Cybersecurity

On January 12, 2010, Internet search engine giant Google announced that hackers based in China had launched a cyberattack on its personal e-mail service, known as Gmail. According to Google representatives, the attacks seemed to target the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, raising suspicions that the Chinese government was behind the infiltration.

The Google incident was one of the most highly publicized cyberattacks in recent years.

Called by the Economist the "fifth domain of warfare, after land, sea, air and space," cyberspace has opened up new possibilities for international clashes.

According to a report on cyberwarfare on the television newsmagazine 60 Minutes, "[T]he people who do these sorts of things are no longer teenagers making mischief. They're now likely to be highly trained soldiers with the Chinese army or part of an organized crime group in Russia, Europe or the Americas."

Cybersecurity is a problem that should be dealt with on the highest possible level.
Richard Clarke writes, "No company, no matter how large, can defend itself effectively against the techniques of sophisticated foreign cyber war organizations and intelligence services. They must rely on the government to so do."

It has become evident that cyberwarfare has emerged as a very real threat to national security in the 21st century.

Some analysts have predicted that cyberspace will be the next theater of war. Do you think countries will wage cyberwars against each other?

Different Ways to Pray by Naomi Shihab Nye

In her first collection of poetry, Different Ways to Pray, Nye explores the shared experiences and differences between cultures and she writes about the ordinary and the perspectives of people in other lands. Nye creates poetry from everyday scenes, celebrating the similarities between us all, as well as our diversity.

Different Ways to Pray

by Naomi Shihab Nye

There was the method of kneeling,

a fine method, if you lived in a country

where stones were smooth.

The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,

hidden corners where knee fit rock.

Their prayers were weathered rib bones,

small calcium words uttered in sequence,

as if this shedding of syllables could somehow

fuse them to the sky.

There were the men who had been shepherds so long

they walked like sheep.

Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—

Hear us! We have pain on earth!

We have so much pain there is no place to store it!

But the olives bobbed peacefully

in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.

At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,

and were happy in spite of the pain,

because there was also happiness.

Some prized the pilgrimage,

wrapping themselves in new white linen

to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.

When they arrived at Mecca

they would circle the holy places,

on foot, many times,

they would bend to kiss the earth

and return, their lean faces housing mystery.

While for certain cousins and grandmothers

the pilgrimage occurred daily,

lugging water from the spring

or balancing the baskets of grapes.

These were the ones present at births,

humming quietly to perspiring mothers.

The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,

forgetting how easily children soil clothes.

There were those who didn’t care about praying.

The young ones. The ones who had been to America.

They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.

Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones.

They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,

for the twig, the round moon,

to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.

And occasionally there would be one

who did none of this,

the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,

who beat everyone at dominoes,

insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,
and was famous for his laugh.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Different Ways to Pray” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995)

Blood by Naomi Shihab Nye

Blood

“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,”

my father would say. And he’d prove it,

cupping the buzzer instantly

while the host with the swatter stared.

In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.

True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.

I changed these to fit the occasion.

Years before, a girl knocked,

wanted to see the Arab.

I said we didn’t have one.

After that, my father told me who he was,

“Shihab”—“shooting star”—

a good name, borrowed from the sky.

Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”

He said that’s what a true Arab would say.

Today the headlines clot in my blood.

A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.

Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root

is too big for us. What flag can we wave?

I wave the flag of stone and seed,

table mat stitched in blue.

I call my father, we talk around the news.

It is too much for him,

neither of his two languages can reach it.

I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,

to plead with the air:

Who calls anyone civilized?

Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Blood” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995)

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952 - )

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1952. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and Nye spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas.

Nye received her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas and continues to live and work in the city. “My poems and stories often begin with the voices of our neighbors, mostly Mexican American, always inventive and surprising,” Nye wrote for Four Winds Press. “I never get tired of mixtures.”

In “Blood” Nye considers the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. She describes a café in combat-weary Beirut, bemoans “a world where no one saves anyone,” and observes “The Gardener” for whom “everything she planted gave up under the ground.”

After the World Trade Center bombing in 2001, Nye became an active voice for Arab-Americans, speaking out against both terrorism and prejudice.

The lack of understanding between Americans and Arabs led her to collect poems she had written which dealt with the Middle East and her experiences as an Arab-American into one volume. 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002) received praise for the timeliness of its message.

In 1997 Nye published Habibi, her first young-adult novel. Readers meet Liyana Abboud, an Arab-American teen who moves with her family to her Palestinian father’s native country during the 1970s, only to discover that the violence in Jerusalem has not yet abated. As Liyana notes, “in Jerusalem, so much old anger floated around…[that] the air felt stacked with weeping and raging and praying to God by all the different names.”

http://www.poetryfoundation.org

Naguib Mahfouz

The foremost novelist writing in Arabic traces his roots to the civilization of ancient Egyptians, seven thousands years ago.

Mahfouz has also wrought a change in Arabic prose, synthesizing traditional literary style and modern speech to create a new literary language understood by Arabs everywhere.

Readers of his works will find many similarities with the 19th c realist novel in Europe. Mahfouz has been called the "Balzac of Egypt." His fictional families and frustrated middle-class clerks have documented the successive stages of Egyptian social and political life from the time the country cast off foreign rule and became a "postcolonial" society.

Mahfouz's stories have a huge audience in the West because they deal with basic human issues in a realistic social context.

Mahfouz believes in the social function of art and the concomittant responsibility of the writer.

As a representative of the Third World, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1988, he says, "The developed world and the Third World are but one family. Each human being bears responsibility towards it by the degree of what he has obtained of knowledge, wisdom, and civilization...in the name of the third world: Be not spectators to our miseries."

Confucius 551-479 B.C.

The Analects of Confucius (which means "Sayings") is the only work that we can confidently connect with the teacher Confucius, who gives his name to the secular social philosophy known as Confucianism.

Confucius lived in a period when the unified Chou kingdom has split into a number of feudal states, most supposedly ruled by descendants of the Chou royal house.

The Analects represents the memory of Confucius's teachings on the part of his disciples and was probably not written down until many centuries after his death.

During the Han Dynasty, Confucian values became interwoven with the ideology of the imperial state.

Confucianism is a philosophy of the relations between human beings, and its persuasive force rests not on a claim of transcendental truth but on the wisdom embodied in a person. Throughout the Analects the reader is reminded that wisdom comes in fragments and fractions; the burden of full understanding is placed on the reader.

By study and self-cultivation, individuals can join their instinctive being and their social being. The members of our society must behave with a natural decency toward one another, respecting age and hierarchy and adapting to their changing roles.

About Heaven, Confucious wrote, "To keep one's distance from the gods and spirits while showing them reverence can be called wisdom."

Chinua Achebe An Image of Africa: Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Chinua Achebe delivered "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" as a public lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1974.

Later on, in his preface to that book, Achebe notes that the great African American W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls Of Black Folk that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour line."

Achebe points out that Du Bois wrote that sentence in 1903, only one year after Conrad wrote "Heart of Darkness."

Achebe continues, "This chronology is of the utmost importance. Therefore the defence sometimes proffered: that Conrad should not be judged by the standards of later times; that racism had not become an issue in the world when he wrote his famous African novel, will have to clarify whose world it is talking about."

Achebe wrote in his essay, "Joseph Conrad was a thorouhgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked."

He also wrote, "Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as "the other world," the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality."

Do you agree with Chinua Achebe?

Conrad "if anything, is less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe's civilizing mission in Africa."

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was born JoZef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Poland (then under Russina rule), son of a Polish patriot who suffered exile in Russia for his Polish nationalist activities.

In his travels through Asian, African, and Carribbean landscapes that eventually made their way into his fiction, Conrad witnessed at close range the workings of European empires, including the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, and German, that at the time controlled most of the earth's surface and were extracting from it vast quantities of raw materials and profiting from forced or cheap labor (Greenblatt, 2006).

In the essay "Geography and some Explorers," Conrad describes the imperial exploitation he observed in Africa as the "vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration." What he saw of the uses and abuses of imperial power helped make him deeply skeptical.

Marlow, the intermediate narrator of Heart of Darkness, reflects: "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it..."

Conrad was also a great master of English prose, an incredible fact given that English was his third language after Polish and French, that he was 21 before he learned English, and that to the end of his life he spoke English with a strong foreign accent!

Heart of Darkness This story is derived from Conrad's experience in the Congo in 1890. The Congo Free State was virtually the personal property of Leopold II, king of Belgium, who made a fortune out of it. Later, the abuses involved in the "naked colonial exploitation" that went on in the Congo were exposed to public view.

The theme of the story is the choice facing the whites in the Congo: either to become like the commercially minded manager, who sees Africa, its people, and its resources only as instruments of financial gain, or to become like Kurtz, the self-tortured and corrupted idealist.

I was born in Niamey, Niger

NIAMEY, city, SW Niger, capital of the country, on the Niger R.

A river port and road and trade center, the city manufactures pottery and bricks, leather goods, textiles, charcoal, metal products, soft drinks, and milled grain. Livestock, hides and skins, grain, vegetables, and locally made mats and textiles are exported.

NIGER, river, W Africa, rising in Guinea and flowing for about 4180 km (about 2600 mi) through Mali, Niger, and Nigeria to the Gulf of Guinea.

A French fort since 1902, Niamey succeeded Zinder as capital of the military territory. From 1927 to 1958 it served as capital of the autonomous Niger Territory. Founded at an unknown time as Niamma, it was later called Niame until the arrival of the French.

NIGER, REPUBLIC OF (Fr. République du Niger), republic, W Africa, bounded on the N by Algeria and Libya, on the E by Chad, on the S by Nigeria and Benin, and on the W by Burkina Faso and Mali. It has a total area of 1,267,000 sq km (489,190sq mi).

The climate of Niger is hot and, in most areas, dry. Rainfall, negligible in the N, increases to 813 mm (32 in) a year in the S. In the S a rainy season lasts from June to October. The average annual temperature at Niamey is 29.4° C (85° F).

The N desert of Niger has little vegetation. In the S are extensive savanna grasslands and, in the lowlands, a variety of trees, including baobab, tamarind, kepok, and a species of mahogany. Animal life includes elephant, buffalo, antelope, giraffe, and lion.

The majority of the population of Niger is composed of Hausa and Djerma, who are subsistence farmers in the S. Of the remaining population, most are Tuareg and Fulani, peoples who follow a nomadic life.

French is the official language, but Hausa is the language of local trade. Other African languages, such as Fulani, Tamachek, and Djerma, are also used extensively.

Masai

MASAI, East African nomadic people speaking the Masai Sudanic language.

The Masai (or Maasai) traditionally herded their cattle freely across the highlands of Kenya.

Probably at the height of their power in the mid-19th century, they suffered from the British colonization of Africa and the resultant ecological and political changes.

Rinderpest, an infectious febrile disease, apparently accompanied the British, decimating the cattle herds that supplied the Masai with milk and blood; famine and then smallpox followed.

The weakened Masai attacked rather than cooperated with the new rulers.

In 1904 and 1912–13 the British government relocated the Masai population to distant southern Kenya and Tanzania, where they continue to live.

Masai males are rigidly classed by age into boys, warriors, and elders. Girls often have their marriages negotiated by their fathers before they are born.

Both boys and girls undergo circumcision ceremonies.

Older women enjoy the same status as male elders.

The Masai, most of whom are nomadic throughout the year, live in kraals, small clusters of cow-dung huts constructed by the women.

Today the Masai number approximately 250,000. They remain a pastoral people.

Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia

MASAI. [serial online]. n.d.;Available from: Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia, Ipswich, MA. Accessed August 25, 2010.

Longing to Belong by Saira Shah

Saira Shah (1964) is a journalist and documentary film maker. The daughter of an Afghan father and Indian mother, she was born and educated in England. After graduating from the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, Shah began her career as a freelance journalist.

"Longing to Belong,"originally published in New York Times Magazine in 2003, is adapted from Shah's autobiography The Story-Teller's Daughter (2003), which relates her search to understand her father's homeland of Afghanistan.

In this essay, Shah tells what happened when at the age of 17, she visited her father's Afghan relatives living in Pakistan. She said, "If you grow up outside the place that you think as your home, you want it to be impossibly marvelous."

Shah conveys the autobiographical significance of the event through a combination of showing and telling. She begins the essay with a vivid image of her uncle: "He would often generously withdraw a half-chewed delicacy from his mouth and lovingly cram it into mine." This image conveys dramatically how she felt at the time, especially to Western readers who, like her, are inclined to be repelled by this cultural practice.

When Shah calls her uncle's behavior "an Afghan habit," she suggests to her Western readers that it should be read not as a sign of domination but of love and acceptance. In effect, by taking food from his own mouth, he is extending to her his protection and treating her as if she were his own daughter.

Read, read, read...

"Read, read, read...Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!"
William Faulkner

"I went back to the good nature books that I had read. And I analyzed them. I wrote outlines of whole books, outlines of chapters, so that I could see their structure. And I copied down their transitional sentences or their main sentences or their closing sentences or their lead sentences. I especially paid attention to how these writers made transitions between paragraphs and scenes."
Annie Dillard

In these quotations, the Nobel Prize, winning novelist William Faulkner and the Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist Annie Dillard tell us what many authors know intuitively, that reading critically helps writers learn to write well.


Reading closely and critically also helps students become analytical thinkers. There is a connection between reading closely and critically and writing thoughtfully and effectively.

We must read for meaning and read like a writer. Read to analyze underlying assumptions leads us to think more critically about the cultural beliefs and values implicit in the reading's word choices and assertions. I encourage students to examine the cultural bases for their own assumptions as readers.

Putting our questions aside even temporarily allows us to be open to new ideas. But reading critically requires that we examine every idea, we own as well as those of others, skeptically.

Reading critically helps us to write well. It leads us to fuller understanding of the topic and it will enable us to avoid superficiality and oversimplification in our writing. Good writing challenges readers.

Cognitive & Language

How we think, communicate, and solve problems are essential elements of being human.

Thinking (cognition) is influenced by how the information is mentally represented, which can come in the form of:

• images, which are often mental representations that have a picture-like quality.
• concepts, which are ideas that represent a group of objects or events that allow us to think abstractly.
• language, which includes words or symbols and the rules for combining them, is used for thinking and communication. Language is an especially powerful way to encode information and manipulate ideas.

Problem Solving: the solution to a problem may be arrived at in a variety of ways that can be learned.

1. Insights occur when answers appear suddenly, usually as a result of reorganizing the elements of the problem.
2. Mechanical solutions may be achieved by trial and error or by rote. This strategy is how computers solve some problems.
3. Heuristics are strategies that aid problem solving, especially by limiting the number of possible solutions to be tried.
4. Understanding (deeper comprehension of a problem) is necessary to solve some problems.

Creative Thinking: To be creative, a solution must be practical and sensible as well as original. Often creative solutions diverge from the norm.

Creativity can be enhanced by strategies that promote divergent thinking.

1. Try different approaches.Restating the problem in different ways may enhance creativity.
2. Define Broadly. Often we restrict our creativity by focusing on a narrow aspect of a situation without considering a wider viewpoint.
   
3. Break Mental Sets. A tendency to perceive a problem in a certain way is called a mental set and may impede problem solving.
4. Look for Analogies. Look for analogies where similar problems exist and may have already been solved.
   

Expert problem solving is based on acquired knowledge and strategies. Experts are not naturally smarter than novices!

Memory

Memory is an active process in which information is received, organized, altered, stored, and recovered.

Memories are often lost, altered, revised, or distorted. Different strategies are required to make the best use of short-term memory and long-term memory.

Remembering is not an all-or-nothing process. Information that appears to be lost may still reside in memory.
An inability to retrieve information isn't the only cause of forgetting. Often, memory failures occur because information wasn't stored in the first place.

Although it's true that some people have naturally superior memories, everyone can learn to improve his or her memory. Memory systems (mnemonics) may help in the short term. However, coventional learning tends to create the most lasting memories.

Michael Thomas Ford

In his book, 100 Questions and Answers About AIDS: A Guide for Young People, Michael Thomas Ford uses a question-and-answer format to answer common questions about topics such as methods of transmission, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.

The text includes detailed diagrams on subject related to the prevention of AIDS as well as interviews with AIDS patients and listing of support groups.

The first 27 questions cover technical aspects of HIV and AIDS, including where the virus is found, how many people are infected, the definition of full-blown AIDS, how many young people have AIDS.

The next section of 20 questions covers fact and fiction; followed by the section on keeping safe with 30 questions dealing with safer sex. Questions concerning condoms, kissing, and drugs point out bluntly what is involved with unprotected sex.


The last section involves 23 questions covering testing and beyond. Also included is a resource guide of hotlines and organizations plus a glossary. This is a highly recommended book for school and public libraries. (H. Robert Malinowsky).

100 Questions and Answers About AIDS: A Guide for Young People, by Michael Thomas Ford. 1992. New Discovery Books/Macmillan, 866 3rd Ave., New York, NY 10022. 202p

Yolonda's Genius by Carol Fenner

This is a book for grades 4-6 but middle school and high school students should borrow it from their sisters or brothers and read it!

Carol Fenner, the author of one of the 1996 Newbery Honor books, Yolonda's Genius, uses several techniques to develop the characteristics of two African American children, bright, fifth-grade Yolonda and her slower younger brother Andrew.

The author reveals both Yolonda's intelligence and her retaliation ability after she is teased about her size through an incident in which Yolonda responds to being called a whale.

Yolonda tells her fellow bus rider that he knows nothing about whales because " Whales are the most remarkable mammals in the ocean, all five oceans" (p. 16). She then provides information about whales, such as "The whales sank, lifting their tails high above the water like a signal. Deep in the ocean, their voices sent out a high swelling cry, sharing their message of victory hundred miles."

We learn that Yolonda goes to the library each week to learn new facts.

Yolonda's positive attitudes and Andrew's possible musical genius are developed as Yolonda shares Andrew's abilities. Yolonda's actions show both her respect for Andrew's talents and her dislike for those who torment her younger brother because he is a slower learner in school.

After reading the book, readers understand that both characters have well-rounded personalities.

Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech

Sharon Creech's 1995 Newbery Medal winner, Walk Two Moons, allows readers to analyze the effectiveness of the author's use of theme and to consider how it relates to 13 year old Sal, her grandparents, her friend, her father, and her mother, who has left home.

Creech uses mysterious messages left by a stranger to tie together the plot, characters' actions, and motivation.

The messages are also written in the form of themes. The first message is "Don't judge a man until you have walked two moons in his mocassins" (p. 51).

This book provides an interesting source for tracing the emergence of themes and the relation of those themes to various characters and conflicts developed in the text.

Grace James's Green Willow

Ellen S. Shapiro in her introduction to Grace James's Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales (1987) summarizes some of the characteristics of Japanese folktales.

According to Shapiro, the stories include appreciation for the beauty and mystery of life, belief the power of the spirit to accomplish its will, and ridicule for pretensions.

Chinese culture influenced Japanese culture, and many Japanese tales are similar to Chinese tales. Dragons, for example, are common in tales from both countries. The tiger, usually considered a symbol of power, is a creature often found in Japanese tales.

Japanes folktales carry strong messages, such as kindness will be rewarded, creatures cannot survive when people held captive, honor is important, and sharing helps people through trouble.

Arab Folktales by Inea Bushnaq

In Arab Folktales, Bushnaq identifies the following categories for Arabic tales: Bedouin tales told by desert nomads; tales of magic and supernatural or household tales that include djinn, ghouls, and afreets; animal tales which include fables and anecdotes; famous fools and rascals; religious tales and moral instruction; and tales of wit and wisdom that tell about clever men and wily women.

The Bedouin tales collected from the nomadic peoples of the desert include characteristics such as generosity in which a person's worth is counted not by what he owns but by what he gives to others; hospitality to those who enter the home and encampment; the importance of ancestry and birth in a culture in which the family is the most important social unit; and pride, independence, and self-sufficiency of the nomadic characters.

Two Suns by Miriam Bat-Ami

Two Suns in the Sky received the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction. The author, Miriam Bat-Ami, uses an interesting author's style and technique to chronicle both the problems of Jewish refugees in America during World War II and the responses to the refugees by Americans living near the refugee shelters.

The author uses parallel voices to express two points of view. One point of view belongs to Chris a teenage girl who lives near the camp in Oswego, New York. The second point of view belongs to Adam, a Jewish youth whose family first escaped from Yugoslovia and then from hiding in Italy.

The author reinforces many of the themes and conflicts developed in the book by introducing each chapter with quotes from former refugees or other historical personages.

The most important quote used to reinforce the themes and conflicts related to the time period is this quote by Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the end of the author's note:
"We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent upon the well-being of other nations far away. We have learned that we must live as men (and women), and not as ostriches nor as dogs in the manger. We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community" (p. 218).

Important themes are found in this book: people will seek freedom from religious and political persecution, prejudice, and hatred are destructive forces, moral obligation and personal conscience are strong forces, freedom is worth fighting for, and family love and loyalty help people endure catastrophic experiences.