Organ Donation

Recently I have heard an interesting podcast about organ donation. In 1954 the first successful living human to human organ transplantation took place. One of the twin brothers was dying and the other one donated him one of his kidneys. According to statistics, about half a million transplantations have been done so far.

Organs are a system of cells and tissues performing certain functions in a body. With age most organs tend to deteriorate. That is why during such operations young organs are preferred. I was very surprised to learn that doctors can transplant almost any organ: a kidney, a heart, a leaver, bones, blood. For example, in 2003 they transplanted a tongue, or in 2005 a woman had a face transplant (she got it from a suicide victim). I was surprised to learn that the leaver is the only organ which can regenerate itself. For example if it is split in halves, and one halve is transplanted, both halves will soon get the former size.

Some organs, such as the kidney, are relatively easy to get, but some others, such as the heart, are very hard to find. If a patient needs a heart transplant, he/she has to wait for about 6-7 years to get it.

Further, in the podcast I heard that there are special organizations, such as OPO (Organ procurement organization) which are responsible for organ recruitment and evaluation. There are also responsible for talking to the family members of the dead person whose organs are going to be transplanted, and get their agreement on paper. Some peoples, such as gypsies treat organ donation negatively. They think that a person’s body will be considered impure if it has an organ missing. In Japan, organ donation rate is very law, too.

Regional Variation

According to David Crystal's "Encyclopedia of the English Language", geographical origin is one of the most important factors that causes variety in  language use. In one of my previous podcast I have mentioned other factors affecting language use, such as social status and gender distinctions. 

When we talk to a person,often by his/her accent or the dialect he speaks, it is easy to say from which part of the country or which country he comes from. Different dialects and accents are usually formed when people are separated geographically or socially. It is important to note that accents and dialects refer to different aspects; by accent we usually mean pronunciation features. For example, in some regions people might drop the initial h in the word hold. 

A dialect refers to grammar and vocabulary features. For example, in some regions people say "They really good" instead of saying "They are really good", or " Is it ready you are?" instead of " Are you ready?".

people usually have different opinions and attitudes toward various accents and dialects.Some people speaking with a particular accent are treated negatively or are often mocked at by those who speak other dialects. However, I do not support this attitude, as each dialect has the right to be respected as they have their own grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation peculiarities.

There is also an interesting phenomenon called regional accommodation. When people from different regions communicate with each other their speech patterns tend to become alike.This mainly refers to accents. When you talk to a person speaking with a different accent you may pick it up.

Thus, it does not matter which part of the country a person comes from, as all the accents and dialects should be respected equally.

KARMA

According to the podcast about karma, in the eastern philosophy it is a religious concept of action or deed, which affects the entire life cycle of cause and effect.

 I used to think that karma is similar to fate. However, further in the podcast I learned that these are two different concepts. Karma is not fate, for humans act with free will, creating their own destiny. In eastern philosophy, they say, ''If one sows goodness, he will reap goodness; if one sows evil, he will reap evil''. I think, this can be interpreted in the following way; if a person does good things his karma will be positive. They say, '' Karma is going to bite you some day'', which means that sooner or later a person will have to pay for the evil actions in his past life.

In Hinduism, karma is usually considered to be a negative thing. However, one can get a positive karma. This is possible, if the person performs all the duties of his social status (cast). If he does this, in the next life he will get a higher social status. In Hinduaism, karma clings to the soul and undergoes transmutations. Your soul goes from body to body until it reaches its ultimate salvation. Karma is a universal law, independent of God or gods. No god can master one's karma. And an interesting thing I'd like to mention here is that even Gods are subjected to Karma.

In hinduism there are three types of karma: Prorabda, which are the experiences during a person's life, Sensida, which is a store of karma, which will come in future life, and Agmen, your actions which are going to be added to your store.

China's One-Child Policy

According to the podcast I have listened to, China’s one-child policy limits couples to one child. This policy was established by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979 with the aim of limiting China’s population growth. Although initially it was designed as a temporary measure, it continues up to now. The policy has prevented 400 million births since then.

I have learned that there are more restrictions in urban areas than in rural ones. If you live in a rural area and your first child is a boy, you can apply for a permission to have the second child. And if you are an ethnic minority, you can get a permission to have 3 children. In order to prevent second pregnancy, there are fines and even pressures by the Chinese government to abort a pregnancy. In 2007, there were reports that in the south-western Guangxi Autonomous Region of China, officials were forcing pregnant women without permission to give birth to have abortions and levying steep fines on families violating the law. As a result, riots broke out and some may have been killed, including population control officials.

Now that millions of sibling-less people in China are now young adults in or nearing their child-bearing years, a special provision allows millions of couples to have two children legally. If a couple is composed of two people without siblings, then they may have two children of their own, thus preventing too dramatic of a population decrease.

As a result of this one child policy, the Chinese culture has been accused of preferring boys over girls and encouraging abortion. One of the reasons of preferring boys might be that in China there is a Patriarchal society. Besides, boys can earn more than girls. And of we take into account the fact that 70 % of the Chinese population does not have a pension, families neeed a boy to take care of them as they grew old. At present male-to-female sex ratios are high both in rural and urbun areas. This can lead to serious social problems, in future it will be very hard for a man to find a woman and make a family.

I think that this policy violates human rights, and couples are the only ones to decide on how many children they are going to have.The government is not supposed to prevent it.

Literacy and Reading

The podcast I have listened to deals with literacy and reading, in particular. We usually take it for granted that a five or six year-old child develops the ability to read to acquire knowledge about the word surrounding him. However, the actual history of literacy began about 6000 years ago when people started to use the first written symbols.Those were initially used for commercial purposes. It took rather a long time to end with written symbols used for communication.

 Various hieroglyphs, icons and other characters have been used as means of communication since ancient times. Later, most of these characters developed into an alphabet, where each letter encoded a particular sound. However, nowadays in some countries, for example in China, they still use hieroglyphs. Both using hieroglyphs and using alphabets have their own advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of having an alphabet is that if you know how the word is spelled you can easily pronounce it. But communication is possible only if people share a common language. The advantage of having hieroglyphs is that people speaking different languages can communicate with each other by interpreting those hieroglyphs. For example, in China, which is a multicultural country, people speaking different languages can use and understand those hieroglyphs.

It was interesting for me to learn that Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, objected to reading and favoured a dialogue. Reading was like the internet of his time. He thought that it hinders critical thinking: people believe everything they read. In reading they have no chance of asking questions or arguing. He opposed reading to a dialogue saying that in face to face communication you can always have the chance to ask the speaker to explain something, or to argue something.

In my opinion Socrates was right, nothing can compare to real communication. Of course, books are great providers of information, but it does not mean that we should believe everything we read. We should always analyse any type of information we get, and also should be able to show a critical approach to what we read.