triangle----------Mandy 2

When it is my turn to post e-journal online, it means that our bridging course is going toward an end. We have done many things together for the past one and a half year, which have turned us from strangers to family members of this fantastic group. There are a lot of things beyond language could express and I still want to say, but there is a movie makes me feel more eager to share. It is called triangle.
The movie describes a story under an infinite loop. The leading character Jess once went sailing with another five friends and met a rain storm which turned their boat over. Fortunately, a huge cruise ship passed by and picked them up. However they found nobody in the huge old ship and they have no idea where this huge ship is heading. While six of them separated to search help, five of them were killed by a hooded man except Jess. When it came to Jess, she fight against him very hard and pushed him into the sea. I thought it was the end of the story, but the real horror just about to arrive. While she standing on the board, she saw a group of people yelling for help on a wreckage of a tiny little boat. They were exactly the same group who had just been killed by the hooded man. That is the same people who companied her went sailing and ran into the rain storm, including another Jess! After several rounds, she finally realized that she was trapped in an infinite loop and the only hope to get out of it is that piece of wreckage where she came from. And when all the six people died, another round began which means another six would step on to the ship and experience exactly what the previous six has gone through. So she could do nothing but hooding herself and killing all of them in order to get onto the wreckage. But the result was the same as the previous Jess—she was pushed in to the sea by the next Jess. I once again thought it was the end; however, she did not die and was washed ashore on the beach where her house located. She went back home and found another Jess and her son was doing what exactly she had done in the past. Maybe because the desire of returning to normal life was too strong, she killed that Jess and took over her son. She got into a traffic accident when she drove her son to the harbor to stop her friends sailing. She was supposed to die but it seems not. A man offered her a lift to harbor and she went sailing with friends again, which finally finish this big loop.
I suffered a lot in the following three days for thinking about this movie, and I finally got what is recycling in this infinite loop. The key is Jess was dead right in front of the movie! The man who offered her a lift was not a driver at all! He was the god of death who was going to take her to the other world! She betrayed her promise to him and received the punishment just like Aeolus’s son, Sisyphus, who has to endlessly pushing a stone to the mountain top and watches it rolling down, in order to pay for his guilt for cheating the Death. That was not the end of my thought.

What if life is just one big infinite loop? All the things that we are trying so hard are just like following a script of a movie and we keep repeating all these unconsciously?

Any science fiction that involves time as a scalar such as the time traveler’s wife and trisome will make people sink into ponders.

So, anyway, never cheat the god of death!

Creative Way to Pay off College Loans Jessy

With college costs soaring every year, more students are getting heavier loans to pay for tuition fees. Recently some creative ways to lessen the burden become popular and they are accomplished through online organizations like SponsorChange.org, IndieGoGo, CharityforDebt, and ChipIn. These organizations not only provide students borrowers volunteering opportunities, but also directly connect them with donors willing to help. By conducting volunteering work, students can exchange for money and enhance their resumes simultaneously. For example, Breanna Zwart, a 2007 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, earned $400 totally for volunteering for five hours at a local senior center’s spa in four sessions. The other way is to reach out the masses and ask for microdonations straight forward with the help of social networking. Max Stephenson from New York University raised more than $12,000 within two years. Compared to Max, Jacqueline Merkher, 22, a trained artist with a Pratt Institute undergraduate degree was unlucky to only collect $850. While the success of Max lies in newness and boldness, with more students joining the campaign, people might become numb and unaffordable to the urgency of tuition fees. Ensuing effort made by some websites is to give donors something meaningful in return, and launch special programmes like a pilot program in 2011. I think these approaches to pay for tuition fees are really creative and have done great good to some students, and they tend to be more popular with more students joining the campaign; however, once the demands of students exceeds the saturation point, then the effectiveness of methods will get discounted. At this point innovation and creativity can save the situation. In this case, the saturation point refers to the maximum of money people are willing to donate and volunteering opportunities they can provide. Just as a big cake is shared among too many people, everyone can only get a small slice. We can discern that Max Stephenson sets an example for students struggling with the soaring costs, and then they imitate his behaviour to turn to those social networking sites. When many copycats came into sight, they did not receive a satisfying result. Comparing Max and those copycats, we find that Max actually acts as a pioneer, who has discovered a potential market, while other followers verify the value of the market and then attempt to take up part of it. Usually they will not live up to their expectations unless they improve the original idea significantly. The quote by Albert Einstein “problem cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them” emphasizes the importance of creativity as well as innovation. Indeed, this case can be extended to real life. The battle on markets of smartphones between Apple and other companies has become fiercer, but iphone always has its place in the market. (Jeff,2010) Because Apple products has device consolidation, this characteristic distinguishes itself from other smartphones. In conclusion, following others all the way will never make you beyond the first original one, so what is more important is innovation and creativity. In this article some organizations have adjusted the policy and advocated that students give something meaningful in return, therefore we may look forward to more microdonations brought by the improvement. Reference: Jeff. V, January 25,2010, Best Smartphone for IT: Blackberry vs. iPhone vs. Android, Retrieved from: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/mowi/article.php/3860411/Best-Smartphone-for-IT-Blackberry-vs-iPhone-vs-Android.htm