text:
Old Dogs (and a new cat).
'Round the dial here. Lots to cover. Bear with me.
Monday, April 16th was a bitch. First, of course, there was the Virginia Tech massacre. A horrible, horrible thing, to be sure. But a tragedy that the media completely and disgustingly exploited with its usual lack of tact, emphasis on the sensational and very un-journalistic editorializing. I mean, thank God the news networks used that sad music over the montages of the victims, otherwise I wouldn't have known that it was a tragedy! As Homer Simpson once wisely pointed out, "The music tells us how to feel!"
And then I saw a CNN anchor tag a profile of Liviu Librescu, the professor who barricaded the door to his classroom before ultimately being killed, with the insightful and keen observation, "He's as brilliant in death as he was in life." What the fuck does that even MEAN? Are these people truly stupid? Isn't there SOME kind of IQ test given to prospective anchors? (Yes, that was hypothetical).
Anyway, just when it seemed that the story was winding down and those poor VT students and faculty could start to heal away from the glare of the media spotlight, Cho's package showed up at NBC News. And I guaran-damn-tee you, they were jumping up and down and high-fiving each other. But the moral indignation with which the other news outlets treated NBC (while simultaneously showing whatever video they could) was pure naked hypocrisy. Arguments as to Cho's manifesto's newsworthiness are irrelevant. Of COURSE it's news. But its sheer existence, the fact of the action is enough. By showing it, they merely gave him exactly what he wanted. This was not journalism. It was sensationalism.
But maybe the worst thing about the news media coverage of the story was their seemingly pathological need to try to tell us WHY it happened and how we should feel about it. Aside from tagging the usual blame-suspects (our media, video games, Cocoa Puffs, whatever), these purported journalists took it upon themselves to get metaphysical. CNN went so far as to invite MD / spiritual guru Deepak Chopra to join them in a search for MEANING in the massacre. Why do bad things happen to good people? They actually had the balls to speak the words, "Where was God in all of this?" Wha--? Seriously?
Here's a thought: After you're done searching for meaning in this tragedy, might I suggest another valuable use of time: Flap your arms really fast, click your heels together and try to make the Earth spin backwards in time to stop Cho Seung Hui before he kills anyone.
I just don't understand why people think that there has to be a REASON for not only good and bad things that happen in the world, but for our very existence. That things need to make sense, that there has to be some larger purpose, some cosmic balance, some explanation. I truly believe there's not (a belief that I find frankly liberating). I simply feel we stupid humans are nothing more than a simple mathematical probability in the vast size of the universe. Something like us was bound to evolve. So here we are, dominating the planet for the time being, fucking it up big time with our destructive self-absorption and soon we'll all be gone. With no ultimate punishment or reward. C'mon, join me, have a drink and let's toast chance.
Anyway. On a more personal note, that same Monday I had another crisis to deal with. My Dad had a stroke. A minor one, thankfully, and he luckily had it in the confines of his doctor's office, so he was immediately taken to the hospital and put on blood thinners. He stayed there for six days, at which point he was released and my brother Ken and I headed home for a visit.
But heading out was problematic. Earlier on Sunday, I wondered why my keychain lock fob was only eliciting a meager burp from the Jeep after I loaded up my bags. When Ken called to say that he had arrived at the Hoboken PATH station, I hopped in the car and turned the key… and nothing happened. My battery was dead. A few days earlier, right around dusk, I had glanced out my window and thought that it looked like there was a light on in the car, but did I go down and check? Nah. It was just the sunlight reflecting in the glass. Right.
Anyway, as luck would have it, my neighbor Ann was getting rid of some stuff at that very moment (I swear) including her jumper cables, for which, since she no longer owns a car, she has very little use. Her mother was there in her car to pick her up for brunch and so I had a battery to use as the boost for my dead juice. Considering it was a crappy situation, things were going pretty smoothly.
At first, anyway. For some reason at the age of 42, I still don't feel grown up enough to be confident that I can jump start a car correctly. I always forget, is it positive to negative or positive to positive? That's right, positive to positive. The thing about a congested town like Hoboken is that to jump a car, you have to close off a whole block. And so, we waited for my brother to arrive to help with the jump while Ann deflected traffic from turning onto my block.
But hooking up jumper cables should be a one man job. It's simple enough, unless of course, you ignore the color of the clamps on the cables. I put the black clamp on the positive terminal and the red on the negative and then let the cables lie on the ground. Dumb, I know. Then Ken picked them up as I got into the car to rev the motor and hooked the other end of the cables to Ann's Mom's car. Red clamp on the positive and black on the negative, as is the norm… but not what I did on my end.
The car didn't start, but smoke did come off of the battery. Ken quickly realized the mistake and corrected the placement of the jumper cables, after which my car promptly started up. Ann and her mother drove off and Ken climbed into the Liberty and all of a sudden we realized that the CD player was dead. And so were the locks. And the dome light. Ken checked a few key fuses, which seemed to be intact. No, this was something bigger. Oh, shit.
The usual three hour drive back to Lancaster was greatly extended, both literally (by the road work on the turnpike, which forced a two mile crawl to take an hour) and in perception, as the lack of music made the oh-so-common drive feel like an eternity. The anxiety was exacerbated by the thought that there was a good chance we had fried parts of the electrical system.
But there were bigger issues upon arrival home. Hey, Dad, how are you? Hugs. Relieved jokes. Small talk. And then dinner. Mom made turkey, green beans and mashed potatoes. As the food was placed on the table, Dad, having his first non-hospital meal in almost a week, asked the question: "Did you make any gravy?" after which he dumped salt on everything.
For well over a decade now, since my father's quadruple bypass in 1994, Mom, Ken and I have been on him to take better care of himself. But truth be told, aside from quitting smoking, he hasn't changed his habits at all (despite also being a borderline diabetic). He has an unrepentant sweet tooth and a German appetite for fat, salt and meat.
The very next morning, we caught him with chocolate smeared on his face, like a five year old boy with his hand in the cookie jar. And it happened again, the salt, the sugar, the candy, the meat, numerous more times over the mere forty hours we were home. He's an old dog who will never learn new tricks, regardless of how much we wish otherwise. And no amount of begging, yelling, common sense talking, crying or anything is going to get him to change his ways.
But back to the Jeep. Monday morning, I awoke with the plan to drive to the Jeep dealership in Lancaster and beg them to squeeze me in and fix my poor sparky Liberty. I had talked to my cousin Andrew, a giant gearhead who's flipped a Wrangler a few times in his life. He and Ken speculated that getting everything fixed could possibly cost around a grand.
But before I headed out, armed with a book to read while I waited, Ken and I gave another check to the fuses and discovered that one of the bigger ones was blown, a 15 amp fuse that controlled about a dozen things included all of the things that were not working. We hopped in the car and hit the AutoZone a couple of miles down the road and bought a new fuse, crossing fingers as we put it into the housing.
I turned the key in the ignition and the CD player sprung to life, Wild Cherry exhorting us to play that funky music, white boys. We jumped in the air and whooped with glee, relieved that our collective stupidity cost a mere five bucks to fix. Not a thousand. Which is better.
That night Pix, Tim, Andrew and Uncle Ken came over and we ordered subs (Dad suggested, "Hey, get a bag of potato chips!") and ate on the breezeway and drank wine well into dark and it was lovely. Tuesday morning came, and after more drama at breakfast (Ham? Fried eggs? How about some chocolate afterwards?), Ken and I were on our way back to New York, musical accompaniment and coffee from PBM making the return trek far less stressful. The anxiety of the week wasn't completely alleviated, but things were, for better or worse, back to normal (whatever THAT is).
At least for now.
Labels: for real
Idiots Rule.
It's been a rather depressing week if you're someone who feels beaten down by the ever-branching stupidity of the American people. First, this whole ridiculous Don Imus controversy, which, based on the coverage it's getting in the news, is tantamount to King Bush coming out and saying, "Y'know what? That colored fella, Kanye West hit the nail on the head!" It's DON IMUS, fer cryin' out loud!! Who's shocked and, moreso, who gives a shit? I'm sure that there were hundreds of other idiotic DJs spouting crap across the country's airwaves that morning that was every bit as offensive and stupid as Cowboy Don's "nappy haired hoes" remark. Did he deserve to be called out on it? Sure. But to turn it into the biggest news of the week and infer that the Rutgers Basketball Team (and ALL WOMEN AND AFRICAN- AMERICANS) are permanently scarred by the offhand comment is as insulting to women and African-Americans as the initial statement.
In lesser, but also depressing news, GRINDHOUSE came out over the weekend and flopped big time (coming in #4 behind BLADES OF GLORY (Ha, ha, Will Ferrell fall down!), MEET THE ROBINSONS (parents, just say no!) and ARE WE DONE YET? (God, I hope so). I saw the movie with Fraulein Opfer and have to admit that I was pretty disappointed. I appreciated the esthetic and the effort (and very much appreciated Rose McGowan), but walked out of the theater amazed at how much fun I DIDN'T have. It was just okay. I spent a good portion of the three hours fairly bored and sporadically annoyed. Surprisingly, Robert Rodriguez' PLANET TERROR was the better of the two films, and far more in the spirit of the exploitation films the double feature claims to celebrate. Quentin Tarantino's DEATH PROOF, on the other hand, has some nice moments, but is far too talky to be an exploitation film. On top of the that, the second half of his film (in which two bad-ass stunt women and Rosario Dawson turn the tables on the homicidal Kurt Russell) is pretty much unbearable, with annoyingly mannered performances (QT's dialogue [for the first time ever] feels totally unbelievable coming out of the mouths of these women) and plot points big enough to drive a Dodge Charger through. And no, the fact that it's a hot-rod-serial-killer film doesn't excuse it.
It is interesting to note that Tarantino's most pro-feminist work is his least successful, creatively. I appreciate the idea of turning the tables on the women-in-peril genre and having a group of tough chicks literally turn the scarred, manly villain into a whimpering, emasculated simp. But for whatever reason (I have to think it's just poor casting, another anomaly for a QT film), it just doesn't play.
I think GRINDHOUSE would've benefited from even MORE editing. If both films were cut down to just over an hour (which easily could've happened), the whole experience would've been more exhilarating.
But more depressing than my lack of total enthusiasm for GRINDHOUSE is the fact that the general public is just too stupid to even UNDERSTAND what the movie is. Notices posted at the box office (at a theater smack in the midst of Manhattan, mind you) had to explain that the scratches, missing reels and fluctuating print quality in GRINDHOUSE are intentional, that it's attempting to recreate an esthetic (of course, I'm paraphrasing, they wouldn't use the word "esthetic"). And now word comes that the movie is going to be re-released as two separate films, partially because some people, unaware that they had paid for a double feature, GOT UP AND LEFT THE THEATER AFTER PLANET TERROR WAS OVER!!!!
I don't expect the grindhouse esthetic to be everyone's cup of tea. I understand that most people, especially younger folks, even if they've heard of or seen films like SHAFT, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST or SATAN'S SADISTS, might not grasp the bigger picture of the culture of exploitation films. But that still doesn't explain or excuse walking into a movie being so completely ignorant of what you're about to see that you complain to the manager about the scratchy film and then leave halfway through because you think it's over!!! It's nothing but sheer stupidity.
Y'know what, fuck it. I'm gonna go see GRINDHOUSE again. Just to show support. And look at Rose McGowan some more. Holy Hot Cleft, Batman!
Labels: hotties, jerks, movies
You only trust FAMILY
As a group of us gathered last night to watch the half-season premiere of The Sopranos (dead soldiers: nine bottles of wine and about 5,000,000 brain cells), speculation was tossed around as to how the show's going to wrap up. We're hardly alone. Everything from Entertainment Weekly to Vanity Fair to the frickin' NBC Nightly News has weighed in, with opinions heated and diverse.
There are those who think that the series needs to end with Tony either dead or in jail (I say no way to either). There are others who feel that Jersey somehow needs to "beat" New York in some way (which makes me scratch my head). And yet others predict that David Chase will end the series with another of his innocuous climaxes in which ennui trumps action and life continues on its merry gray march.
I kinda hope that there is SOME kind of bow tied on the package. Over the past month, I've rewatched every single episode and have come to feel that The Sopranos is (soon to be was) the greatest dramatic series in the history of television (as opposed to the inarguable "one of the greatest"). Its singular balance of drama and comedy, its ability to be alternately terrifying and touching, its wit and the amazing cast of perfectly balanced characters is something that's simply never been matched in TV. And as the hub of the wheel, James Gandolfini managed to make Tony Soprano equal parts horrible and likeable (just ask Agent Harris, he'll tell you… it's hard to hate the guy, no matter how much you want him to go down).
So, what's going to happen over the course of the next eight episodes? Well, I do have a guess. I don't think anyone's going to be punished in a traditional dramatic sense because (as John Hanlon reminded us all last night), Chase has always been adamant about The Sopranos not being a morality tale. He's not judging these people, he's merely telling their story. And a huge part of their story is the seeming inevitability of becoming part of (or at least affected by) the "family" if you're born into the literal family. In the past ten years (or six seasons), AJ Soprano has gone from the innocent little kid who didn't even know his dad was in the mafia to someone who resents his sometimes-distant father's power and status while simultaneously trying to use it to his advantage. AJ's arc has always been tragic, the poor kid never had a "good" season (unlike sister Meadow, whose issues with her family were the usual teen-into-adult trauma… and she seems to have found an identity for herself while finding some kind of peace with her family).
So, AJ. Some have speculated that AJ (or Meadow) is going to get killed, but I don't think so (and not just because that would be too much like the conclusion of The Godfather Part III). I think the series is going to end with AJ becoming a part of his father's other family, due to some event (will he kill someone?) that would make it impossible to keep him isolated anymore. Which would of course be a tragedy to Tony (and Carmela), and would bring AJ's story arc to a close, while not giving the series a forced final chapter. If Christopher's burgeoning movie career takes him away (or OUT), Tony would have no choice but to turn to his son. After all, "You can only really trust family." And the entire series has been about the balance between Tony's two families. It seems like the only logical conclusion.
Of course, I'm probably wrong, since one of the great things about the show has been its unpredictability. Regardless, it's a sure bet that eight weeks from now, life will go on, the mob will go on, a mere stone's throw from where I sit, the Sopranos will go on. Just not on TV anymore.
Labels: the Sopranos, TV
It's All Subjective...
Pops Gustav
Bitten by a radioactive silverfish at the age of five, Karl Heitmueller Jr. (aka Kalli, aka Pops Gustav) gained the power of pop culture hyper-perception. Now as an adult, he writes, draws and cartoons about comics, movies, television, music, Superman, advertising, design, politics, religion, drinking and jerks. Sometimes all at once.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Note: I plan to record next week but will probably skip recording on Oct. 28-29.
Sockhead hat by Kelly McClure, knit on US 3 needles out of Nomadic Yarns Twist Sport yarn, in colorway When You Play the Game of Thrones.
Knit out of leftover sock yarn on US 3 needles.
The Walking Dead is back! I've also been enjoying Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on Netflix.


text:
Home Exclusive Relationships and Sexual Health
Study uncovers a feedback loop effect between attachment anxiety and manipulative mate retention behaviors
in Relationships and Sexual Health, Social Psychology
People who fear abandonment and have an excessive need for approval become more likely over time to use manipulative tactics to keep their romantic partner in a relationship. But men and women who engage in such tactics end up becoming more anxious about their relationship. Those are the findings from new research published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
"Although mate retention had been researched for decades in the field of evolutionary psychology, it had yet to be connected to the large research area of attachment theory, which to me seemed like an obvious intersection," said study author Nicole Barbaro, an adjunct professor at Utah Valley University and research scientist at WGU Labs.
Attachment theory describes how people bond to others and maintain their relationships. People can be secure or insecure in their attachments, and insecure individuals can be either anxious or avoidant. People with an anxious attachment style are fearful of rejection and abandonment, while people with an avoidant attachment style tend to distrust others and shun intimacy.
"Theoretical frameworks of mate retention were also historically male-centric, for example sperm competition theory, and I wanted to explore frameworks that could explain both male and female mate retention behavior in any type of relationship," Barbaro said.
Previous research has indicated that anxiously attached individuals tend to engage more frequently in cost-inflicting mate retention strategies (such as snooping through a partner's phone or talking to another person at a party to make a partner jealous.) Barbaro and her colleagues replicated those findings with a study of 104 young adults who were currently in a sexually active relationship that had lasted at least three months.
But one area that has been left unclear is whether cost-inflicting mate retention strategies lead to anxious attachment or whether anxious attachment leads to cost-inflicting mate retention strategies. To better understand this, the researchers examined two waves of data from 489 heterosexual couples who had participated in the Processes in Romantic Relationships and Their Impact on Relationship and Personal Outcomes (CouPers) study, longitudinal research conducted at the University of Basel.
Barbaro and her colleagues found that cost-inflicting strategies predicted higher attachment anxiety 18 months later. But the reverse was also true: higher attachment anxiety predicted more frequent use of cost-inflicting strategies. In other words, those who engaged in more frequent cost-inflicting mate retention behaviors tended to become more anxiously attached and those who were anxiously attached tended to become more likely to use cost-inflicting behaviors.
The findings indicate that "high anxious attachment is a strong risk factor for negative and manipulative partner-directed behavior for both men and women," Barbaro told PsyPost. "This relationship appears to be reciprocal, meaning that high attachment anxiety can lead to negative behaviors, which in turn appear to also predict later attachment anxiety."
The study provides new insights into how mate retention behaviors and attachment orientations interact over time in romantic relationships. But the study — like all research — includes some limitations.
"This line of work is still, overall, in early stages," Barbaro said. "Research in this area still needs to evaluate these behaviors using more than self-report survey measures. We still want to know the mechanisms underlying these associations between attachment and mate retention behavior, for example, what triggers are activating the attachment system and motivating specific types of behaviors? We still want to know how these processes impact other aspects of relationship functioning. For example, other research shows the impact of negative mate retention on relationship satisfaction – how does this connect with attachment orientations?"
"This is a line of research that I developed as a graduate student in an effort to develop a single evolutionary framework that explained both men's and women's mate retention behavior and it's great to see that a broader interest in this area has taken off in recent years, and I'm excited about the new insight researchers will uncover."
The study, "The (bidirectional) associations between romantic attachment orientations and mate retention behavior in male-female romantic couples", was authored by Nicole Barbaro, Rebekka Weidmann, Robert P. Burriss, Jenna Wünsche, Janina L. Bühler, Todd K. Shackelford, and Alexander Grob.


text:
OMG... Ileana accepts that she did a BOLD THING...
SIBY JEYYA June 18, 2019 12:30 IST OMG... Ileana accepts that she did a BOLD THING...
Slim and Sexy beauty Ileana D'Cruz started off with Tollywood flicks like Devadasu, Pokiri etc, and went on to become the top heroine of Tollywood demanding more than a crore per movie, thanks to the Telugu audience liking for her beauty and Sensuous hip-shaking moves. However, she soon vanished, after Venturing into Bollywood.
Though she began with a bang with ranbir kapoor starrer barfi, her later films didn't perform well at the box office, but however, she came back with movies like Rustom and Baadshaho. Currently busy with numerous Hindi flicks, the actress recently revealed a shocking secret in a magazine interview.
The actress revealed that she had attempted suicide, as she had body dysmorphic disorder which makes people hate their own body shape, leading to depression. The sexy babe revealed that her mother's support along with anti-depression treatment helped her come out of the dark phase.
ileana beauty view ranbir kapoor deva nk rk vani audi barfi india
Bollywood saves Sharma sisters! Movies 10 Hrs ago


text:
package com.company.repository;

import com.company.models.Course;
import com.company.models.Student;
import com.company.staticData.ExceptionMessages;
import com.company.io.OutputWriter;
import com.company.staticData.SessionData;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Paths;
import java.util.*;
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class StudentRepository {
    private boolean isDataInitialized = false;
    private HashMap<String, Course> courses;
    private HashMap<String, Student> students;
    private RepositoryFilter repositoryFilter;
    private RepositorySorter repositorySorter;

    public StudentRepository(RepositoryFilter repositoryFilter, RepositorySorter repositorySorter) {
        this.repositoryFilter = repositoryFilter;
        this.repositorySorter = repositorySorter;
    }

    public void unloadData(){
        if (!this.isDataInitialized){
            throw new RuntimeException(ExceptionMessages.DATA_NOT_INITIALIZED);
        }

        this.courses = null;
        this.students = null;
        this.isDataInitialized = false;
    }

    public void loadData(String fileName){
        if (this.isDataInitialized){
            throw new IllegalArgumentException(ExceptionMessages.DATA_ALREADY_INITIALIZED);
        }

        this.courses = new LinkedHashMap<>();
        this.students = new LinkedHashMap<>();
        try {
            this.readData(fileName);
            this.isDataInitialized = true;
        } catch (IOException e) {
            throw new IllegalArgumentException(ExceptionMessages.CANNOT_ACCESS_FILE);
        }
    }

    public void getStudentMarksInCourse(String course, String student){
        if (this.isQueryForStudentPossible(course, student)){
            return;
        }
        double mark = this.courses.get(course).getStudentsByName().get(student).getMarksByCourseName().get(course);
        OutputWriter.displayStudent(student, mark);
    }

    public void getStudentsByCourse(String course){
        if (!this.isQueryForCoursePossible(course)){
            return;
        }
        OutputWriter.writeMessageOnNewLine(course + ":");
        for (Map.Entry<String, Student> student : this.courses.get(course).getStudentsByName().entrySet()) {
            this.getStudentMarksInCourse(course, student.getKey());
        }
    }

    private void readData(String fileName) throws IOException {
        String regex = "([A-Z][a-zA-Z#\\+]*_[A-Z][a-z]{2}_\\d{4})\\s+([A-Za-z]+\\d{2}_\\d{2,4})\\s([\\s0-9]+)";
        Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regex);

        String path = SessionData.currentPath + "\\resources\\" + fileName;
        List<String> lines = Files.readAllLines(Paths.get(path));

        for (String line : lines) {
            Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(line);
            if (line.isEmpty() || !matcher.find()){
                continue;
            }

            String courseName = matcher.group(1);
            String studentName = matcher.group(2);
            String scoresStr = matcher.group(3);
            try{
                int[] scores = Arrays.stream(scoresStr.split("\\s+")).mapToInt(Integer::parseInt).toArray();
                if (Arrays.stream(scores).anyMatch(score -> score > 100 || score < 0)){
                    OutputWriter.displayException(ExceptionMessages.INVALID_SCORE);
                    continue;
                }
                if (scores.length > Course.NUMBER_OF_TASKS_ON_EXAM){
                    OutputWriter.displayException(ExceptionMessages.INVALID_NUMBER_OF_SCORES);
                    continue;
                }
                if (!this.students.containsKey(studentName)){
                    this.students.put(studentName, new Student(studentName));
                }
                if (!this.courses.containsKey(courseName)){
                    this.courses.put(courseName, new Course(courseName));
                }

                Course course = this.courses.get(courseName);
                Student student = this.students.get(studentName);
                student.enrollInCourse(course);
                student.setMarksInCourse(course.getName(), scores);
                course.enrollStudent(student);
            } catch (NumberFormatException e){
                OutputWriter.displayException(e.getMessage());
            }
        }

        OutputWriter.writeMessageOnNewLine("Data read.");
    }

    private boolean isQueryForCoursePossible(String courseName){
        if (!this.isDataInitialized){
            OutputWriter.displayException(ExceptionMessages.DATA_NOT_INITIALIZED);
            return false;
        }
        if (!this.courses.containsKey(courseName)){
            OutputWriter.displayException(ExceptionMessages.NOT_EXISTING_COURSE);
            return false;
        }

        return true;
    }

    private boolean isQueryForStudentPossible(String courseName, String studentName){
        if (!this.isQueryForCoursePossible(courseName)){
            return false;
        }
        if (!this.courses.get(courseName).getStudentsByName().containsKey(studentName)){
            OutputWriter.displayException(ExceptionMessages.NOT_EXISTING_STUDENT);
            return false;
        }

        return true;
    }

    public void filterAndTake(String courseName, String filter) {
        int studentsToTake = this.courses.get(courseName).getStudentsByName().size();
        this.filterAndTake(courseName, filter, studentsToTake);
    }

    public void filterAndTake(String courseName, String filter, int studentsToTake) {
        if (!this.isQueryForCoursePossible(courseName)) {
            return;
        }
        HashMap<String, Double> marks = new LinkedHashMap<>();
        for (Map.Entry<String,Student> entry : this.courses.get(courseName).getStudentsByName().entrySet()) {
            marks.put(entry.getKey(), entry.getValue().getMarksByCourseName().get(courseName));
        }
        this.repositoryFilter.printFilteredStudents(marks, filter, studentsToTake);
    }

    public void orderAndTake(String courseName, String orderType, int studentsToTake) {
        if (!this.isQueryForCoursePossible(courseName)) {
            return;
        }
        HashMap<String, Double> marks = new LinkedHashMap<>();
        for (Map.Entry<String,Student> entry : this.courses.get(courseName).getStudentsByName().entrySet()) {
            marks.put(entry.getKey(), entry.getValue().getMarksByCourseName().get(courseName));
        }
        this.repositorySorter.printSortedStudents(marks, orderType, studentsToTake);
    }

    public void orderAndTake(String courseName, String orderType) {
        int studentsToTake = this.courses.get(courseName).getStudentsByName().size();
        this.orderAndTake(courseName, orderType, studentsToTake);
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Latest COVID Updates
Record-high 128 deaths reported in Wisconsin; positive test rates continue to dropPHMDC reports 170 new cases, hospitalizations continue to dropMore than 30,000 Wisconsin residents now fully vaccinated; positive test rates continue steep declineDane County confirms 137 new cases, hospitalizations fallMore than 25,000 in Wisconsin have received full vaccine; COVID stats continue to improve
Home Academy Not All-or-Nothing: Animal Testing Justified in Medical Research, Not Cosmetics
Not All-or-Nothing: Animal Testing Justified in Medical Research, Not Cosmetics
Ruben Elvira
This opinion piece was produced by a student in the Madison365 Academy. It reflects the opinion of the author, not necessarily the opinion of Madison365, its staff, board of directors, sponsors or funders. To learn more or support our educational programs, visit madison365.org/academy.
Scientific testing on animals has allowed us to produce a lot of medical treatments. But is it justifiable to test cosmetics on animals to enhance our looks and promote our attractiveness?
First, animal testing has always had very unpleasant and cruel effects on animals. They are restrained and undergo inhuman treatment; for example, in the Draize test, rabbits' eyelids are held back for at least 72 hours while ingredients are applied to them that can be very painful and harmful to these animals, which may eventually die from the test. Another example of an inhuman test is the inhalation test where the animals are sprayed, put into inhalation chambers and forced to inhale potentially harmful chemicals. Most of these test performed on animals can only predict human reaction with approximately 65 percent accuracy in most cases, and many ingredients that are tested are never put into use.
I strongly believe that we shouldn't test cosmetics on animals because there are already ingredients in the market that are deemed safe to use. The FDA does not require cosmetic products to be animal tested. There are so many other ways to test the effects cosmetic products have rather than using animals (in vitro, stem cell, genetic testing, etc). Cosmetic companies that do not test on animals can also test their products on human volunteers or in clinical trials. Also testing on animals can be really expensive because you have to provide them with food, care, and shelter.
However, testing for scientific purposes is an entirely different matter. It has helped us better advance comprehension of how to treat medical conditions like breast cancer, cystic fibrosis, malaria, etc, as well as creating vaccines. Scientific testing on animals has made it possible for us to obtain information that can't be learned in others ways. Animals can provide experimental models that would be nearly impossible to replicate using humans. They make for great models when studying specific diseases because some animals have biological similarities as humans. Studying a process that involves more than one organ requires the use of an animal because it's impossible to replicate using a culture dish.
Some people might not agree and think cosmetic testing on animals is necessary and acceptable. Also some companies have said that they need to test products on animals in order for there products to be sold many other countries. But this isn't fact not all true, because the companies have chosen for their products to be sold in countries where it's required for the products to be animals tested before they are sent out into the market.
In conclusion I believe that's it isn't justified to use animals to go undergo very painful procedures just so that we can produce new products and ingredients to make us look more attractive. Especially if there are already ingredients that's are determined to be safe for use. Scientific medical testing on animals is justified, however, because we are actually trying to improve human health by finding treatments and other medications that could potentially extend someone's life.
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