repeat, Just like when we would meet
Like when we would meet

Cause I was born to tell you I love you
and I am torn to do what I have to, to make you mine
Stay with me tonight

Stripped and polished, I am new, I am fresh
I am feeling so ambitious, you and me, flesh to flesh
Cause every breath that you will take
when you are sitting next to me
will bring life into my deepest hopes, What's your fantasy?
(What's your, what's your, what's your...)

Cause I was born to tell you I love you
and I am torn to do what I have to, to make you mine
Stay with me tonight

And I'm tired of being all alone, and this solitary moment makes me want to come back home
x4
(I know everything you wanted isn't anything you have)

Cause I was born to tell you I love you
and I am torn to do what I have to, to make you mine
Stay with me tonight

Cause I was born to tell you I love you
and I am torn to do what I have to, to make you mine
Stay with me tonight
(I know everything you wanted isn't anything you have)

Where Am I Now?

Where Am I Now?

Before I start to answer this very hard-to-answer question let me sing a song first. This song was entitled Do You Know Where You’re Going To? The Theme from Mahogany which was sang by Diana Ross. It goes a little something like this!

Do you know where you're going to?
Do you like the things that life is showing you
Where are you going to?
Do you know...?

Do you get
What you're hoping for
When you look behind you
There's no open door
What are you hoping for?
Do you know...?

Once we were standing still in time
Chasing the fantasies
That filled our minds
You knew how I loved you
But my spirit was free
Laughin' at the questions
That you once asked of me

Do you know where you're going to?
Do you like the things that life is showing you
Where are you going to?
Do you know...?

Now looking back at all we've planned
We let so many dreams
Just slip through our hands
Why must we wait so long
Before we'll see
How sad the answers
To those questions can be

Do you know where you're going to?
Do you like the things that life is showing you
Where are you going to?
Do you know...?

Do you get
What you're hoping for
When you look behind you
There's no open door
What are you hoping for?
Do you know...?

In my 20 years of existence, I can say that I really don’t know where I am. Maybe, I’m in the stage where I want to explore new places, meet new people, dream big dreams, see the real world apart from the world I’m leaving as a student, experience what I didn’t experience before, do what I wanted to do a long time ago, and know what I can and I cannot do. I’m not sure!

As of now, all I know is I’m in the verge of knowing my true identity as a person. I’m in a search of a path that will lead me to a good future. I’m on a journey towards my ultimate goal. I’m in my preparatory stage to being a full adult.

The question here doesn’t merely lye on where am I now? But, also to the question, do I know where I’m going to? (As what I’ve sang a while ago) At this point of my life I can say that I have gone too far but I still don’t know where to go. I’m so pathetic! Imagine! I’m 20 years old but still don’t know where I should go.

Actually, I have a lot of big dreams. I wanted these big dreams to come true. So now, I study (but not that hard) because I believed that an educated man has the power to excel in everything he wants to achieve. At this point in time I don’t have big dreams only. I also have plans. Dreams won’t be achieved without a plan.

First, if I graduate I want to go abroad. I will use my talent in singing to go anywhere I want. If I’m already there, I’ll find a job that will really suit me as a degree holder. I will help my family and relatives who are in need and I will also save up for myself. When my savings is enough, I will put up my own business, build a house for my father, buy a truck for my aunt and uncle for them to deliver their product, buy a taxi for my other uncle so he could raise his children decently, rent a space in a public market for my other aunt and buy a farm so that my father will have something to get busy when he gets older.

When I’m already stable with my life I want to travel the whole world. I want to go to Acapulco and enjoy the beautiful beach there. If possible, I want to climb Mount Everest! Hehehe! I also want to visit Japan and buy different flavors of noodles and chocolates. There are many places that I really want to go, someday.

In terms of building a family, I’m not so sure with that. Maybe I’ll marry but I don’t want to have children or I’ll have at least 1 or 2. I’m planning to marry when I’m already 28 or 29. Time will tell.

If all those things come true the next thing that I’m planning to do is build a foundation. This foundation is intended for all Lumads specially those in Marilog District. I will give them free education. Awesome! Actually I have been to many mountains and I saw a lot of Lumads there who are uneducated. Although they have schools there, the teachings were very limited according to the Lumad that I happened to ask. They only come to school on Sunday and the only thing they learn was all about handicrafts. So what about other stuff? People just cheat them because they were uneducated and I don’t want that that’s why I have to make this dream come true. Yehey!

If I’m done with all those things, I want to focus myself on my personal relationship with God so that I’ll reach my ultimate goal. To be with Him forever!

For now, those are only dreams that I have to fulfill. The answer to the question is now clear to me. Now, I am in the beginning of my journey and I know where I’m going to and that is to heaven?

Computer and Life

Life

By: Pink Cabero

Life’s just like a binary number

One means on and Zero means off

On when you’re up

Off when you’re down.

Life’s hard when it is not simplified

Life’s short when not properly managed

But life’s easy when you have a positive logic

And life’s long when it’s properly organized.

To live life to the fullest means to simplify your function

To prosper means to base your life on the truth table

To be rich means to use your wildest imagination and,

To have a good life means to have a good logic design.

History of Voice Recognitio

Over two hundred years ago a Russian Professor Christian Kratzenstein explained physiological differences between five long vowels (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/) and made apparatus to produce them artificially. He constructed acoustic resonators similar to the human vocal tract and activated the resonators with vibrating reeds like in music instruments. (www.acoustics.hut.fi/publications/files/theses/lemmetty_ mst/chap2.html) The development of voice recognition continued until Alexander Graham Bell discovered how to convert air pressure waves (sound) into electrical impulses in 1870. In the 1950s, Bell Laboratories developed the first effective speech recognizer for numbers. By the 1980s, two distinct types of commercial products were available. The first offered speaker-independent recognition of small vocabularies. It was most useful for telephone transaction processing. The second, offered by Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Dragon Systems, and IBM, focused on the development of large-vocabulary voice recognition systems so that text documents could be created by voice dictation. (www.allbusiness.com/ management/3603917-2.html) Modern voice recognition technologies involve quite complicated and sophisticated methods and algorithms. One of the methods applied recently in speech synthesis is hidden Markov models (HMM). The reason why HMMs are used in speech recognition is that a speech signal could be viewed as a piece-wise stationary signal or a short-time stationary signal and because they can be trained automatically, simple and computationally feasible to use. (www.wikipedia.com)

Recent technological advances have made recognition of more complex speech patterns possible. The availability of fast computers with inexpensive mass storage capabilities has enabled researchers to run many large scale experiments in a short amount of time. In fact, speech recognition systems with reasonable performance can now run in real time using high-end workstations without additional hardware.

Voice recognition technologies can now be applied on any particular real world-applications like texting in cellular phones. Since, it is used to automate many tasks that previously required hands-on human interaction. It can also serve as a data entry, command & control and also for document preparation.

This research is about integrating voice recognition on cellular phones. People dont have to use their thumbs to text because texting will be in a form of dictation. This means that, the person will dictate his/her message and the phone will automatically convert it into text. This is a challenging and worthwhile research that can be rewarding in many ways.

Trifles by Susan Glaspell

Summary

One day, Lewis Hale dropped by the house of John Wright to ask him if he wants to share a telephone line with him. When he arrived, he saw Mr. Wright’s wife, Minnie Foster, sitting on a rocking chair. He asked her about Mr. Wright and found out that he was dead. Minnie Foster said that, someone strangled a rope around Mr. Wright’s neck while they were asleep. After what happened, Ms. Foster was under the probation of the local police as she was the primary suspect.

The following day an investigation took place at the house of the victim. Henry Peter, a sheriff, George Henderson, an attorney together with Lewis Hale, Lewis’ wife and Peter’s wife went to conduct the investigation. The group gathered at the kitchen first. After that, they decided to search the whole house from the bedroom upstairs to the barn outside. While the men went upstairs, the ladies remained in the kitchen while gathering some things to be brought to Minnie. While gathering things, both of them got the chance to talk privately. They talk about the personality of Mr. Wright and the younger years of Minnie Foster. While looking for useful things, Mrs. Hale found a dead canary with a broken neck inside the sewing box of Minnie. She speculated that it was killed by Mr. Wright and that pushes Minnie to kill him. The two ladies found out how miserable Minnie’s life is when Mr. Wright is still alive. Before, Minnie used to be a cheerful woman full of spirit but after their marriage her whole world changed. She was moved into a creepy house where she can’t even see the road. Every time Mr. Wright is at the farm, she is left alone. The ladies felt that Minnie felt so much isolation and loneliness. The bird that used to sing for her was killed by her husband. It cost her to lose her mind and killed Mr. Wright.

Knowing all this, the ladies did not tell it to the men and chose to conceal the real motive behind the crime by hiding the sewing box.

Character s

1. Lewis Hale – the neighbor of Mr. and Mrs. Wright who’s also a farmer and the one first to discover the murder

2. Mrs. Hale – a very observant person who notices most of the clues, wife of Lewis hale and a friend of Minnie

3. Henry Peter – the sheriff assigned to investigate the case

4. Mrs. Peter – wife of Mr. Peter, very cautious person who shows sympathy for Minnie

5. George Henderson – the attorney that will prosecute Minnie, the youngest among the characters, harsh in words, sarcastic, judgmental

Themes

Gender differences

In almost all parts of the story, we can see that there is a difference between genders. Men show dominion over women. They tend to have high positions in the society like the sheriff and the attorney. They are sarcastic, analytical, harsh and rough. Women on the other hand were intuitive, deliberative and more sensitive to the needs of others. These differences show that men and women have different capabilities.

Isolation

One of the reasons why Minnie has committed the crime is isolation. When she was still single, she used to have social life, she used to wear pretty clothes, she used to sing and mingle with her peers. But, when she married John Wright her colorful world changed. She was often alone in the house with no one to talk to, she can’t even see the road and no one came to visit her, her pretty clothes turns to drab and most of all, her singing bird was killed by her husband. The effects of isolation drove Minnie to lose her sanity.

Moral Lesson

The moral lesson of the story is, do not tolerate the wrong doings of other people just because you felt sympathy for it. We should always remember that a mistake added by another mistake will just worsen things. Mrs. Peter and Mrs. Hale could be considered accomplices of Minnie for what they did. They put judgment into their own hands without considering the law. They too were criminals.

One has not the right to judge whether a person deserves to die because of what he did. Remember, only God has the right to do so because he owned this life we had. No matter how bad a person is, considering that he is a son of God, one has not the right to judge him nor has he the right to condemn him.

The two ladies lack the realization that, what if the same thing happened to them? Isn’t it unfair? The issue here is about the morality of a person. How could you conceal the truth when you are capable of thinking rationally? How could it feel so right when everything seems so wrong?

Computational Determination of Human Beauty Through Face Recognition Algorithms and Geometrical Analysis

Each individual has different perception of what beautiful is and everybody wants to be called beautiful. Nowadays, if someone thinks she is ugly it is not a problem as long as she has money. Everyday, the numbers of individuals who have plastic or cosmetic surgeries are increasing and it is well accepted by the society. In fact, teenagers were enumerable than adults. According to the ASPS, over 333,000 people 18 years and younger had plastic surgery in 2005, up from about 306,000 in 2000. (http://www.kidshealth.org)

There are different ways how to judge a person’s beauty. Some will look at the physical attributes of a person while others look on the personality. But surgeons like Dr. Sherrell J. Aston, professor of surgery at New York University believed that a beautiful face is symmetrical, proportional and harmonious. (http://abcnews.go.com)

This research is about integrating facial recognition technology in identifying whether a person is beautiful or not. Humans have always had the innate ability to recognize and distinguish between faces, yet computers only recently have shown the same ability. Facial recognition began during 1964 and 1965 when Bledsoe, along with Helen Chan and Charles Bisson worked on using the computer to recognize human faces. Given a large database of images and a photograph, the problem was to select from the database a small set of records such that one of the image records matched the photograph. (www.en.wikipedia.org)

The researchers believe that it is possible to design an intelligent computer

system that can identify the areas of a person’s face which needs enhancement or

which needs correction.

What Happens When There's No More Rhyme?

Well, me and my friends just had a videoke marathon at Ellen's house a while ago and one of the song that I sang was entitled No More Rhyme. So, what will happen when there's no more rhyme? Eventually, when there's no more rhyme there's no more "kilig factor". At the beginning of a relationship, a person really tries to be compatible with his/her partner so as to jive in with his/her differences in any aspect for that matter. Oftentimes, specially when a relationship lasted for quite sometimes, the rhyme usually fades away. Now, what could be the reason for rhyme to fade? Based on my own experience, it will gradually fade when a person expected to much of his/her partner and these expectations weren't met. When a relationship lost its rhyme it will not succeed!

So Sick!

Hello! People. I was absent today. I prefer not to attend school. Hehehe! Pero dili daw ko absenot! Hahahihi! Actually, I was making myself busy here. I'm trying to make the most of my time. Bwahahaha! Busy ug friendster! Well, I have a lot of deadlines to catch up. I have my chapter 1 for our thesis which I am almost done with. I just have to make some polishing. I don't mind the logic project! It'll just make me sick! I'm so sick of it! Bahala na si Batman! Harhar! That's not all people! I'm very sick of paying the monthly bills and doing the budget on regular basis! It has always been a nightmare for me. Kasi, I'm the type of person who usually spend my money very unwisely! That's why I end up with lots of credits. Huhuhu! College pako daghan nako ug utang! Great! So, how was your day today guys? I hope you had a good time.

What A Day!

Today's the 2nd day of our prelim exams. Whoah! I'm mentally exhausted! It's really annoying that you'd study everything and the exam wasn't worth it! Some of the questions were out of the world and some of it will drive you nuts! Especially with our abstract algebra. My brain got almost brainwashed! Huhuhuh! All of the questions were BLOODY! But thanks to our cheating arrangement, I was able to get some cheated answers. Wakokok! Tomorrow will be the last day, but I think it'll be getting tougher! Good luck to us all! I'm very sleepy and tired coz i'd just went to roxas to do our project but I'll try to scan my notes. Maybe I'll remember some of it. Oyasumi nasai!