Patrick Franzinelli

Past evening I attended the speaker event of Debby Dougherty at the Marshall school of Business. She is a professor for communication at the University of Missouri. The topic of her presentation was sexual misconduct at the workplace. Her main focus was on what causes this damaging behaviors. When we thing about sexual aggression, we should not only think about only "offender" and "victim", but we have to take into account the surrounding environment. The conclusion of her research is, that such behavior is fueled by the underlying culture of certain organizations, and how these reflect the macro-sociological image of society. To start out the presentation she named a lot of examples of sexual predatory behavior which made  the news recently. Sadly our campus was recently involved in such affairs. Together with us––the audience––she analyzed the environment of the school. We realized that there are many factors on our campus which are favorable to such behaviors. ...

In the first chapter of his book, Chuck Collins starts to talk about the 1%––the 1% which owns most of the wealth in this country. Society has very mixed feelings about this wealthy minority. He points out that we admire, hate and want to be part of that group at the same time. At this point, he admits that his very family is part of this controversial group of people. He states that he grew up with many privileges. His grandfather was the founder of Oscar Mayer food corporation. Therefore, his family could rely on the substantial wealth which they inherited to them. Growing up he was able to rely on an endowment which was underwritten in his name. As a privileged child, he went to prep school where he slowly realized that he was living in a bubble. As a result, he decided to explore the "other side" right after high school. He decided to do some simple jobs within a worker-town which was experiencing trouble during the recession fo the 70s. The years after, he went to coll...

Art Opening at Coagula Curatorial This Saturday evening Lorenzo and I decided to visit the Coagula Curatorial. This art gallery was featuring a new collection called "Real Abstraction" by the artists Jennifer Faist, Frederika Roeder and Jane Park Wells. Each artist had a couple of their pictures exposed in this gallery––which is situated in the pedestrian zone of LA's china town. We found the place after a short search and we started our visit. The featured artworks as part of "Real Abstraction" The Curatorial had two rooms which presented the art: a front-room and a backroom. The artworks exposed were pretty similar in both rooms: monochromatic pictures with minor abstract features. These artworks were a little bit too minimalistic to catch my full attention. On the other hand, the other features of the gallery were pretty interesting; especially the Mexican shrine (left) and the bathroom (right) of the place struck my attention. Both were very ...