Big Brother is watching you

I've come across an interesting article about about monitoring. It is just incredible how governments have been observing us and violating our privacy.

You should absolutely read this article if you're interested in this topic (and in my opinion everyone has to has an interest in these incredible activities that have been recording every single part of our life for quite a while now)!

It is shocking to which extent the book "1984" by George Orwell predicted today's life. I've read some extracts from the book and unfortunately he was absolutely right with his assumptions about life in the 21st century.  I am certainly going to read this book as soon as I've finished my exams. 

This article is about the GCHQ, the British version of the NSA. They assure giving pertinent information to the British government and the author of the article explains how they manage to spy on everyone using modern means of communication.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/legal-loopholes-gchq-spy-world

Culture presentations

As you all know, last week on Wednesday and Thursday the culture presentations organized by the SUK2 class took place. I had the opportunity to see some fascinating presentations - by the way, all of the speakers I saw did a great job. I spent quite a while watching presentations about various topics and time went by so quickly. I learned a lot and I'm kind of sad that I couldn't watch more presentations (too many other courses, sorry) as there were so many other extremely interesting presentations. 

I watched 11 American and 3 Irish presentations (which were particularly interesting as I had never heard about those topics before). 


AMERICAN PRESENTATIONS:

1. Comic books and superheroes (Lucie Bois)
2. Harlem, New York City: Between legacy and change (Louis Nguyen)
3. Hurricane Prepardness (Claudia Schwaiger) 
4. Two Heroines of American Aviation: Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman (Orsolya Csizmar)
5. Religion made in America: Scientology (Harald Pasch)
6. Racial segregation as depicted in two movies (Tiana Jerkovic)
7. Why on earth would anyone live in Tornado alley? !!(Anna Agabani)
8. Painted America - Famous American paintings refleccting American culture in the 20th century (Natascha Ramic)
9. Recent Gun Discussions in the States (Stefanie Almer)
10. The Amish country (Anita Muzek)
11. TV shows depicting social issues (Christine Hartinger)

I really appreciated all of them and it was not easy to decide on 5 topics for the KGP. Those are all topics I could talk about, even though I didn't even know that I was interested in such a them before listening to the presentation. The best example is the one about Painted America: at first I thought that I wasn't really in to art and I just listened because I was there but actually Natascha managed to present her culture project in a great way and I loved it. 

However, we have to take decisions in life and I chose the following 5 culture presentations for the KGP:

1. Comic books and superheroes
2. Hurricane Preparedness
3. Religion made in America: Scientology
4. The Amish country
5. TV shows depicting social issues

IRISH PRESENTATIONS:

1. Kilmainham Gaol (Carola Ponjevic)
2. The hidden meanings of the children of Lir (Dajana Savic)
3. Gerry Conlon reflects on the case of the Guildford Four (Emina Ribo)

These topics were completely new to me and I appreciated learning something about the Irish culture.