Nash Equilibrium

Nash Equilibrium: The Nash Equilibrium consists of two sides that can both make some kind of a profit. They both make a profit without changing the strategies of one another  

Game Theory – The theory of games is all around us in any game we play. All it is, is we change our decisions based on how others make their decisions. 

Prisoner Dilemma – similar to game theory but is more along the lines of someone being forced to make the choice rather than making a decision on their own 

The Serendip online interactive dilemma game was very interesting. This game was life like. If I kept cooperating with it, it would agree with me. It made our profits grow together. The only thing I didn’t like was from the time I disagreed they disagreed until the end. 

In History: The cold war, the U.S and Soviet Union did something much like the nash equilibrium 

In Government: both parties must agree on things that will benefit the nation 

In Economics: companies will lower and raise their prices to compete around the world 

Sociology: Sociology studies the structure of this entire thing 

Psychology: Studies how the mind reacts in situations like this

Everyday life: like I said before every day you make choices just like these and any choice can affect you in many ways  

In the game we played in class I enjoyed seeing what kind of classmates I truly have. To be completely honest I expected the other group to stab us in the back but in my group we wanted to at least try to put ourselves out there and achieve greatness even though we ended up losing by a lot the one thing I got out of it was that Wendy will not be invited to any of our class reunions.

Shutter Island review

We watched the movie shutter island so we could try and evaluate it with a sociological outlook. The movie takes place on an abandon island, which once had a war fort on it that was converted and added onto to create a private in sane asylum. On this Island were many insane men and women. They all were considered violent and a danger to society so they were sent here to be helped.

The movie began with a ferry ride across the ocean to shutter island where Teddy Daniels, a United States Marshall, and his partner Chuck were coming to investigate the case of an escaped patient that was loose on the island. They got to the island and the head doctor got them situated in their rooms. Then the two marshals began their investigation by talking to some of the patients and staff members at the insane asylum. They were looking for a girl named Rachael Solondo. She was an escaped patient at the hospital and the two marshals were brought in to help search for this woman.

Rachael’s condition was of the worst case but it shocked the workers on the island that she would do so much as to try and escape the premises. So that is why they brought in the big dogs for this specific incident. The reason Rachael was brought into the hospital was because she drowned all of her kids in a lake. The reason she is considered clinically insane is because she has no recollection of it and swears that she would have never done such a thing.

So Teddy and Chuck continued their search for Rachael and they found some leads that eventually ended up with a dead end and they didn’t make sense. Throughout the movie though you may notice one thing, Teddy has many different flashbacks and continues getting headaches that he gets “aspirin” for from one of the doctors on the island. Eventually Teddy finds this strange and he decides to stop taking the pills and he begins to have more flashbacks that all eventually lead him to the lighthouse on the island where we find out the real truth about exactly what is going on, on Shutter Island.

When Teddy got to the lighthouse his eyes were opened to something nobody watching the movie saw coming at the time. He found out that he wasn’t just a United States marshal; he was much more than that. Teddy Daniels was actually Andrew Laeddis, the guy he thought burnt down his apartment building years ago. The woman named Rachael Solondo was actually his wife Dolores Chanel. If you pay close attention to these names they are the same letters just switched around into different names, seems like this is something that an insane person would do, that’s because Teddy Daniels was a patient at the hospital and he was the one living in his own little make believe world where he was still a marshal and he was still doing work for the nation he lived in when really he is the one that killed his wife Dolores. This all happened after he came to their lake cabin after a week of work where he found her outside next to the water on a swing and the three children face down in the water dead. He then remembered that he shot his wife because of what she had done to the kids.

The movie ends with a phrase that Andrew said to his partner (psychiatrist). The phrase stated, “Hey Chuck, this place has me wonderin, is it better to live a monster or die a hero?” this tipped off Chuck about the fact that even after remembering that Andrew had done these things he had pushed it out of his mind again and they were back to square one. So Andrew was then taken to be lobotomized by the doctors. There is one thing that Andrew did leave us to wonder about though. From what Andrew said to chuck did he really not know who he was and what he had done, or did he decide that it was better for him to only remember the good things and not the bad even if that was going to get him killed.

Gary Webb the HERO!!!!

Is Gary Webb a hero or a zero? I believe that many people could see him differently based on their views as a member of the United States. Although I personally see him as a hero some people may not support that idea. Gary Webb was a journalist and during his time working for the San Jose Times he came across a lead to a story that included the CIA and the drug cartel in Nicaragua, along with the rebels in the war. What happened was the United States was trying to stay out of a war that included the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who were backed by the communist Russia, and the Nicaraguan Contras. The Contras were trying to stop communism from entering their country and taking over, while the Sandinistas were trying to impose communism on the people of Nicaragua with the help of the Russians. America decided to help the Contras to stop the spread of communism in Central America, but we didn’t want the world to know that we were the ones helping so we came up with a plan. The CIA headed the operation to help the Contras by selling cocaine on the streets and using that money to pay for guns and ammunition for the Contras. The reason they sold cocaine was because the people on the streets were willing to pay a high dollar for it and if they sold it this way there would be no trace of where the money came from. So we secretly sent the money over and helped the Contras and the CIA did this with ease and never got caught until Gary Webb came along.

Gary found this story and decided to roll with it because it was set at the time to be the biggest story in the history of investigative journalism. He dug deep and it even took him on a trip to Nicaragua to research deeper into the topic. Once he finally had enough evidence to release the first article of three in the series the Dark Alliance these papers shocked the nation and blew up just as Gary expected and they finally revealed what the CIA had been doing all along.

I see Gary as a hero because he didn’t shy away from this story. He stood up to one of the most powerful agencies in the world and wasn’t afraid to back them into a corner and exposed them for all that hidden things that they had done. Gary was a hero because he put out one of the most revealing stories of all time and I believe he should go down not as a lying coward but as a brave investigative reporter that stood up for what reporting is meant to be, exposing the world to the truth.