Oh yeah! my blogging experience...

I almost forgot that I had to write this last post... end of semester, you know how it is, don't you? pretty busy lately.. anyway, I did enjoy writing on this blog, even if it took plenty of my time, it was kind of a nice homework to do. I like the fact that I had to write about things that I like in life, and about the career I chose to take, so it didn't feel that I was working on an assigment really. The only difficult was the language, because it is kind of hard sometimes just to switch languages like that, so having to write on this blog almost every week helped me to do that with less difficulties. I think it helped me improving my english so I'm happy for that. Now I feel a little more confident about my english and that's good.

I think that blogging in english class was a good way of learning the language, at least how to make sentences and grammar. I think teacher's comments on some of the assigments were very helpful. Another good fact about blogging, at least in my case, is that I got to write an entire blog by myself. I had tried to do it before, last year for some english class as well, but it got completely over me so I just dropped it. Now I know that it isn't that complicated and I wouldn't mind if I have to write another blog in a future, I actually like the idea of having one.

I got a very good blogging experience, in every way.

· Do schools kill creativity? · · · Review

This is a twenty minutes talk about how schools kill creativity, by Sir Ken Robinson. He starts his speech in a very entertaining way which he keeps all along the conference. Even if he seems to be a comediant sometimes, he is always centred on his idea.

At the beginning, he gives us some dimensions about creativity's magnitude. Just after everybody has made a picture of their creativity and its dimensions, Sir Robinson introduces a bigger subject: children's creativity. Anecdote over anecdote that make you wander about what happens in the transition from kids to adults that seems like we are loosing creativity, capacity for innovation? Sir Robinson says that education is happening and that's why we loose capacity and become "robots" programed to do things just in certain way. He celebrates children for not being frightened of being wrong:

"I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original, and by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity, they have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes, An we are now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make, and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities."

He points at how education systems is structure in the way to meet the needs of indutrialism, so there is a hierarchy of subjects, where the ones on the top are the ones that are going to be useful to work, and the ones in the bottom, are subjects like, drama, music, arts, dance, that you may like, but the system minimises their importance because they don't go hand in hand with industrialism, so it's not easy to get a job to survive on the world.
He invites us to rethink our view of intelligence, considering intelligence is diverse, dynamic and distinct; to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children; to educate their whole being, so they can face the future and make something of it.

Mathematics

One of my favourite subject is Mathematics, because it makes me open my mind and the world around me.
I had to take this class the first year I got into this university. It was not easy, because it required a lot of time to study. My mathematic's teacher, Cristian Reyes, was very good. I like the methodology he uses to teach. He likes to demostrate different arithmetic and calculus functions as he trys to get us to help him to elaborate those demostrations. Everything that I learnt and the mathematical thinking that I got by doing all that math's studying is very useful to me now and I can make use of it in other areas like physics, chemistry, genetics and statistics for example.

I believe that mathematics is very essential to different careers, even if it is a hard science, I think it should be taught in all careers with no exemption. I say this because in Anthropology, this subject is not given due its "pure mathematical nature", and I'm not agree whit that, because mathematics is a formal science, which are essential in formulating and evaluating hypothese, theories, and laws, both in discovering and describing how things work (natural sciences) and how people think and act (social sciences), so mathematics constitutes the basis for every method of analysis that we use doing investigation, and I think it would really helps us if we can understand it
Another reason I got to like it, is because by learning mathematics I exercise my mind turning it more agile which is good for the daily living

···My·Ideal·Job···

My ideal job would be to work as a physical anthropologist in some lab outside Santiago, would be nice to work in some place in Chile's big north or in the south. What I'm looking in this job to be ideal for me is not easy to find, but I'm pretty confident about it. I would like to count with a fun and good group of coworkers with a lot of team spirit. This job would has to count with a good infrastructure, with all the necessary tools to do a good research. I would like to have the opportunity to do some field work by myself, to collect my own bioarchaeology material, as well. Since I don't have banknotes growing up in my trees at home, it is also important -not essential- to mention a good salary, so I can live by myself and give economic support to my family. And talking about family, work schedule must be flexible so I can separate work from life a few hours a day, to spend time with my family and to do sports or other hobbies I have.
It is important that this job helps me to better myself as an anthropologist so I can lead better investigations everytime, having more experience and knowledge to do so, in order to be really helpful to society.

Finding this kind of job isn't easy, considering all my requirements, especially talking about investigation fields, and for this job to be place outside the big city, because here in Santiago are most of the main labs and study centres. the same about salary, because most of the times isn't enough to maintain the same life level, especially when you want to have a family, which is really important to me. So I have to recognize that an ideal job doesn't always go hand in hand with the career that you want, so in the case I may not find it, I'm willing to accept other king of job -even if is not too related to anthropoly- that can supply me with new perspectives to learn new things, and with the kind of life that I want.

My Future

In the future I hope to work in some investigation about human features. About that time I expect to have studied at least a master's degree in forensic genetics, in Europe, in countries like Spain, England or France. I see myself traveling for different countries, even though it might be difficult, I would like to visit Japan, Turkey, Greek, Egypt and the Amazonas. Since I expect to be traveling at the time after I'm done with my master's degree, I'm not suppose to be working while I do so but getting to know a lot of beautiful places everywhere in the world.

After travelling, I would like to come back to Chile to work in Legal Medical Service as forensic athropologist. So after a time of five years from here I would like to own a house in some nice city in the south of Chile, and maybe start a family

In summary, in five years from now, I would like to be a graduated anthropologist, to study to get another degree, to travel around the world and to start a settled life.

The Best in My Field

CHARLES DARWIN (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882)

Since I don't really have a physical anthropologist to look up as a "god" in my field, I decided to write about Charles Darwin, one of the most famous biologists of all time, because even if he is not directly from my field of studies, he has made big contributions to anthropology with his work in evolution of the species.

Darwin was an english naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection. In his book On The Origin Of The Species (1859) he established evolutionary descendant with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. He examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent Of Man, And Selection In Relation To Sex (1871), followed by The Expression Of The Emotions In Man And Animals (1872).

Darwin's theories have reached not only to anthropology, but to sociology and psychology too. But the interpretation of his biological theories haven't been always a complement to social theories in a good way thou. The natural selection theory, for example, brought support to racist theories in the 19th century. On the other hand, Darwin's theories have been a good support to cultural materialism. So, for good or bad, a lot of social theories are based on darwin's ones, and that is the importance that he has to me, because in other words, his theories, specially the ones about evolution, have given the necessary tools to anthropolgy to step in scientific fields as physical anthropology to study human evolution and culture from a different perspective.

The picture above is the first sketch of an evolutionary tree of life ever done, by Darwin when he was 28 years old, in 1837, trying to figure out a way to explain his theories. The sentence "I think" can be read in the upper side of the draw.

My Career

I decided to study Physical Antropology becouse is a career that is a mix of different areas. These are, social and cultural vision, medical knowledge and arqueologycal methods. Other reason is that I like investigation and whit this I can descover and resolve some problems in actual and ancient.
Professionals contribute to society of differents ways. First, someone investigate genetics deceases and how these are present in different populations. Other professionals have been dedicated to osteopathology, that are asociated whit life ways, and they make use of this knowledge to help people in prevention of this posibilitates of get a pathology. Finally, they contribute to re-built the prehistory and hystori, showing us, how did people live in that time.
Tools that need to continue working are tecnology to work some samples. We need continue stdynd becouse the cience progess and we must stay preparated to physical antropology advance.
My favourite subject is genetics, becouse I can study microsamples that will show me differents changes in the populations. Genetics is a area very complete, where biologycal evolution can ber described for this area, becouse of, other component, like natular selection, associated to wheather, depredation, demography, etc, are more difficult of investigated.
Physical Antropology is a science that must continue working and developing, becouse it can give us some much answer of differet byological process.

This is the photograph that I like!

This picture was taken by a friend on Easter holidays in San Esteban two years ago. It shows children playing in a playground, that was built by a group of friends and I, in a poor suburb of that city.
We thought this proyect to make local children happy. Before the construction of the playground, this place was a very ugly and contaminated landfill. It was a hard job to make that place look as pretty and enjoyable as you can see in the picture. those kids were really excited after we were done with the construction.

This picture remember me all the trouble we had to go through in order to get this place running, because, like I said before, it wasn't easy. We had to get permission from the community first, then go to buy all the construction's materials to start working on it and we only had one weekend, so it was a pretty tight schedule. It took us two days to get the playground ready for the big opening.
We were 12 happy hardworker-friends looking to all those kids playing and laughing on their new game's place, and that was the most amazing moment of all.

We had a lot of fun working as a team, specially knowing that we were going to make others happy with our work.
All this made me feel that if you really want to do something, it is possible to make it happen.
I'm very proud of what we did.

So now you know why this picture is so special to me, and those children smiling are the best :)

Web Site

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

I knew this web site, becouse genetic's teacher show me when I had a homework. Since that time, pubmed has been a very important tool to my knowledge like physical antropology.

PubMed is a web site of Medical Information. It's a service of US National Library of Medicina and National Institutes of Health . Here you can find different articles from a lot of journals. These journal publish papers that are very important becouse they show us progress of the different sciences associatted whit the medicine. This information is a great help becouse provide relevant evidence like for example genes that are involved in some deseases or relationships between animals and human that delivery information from evolution of diferents species.
I usually visit this web site to look for molecular information of deseases humans, nucleotyde secuences and background of any subjects.

Camera

Camera is a piece tecnology. It takes a pictures, and in the time it had changed in size, tecnology and quality. My first camera I got it when I was a child and it was a present from my parents. That camera used roull film.

Actually I have a Digital Camera and I use it when a I go to interesting place. I prefer take a picture from natural views or cultural built. I use it sometimes, when I want capture a beautiful or important moment in my life. I like camera becouse whit it I can capture beatiful imagen and important moment for me. This piece of tecnology is very important, becouse, whit it we can capture historic moments and diferent place that we can't enjoy or know becouse are faster. It's very important this tecnology becouse is a approach of different place that we can meet it.

First Post - Presentation.-

Hello, my name is Pamela Cañas Encina. I was born in September twenty sixth and I am twenty two years old. I'm studying Physical Anthropology in the University of Chile. I'm actually in fourth grade. I study in Santiago, but I live in Los Andes, a town which is one hour away from Santiago.
Besides study, I enjoy doing outdoors activities and sports like playing basketball, I also like to hang out with my friends and go to parties or to the cinema to watch a movie.
This is my first blog and I hope to be improving my english through the creation of this space.
Since I have never had a website before, I will also learn to build one by myself through the creation of this blog. I like the idea of having a blog because I think it is a good way to express some of my ideas out, about any subject given in classes.