Why is sleeping important to us? It is a good question to be thought about, and I bet there are already some blogs talking about that. Although I never do a study about how sleeping is important to us, I guess there are only two way out for people who keep themselves awake – fail to be awake (fall asleep) or die. So I believe sleeping is pretty important to humans. It seems like our desire for sleeping levels up as specialists make more and more suggestion about how to sleep better. One of those advice is people should sleep early at night – about 23:00 pm. However, many people still sleep late because of work, study, entertainment or because they are just not sleepy. So is sleeping late truly bad for our health?

If you guys can google ‘sleeping late at night’, you can find hundreds of disadvantages you shouldn’t do that. I list some of them here:

1. Causing gastrointestinal dysfunction
2. Amnesia
3. Overusing your eyes
4. Increasing possibility that women will get mammary cancer
5. Causing endocrine dyscrasia
6. Decreasing ability of immunization

So there are only six of them, and each of them sounds serious. However, if you can read those article thoroughly, you will find they don’t have much strong evidences or they don’t have any evidence at all but only hypothesis and predictions. So can we find any hypothesis which can be supported by sounding evidences?

The earliest information about the relationship between sleeping time and health come from old Chinese medicinal book ‘Huangdi Neijing’. The relevant piece is from the Section ‘Lingqu’, as

‘The sunlight grows in spring, shines in summer, reduces in autumn and hides in winter. Humans’ lifestyle should also be the same, so morning should be spring, noon should be summer, afternoon should be autumn and midnight should be winter.’ People who believe in Chinese traditional medicine thought this piece supported the hypothesis ‘people shouldn’t sleep late’. However, the Section ‘Lingqu’ is mainly about how to uses seasonal changes to explain possible changes of disease in one day and patients’ clinical manifestation. So we can see actually it is not so relevant to sleeping late.

There are also many theories suggesting that a fixed time schedule is necessary for organs to rest, to modify themselves or to expel toxin from human body. However, those theories with fixed time schedule can easily be disproved as what if we travel abroad: for example, if I sleep at 23:00 pm every night in China, I should sleep at 11:00 am in America every day. Of course it is impossible, but then doesn’t those theories suggest my action is not healthy. So they are not scientific.

On the other side, during the time I was searching for strong study which can prove sleeping late is bad for us, I found two interesting studies which have strong databases for back up.

The first one was an extraordinary observational experiment ran by American Cancer Society, called as Cancer Prevention Research II. The original principle for this experiment was to find possible triggering factor of cancer, so many factors including sleeping time were kept in records. The experiment included data from 1,160,000 people aged from 30 to 102. They were asked to provide their average daily sleeping time nearest to hour. After six years, researchers interviewed with those people and calculated the mortality rate of groups with different sleeping time. Surprisingly, after ruling out effects of possible known third variables, they found that people who slept average 7 hours had the lowest mortality rate. 6-hour-group was in the second place, and people who slept 8 hours every night had a 12% higher mortality rate than 7-hour-group.

(The left one is for female and the right one is for male. Every 0.1 in risk rate means 10% higher mortality rate.)

Of course, we have no idea about the mechanism of this hypothesis and the hidden effects of other third variable. Like Professor Daniel F. Kripke commented it as ‘although sleep time is strongly relevant to the mortality rate after 6 years, we cannot prove the causation. We cannot prove whether the sleeping time is the cause of difference in mortality rate with the current knowledge and technology.’

The second study was published on magazine ‘SLEEP’ in 2011.5.1. Its research studied the effects on cognition from the change of sleeping time between 5 years. The research was based on the database of the fifth and seventh periods from Whitehall II study, including 5431 officers aged from 35 – 55 who were working in 20 government departments in London. Researchers designed a several texts to evaluate people’s memory, deduction, vocabulary, oral expression, word expression and cognition as a whole. After 5 years, they asked all officers about any change in sleeping time, and about 42% males and 50% females claimed that their sleeping time changed. After that, researchers ran the cognition test for those officers again.

Researchers claimed that, based on their study, ‘the acceleration of cognitional eldering is about 4 -7 years if people sleep over 8 hours or less 6 hours every night.’ The result indicated that officers who extended their sleeping time from 7 hours to 8 hours got lower scores in 5 sections of the test except oral expression. Officers who cut their sleeping time of 6, 7 or 8 hours got lower scores in 3 sections of the test. Furthermore, researchers found that officers who slept 7 hours got relatively the best score in any way and no evidence indicated any extension of sleeping time from 6 hours or lower was not benefit to health. One of the leader of this research, Jane Ferrie, said ‘negative change of sleeping time seems to relate to the middle-aged people’s weaker cognition.’ However, they didn’t find the definition of negative change of sleeping time and the mechanism of the whole hypothesis.

Those two interesting researches pointed on the same conclusion: So far, we can only prove whether people have enough and good sleep is most likely to be relevant to health. However, we have no evidence to support that the difference in when people fall asleep will affect human’s health. Furthermore, many conclusions based on ‘sleeping late is bad for health’ can be explained as symptoms of not enough sleeping.

So right now, we can have no worry about sleeping late, but just make sure you are able to sleep 7 hours every day.

Resources:

1. ‘Huangdi Neijing’ – Huangdi
2. ‘Mortality associated with sleep duration and insomnia’ – Daniels F. Kripke
3. ‘Cancer Prevention Study Overviews’ – ACS
4. ‘Too much or too little sleep may accelerate cognitive aging, study shows’ – ScienceDaily

Have you ever heard a sound inside your mind make suggestions to you when you are thinking or making a decision? I bet many of you have this kind of experience. Of course, the sound appears from no where and also disappears in seconds – all in a mysterious way. In some adventure novels, we can see the writer writes something like ‘However, there is a sound in his mind whispering ‘no, no, don’t go there’’, and most of them will explain this as character’s strong instinct. On the other side, in cartoon, the same thing usually is presented by a small image of the character itself. Like in ‘Tom & Jerry’, when Jerry is struggling whether he should do something, two small mouse (represent as angel mice and evil mice) usually will stand on his shoulders and argue with each other to let Jerry listen to their own idea. So scientifically, what is this sound and where does it come from?

Academically, the sound appears when people are thinking is called inner speech (or inner voice). And no commonly approved mechanism have already been set for this subject, which covers psychology, neuro science and cognitive science. Generally, it might be a process of self-talking as listening what you are saying to yourself. Inner speech is benefit for people’s time management, problem- solving, self-encouragement and critical thinking if they appear always properly at the right time. However, excessive inner speech will compromise people’s cognition and interpretation, even will trigger people getting depression disorder or anxiety disorder.

The research of inner speech was began at 1930 by Lev Vygotsky, an amazingly important figure to psychology. He first defined the inner speech as ‘speech began as a social medium and became internalized as inner speech, that is, verbalized thought’. However, back to those days, current technology cannot support Lev Vygotsky to further study the inner speech. Fellow researchers were able to go deeper until imagology was well-developed.

As we know, cerebral cortex can be separated as different areas based on their functions, and one of those areas which links to linguistic output is called Broca’s area.

Some researches indicated that the Broca’s area was activated when people are talking. As shown in the fMRI image, colors indicate that Broca’s area and area that controls human’s mouth are activated. So here is the problem: what will happen in our cerebral cortex when there is a sound in our head?

Like most of you guys can guess, the result of this relative research indicated that volunteers’ broca’s areas were also activated when they were doing inner speech. Then researchers went further as they stimulated volunteers’ broca’s areas, and they found both of volunteers’ speaking and inner speech were obviously affected. So they dropped the conclusion as ‘Inner speech is closely related to the activities in Broca’s area, just like talking. Furthermore, those researchers also found two other things: 1. The breathing patterns are the same when people are talking or doing inner speech; 2. The speeds are the same when people are talking or doing inner speech. So seems like those two findings also support the hypothesis above.

However, some other research also found that many stuttering volunteers believed they were not stuttering when they were doing inner speech. And more specific fMRI images pointed out that except Broca’s area, inner speech activates and uses quite different areas on the cerebral cortex with normal talking. So if I have to answer the original question, I would say the sound we heard in our mind was most likely our own sound.

Of course, there are still many scientists are studying this subject and try to answer this question. For example, PhD Mark Scott from UBC published an article on ‘Psychological science’ in 2013 talking about another explanation for the process of inner speech. He believed inner speech is caused by corollary discharge.

What is corollary discharge? It is pretty easy to explain: sometime when people scratch some part of your body, you will feel tickle and want to laugh out. However, if you scratch the exact place by yourself, you won’t have the feeling. That is because corollary discharge copy the signal before your muscle ever move to tell your brain that you are coming to scratch yourself, then you can barely feel tickle because you are ‘well-prepared’ for that.

So Mark believed corollary discharge also happens when people doing inner speech: when we are thinking to speak something, corollary discharge will send an advanced signal to our auditory system to tell the system what we are going to speak. So whether at last we are going to speak out or not, our auditory system have already gotten the information we want to say. In another word, the inner speech we are heard is actually corollary discharge. Unfortunately, we still cannot prove that corollary discharge is the origin of inner speech. But if we can prove that, then the sound of inner speech will be definitely our own sound.

Resource:

1. ‘Thought as action: inner speech, self-monitoring and auditory verbal hallucinations’ – Fernyhough C.
2. ‘Inner speech: nature and functions’ – Vicente A., Martinez-Manrique F.
3. ‘Inner speech captures the perception of external speech’ – Scott M., Yeung H. H., Gick B. & Werker J. F.
4. ‘Influence of preceding liquid on stop consonant perception’ – Mann V. A.
5. ‘Corollary discharge provides the sensory content of inner speech’ – Scott M.

Back in China, piano is the most popular instrument that kids will choose (or be forced) to learn. I still remember that one of my friends told me that he spent 6 hours every day to practice piano because he wanted to be a professional pianist. After so many years, he is quite close to his dream, as a reasonable reward of his hard-working. Last time when we hang out, he told me he was concerned by his weaken hearing. So I joked that possibly it was because he played too much piano every day, and all a sudden, this joke got me – ‘what if those two things were really linked to each other?’.

First of all, you guys can check how high the frequency you can hear in the website below: Ultrasonic Ringtones (http://www.ultrasonic-ringtones.com/). As many of you can guess, if you do this test ten years later again, possibly highest frequency that you can hear will go down (just like elder people normally have worse hearing). Don’t be sad if your test result is not good, because actually sounds that have a frequency higher than 14000 HZ are not so usual in music. Except music synthesizer, no normal instrument can reach that level of frequency. Even instruments which have an extremely high one like piccolo, 5000 HZ is the best they can do. So if some of you are already lost hearing of this part of frequency, you will just think songs turn to be a little bit ‘choked up’. You still can easily distinguish those main instruments in the music and have no difficult to appreciate any kind of them.

It is a diagram about normal decibels under different environments. Basically, we cannot hear any sound under 20db. Even though the night is silent (as we think), the background noise is still remained at the level of 30db; even though the room is quiet (as we think), the background noise sometimes even reaches 50db. When people can feel any noise, the loudness is around 60db. And if people are in a moving car, the obvious noises they can hear are about 85db. Furthermore, people think it is definitely noisy when they are in a rock band concert or near a taking-off plane.

The structure of our ears can be separated by outer, middle and inner ears. Outer and middle ears are not possibly hurt unless they got physically damaged or infected. However, the situation is different for inner ears. There are two kinds of hair cells in the inner ears as outer hair cells and inner hair cells. Outer hair cells are responsible to amplify small sounds loud up and inner hair cells are responsible to transfer sound signals to the brain. Young people have well-arranged hair cells looked like in the first X-ray, and hair cells are damaged when people are older and older. Unfortunately, for human beings and most mutual animals, hair cells cannot be reproduced, so hearing damages are also unrecoverable.

(Two X-rays show the differences before and after your hair cells in ears get hurt.)

For example, I bet many people were able to know if the TV in the house was on or not before opened the front door by hearing the high frequency. However, when people got older, we lost this ability. It is inevitable for us to stop losing part of our hearing. Theoretical hearing range for humans is from 20HZ to 20000HZ. However, most 17-year-old teenagers’ range is from 30HZ to 18000HZ now.

Moreover, over-volume can also causes unrecoverable damage to our ears. Most of modern researches believe that noises will affect human’s hearing when they are over 85db. They will truly hurt our hearing if we stay in the noises for over 8 hrs. And the time needed to cause real damages will less half ever the volume increases 3db:

85db～8hr

88db～4hr

91db～2hr

94db～1hr

97db～30min

100db～15min

120db～threshold of pain

So finally we can answer the question at the beginning: will people play piano for a long time will damage their hearing? As shown in the picture about loudness for different instruments, we can know that playing piano will usually create sounds from 60db to 70db. And when the pianist express the music with fortissimo (fff), the sounds possibly will increase to 95db. As we know, when it reaches 94db, humans’ hearing could be damaged in one hour. So the answer to the question should be: possibly.

However, if the answer is practical or not? I would say it is not practical. Because if you are not a pianist, you can ask any one of your friends who plays piano about how frequently they will play with fortissimo over one hour in any piece or for practice. It is probably unusual to happen. So if my friend didn’t play in such a dramatic way, his long-time practice was not possible to cause any damage to his hearing.

Of course, some researches indicate that musicians from strings and rock band face seriously damaged hearing problems. But comparing to them, approximately 15% of teenagers from age of 6-19 face more serious problems as places like discos or live shows may cause harder damages to humans’ hearing. But anyway, enjoying the music you like and going to the live shows you want as much as possible because a life without music is a wasteful life. So it is ok to take some hearing damage for that.

Resource:

1. ‘H.E.A.R. | Are You At Risk?’
2. ‘Protection of auditory receptors and neurons: Evidence for interactive damage’ – Ryan A.F.
3. ‘Noise induced hearing loss.’ – Alberti P.W.
4. ‘Young people: Their noise and music exposures and the risk of hearing loss’ – Morata Thais C.

In last post I discussed the existence of people’s attribution bias and how it will affect interpretations. However, we haven’t answered the original question: why will we feel our speech is worse when we listen to record than when we are making the speech? Generally, it is also because of the difference in observation positions – being in the party involved or being in the observation party.

  The most well-known relative experiment about this difference was done by Richard Nisbett and his coworkers in 1973. Richard invited a large number of undergraduate male students to join the experiment and ask them the following questions: 1. Why do you love the girl you dated the most in this year? 2. Why do you choose your current major? 3. Why does your best friend love the girl he dated the most in this year? 4. Why does your best friend choose his current major?

After collecting the results and analyzing, Richard found that when students answered the question ‘why do you love the girl you dated the most in this year?’, they would give situation factors (like girl’s personality or characteristics) as twice as much individual factors (like personal demand or favorites about girls’ eyes or hair colors). On the other side, when they answered the question ‘Why does your best friend love the girl he dated the most in this year?’, they would give same number of situation factors as individual factors. Same thing happened when they answered the questions about major: They would give the same number of situation factors as individual factors when the question was about their majors, but they would give individual factors as forth as much situation factor when the question was about their best friends’ majors.

So at the end Richard concluded as ‘when people explain for their own actions, they prefer to attribute under the effects of situation factors; when people explain for other’s actions, they prefer to attribute under the effects of individual factors.’
Unfortunately, the mechanism of this difference still remain unknown. However, I would like to share my own hypothesis: when people are the party involved doing something in a friendly environment (people relax), they will be focus more on the situation factors than individual factors; for example, when kids walk back from school to home, they will be attracted by what is happening around them but not their own actions. When people are in a unfriendly environment (people stress), they will inevitably receive more information from individual factors, for example, when rookies play their first game in the NBA, they will feel their hearts speeding up or sweeting, but effects from audiences’ shouting and flashlight will somehow be reduced or even ignored. However, when people are observers, they can only get information from the performances of the party involved or the actions themselves. Observers cannot analyze any situation factors as they are unable to receive. This kind of ‘information failure’ causes the difference we are discussing.
Finally, we may have an answer for the original question: when people are making speech, they are focus more on their inside feeling, so they have more specific information about own heartbeat, echo, temper and feeling than other observers. However, when people then listen to the record of their speech, they turn to be observers. All situation factors cannot be represented so observer can only get information from the speech itself as individual factors. After all, we always have good comment on our speech at first, but the compliments go down after we listen to the listen as we can only be focus on the speech itself.   Furthermore, we can also discuss some other relative cases or problems. When people interpret other’s action, they will overestimate the effects of personality (individual factor) because they can only get information from it. So when people need to answer the question like why this man is poor, people are prefer to give a reason like the man is not hard-working. Same case will be if people are asked why a disabled people fails to do something, they are prefer to talk about disability. On the other side, when people are asked why some businessmen and world leader are successful, they are prefer to attribute successes to good personalities. This kind of attribution bias is called fundamental attribution error.

However, when people interpret their own action, they will overestimate the effects of situation factors, especially when people interpret own failures. For example, when students failed to pass an exam, most of them would complain the exam was too difficult, the review session was not helpful or questions were too tricky. They might also said they didn’t do well because they slept bad last night or the weather was horrible. This attribution bias is called self-serving bias in attribution. After all, many dilemmas could be solved after we know clearly about attribution bias. For example, when an employee is late for his work, he will find situation factors as his reasons, like traffic jam. However, his boss will find individual factors as his reasons like laziness. And that’s why most of employees thought it was unfair to be fired because they didn’t think their wrongs were worse enough to be fired, but their bosses thought so.

Resource:

1. ‘Point of view and perceptions of causality’ – Taylor S.E. & Fiske S.T.

2. ‘Popular induction: Information is not always informative’ – Nisbett R.E., Caputo, C., Legant P.,& Reed H.

3. ‘Cognition and social behavior’ – Carroll J.S. & Payne J.W.
 

  Imagine that, you are in a night club right now and you are a little bit drunk. Alcohol and DJ make you feel so energetic and excited so you decide to go dancing in the dancing floor. In next few hours you believe you are surly the dancing star of this night club and you are charming, attractive, amazing – just like Magic Mike. Then time turns to the next afternoon, when you finally wake up after hangover and check your Instagram and Facebook, you find your friends posted some photos about your dancing last night and your moves were so ugly and hilarious that you cannot even believe the guy in the photo who had the same face was you!

The scenario above actually isn’t a great example (but a hilarious one) of what I would like to talk about today because it has third part variable like alcohol and maybe DJ, too. A more proper example should be making a speech: You are well-prepared and confident about your speech, and when you are doing it you are pretty sure you are doing your best. However, later when you watch or listen to the record of your speech, normally you will feel that the speech was not that good, at least not as good as you thought. So why do we have such differences in our feeling and what can we learn from it?

First of all we have to know what attribution is. Attribution is the way an observer uses what he/she sees, feels and knows from the whole environment to explain events. In 1958, Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider first discuss about the idea of attribution theory in his book ‘The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations’ as ‘a study trying to explain how different observers interpret same thing in different ways’ and later he also pointed out the exist of attribution bias which explains that ‘under certain circumstances that people have to find explanations about events only (or mostly) base on their own (misleading) understanding and knowledge, people will interpret things differently and wrongly.

Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske ran a related experiment in 1975. They let six observers standing on three different position observed two other people have a conversation (Of course they didn’t only do the experiment one time; A total number of 38 male and female students attend this experiment). Two people marked by C were people who had conversation and other people marked by O were observers. We can see from the picture that two observers were standing between two confederates and each talker also had two more observers who could only observe another confederate which was relatively away to them ( they could only see the backs of the confederates who were close to them). As other factors were been controlled by Taylor and Fiske (or at least they tried their best), the only variable, as also the X-variable in this experiment, was the differences of the observing position.

So after the conversation Taylor and Fiske asked six observers to determined ‘which confederate set the tone of the conversation, chosen the conversational topics, and caused his partner to behave as he did. The result is shown in table one:

So we can easily analyze the result just like Taylor and Fiske did as ‘observers who faced A believe A performed better than B in the conversation and observers who faced B believe B performed better than A in the conversation.’ Furthermore, those two observers (control group) who stood between the confederates believed their performances were in the same level. So the experiment proved that even observation position can affect people’s interpretation of an event.

We also need to consider the accuracy of this experiment. And the first question will be what if one of the confederate was truly better than another because of a better eloquence or better acknowledge of the topic. This variable was really difficult to control as Taylor and Fiske didn’t actually set a fixed plot for two confederates (like making a movie) about the conversation so there was no way to balance the performance of two confederates. The second question will be about how many times the experiment was run as only 38 students participated in this experiment. However, the obvious result from the experiment also proved that those problems I mentioned were unable to change the basic conclusion of the experiment, but maybe its accuracy. So I prefer to believe in what conclusion this experiment could provide.

So now we know the existence of attribution bias and how (easily) it can affect our interpretations. But the experiment I talked about still cannot answer the question in the speech scenario. So in the next blog I will talk further about the attribution bias and two specific attribution bias which can answer the question we brought from the beginning of the blog.

Resource:

1. ‘The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations’ by Fritz Heider
2. ‘Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior’ by Himmelfarb. S
3. ‘Point of view and perceptions of causality’ by Shelly Taylor and Susan Fiske 

When we are talking about crimes, it is difficult for us not to share sadness with those victims.  They were hurt both physically and psychologically, and some of them even lost their life. We always said that victims were innocent and did nothing wrong. However, what if the victims themselves were also a huge effect to those horrible crimes more than just being at a wrong place at a wrong time? In 1941, German criminologist Hans von Hentig made a series of hypothesizes about the role of the victim in someone committing a crime. Comparing to people’s original thought that victims were randomly chosen at first by criminals, Hentig believed that ‘a logical, scientific and systematic pattern could be found in the victimization’ (Criminology: The Essentials). And he also believed that studying it could prevent more crimes to happen and more victims to be hurt in future crimes.

The most popular theory based on the specific study on victimization is presented by Hentig – Victim Precipitation Theory. The basic premise is that ‘victims may initiate, either actively or passively, the confrontation that leads to their victimization’ (Siegel, Brown and Hoffman, 2006).  H.L. Dietrich also provides its further explanation as ‘Active precipitation occurs when the victim behaves aggressively or provocatively or even is the first to attack.  Passive precipitation occurs when victims unknowingly threaten or encourage the offender. ’ So generally, this theory is talking about victims surly did something that initiated or stimulated the following crimes that happened to them; Victims strongly linked back to criminals and crimes.

As the most well-known theory, victim precipitation theory was the basis of researches and experiments of many following victimologists. (Of course there were also many victimologists who tried hard to disprove it) For example, in 2002, Schaffer and Ruback started a project about ‘Violent Victimization as a Risk Factor for Violent Offending Among Juveniles’. After thorough consideration of how to control all other variables and keep the result as accurate as possible, they decided to let students from 80 high schools and 52 paired middle schools, in grade 7-12, fill in a questionnaire. At the meantime, a subsample, stratified by grade and gender, was selected for in-home interviews, ‘which included information about family composition and dynamics, substance use, criminal and delinquent activities, and violent victimization’ twice in year 1 and year 2. And the result would be their basis of analyses. So what they did next was examining any relationships between violent victimization and violent offending in both years. The analyses supported their hypothesis as students who had been offenders were more likely to be victimized and students who had been victimized were also more likely to committed violent crimes, just like what the table 2 shows to us. (Their analyses were much more thorough, you can check here for it)

So in their final conclusion, they pointed out that the percentage of year 1 victims who committed a violent offense in year 2 as 52% was significantly higher than the percentage of year 1 non-victims who committed a violent offense in year 2 as 17%, so violent victimization is an important risk factor for subsequent violent offending. They also pointed out that violent victimization and violent offending share many of the same risk factors, including previous violent victimization and offending, use of drugs or alcohol, being male, depression, and having a high level of physical development. (As shown in the following diagram)

Although Schaffer and Ruback tried really hard to control any possible effects from unwanted variables to their observational experiment, there were still many problems. The critical one should be the dataset of their analyses was based on those questionnaire that filled in by juveniles about violent victimization and violent offending- there were not some very good histories. They had many reasons to hide and not report them in the questionnaire even they knew the questionnaire was anonymous. It was also possible that some students might report some violent offending that actually never happen for fun or self-pride. Those possibilities inevitably affected the accuracy of the following analyses.

So can we believe the victim participation theory or the whole hypothesis that the role of victim is important in a crime? I will say yes for now. Problems in Schaffer and Ruback’s experiment could only affect its accuracy but almost impossible to be able to turn over the conclusion. So I believe more deeply working and studying in victimization is good for polices and other jurisdictions to prevent future crimes happen and protect us. Furthermore, we should still try to design an experiment with less problems to furtherly support the theory and help preventing crimes.

Resource:

‘Criminology: The Essentials’ by Anthony Walsh

‘Violent Victimization as a Risk Factor for Violent Offending Among Juveniles’ by Jennifer N. Shaffer and R. Barry Ruback

‘Victimology: An Emphasis on the Lifestyle-Exposure Theory and the Victim Precipitation Theory as it Applies to Violent Crime’ by H.L. Dietrich

Hi,everyone. My name is Qian Chen, and I’m from Shenzhen, China. I love my hometown, but I have to admit that it is a new city with nothing old – We have buildings, cars and busy people, that’s it.

(it’s a photograph of my hometown as today is its 35-year-old birthday!)

I am in Smeal College of Business and still unclear about my major. I believe I will take financing or accounting in future becuase I love the feeling of money in my hands(yet I dont have much desire to spend it). Through my 13 years of educations, I never think about being a scientist. Chemistry, physics, and biology, I knew I havd no gift in them at the first time I read those textbooks. However, I share the thought of science about balancing. Balance in our world is so important, because horrible things will happen once it is destoryed(Like extinctions of animals are caused by overhunting). That’s the reason I take this clas, I want to understand sciences as much as possible in the sight of mine, a non-scientist’s.

https://sg.video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=A8tUwXBWP99VtFMAwxpO4gt.;_ylu=X3oDMTBzMmQ2MHUwBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDdmlkBHZ0aWQDBGdwb3MDMTc-?p=extinct+animals&vid=6379e47220b7d8dc41346e93383af85c&turl=http%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DWN.JVC%252f98Nk%252f9LUldQRUrMlNQ%26pid%3D15.1%26h%3D168%26w%3D300%26c%3D7%26rs%3D1&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D9reZZdKVogA&tit=Recently+Extinct+Animals&c=16&h=168&w=300&l=247&sigr=11bi06sh5&sigt=10oknqnqc&sigi=12phte005&age=1430372960&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Av&fr=sfp&tt=b

There is a link to an article about recent extinct animals.

So glad to have your guys as classmates!