Daily Stuff--9/27/2012

Languages--Chinese:

I watched episode 68 of Travel in Chinese. This episode was about visiting the Huaqing Pool, another popular tourist destination in Xi'an.

Articles:

There were two interesting articles on the Yahoo!Finance website. The first one was about majors that are the most satisfying and pay the highest. Engineering is the major that leads to the highest paying jobs whereas social work leads to very low paying jobs. But money isn't the only factor. Most people seem to say that careers like nursing and special education are the most satisfying because they involve helping people more directly than an engineer does. Generally, people try to strike a balance between high-paying and satisfying so they end up earning a medium wage with a job that is fairly satisfying.

The second article was about the rising debt among college students. Because of the economy, it's difficult for a lot of them to find decent jobs straight out of college so they're stuck with the debt for longer. The debt has risen among all socioeconomic statuses but the middle and lower classes are suffering the most because of it.

Philosophy:

I read about the idea of an entity being the sum of its parts. This is an important concept for applying the law of identity to entities. They aren't static. They change, some more than others. For some entities, all that changes is maybe their location, but for others, change is in their very nature and one of the only constants about that entity.

Internships:

I looked at Dragon Medical Practice Edition on nuance.com. It's intended to be used by physicians and it speeds up the process of updating a patient's electronic file. Typing takes too long so if doctors can simply speak what they want to write and have the computer transcribe it, it saves a lot of time.

To-Do:

• Italian lecture
• The first class covered the basics of any language (name, date, "how are you?", "where are you from?", age, etc) as well as basic vocabulary (all verbs) like "to eat", "to drink", and "to sing". At least the lectures are taught entirely in Italian though the professor is teaching under the assumption that this is everyone's first Italian class ever. 
• LIGN 110 lecture (Phonetics)
• The first class was mostly spent going over the syllabus and course requirements. But the last twenty minutes or so were spent going over what phonetics isn't. What it isn't is spelling. In English, several letters can make up one sound. For example, the "gh" in "laugh" is one sound, [f]. Also, the same sound can be represented by different letter clusters. For [f], it's "gh" or "ph" most commonly. The reason for the difference is that certain words have origins in different languages which means the spelling follows a certain pattern for one word but might follow a different pattern for another word. In phonetics, one sound is represented by one symbol. 
• Read Udacity article about self-driving cars
• Didn't get to it today. Will do tomorrow.
• Watch video on blog layout
• Done
• Customize header to reformat the quotes
• Will do tomorrow.