Stephen D. Krakie
12/13/17
Techniques in Computer Analysis
Reflective Paper
Help Received: None

When I first started this class, I was skeptical that I was going to learn anything new or interesting. However, throughout the past semester I found myself learning much more than I thought I would. Not so much about statistics and how to manipulate variables and whatnot in SPSS, but about how to actually conduct a good political science experiment. That was by far the most interesting and relevant thing that I took from the course.
When I started this class, I was honestly dreading it due to the focus on statistics and manipulating numbers and variables. All things that I thought I had left behind in statistics rat year. Therefore, I was worried that I would even be able to pass the class thanks to my barely passing those classes years ago. I would do the reading and not understand what they were talking about, and I was very stressed in the first few weeks about how I would be able to do in the class, especially when my first quiz grade came back as a D.
One thing that I did find useful in learning the concepts was SPSS. Even though while I would be doing the assignments I would become very frustrated almost every time, if I sat for long enough with it and tinkered with the functions enough I found that 95% of the time I could get it figured out. I found that simply sitting and messing around with different functions was more useful for me to understand what was going on then reading the book itself. I would read the book to get the general gist of what the functions we were doing were, and then sit and work until I eventually figured it out. And I did fairly well on most of the homework because of this.
Another thing I learned that is important is what really goes into setting up a political experiment, such as the difference between a theory and a hypothesis. I even commented in one of my blogs about how much more difficult it was to build a theory and hypothesis than I originally thought. Also, I learned about what independent and dependent variables actually look like in a political experiment. Although I’ve learned about these before in other statistical classes, it was helpful to actually see what they looked like in practice and having to build our own.
The best learning experience I have had throughout the semester though has been working through the group project. We have not even finished our project yet and I have already learned a lot from the mistakes we’ve made already. One of the biggest lessons I have learned that I mentioned earlier is that, if you are giving a survey, and you want a very specific kind of answer to your questions, specificity is everything.
When we built our survey, we assumed at times that people taking it would assume to answer how we wanted them to. This was not the case for several of our respondents. Several questions, such as our question about what ROTC you are in and if you are commissioning or not, was one that was misunderstood by almost everyone. Therefore, we had to adapt how we were going to collect the data based on the kind of responses we got. And then of course there were the people who just didn’t take it seriously and gave us goofy answers, that we had to somehow find a way to record.
So, after collecting our data we created our scale, and we were very careful and methodical in how we set up the scale in order to maximize our variables. However, when it came to applying our variables to our scale we ran into even more problems that I mentioned in my blog. Often the responses did not fit cleanly into the scale. For example, and response for how many hours a week that someone spends working about might be 12-15, but our scale only measured in increments of two hours. Therefore, we have to adapt and chose to record whatever was the lowest end of the responses in cases like this.
The final lesson I have learned from this experience is how to actually apply the SPSS functions to our data. I have to say it was very satisfying after spending hours scaling our data and entering it all by hand into SPSS and researching which functions we should use, to have SPSS do the analysis for us in a half second. We were able to see where exactly the correlations were, and were surprised by what we found, learning that you’ll often find things you did not expect in these experiments.

The other night my group mates and myself met to begin analyzing our data variables.  We started by getting all of our surveys together and assigning numerical scales for the responses, and immediately we began to run into problems, and notice things that we did wrong with the surveys.  The first problem was people just simply not taking the answers to the surveys seriously, putting in goofy answers that we could not use.  Also certain questions that called for numerical responses such as their PT score, some did not give an exact number.  So immediately we noticed that the specificity of some of our questions was not as high as it should have been.  Another problem was that some of the numerical answers did not fit cleanly in with our scales.  For example a response for how many hours spent studying a week might be answered as 12-15, while our scale measured in increments of 2 hours, so we had to create a standard of how to respond to those questions.  We improvised by choosing to use whichever was the lowest number they provided, so in this case we would use the 12, and did that across all similar responses.  While it was a struggle we were able to convert all our responses into variables and data in SPSS, identified which group members would be responsible for which parts of the project, identified our case study, and found the functions that we will use to perform our analysis.

So as we come to the end of the semester, I’m going to talk about what I’ve thought about the class so far.  As far as SPSS, I didn’t really understand why we were doing it but towards the end I started to understand what the purpose of it was, and how it can be useful for analyzing data.  It also showed me how to group variables and assign numerical values to non-numeric data in order to make more sense of it.  This will be useful for when we start analyzing the data from our experiments. As far as the experiment goes,  I’m still not quite sure how its going to turn out, or if our questions will even be useful in determining what we are trying to find out.  But either way, I think it will be a good learning experience.

So far this class has been fairly interesting. With my experiences with Comparative Politics I never really saw how data can be useful for explaining political phenomena, but I am beginning to see the usefulness and merit of utilizing scientific inquiry to try to explain certain phenomena.  So far I have found the reading pretty dry and difficult to understand, but when we go over it in class I understand it much better.  I think the most useful thing for me personally that we will do in this class is the group project.  Just the process of building a theory and a hypothesis so far has already taught be a lot about how difficult this sort of experimentation can be.  There are so many variables to take into account that can affect your results, and I am realizing how important it is to cover all of your bases and be aware of all these possibly confounding variables.

This was a movie with a pretty easy to interpret message.  What I got from it, was that the Korean war wasn’t only a conflict between two ideologies, it tore apart families of the same country, and turned countrymen against one another.  However, it did have the ultimate message that regardless of how much the war was able to tear families apart, that family will ultimately triumph over everything.  Family is very important to the Korean people as it is in most Asian countries.  The concept of family over ideological differences and conflict is not only shown through the two brothers, but when they turned on their own countrymen in order to rescue the older brother’s fiancé from the death squads looking for communists.  They were willing to kill for their family even though they were technically on the same side of the conflict at hand.

While the Russian documentary was pretty similar to most of the other North Korean documentaries I have watched, there were some huge differences that I noticed.  The first thing I noticed was that it was the first time I had seen any North Korean citizen who was being interviewed say anything even sort of negative about the North Korean regime.  The biological scientist who was being interviewed admitted that the country was in a difficult situation, and remarked how they still had not reached a western standard, and that the government was relying on people like him for improvements.  That amazed me that we said it as frankly as he did, and he seemed at lease somewhat aware of the dire situation that his country was in.  The second thing that stood out to me was the Spaniard who was working as president of the North Korean Friendship Association.  This association Ive found, was in fact started and is operated  by the Spanish, and has official representatives in 28 countries including the United States. The KFA pages provides DPRK related material, including tourism tips and political essays, and it is possible to hear views from a DPRK point of view. The KFA Forum site is hosted and administered in Europe and gives links to Korean language teaching sites. The KFA also denies allegations of human rights violations and concentration camps in North Korea.  Their objectives as stated by the KFA are to: show the reality of the DPRK to the world, defend the independence and socialist construction of the DPRK, and to work towards the peaceful reunification of  the Korean peninsula. Due to many of these beliefs, they have lost much of their role in the international arena, and are now reduced to serving domestic purposes in North Korea.  Which in my opinion, makes it safe to say that they are under the direct control of Pyongyang.

I was finally able to find my propaganda poster, it was in the barracks study room where I had been working the night before. I uploaded a picture of it to the media portion of my eportfolio.  I used several key themes I found to be the most important throughout the different North Korean propaganda I looked at.  First of all I featured Kim Il Sung at the top of the poster within a sun to represent how the Koreans look to their leader as the sun that gives them life.  The left portion of the poster under Kim Il Sung is used to represent the Korean Military prowess.  It features a Korean soldier holding a rifle with a bayonet on it, and stuck on the bayonet is a much smaller helpless American solider, to represent how the North Koreans believe that America is the enemy and their superiority over us.  I also added several missiles behind the soldier to represent their nuclear capabilities.  To the right side of the poster I drew several sunflowers, a common symbol to represent the Korean people, who turn towards their sun (Kim Il Sung) to give them life and direction.  And finally the top right portion of the poster has a North Korean flag, used to represent the sovereignty of the North Korean state as a whole.

This movie has been the hardest one to interpret so far out of all the ones we have watched.  It seems to be, at least in part, a contrast in how the Japanese view their role in WWII and their role in the world moving forward.  The different interpretations of the story represent the different interpretations how the Japanese role can be interpreted, either as aggressor,  manipulator, or victim.  Then the priest is meant to be the catalyst for moral interpretation of not only the actions portrayed in the story, but interpret the actions of all men due to their nature.

The study conducted was to test how well we could remember certain patterns over time.  We were asked to determine whether a picture we saw was taken inside or outside, and remember which of four quadrants on the screen it appeared in.  After the initial stage of seeing all the pictures, we did a math page for five minutes, when were shown all pictures again in a different order.  When a picture appeared we had to remember which quadrant it appeared in.  We also had our heart rate and blood pressure taken incrementally throughout the testing.  We did not experience any stressors, as we were simply the control group, but from what I understand future groups will be exposed to some form of a stressor to measure the affects.

Unfortunately I was unable to complete the movie all the way through due to technical difficulties with my computer, but I was able to watch enough to get the idea of what the movie was trying to get across.  I think that Mr. Chu’s character was supposed to represent the older generation of Taiwan, and the old traditions of the Taiwanese people.  Through his cooking of traditional food he seemed to by trying to keep the old spirit alive, even as the times were changing.  His daughters, who were more involved in the more modern Taiwan represent the modernization and change that has happened, and Mr. Chu’s disconnect with their interests shows the disconnect between the two generations, who favor work over simple things in life like eating a good meal.  They live in a fast paced world while Mr. Chu seems to prefer his slower simple life of cooking food.  It also seemed to by trying to teach a lesson about love and human desires through the daughter’s love interests.  Even the title is a metaphor, which is reiterated later by Mr. Chu’s friend, that eating and drinking are like man and woman.  They are basic desires that go together.