Author Archives: Shinsaku Takikawa

The field of micro-finance was unexpectedly new and interesting to me. When I was reading Half The Sky, the word micro-finance stood out to my eyes even though I had no idea about what it is like. As I kept researching into this topic, I felt that its humanistic aspect of focusing on every woman’sContinue reading “What was something new that you learned?”

Since several studies have proven that achievement gap in education is solely related to children’s background, at first, it seemed to me that addressing both socio-economic disparity and individualization of education are crucial to solving this issue. However, I noticed that the first option might be chicken-and-egg issue because we learned that the best wayContinue reading “What can we do to minimize education gap?”

As far as I understood from the books, just war has three characteristics. First, in theory, war can be justified when self-defense is needed against unjust enemies. Second, war can be justifies when conducted in a just way. These two are traditional components of just war, and they can be rephrased into “why” and “how”Continue reading “What is just war according to just war theory?”

“Education” and “Empowerment” are mentioned as the key to improving women’s social status. How are these related, and how can they resolve the situation? First, empowerment can be defined as an authority or power given to someone to do something. This way, education can be regarded as a type of empowerment because education can provideContinue reading “Discussion Question for Ch. 3”

I’m against the idea that voluntary prostitution should be legalized because of a simple reason: it is very difficult to distinguish whether a person is voluntary prostitute or not. Furthermore, it is also possible that one change what they say about their will in a moment. Hence, even involuntary prostitution could be justified by law.Continue reading “Should voluntary prostitution be prohibited by law?”

Even though some are revealing the significance of WMDs, like O’neil, I basically think the situation will keep going even in the future. First, it seems that now is still in the process that WMDs are becoming known among people as we can see from O’neil’s book. Therefore, this process of recognition will continue inContinue reading “The future of WMDs”

I actually was the one who asked this question on another student’s thread, but I’m not really sure about a solution. The fundamental requirements should be the opposite of the three characteristics of WMD, which are 1) transparency, 2) fairness, and 3) unscalability. Transparency can help a model not become a WMD because those whoContinue reading “How can we prevent a model from becoming a WMD?”

What is a model? “A model, after all, is nothing more than an abstract representation of some process, be it a baseball game, an oil company’s supply chain, a foreign government’s actions, or a movie theater’s attendance” (O’neil, 2016, p. 18). “No model can include all of the real world’s complexity or the nuance ofContinue reading “1/06/2020”