FYI:
Upon reviewing the methodology of the analysis, we found two major problems:
1) Data did not contain all the dates with 0 entries
2) Plotting trendline over individual dates is not right, since there could be trends within each 2 periods (i.e. positive/negative trend within the month of april, and positive/negative trends within the month of may) which skew the result
New methodology: Calculate the average twitter post per month for the past couple of months. This way, trends within each month will not affect the result. The aggregation period is chosen to be one month for convenience - esp since i've been here for one month. If aggregation is done for period less than one month, we will need to keep in mind the potential negative/positive trend within each month.
Result:
Jan - 4.258065
Feb -4.214286
March - 5.354839
April - 3.733333
May - 3.310345
Conclusion (Pending Raj reproducing the same result): May average is lower than Jan-April averages. My intuition through normal observation was right: there is a negative correlation between my being here and Raj's daily twitter posts.
End of Entry
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
Why I don't use Twitter
[NOTE: I changed my mind. Please refer to a newer post.]
I thought that the video titled "Twitter in Plain English" was explanation enough, but some argued that the video had done no justice at all to the real value of Twitter. I don't disagree - the mayor of Toronto uses Twitter as a channel of communication. Certain police departments are using Twitter to provide up to the minute details as to what's going on. Twitter can be used well, sure, but that doesn't mean that I will use Twitter well. (Though it begs the question of why they couldn't post something on their own website that's easily updatable and 140 chars long...)
So for one thing, having Twitter is like talking to everyone and talking to no one at the same time. Exactly what blogging is like. It's like you're just casting information out to nowhere - information about your daily lives. It's exactly like bad blogging (i.e. what I used to do, and still do to an extent): there's no audience to consider, it's just you... except there is the pretense that the fact that you're on top of emails or gmail is sending your email twice is important to someone else. Sure, other people can and do read it, but ... what's the point? I'm mowing the lawn. So what? Twitter, then, has the potential to creating pretenous people who thinks that mowing the lawn might be big news for someone else.
And guess what? I'm really suseptible to that. Blogging sortaf swayed me to that direction. At first, it was used like a journal/diary type thing - just put all the thoughts down so I don't have to think about them anymore. Not a bad idea. Until it really grows and consumes you: if you're like me, you will probably consciously think about blogging or twittering or what not, and be really conscious of the fact that it needs to be up to date. Blogging isn't so bad, because blog entries can be made thoughtful. But Twitter? I don't want to think "I should Twitter this!" every time I have a late night chess game. It's true that not everyone will have the same problems, but based on past experience, I know that I will.
So there you have it: Twitter may be used well by certain people, but I see it as another wormhole that can suck me in if I started using it, and I would be moving backwards.
End of Entry
I thought that the video titled "Twitter in Plain English" was explanation enough, but some argued that the video had done no justice at all to the real value of Twitter. I don't disagree - the mayor of Toronto uses Twitter as a channel of communication. Certain police departments are using Twitter to provide up to the minute details as to what's going on. Twitter can be used well, sure, but that doesn't mean that I will use Twitter well. (Though it begs the question of why they couldn't post something on their own website that's easily updatable and 140 chars long...)
So for one thing, having Twitter is like talking to everyone and talking to no one at the same time. Exactly what blogging is like. It's like you're just casting information out to nowhere - information about your daily lives. It's exactly like bad blogging (i.e. what I used to do, and still do to an extent): there's no audience to consider, it's just you... except there is the pretense that the fact that you're on top of emails or gmail is sending your email twice is important to someone else. Sure, other people can and do read it, but ... what's the point? I'm mowing the lawn. So what? Twitter, then, has the potential to creating pretenous people who thinks that mowing the lawn might be big news for someone else.
And guess what? I'm really suseptible to that. Blogging sortaf swayed me to that direction. At first, it was used like a journal/diary type thing - just put all the thoughts down so I don't have to think about them anymore. Not a bad idea. Until it really grows and consumes you: if you're like me, you will probably consciously think about blogging or twittering or what not, and be really conscious of the fact that it needs to be up to date. Blogging isn't so bad, because blog entries can be made thoughtful. But Twitter? I don't want to think "I should Twitter this!" every time I have a late night chess game. It's true that not everyone will have the same problems, but based on past experience, I know that I will.
So there you have it: Twitter may be used well by certain people, but I see it as another wormhole that can suck me in if I started using it, and I would be moving backwards.
End of Entry
Monday, April 6, 2009
the paradox of selfishness
This is something that I thought about for a while... and finding the answer to this delimma seemed to have become more urgent when I saw this talk on TED.
It's a delimma between individualism and ... well, one-ness with the world. Between "materialism" and spiritualism.
Around grade 8 or so, I was perplexed by the paradox of selflessness. If you cared for someone else, well, isn't it because that person is valuable to you, and hence you're really acting out of self interest? Your desire for someone else's happiness is still a desire that you own, and any action to fulfill that is really an action to fulfill your own desires - a selfish act. At the time, I was brainwashed by the thought that selfless=good, selfish=bad. I concluded, therefore, that the world was not capable of true selflessness. The world must therefore be bad. This is the main reason why I felt so liberated after reading Rand, who basically said - yes, we act out of selfishness, even when we care for others, and that is good. If one acted to benefit someone that we don't care about... then we've betrayed ourselves. Values are important, and the self is what creates and attains values.
Yet on the other hand - the abundance of compassion, mutual respect, and love for those you may or may not know personally is what makes the world a better place. We are interconnected in a great many ways - both physically and mentally, in more ways that we'll ever understand in our life time. I'm trying to find that article about monkeys dipping potatoes in sea water - the one where after one monkey found that it made the potato taste better... the entire island of monkeys started dipping potatoes in sea water. What's more astonishing was that the monkeys in a different island started doing the same thing - and the two islands are totally separated, and the monkeys had no normal means of communicating with one another. Another experiment showed that people do better on yesterday's crossword compared to today's, as if people could access a collective consciousness... well, does this mean that a collective consciousness does exist, that we really are one? Is that what Budhhism teaches? Even without the collective consciousness, community spirit makes the world better. We're affected by what people do and say, how they act. Many will say that compassion, respect, and understanding is a small commitment worth making.
So that's the paradox: in the "micro" world, selfishness is what would make a happy person: the application of ones effort in the achievement of ones values. Yet in the "macro" world, things would be better if everyone cared for one another. How do you connect the two?
Well, things would be good if all individuals judged the world as something worth caring about. Then creating a better world would be a personal value for everyone. I guess the question each person has to ask is: how much do I value the world? In what way?
With that being said, I don't think that it's a question of "Which side do you choose?" - and I don't think that Dr. Taylor is right in that the answer lies solely in the right brain, the spiritualism and one-ness. Both are beautiful in its own ways, and they do compliment each other - ying and yang, productive and thoughtful, present and past/future...
How much do I value the world? To say infinitely much is an outright lie, and to say not at all is naive. Where is that balancing point - my balancing point?
End of Entry
It's a delimma between individualism and ... well, one-ness with the world. Between "materialism" and spiritualism.
Around grade 8 or so, I was perplexed by the paradox of selflessness. If you cared for someone else, well, isn't it because that person is valuable to you, and hence you're really acting out of self interest? Your desire for someone else's happiness is still a desire that you own, and any action to fulfill that is really an action to fulfill your own desires - a selfish act. At the time, I was brainwashed by the thought that selfless=good, selfish=bad. I concluded, therefore, that the world was not capable of true selflessness. The world must therefore be bad. This is the main reason why I felt so liberated after reading Rand, who basically said - yes, we act out of selfishness, even when we care for others, and that is good. If one acted to benefit someone that we don't care about... then we've betrayed ourselves. Values are important, and the self is what creates and attains values.
Yet on the other hand - the abundance of compassion, mutual respect, and love for those you may or may not know personally is what makes the world a better place. We are interconnected in a great many ways - both physically and mentally, in more ways that we'll ever understand in our life time. I'm trying to find that article about monkeys dipping potatoes in sea water - the one where after one monkey found that it made the potato taste better... the entire island of monkeys started dipping potatoes in sea water. What's more astonishing was that the monkeys in a different island started doing the same thing - and the two islands are totally separated, and the monkeys had no normal means of communicating with one another. Another experiment showed that people do better on yesterday's crossword compared to today's, as if people could access a collective consciousness... well, does this mean that a collective consciousness does exist, that we really are one? Is that what Budhhism teaches? Even without the collective consciousness, community spirit makes the world better. We're affected by what people do and say, how they act. Many will say that compassion, respect, and understanding is a small commitment worth making.
So that's the paradox: in the "micro" world, selfishness is what would make a happy person: the application of ones effort in the achievement of ones values. Yet in the "macro" world, things would be better if everyone cared for one another. How do you connect the two?
Well, things would be good if all individuals judged the world as something worth caring about. Then creating a better world would be a personal value for everyone. I guess the question each person has to ask is: how much do I value the world? In what way?
With that being said, I don't think that it's a question of "Which side do you choose?" - and I don't think that Dr. Taylor is right in that the answer lies solely in the right brain, the spiritualism and one-ness. Both are beautiful in its own ways, and they do compliment each other - ying and yang, productive and thoughtful, present and past/future...
How much do I value the world? To say infinitely much is an outright lie, and to say not at all is naive. Where is that balancing point - my balancing point?
End of Entry
Friday, April 3, 2009
New template
Why? So that I have a better idea of how long my blog posts really are... just so that I get feedback when I'm going on for too long without meaning to.
Anyways, I like this.
End of Entry
Anyways, I like this.
End of Entry
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