More Like Google Minus

In order to get up and going on my blog posts, I had to log into my non NEU gmail account for the first time in a couple of months.  I noticed that I had a few Google+ messages, and had completely forgot that it existed. 

When it first came out, my close friends and I started using Google+ a lot, neglecting Facebook for a few weeks, since they were the only ones I really kept in close touch with online anyways.  One friend even deleted his Facebook to migrate to the Google network.  That lasted no more than a month.  Not a lot of people migrated and  Facebook had all my pictures and friends already.  I thought that Google+ would have taken off just because Google's always putting out a good product.  It seems that Facebook is locked in pretty good, but something is going to inevitably take its place. 

Since most of my friends and I will be graduating in a couple weeks and are looking for jobs, we're trying to keep our online activity to a minimum because everyone's always using HR horror stories to scare us from having incriminating pictures up.  A lot of my friends are considering finally getting rid of their Facebook's permanently.  I think there would definitely be a market for a new social network for the young professional crowd, I'm curious what it will be.

McContagion

Earlier in the semester we talked about how obesity can spread quickly throughout a network.  Living with 5 guys surrounded by takeout that is cheaper than making a dinner at home has had its tole on my waist line.

My friends are pretty much all seniors, and it is funny to see the guts growing on my friends that have never had any body fat before.  One friend, "Senna" has been made fun of recently by his high school friends on trips home because he has a good sized belly and looks a couple months pregnant.  Another friend had his sister tell him to go to the gym because his belly overhung his belt for the first time in his life during his Easter trip home.  This past weekend, I woke up craving McDonald's, so since I have a car I was gonna make it happen.  A couple of my roommates wanted to come too.  The original plan was just to get a Big Mac meal, but honestly who gets full from a number one anymore since McD's got rid of super size and jacked prices?  So one friend offered to split a 20 piece McNuggets with me on top of the burger I was getting.  But then the third friend who was going was feeling left out, and we decided to split 2 20 piece nugs 3 ways.  It ended up with all of us getting our our 20 piece on top of a burger, because a 10 piece costs 4.79 vs 4.99 for 20 (a whole other blog post could be dedicated to how whack Mc'D's pricing is down Mass ave).  The 'social norm' for my group of friends has been to be a fatty lately.

While the obesity spreads quickly, you would think that exercise would as well.  I like to run to stay in mediocre shape, and had been slacking all winter because it was too cold to go outside and the gym is not my cup of tea. Once it warmed up I started getting back into it, trying to log around 20 miles/week to ease back into it.  One of my roommates who used to be in real good shape just gets mad at me when I go running and makes fun of me for going before we go out, asking why I don't just chill and drink a beer instead.   Another friend ("Senna") bought new shoes and was all set to get going, but quit after 1 run on his new kicks, and has resorted to ridiculing me as well for trying to be in shape.

Obama Transparency

While browsing Reddit the other day i found a post that reminded me of one of the videos we watched earlier this semester on open policy and transparency on government.  The woman who gave the presentation talked about how the current administration was pushing to be more transparent with its doings and let there be more access to information for the public.  The article that I saw was a list of all the charities that the president gave to this year.

I read another article today that Romney will open up his fundraisers to the media.  This is due to pressure from democrats and other critics of Romney who wanted to be more open with his campaign.  It is following an incident that occurred earlier in the month in which a reporter overheard Romney and leaked previously unreleased information on his tax plan.

Homophily in the CD Player

The theory of homophily definitely applies to group of college friends.  Most of my friends favorite type of movie or TV show is comedies.  The summer after my freshman year, 3 of my favorite comedies came out:  Pineapple Express, Step Brothers, and Tropic Thunder.  When I got back from the summer break my friends were discussing which movies were our favorites over the summer, and all of us had gone to see these three, and most had seen Step Brothers more than once in the theater.  One of the things that has kept my group of friends close knit through school is our sense of humor, and half of the words that come out of our mouths are movie quotes. 

Another thing that we share is our taste in music.  Most of my roommates (including myself) that I was assigned with in freshman year were big fans of rock music and played some sort of instrument.  One of my friends had even gone to the same Allman Brothers/Tom Petty tour the summer before school.

There is lake in the town where I'm from, and every summer there is a large party in one of the bays with thousands of people that come from all over to celebrate the end of the summer. My roommate came up for that weekend to hang out.  I had a mix CD in my car of all the hits that I was listening to at the time and we played the CD all weekend while we were hanging around.  When he went back home to Boston, I hopped a ride with him.  When we got in his car, he threw on one of his mix CDs, and 10/15 songs on his CD were the same as the ones that were on mine.  Neither of us had talked about what music we'd been listening to, and we had a pretty good laugh.

An Experimental Study of Taxes

I went to a psychology study at the Harvard Business School last week. It was an interesting experiment. I was told to type in a series of 9 symbols repeatedly, and that I would make 2 cents apiece for each line I typed. Easy enough. For ten minutes, I typed furiously away trying to see how fast I could type and how much money I could make as a broke college student. I ended up making $2.22. Not bad for ten minutes work, but also a low value for what I thought would be achievable. Afterwards, I was shown what I had typed with each line stacked atop the next. It looked like hieroglyphs from Ancient Egypt or a Totem Pole from the Native Americans in the Northwest Pacific, I could not decide which. I was then again asked to type rows of nine for ten minutes, but this time the game changed. I was told that I was “taxed” one penny per line, or about fifty percent, of my earnings. This, to me, meant that I was still making one penny per line rather than two, which was more money than I would have had sitting at home for the same ten minutes. Both ten minute intervals had the option of surfing the web instead of typing for cash. As I typed furiously away the second round, my earnings adding up to a measly $1.35, I could not help but listen to the key boards around me. Many fell silent on the second ten minute interval. This just made me want to type faster to make even more pennies, hoping to pay at least for my bus fare to the campus. At the end of the session, we were asked what we saw when we typed.

At that point, I could not tell if we were being studied to see our actions when faced with a “tax” of fifty percent of our earnings, or a kind of ink-blot test in which they determined our emotions from what we saw in the symbols. I have since decided that it was the former. But as I mindlessly typed during the second ten minute session, I could not help but think about how the tax translated to the “real” world, as opposed to our virtual world of typing hieroglyphs. A fifty percent tax is one higher than any American pays, and is equal to some countries considered to have the highest taxes in the world (for example in Scandinavia). But I still worked hard to earn the cash I would not have otherwise had, regardless of the diminished earning potential due to taxes. I wonder if this would hold true when considering real lifetime wages. I think for a person like myself, I would continue to work hard to keep my head afloat. However, clearly there are some people who would rather surf the web than make an extra dollar, and that must be accounted for in public policy making.

FLOS

For the first night in a while, all my roommates were home at the same time.  Four of us were doing work tonight and the other 2 had a free night and were relaxing watching TV in the living room.  One of my roommates has always had a tough time getting his work done around the house, and always wants to be hanging with the guys.  As my roommates who had nothing to do started playing foosball in the living room, the one trying to do work got up right away and got involved in a quick tournament with the rest of the guys.  We got into a discussion of FLOS, or feeling left out syndrome.  It was a term I'd never heard before and we were having a good laugh about it.  It made me think of class though and how Facebook has a tendency to amplify the problem.  Whenever I'm trying to get my final paper (or blog posts) done in time, its not easier when I see half my friends are at Connors all day.  I had a friend who just attended the Coachella music fest in California this weekend, and I had a serious case of the FLOS. 

Slacktivism

The last class we discussed whether or not the revolution would be Tweeted.  This debate made me think of the whole Kony 2012 ordeal earlier in the year.  My Facebook news feed was chock-full o' Kony stories detailing how he had committed many atrocities in Uganda, stealing kids from their homes and forcing them into his army.  The whole time I felt like this is terrible, but are these people really that invested in this cause?  It's easy just to post something, but its a whole other story to actually go to Uganda and do something about it.  Eventually the guy who started the whole Kony craze with a half hour long documentary (for the invisible children organization that has commercials on TV) was caught in some public scandal, and the organization was under fire for shady usage of the money it raised.  Then the Ugandan government said that the documentary put their country in a negative light, and that Kony had been out of the country with hardly any support for 6 years. 

Although it seemed like Twitter, Facebook, etc. were raising a ton of awareness for people who couldn't easily take to the internet, it was not up to date information, and most of the people posting were not actually invested more than a quick status update. 

I think that there is no way that any huge political change won't be covered on the internet and fill up social networks with info, but I don't know if those who are directly involved will be using Twitter right away.  I think that after some action goes down, then the social network sites will play a larger role.