This Emotional Life:

Its a desire that we all share to lead a rich fulfilling and happy life, but yet you can't always get what you want. Our life seems to be a roller coaster taking us from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of despair and everyplace in between. All emotions have their own importance, is it? The resilient spirit of human spirit is interesting. Our greatest source of happiness lies in the people around us, the basic need of human beings is love and companion ship, its not things or success. Happiness comes from within. What are the obstacles to happiness? Emotions such as fear, anger, and sadness seems to come in between us and our happiness. There is no pill that can give us happiness. Facing our fears seems to an important thing in our this emotional life.

In amusements parks, all the activities are dedicated to the thing called human feeling. At such places, people are found to happy and relaxed, excited and with fear, exhausted, and relieved and sometimes amused. We like the ups much more than the downs.

Over all the negative emotions are considered to be both are best friend and also the worst enemy.  Science is trying us to understand how such a paradox is possible in humans. When any living things are threatened,  their bodies release hormones that prepare them either to fight back or to flight away. Such a response is crucial for our survival.  We secrete a hormone called Cortical that heightens our auditory and visual perceptions. Such a response is important in saving our lives and now a days such a response might not be needed in daily experienced anger or fear emotions.  When we try to control the effects of such a release of chemicals, then we start a tug of war in the brain between oldest parts (cave mans survival part of brain called amigdilla) and the newest part of brain (prefrontal cortex) that is responsible for making informed decisions tries to calm down the responses triggered by the Cortisol-like hormones.

It is interesting to know that in spite of us knowing the response of fight or flight inducing Amygdilla we still can't seem to control our spontaneous response because of the wiring of the brain. In the human brain, the newest part of the brain is called the pre-frontal cortex, that is responsible for planning our future, to make informed cognitive decisions,  to strategize our decisions.

Why is that we are unable to control our response of fight or flight even though we try deliberately to avoid the feeling to hatred and anger?

This part of pre-frontal cortex has no pathways connecting it to the oldest part of the brain called Amygdilla. Where as the pathways from the Amygdilla to the pre-frontal cortex are very well developed  as shown in the figure.  Therefore the pre-frontal cortex is unable to tell the Amygdilla to cool it and to avoid the unnecessary fight and flight response induced by Amygdilla. Well, of course as time progress we all are in the process of evolving and letting our brain development adapt to the current conditions of living that are unlike the caveman days.

The fact that our brains are not designed to have a complete control over our emotions can have some unfortunate consequences.

I was looking at an interview by a victim of such a consequence of not being able to control the fight response during a party. The person giving the interview was a female who was invited to a party and while enjoying the party decided to go and change the song being played (due to her control-freak behavior, as mentioned by her). As the song was abruptly changed the party host came over and confronted her as to why she had changed the song and this triggered a fight response by this person's Amygdilla and consequently she started hitting the host for no apparent reason. Just because her pre-frontal cortex was unable to send message to Amygdilla to cool off. What seemed very unreasonable to me is that this person, started crying as she was describing the incident of she being unreasonably angry. I just couldn't help but thinking that a women's cry is louder and can be easily misjudged to be distress response by her, even though it might not be so. I have  no idea why she cried during the interview, even though she understood that she was a control freak and that her fight response was not appropriate towards the party host. But to any outsider who is unaware of the series of events that lead to her fight response, they might easy consider the party-host to be fault of mistreating the lady (just because the lady cried at the end of the scene). This is my summary of the interview and my audience of this blog are encouraged to see this PBS episode to make things clearer from their point of view.  This person concludes this narration by saying that what she did goes against her values and against what she is. She acknowledges that she feels hurt because her response in this incident, perhaps her response was again out of her control as it was mentioned earlier (due to the hard-wiring of the brain itself)

It is often observed by us all that after an intense argument one feels terrible and often depressed. Anger is not a helpful or appropriate emotion and leads to a regret at a later point of time. Anger is never constructive or useful to the world, in fact it can bring a personal havoc. Well, people mistakes every day in their after all, we are being human.

Can we learn to control our emotions deliberately? can we do something called emotion regulation?

James Gross, a Stanford university researcher states that: Emotional regulation is the science of understanding how we can modify our emotions harness their energy and direct them to ways that we would like to.

After an event that triggered a fight or anger response once the  person reappraises and thinks about the past event from a neutral third-person perspective their bodies were observed to become calmer, thus indicating that their is a very important role that thinking and reappraisal plays. If one can change the way they think, they can change the one feels. One technique that the interviewed person uses is to stop and think about the person in front as a human being prone to making mistakes, says things they didn't mean, may be had a bad day gives her a calm perspective and makes her make a better decision.  Such an activity of pausing and  thinking  might be a hard exercise (during the fight or anger response) but it seems to be working for the person talking about her experience.

Psycho-Dynamic Therapy:

It was Sigmund Freud who suggested that emotional problems might be symptoms of something deeper, something more significant, something the mind is hiding from itself. It could be a traumatic childhood experience or something else unpleasant. Freud's therapy to understand the cause of emotional problems has evolved into a thing called Psychodynamic therapy. It deals making aware of the unconscious conflicts that cause problems in daily life. These conflicts are generally hidden from oneself but tend to make ones life miserable. It aims in helping  people in developing insights about how they feel today, about their expectations they have about life and people from their past. Such an insight helps people helps them in changing their behavior and alters their way of thinking in a positive way thus reducing their unpleasant symptoms.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy:

There is another kind of therapy that relies on the concept that rather searching for the hidden causes of emotional problems it might be helpful if a therapy helps a person to develop skills that can deal with such emotional problems.  Such a therapy might help in controlling one of the most basic emotions of FEAR.  This episode presents another persons interview about their fear of flying.

Difference between fear and phobias:

Phobia is a fear that is not rational at a given point of time and place. Emotional state is like a paradox, the more we do not want them, the more we experience them

Out of the pens of students – what student survey results tell us

First year factors:
-completing gateway courses
- not withdrawing or repeating courses
- earning 20 credit hours earned in fir calendar year
- math credit earned in first year

After first year
- continuous enrollment
- rising GPA trend
- withdrawal/repeat ratio
- transfer pattern

Data of Predictors:
High school within 2 yrs before college enrollment : 89%
4+ English: 91%
4+ Math: 90%
Algebra II - 91%

Family Educational Attainment:
-13% students are the first persons in their family to enter college-32% students have had no relative pass college


Fall Survey of Students



Communication: I met with my mentor at GGC
Never:  14%
Once: 61%

Student Course Evaluations:
- Administered online to all students 

Mean responses for each section (4 point scale)
- Instructional design: 3.6
- Instructional delivery: 3.6
- Student-Teacher Engagement: 3.6
- Overall evaluation: 3.6

Survey of undergraduate students and tehnology
- administered to sample students 
 - desktop computer usage:


Survey of Graduating Surveys
- administered to only the graduating students, paper based survey


Alumni Survey
- administered to students graduated 3-5 years before the survey date.

Below is the % for "very well" option of the survey
 
- prepared for grad/prof school: 89%
- prepared for current career: 47%
- satisfied with undergrad education: 59%
- encourage current High School senior to attend GGC: 75%


Metrics of Early Student Performances (current value 3 year average)

 - first semester exit rate for remedial English: 63.5% 

 - first semester exit rate for remedial Reading: 71.6% 

 - first semester exit rate for remedial Math: 37.1%
- Passing rate of Eng composition (first course): 73%
- Passing rate of Eng composition (second course): 68%

- Passing rate of college algebra: 64.5%

- Passing rate of Introduction to computing: 76%
- Passing rate of first year students earning 12 college level credits in first semester: 37.4%
- Passing rate of first year students earning 24 college level credits in first semester: 30.4%

- One year retention rate at GGC: 68%
- Course completion ratio for new freshman:69.7%
- Course completion ratio for all GGC students: 78.5%

Trading Fundamentals

Here is a summary of things I learnt from the book titled " A Beginner's Guide to Day Trading Online" by Toni Turner.

Below are the key times periods of a typical trading day, in EST, as found true by the author during her experience as a day trader:

- 9:30 am - market opens
- 9:50 am - 10:10 am - first reversal period
- 10:25 am - slightly milder reversal
- 11:20 am - beginning of lunchtime moody blues
- 1:30 pm - lunchtime moody blues begin to cheer and clear - some stocks start to edge up
- 2:30 pm - stocks break out (or down) in a more definitive manner
- 3:00 pm - Treasury bonds stop trading; market breathes a sigh of relief, possible reversal
- 3:30 pm - mild reversal possible
- 4:00 pm - market closes


At around 1:10 am, strong stocks that have pulled back slightly on a bullish day will again turn up. Bearish stocks on a negative day resume their growling. If one buys a stock before 10: 00 am, and it soars through the first reversal period, do not asusme that it is clear sailing for the rest of the morning. Chances are that the stock will top out around 10:25 am and then pull back and retrace price movement back toward opening price of last support area (come-in) before it begins its next move. On a bearish day, the author has found the weaker stocks to fall hard at lunch time. Experienced traders avoid entering positions at lunchtime as the stock movements can be erratic at this time.

In the evening around 3:30 pm the reversals can get initiated and one can know about this possible reversal by watching the leading indicators line S&P futures, the TICK, and the TRIN. Most stocks follow their lead.


Charting Techniques:
Traders generally use three types of following charts while day-trading.
1) Line Charts: these are drawn from the closing prices each day, and form a line across the chart. Line charts can be helpful in seeing the big picture when they are overlayed on top of each other. Compared to the line charts, the bar charts and the candlestick charts offer more information for day-traders.

2) Bar Charts: On this chart, the vertical bars show the price range the stock has traded in during that day. The protruding horizontal bar on the left designates the opening price and the horizontal bar on the right indicates the closing price.


3) Candlestick charts:Its black and white colors make it reading quicker and clearer than the bar charts.  They interpret the stock movements in detail and give more signals about possible future movements. Like bar charts, candlesticks use bar forms to designate price range. Then they fatten the bar with a vertical rectangle to indicate opening and closing price comparisons. A clear/white body color indicates the closing price was higher than the opening price. A black body color means the closing price was lower than the opening price. 





The shadow above the real body is called the upper shadow. The shadow below is called the lower shadow.

If the stock opens at its low and stays above it, the white body will have no lower shadow and is referred to as a shaven bottom. If it closes at the high, and has no upper shadow, its referred to as a shaven head.

If  a stock's price range remains the same, and it opens and closes at the same price, then the real body is reduced to a line and such a stock's representation is called a doji.

Hammer and Hanging Man:

- The real bodies are at the top of the day's trading range, the lower shadow should be twice the height of the read body, and it should have a shaven head.
- A hanging man appears at the top of an uptrend. A hammer appears at the bottom of a down trend.
- Their appearance during a downtrend or uptrend signals the prior move may be broken.
- The real body can be white or black, but it is slightly more bullish if the hammer is white and slightly more bearish if the hanging man is black.

Engulfing patterns use two candlesticks to prophesy a major trend reversal. A bullish engulfing pattern reverses a downtrend, and a bearish engulfing pattern reverses an uptrend. The bearish engulfing pattern can be viewed as a total solar eclipse blocking out the entire sun and it covers the entire white body.
- The stock has to be in a definite uptrend or downtrend, even if short term.
- The second real body should be the opposite color of the prior real body.
- The second real body has to engulf the first real body although it need not engulf the shadows. The pattern becomes even more accurate when the first real body is quite small, and the second very long.
- If the second real body engulfs an additional body, the signal grows stronger.

Dark cloud cover:
it is a bearish reversal pattern and appears when an uptrend has run out of steam, or at the conclusion of a congestion move. This pattern uses two candlesticks:
- First candlestick is a strong white body.
- Second candlestick's price gaps open above the top of the white body and its top shadow, if any.
- By the end of the move, though, the second body closes well into the white body and near its own low. The more the second, black body moves into the lower part of the first, white body, the higher probability that the bears are taking control and the uptrend is broken.
- If a long, white reald body closes above the highs of either the dark cloud cover or the bearish engulfing pattern, it suggests the start of another rally.

Bullish Piercing pattern
Its the reverse of the dark cloud cover and forecasts the reversal of a downtrend.
- The first real body is a blak body in a falling trent.
- The second is a white real body, in which the stock gaps open lower than the previous candlestick's low.
- Then the price rises higher, and the real body closes more than midway into the prior black real body. Now the bulls have wrested control from the bears, and the downtrend is broken.
- If the real body does not close at least halfway or more into the black body, it negates the signal and indicates the downtrend may continue.

Key Reversal Day
If the white real body opens lower than the previous day's low and closes higher than the previous day's high, its called a key reversal day.

STARS: evening star, morning star, doji evening/morning stars. These patterns are created by three candlesticks.

- In each case, the star itself can appear as black or white.
- The star must gap away from the preceding candlestick, meaning the star's real body must not overlap the previous real body.
- The star's real body is small, indicating that a stock that's had a strong surge up or down is now slowing , and the bulls and bears are deadlocked in battle.

Evening Star:
- The first two candlesticks are composed of a long, white real body, followed by a star with a small body, which can be white or black. The star suggests the top of the uptrend.
- The third candlestick is a black real body that drops low into the range of the first, white candlestick. Now the bears are in control, and the uptrend is broken.

Morning Star:
- The first two candlesticks are composed of one, long black body, followed by a candlestick with a small body, which can be white or black. The candlestick gaps open lower that the previous real body's close, then the price rises. This move indicates buying pressure has begun.
- The third candlestick is a white real body that moves into the price range of the first, black real body. Now the bulls have taken control, and the downtrend is broken.

Physics requirements at SST

All biology majors can take either Phys 1111K and Phys 1112K 
OR
Phys 2211K and Phys 2212K to fulfill their physics requirements. 
(No catalog change is necessary for this to count for graduation).

Phys 1112K now requires Math 2210 (Calc 2) as a pre-requisite. 

If students chose to take the calculus based physics sequence (Phys 2111K and 2212K), they must complete Math 2210 with a C or better before registering for Phys 2112K.