Transience

                                                                                                       I will revisit this one day. Properly. Implications of the Interpretations of Islam: Comparative Gender Studies in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel and Davar Ardalan’s My Name Is Iran . Nurul Kamilah Mat Kamil 1007C10614 Period 3 ENG4U Mr. S. Wise May 5, 2011            The status of Islam‘s relevance and compatibility to modern context such as individual women’s rights is a debatable issue. Presently, in Muslim communities, discrepancies in gender equ...

My blurb was featured here .  But I actually did a full writeup for all the questions. So I suppose, this was the full thing that I came up with if it suits your fancy.  Nurul Kamilah Mat Kamil, McMaster University, Canada, Electrical and Biomedical Engineering, B.Eng 1.       How much did you change as a person as the result of your overseas education? I am definitely not the same person as I was when I left the country. Although there was little to no physical changes (I have not grown any taller nor gained any weight as my friends can testify), there is a big change in my outlook of the world. Being in contact with people of different cultures and different backgrounds abroad has widened my perspectives. It has given me an opportunity to be exposed to different sides of the same story. For example, having known people who have actually emigrated from war-torn countries or refugees in Canada. You get a first-hand account of the goings-on and...

Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative Book Reflection Nurul Matkamil 1160337 At the beginning of every chapter, Thomas King would start off with a story of the earth riding on a turtle’s back. The point he wanted to drive home with this is that when circumstances deny you of having even the right of identity, all you really have are your stories that you must tell to assert your individuality. It just goes to show that sometimes circumstances have not been kind to certain parties and some voices will go unheard if no one spares a thought to consider all interests equally. In the last chapter, he talked about the story of the wolf taking away the ducks’ feather after promising them “protection”. He relates this with the behaviour of the government making treaties with the native people to “protect” them, but in reality, the legislations were there to monitor them, strip them of their land and erase their race by setting regulations to define who is or not an India...

Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress Book Reflection Nurul Matkamil 1160337 Ronald Wright poses three of Gauguin’s questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? He then proceeds to answer them by telling society to learn from past civilisations that fall victim to “progress traps”. These progress traps are a product of the obsession for the advancement of technology which in the end, caused the very down fall of the civilisation as these advancements proceed with little to no consideration on the impact it has on nature and society. One such example of a progress trap is the Mesopotamian civilisation that improves its crop production and soil fertility by using the advancement of irrigation technology that diverts the river flow of the Tigris and Euphrates to water other barren parts. So, due to more coverage of area that they can water, the civilisation grew. However, because of the design of the irrigation went against the natural flow of water, this r...

December 31, 2013 Dear Joel, Before I tell you why I got an A in your class, I’d like to reminisce the first day of class. It’s always good to see where you began to appreciate how you got to where you are now. I came to the first day of class, expecting what would be a typical ethics course. Supposedly it should add value to my personal conduct as an engineer and make me a responsible future engineer who is in tune with societal issues and one who designs for sustainability. I’ve had other ethics courses before, but memorizing a list from a textbook wasn’t really all that memorable. However, your mouse trap fetish on the first day did make an indelible impression on me, and as I had hoped, you didn’t let my expectations down for the whole term in terms of serving up new perspectives and interesting lessons. My experience in your class was indeed a memorable one, if not, a personally life changing one. It certainly made me think about a lot more issues that didn’t occur to me to th...

Reflection: I have honestly never done an ecological footprint of my lifestyle, neither considered doing it. I have vaguely heard of the idea, but I didn’t see any importance or urgency to do it. So, as I was doing the assignment, I was actually forced to consider every little thing I do in my daily life which I never really thought of before. Even small things like recycling, or the amount of meat you eat, and turning off the lights could contribute so much to your ecological footprint. I feel that if I had known everything in detail, it would have been more accurate. Based on the quiz results, my first reaction was well, “it could have been worse”, but it’s not exactly great either. Since we only really have resources from one earth, and already, my daily lifestyle is doing harm to the world, if everyone on earth decided to adopt it. That’s not even considering other people’s lifestyles that might be more exhaustive than mine. I guess it’s due to the fact that we live in a consumeris...

Introduction: I decided to go for this challenge because my friends and I agree that I am a social media addict. I post at least 10 status updates on my Facebook and Twitter every day, and I never logout from both accounts. My mornings are spent checking Facebook at the waking hour. I’ve also had multiple social media accounts. I was hoping that going 7 days without social media would help cure me of this addiction and hopefully teach me how to use social media in moderation, as well as gain some form of insight. Report and reflection: 7 days of going without social media for me drove me into an existential crisis. Well, no, that’s exaggerating it a little bit, but the impact was felt because I was so used of having social media being an integral part of my daily routines as well as my interaction with people. It gets kind of frustrating when I can’t get the updates I want really fast and when I watch a funny video, or thought up of something interesting and I couldn’t share it with pe...

I am sometimes grateful for the moments of solitude in a life where there is a constant influx of deadlines and to-do lists, because that’s when I get to sit down and consolidate my own thoughts and experiences. Sometimes, you forget to “check” yourself once in a while, as you keep telling yourself to move on to the next thing. Having ambitions and chasing grades is not a bad thing, but that doesn’t mean your perspectives in life should remain stagnant just because you don’t have time to think about it. 4AO3 classes so far has given me that space to stop and think of other things in life. In engineering, we have a top-down and bottom-up approach. 4AO3 is sort of a bottom-up approach as you take a step back and see where the individual engineer as a module fit into the rest of the system, which is the society, or the rest of the world. I could suddenly see the bigger picture of my role in the society. How my slaving away in circuit analyses is not just for the sake of it, but it is to e...

                                                                                                     Richard Parker, Animal Alter Ego: An Examination of the Nature of Id in Life of Pi by Yann Martel Nurul Kamilah Mat Kamil 1007C10614 Period 3 ENG4U Mr. S. Wise 7 th March 2011             As a device of the poetic imagination and rhetorical flourish , metaphors give as much colour and emphasise to a particular message; be it a social critique or even a psychological examination (Lakoff). Animals are widely used as metaphors in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi ...