Debby the TA’s Neighborhood

The article “Great leaders in the world” give us some examples of leaders’ character. One successful leader must have the ability to speak well in public, easy to know what others mind, to experience much having a grand horizon, and have a judgment view. The study by Howard Gardner, showing that one great leader should bring about story that makes the followers understand clearly, and well on embody it. The leader’s behavior can be an example of the message. For example, Margaret Thatcher gave the Britain a clear direction, trying to convince them follows her faith.  She encouraged the citizens to rebuild a vibrant country. During the Falklands War and after a terrorist bombing at the Conservative Party, she used her own courage to help many people. The other examples are Gandhi and Jean Monnet. Gandhi makes Indians and citizens of other nations believe that conflict didn’t be accompanied by violent. Jean Monnet made that the Europe didn’t have to remain a collection of hostile countries. The leaders who change the world have same vision for the future and been elastic in their lives. After all, they influence on millions of individuals.

The talents which are equipped by those leaders on this article are familiar with me, because I ever went to a 領袖培養 conference in my high school tine, the topics representing same. I think the natural leader has magic temperament to draw people’s attention. The leaders change the thinking of the followers, therefore, they should have more sharp thought and experiences than the other people. I totally agree with the importance of embody. It is so essential. After all, the leader must communicate with others at any time.

According to the psychological researches on the heart disease breaking out under the age of 50, Dr. Redford B. Williams dedicates that people who are hostile will lead premature death than those who are relaxed. Williams figures out the differences between the identified "Type A" and "Type B" men. The feature of Type A people are that they tend to be angry, cynical, stressful and will always act on  their anger and easily encounter more problems. On the contrary, Type B people are calm, trusting, relaxed and live a better lives.

In the report, the personality traits provide some information that may be the causes associating the early death of some people. Williams points out that hostile and nonhostile people seem to vary from the fundamentally different nervous system. Because of having weak nervous system, hostile people are hard to calm down and then will make the level of adrenaline in their bodies remain high; thus,they will stay unpleasantly aroused and continue to feel angry, Williams says.

Besides, Williams also mentions that those difference between hostile and nonhostile people appear in infancy. When they become upset, hostile people have large rises in blood pressure and have bigger chances to lead to damage of the heart and blood vessels than nonhostile people. However, Williams states, there is no evidence that the Type A personality is likely to die young but there is lots of evidence that people who are hostile and angry do.

In my opinion, I believe that being calm and relaxed will definitely benefit our health condition no matter how much evidence are claiming this idea. I think that people who are always in bad mood or feeling negative such as anger, anxiety, pressure will damage their mental and physical health. And I think why the negative feeling will do harm to us is because they will make our bodies running into a abnormal, irregular state disturbing the originally operating function. So, I suggest that we should try to be calm when facing problems or difficulties and relax ourselves when finishing a big project or feeling exhausted to make ourselves get chance to recharge and refresh then to start again.   

      The article “Great Leaders in the World”provides some common characteristics of the prominent leaders. A successful leader has to be capable of speaking well in public, having mutual understanding of other people, having the experience of traveling early in life to expand his horizon, and daring to challenge the authority in the proper ways. According to Howard Gardner, an outstanding leader has to create the message that can influence the followers’ feeling, and possess the ability to embody it. For example, Margaret Thatcher gave the direction of the future of the Britain, and made people believe that she could fulfill what she promised. In fact, she indeed showed her courage during the Falklands War and after the terrible bombing. Besides, the other kind of the leader is the one who is able to persuade his followers in the more complicated ways. For example, the Mahatma Gandhi and Jean Monnet are the best models of it. Mahatma Gandhi convinced citizens of the nation to believe that violence was not the only way to solve the conflict. Besides, Jean Monnet made certain that the Europe didn’t have to be the collection of the hostile countries. They provided the population a flexible thinking, changed their thoughts, and took the obstacles as chances.

      Thus, I think that the leader’s characters such as confidence, broad vision, courage, and the acceptance of other's opinions are quite important because they will present in his behavior and the way he deals with things, and they will influence the followers’ perspectives about whether the leaders have the potential to be a distinguished one.

The report said that the Japanese society had debated whether a convicted minor criminal should be executed since a youth, who was 18 years at that time, was accused of murder. It was a case in 1999, the youth killed a woman and her 11-month –old baby when he was 18. The woman’s husband insisted that the youth should be put in death, and this issue provoked much discussion in the public; even, the session of the court was televised by mass media.

In Japanese law, the person who is under the age of 20 is seen as a minor, and it is rare for a minor to be sentenced to death in Japanese. In the high court, the youth murderer was punished to life imprisonment in this case, but it seemed to lead to an argument among the public. The survey revealed that most of Japanese support death penalty, while human rights group against the capital punishment. Makoto Teranaka, secretary-general of Amnesty International Japan said that if the death penalty has to be preserved, we ought to prove that there are no alternative punishments.

In Taiwan, we have similar situation that the youth criminal can abate the punishment. According to criminal law, the minor, less than 20 years old, are too young to control their behavior, in other words, they are immature, so they should not be punished so severely. As far as I am concerned, it is not a good way to prevent youth from committed a crime. I think immature is not a reason that youth can evade punishment. We have to emphasized on our law education and in my opinion, it will be much better than just abate their punishments.  

News Resourse: http://www.chinapost.com.tw/asia/2008/04/23/153165/Japanese-man.htm

Here is the last assignment of this course

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Dr. Redford B. Williams ,a psychiatrist, pointed out that people who are angry and hostile are more possible to die earlier than calm and trusting people, which is different from the researchers have believed: Type A people are likely to have an early death because of heart disease. However, in 1980, a series of study shows that type A personality isn't fully related to heart disease.

In Dr. Williams's research, only hostility and anger in type A person may draw people to die faster. 118 lawyers joined this experiment when they were in law school. They had a personality test and people who received high scores on hostility traits were five times more probable to die before 50. In this case, rather than paranoia or social avoidance ,personalities such as anger and angry heavier are the powerful predicator of early death.

According to Dr. Williams, cynicism and anger can be seen in daily life. For those who has angry and hostile personality, they'll act on their anger when facing some upset situations. People who are not  hostile easily calm down when facing disappointing problems, but hostile people can't get rid of their anger easily. Thus,they may face more problems in everyday life.

Compared with nonhostile people, when becoming upset, the hostile people's blood pressure would get high easily, which is a  damage to heart and vessels. Nonhostile people are safe from the risk because their nervous system won't cause these pressure to their body. At last, Williams stated that no evidence that people of type A personality is likely to die young, but more evidence show that angry and hostile people do. 

In my opinion, I do feel surprised that not trust to others can be a cause to early death. However, I definitely believe that personalities such as anger and hostility would damage our health. When we are unsatisfied or mad at someone, we will become unhappy and somtimes feel uncomfortable. If we have the bad mood all the time, the health condition would decrease and thus our life-span may be shortened. I'm a demanding person. I examine everything in a high standard, especially my work. From time to time, I do feel upset when I screw up somthing or fail to make an achieve my goals. I easily get nervous when the working process is delayed. After reading this article, I think I'll try to change my perspective of my work and be nicer to myself. After all. easy and happy life is what I want, not pressure and bad health.    

     Dr. Redford B. Williams, who is a psychologist, has found that people angry and cynical are five times more likely to die under than people calm and trusting. Many researchers used to believe that there are a “Type A” people, who are under stress, working too hard, and always in a hurry. Besides, Dr. Meyer Friedman and Dr. Ray Rosenman, the cardiologists in San Francisco, identified that Type A people are twice as likely to suffer heart disease as relaxed men, who are labeled “Type B” people. Williams based his theory on several studies to lawyers. He found that those who received high scores on hostility traits were five times as likely to die before 50 as classmates who were not hostile. Although the personality traits, such as paranoia and social avoidance, are not related to early death directly, they still cause some emotions strong predictors of premature death. Furthermore, it seems that hostile and nonhostile people have different nervous systems and vessel structures. And these features are related to their characters and the reactions to things. Finally, “I think we should forget the Type A assumption because there’s no evidence that the Type A personality is likely to die young, but there’s a lots of evidences that people hostile and angry do.” stated Williams.

     I think this article is very interesting. Dr. Williams considers that the negative emotions, such as cynicism or anger, affect human body. In other words, he thinks that human emotions are related to their physical bodies. In fact, I have heard some kind of this concept in the past. For instance, if you always keep a cheerful mood, you will become young and not to be old soon. And I also believe this theory. Although I don’t have any evidence or theory to support my thinking, I still believe that keeping a cheerful mood can make me not only become young but also healthy. On the other hand, I think the negative emotions indeed damage our health as well. After all, it is not good to be cynical and angry. Therefore, no matter this theory is true or not, we should always be happy and try to avoid generating negative emotions.

Dr. Redford B. Williams has found that Cynicism and mistrust lead a person to premature death. Back to the 1970s, two cardiologists in San Francisco stated people under stress who work too hard and are always in a hurry were more likely to suffer heart disease. However, Williams claimed that only hostility and anger really lead to heart problem. In one of his findings, a 25-year study of 118 lawyers, personality traits that reflected cynical mistrust, anger, and angry behavior were strong predictors of premature death. Hostile people seem to have rather weaker nervous systems than nonhostile people, which can’t calm them down while they become upset.  Also, hostile people have larger rises in blood pressure; it can damage the heart and blood vessels in hostile people. To conclude, people who are hostile and angry, instead of people under too much stress, are likely to die young. I believe there’s still some relationship between overwork and premature death, and we’d better avoid working too hard as well as being hostile at the same time.

I’d heard that some workaholics died in their offices. At first, I was totally convinced that working too hard must lead to early death. After reading this article, I search some information of their death. However, I still found a few of them died from heart diseases. But their heart diseases were not caused but worsen to death by overwork. In other words, workaholics with certain heart problems tend to die earlier than those don’t overwork.  

On the other hand, in Taiwan’s soap opera, there are a lot of examples on somebody’s stroke for extremely anger. In reality, as this article confirmed, hostility and mistrust would hurt one person’s nerves and blood vessels, which lead one to premature death. Human being can hardly live alone. While surrounded by people, hostility and mistrust would let one so painful and stressful due to disbelieving everyone. How could a man be happy and satisfied when he considers everybody as enemy? Based on the thesis “mentality will affect physiology,” I completely agree that hostile people would die young.

I found this report on Taipei Times.

     Whether to abolish capital punishment seems to be a hard decision for the incoming Minister of Justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) because most people in Taiwan believe the commination of death penalty. However, abolishing capital punishment has been a global trend. Maintaining death penalty may be harmful to our nation image. Although it's contorversial, Wang chose to face it instead of avoiding it.

     In fact, there's almost 80% people in Taiwan against abolishing death penalty. However, if there were addition measures, such as setting sentence limits and a threshold on parole for life imprisonment, the opposition would drop to 40%. Therefore, Wang said that the ministry will study the complementary measures along with the possibility of abolishing the death penalty. According to the ministry figures, the number of executions has decreased for years. Thirty-two prisoners were executed in 1998, a number that shrank to 10 in 2001 and three each year between 2004 and 2006.

     Another thing is about the Prosecutor, Wu Wen Chung of the Supreme Court Prosecutors Office's Special Investigation Panel had said on Tuesday that “former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) should be executed” while chatting with reporters after a press conference. Although Wu said he was joking, Wang thought there needs an investigation. 

     I think it's really hard to say having death penalty is good or bad. Killing murderer actually doesn't do any good to the victims. The country uses law to ban killing, but the law can kill. It sounds kind of conflicting. I personally agree with abolishing death penalty because I think we shouldn't encourage brutality. However, due to traditional value, many people in Taiwan still can't accept putting murderers in prison for life long. They think that's too slight for them.

     The definition of the household force is that the trespass on body or the spirit between the family members. This force arises more and more people’s attention in the recent years. The following are some misunderstanding about it. First, only the violence between husband and wife is called household force. It’s wrong because violence between the people live together but don’t marry, the one of the spouse hit the other’s family, and even they are divorced are also called as household force. Second, the victims are always females. It’s not true because there’re males who suffer the violence but fear to ask for help, because people think it’s disreputable. However, the violence isn’t relevant to the sexual difference. Third, there’re few people are in this situation. In fact, there’re 30 to 35% of the couples are in the shadow of the violence, which points out the problem seems to become more serious. Fourth, the violence is not as serious as the victims say, or they will leave as soon as possible. There are many factors which influence the victims’ ways to deal with it. For example, the economic, traditional stress, and the social support will restrict the victims’ will to escape from it. The last but not least, the children in the violent family are much more possible to become the abuser. It’s the most common concept that most people agree; nevertheless, according to the report, there’re 70% of the children in the family won’t become abuser, and only 30% of them will be. I think this concept is why people label the children and produce a kind of the prejudice to them. From the above statements, I think we should pay more attention to the others, because this kind of violence is uneasy to discover. A bruise, scar, or a cut can be a signal for help. If we can notice it and give our hands in time, many tragedies can be prevented.

          I think the fascinating and meaningful gesture can represent mysterious Hip-Hop culture. We all know the Hip-Hop which occurs in our daily life and influences the world deeply, such as music or clothing. The gesture uses the thumb on top of middle finger and third finger, so it is just like a W. It has a very close relationship with Hip-Hop, while Hip-Hop has a lot of gestures but the one is the most famous. At the beginning of 1970, Black people from New York created the rap to convey their thought with music. Because of that, rappers want to do more powerful gestures to convey their idea validly. Hand gestures give the verses more energy, they work to emphasize certain words, and they add a visual element to listening experience. That is, the gesture has become not only the logo of Hip-Hop but a sign to represent cool, all right, or hail. We can see the gestures often appear in many movies from Hollywood meaning a lot of different behavior.

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