You one thing that seems to get at me? I don’t like the helplessness random people espouse. A little backstory. My social skills are almost perfectly correlated with how good I am feeling. It’s like when I’m in a great mood I can strike up a conversation with most anyone. The sad thing is I’m mostly in the not too happy and not too sad mood, which translates to interacts with people who I trust. The few times I’m in that great mood I tend to converse with whoever is around me. I find that a lot of people have this feeling that life is what’s happening to them, not what they are doing to the things around them. It’s as if you have no choice on things. To find the one you love, To find a job you’ll like, To find your passion. Yes finding these things are not easy. Yes, you’ll probably be near exhaustion or to your wit’s ends. But you either try to live, try to find light in this sometimes dark as a moonless overcast sky night, sometimes bright as the noon time clear sky day, or just go jump out your 3rd/4th floor terrace. Fuck nihilism, Fuck meaning. Live. Don’t cocoon yourself, shutting everyone off, and slowly losing connection with life. Marc Cuban once wrote that “being rich saved you from problems not having money brought” or something similar. So you didn’t have a life less ordinary. So you didn’t expect that after college life would be so fucking hard. So you didn’t think that things would be so fucking slow. Well so what. The sun will shine if you’re not here. People will be happy. Happiness is a choice. Living is a choice. Fucking deal with it!!!!
PS:Sorry for the rant spent from 6:45 am to 2:30 pm in a fucking long line under the searing heat of a summer inspired sun for an NBI fucking clearance , while my fucking sense of right didn’t allow me to go to the fucking fixers who were helping people skip the line, I needed to unload.
Please Help With Question :: Mind Games And The 2010 Elections | Filipino Voices
Stat friends especially those who work for the said polling firms please help with this question.
In the past, face-to-face interviewing was viewed by US opinion research experts as an appropriate method for conducting opinion surveys. It ostensibly allowed them to select the “right” respondent to be interviewed. After major failures, however – notably, the erroneous forecast of Thomas Dewey’s victory over Harry Truman in the 1948 US presidential elections– this survey method was abandoned, so much so that reputable pollsters in the US have now discarded it altogether.
Why was this? We invite some experts to tell us why. Chava Frankfort-Nachnias and David Nachmias in Research Methods in the Social Sciences write: “The very flexibility that is the interviewer’s chief advantage leaves room for the interviewer’s personal influence and bias.”
The pollster Kenneth Warren in his book, In Defense of Public Opinion Polling, says: “The cons of door-to-door interviews far outweigh the pros…Because of the sensitivity or personal nature of some questions, interviewers, because they were placed in face-to-face situations, have admitted that they sometimes guessed or fudged responses…These problems are a major source of bias in personal interviews, causing significant contamination of the poll data.”
These methodological and practical problems, according to Warren, doomed face-to-face interviews forever. By 1980, nobody in the US wanted to pay for this type of “fatally flawed and grossly inaccurate” surveys.
This, however, seems to have had no persuasive effect on our local pollsters.
A second glaring weakness is the extensive and general use of quota sampling to create “a representative sample” of the Philippine population. In quota sampling, survey respondents are picked from different types of people (e.g. by age, sex, religion, income) and various predetermined areas (e.g. region of country, as well as urban or rural).
This method is the most familiar form of non-probability sampling. It is supposed to mirror the same proportions in the targeted survey populations, but doesn’t. And it proved to be an earth-shaking failure in 1948 after three leading US pollsters–Gallup, Roper and Crossley—erroneously called the US presidential election in favor of Dewey instead of Truman. In the United Kingdom, where it persisted, it was blamed for the failure of the pollsters to predict Prime Minister John Majors’ victory in 1992.
“Quota sampling could never work in practice,” says Professor Warren. “Not only could pollsters not know the exact demographics so they could pick a representative sample that actually reflected the proper demographical proportions, but it was naïve to think that the interviewer could manage to interview the precise people needed to fill each quota.”
Thus today, reputable US pollsters rely almost exclusively on probability random sampling to create a “representative sample,” says Warren.
Why then do local pollsters continue to use quota sampling and face-to-face interviewing for their surveys? Why haven’t they adopted probability random sampling, which has protected US opinion polls from using contaminated data?
via Mind Games And The 2010 Elections | Filipino Voices.
rePost:: Her Facebook status changed to "single?" Ur dumped | ABS-CBN News Online Beta
Nice, social norms are changing fast!
Her Facebook status changed to “single?” Ur dumped
Reuters | 02/24/2010 5:40 PM
LONDON – Digital dumping is on the rise, according to a survey, with growing numbers of people preferring to use email and social networking Web sites to break up with their partners.
Over one third of 2,000 people polled (34 percent) said they had ended a relationship by email, 13 percent had changed their status on Facebook without telling their partners and six percent had released the news unilaterally on Twitter.
By contrast, only two percent had broken up via a mobile phone text.
The rest had split up the old-fashioned way by face-to-face conversation (38 percent) and by telephone (eight percent).
via Her Facebook status changed to “single?” Ur dumped | ABS-CBN News Online Beta.
Elink Video :: Treadmill Desk
I need one of these!!! How many pound would I lose with this!!!
rePost:: Some stirred-up Moslems?
Go to the linked site if you want context.
Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.
via . http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Active_Clippings/brzezinsky_muj.html
rePost::How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker
Reading this I was hit by a desire to do something. We are in the midst of what probably is the few times we can do great and original work. It is as if FB and other distractions are the ways we are being controlled to not do useful stuff. sorry for the minor rant. It’s just that we must able to look at each day in the context of a lifetime and the context of birth to that day is the lifetime.
But it’s been a long time—years now—since he did any serious research. Could he, still? “I’d like to get back to it,” he says. “I’m craving the chance to do some deep thinking, and I haven’t been doing a lot of that. I guess doing the really creative academic work does require a state of mind that’s hard to maintain throughout your whole life. Even Paul Samuelson—the bulk of the stuff you read from him is before he was fifty. There was an intensity of focus that I had when I was twenty-six that I won’t be able to recapture at fifty-six. You develop your habits of mind, and to a point that’s a good thing, because you learn ways to work, but it does mean that you’re less likely to come up with something really innovative. Even if I weren’t doing all this other stuff, I don’t think I’d be producing a lot of breakthrough papers. There’s crude stuff: if I do have some brilliant academic insight, what are they going to do, give me a Nobel Prize? . . . When I was younger, when I figured something out there was this sense of the heavens parting and the choirs singing that I don’t get now. And that’s life.”
For someone else, this loss might be a devastation, but even though for thirty years thinking deeply about economics was all Krugman really cared about, he has let it pass out of his life without regret. “I think he’s happy,” his friend Craig Murphy says. “A much happier person now than when we first met him. He feels like he’s done good things, and they’re greater than what he expected when he was young. If there is sadness in him at all, I think it is a tiny core of profound sadness of the kind that the Buddha understood—that we probably can’t use human rationality to make the world all better, and it would be really nice if we were able to.” ♦
via How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker.
rePost::Life With Food Stamps as Your Only Income : Casaubon's Book
This was a reaction to this article: Alternet, a good piece on what it really means to be one of the six million Americans with no income at all save food stamps:
Hope you can read both the linked sites.
We are teetering on a basic question, I think – what is government for? In the present situation, we don’t have the luxury of doing everything we’d like – of funding every project, of engaging in every kind of research or investing in every area of life that we’d like. We have to make choices. So we come to the question – as more and more citizens are impoverished and desperate, and we invest more and more money in propping up an economy that is still failing, still falling, what should governments do? What choices should we make? Is the mission of our society to preserve an economy at all costs? To preserve an imperialist enterprise? Or to preserve the people?via Life With Food Stamps as Your Only Income : Casaubon’s Book.
Praise::Presidential bet to rival Aquino: ‘I want you to succeed’ – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos
This is called the Rights Based Approach to Development. I commend him the Presidential candidate for being updated in the some of what’s in fashion in the Development Community
When Aquino’s turn came, he said: “Thank you to Councilor JC for, acknowledging that I have a chance of running the country.”
He said human rights were not simply about the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, but also the right to a decent living, and the right to have food on the table.
via Presidential bet to rival Aquino: ‘I want you to succeed’ – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.
rePost::So You Want to Be a Pro::Pinoy Penman
Some good advice on how to become a professional writer!!!
So You Want to Be a Pro
Penman for Monday, February 22, 2010
…..So rather than fuss over what “success” means, I’m going to address these remarks to people who want to become professional writers, by which I mean people who depend on their writing to support themselves and their families. Journalists naturally fall into this category and already know pretty much what I’ll be saying here; it’s the creative writer and the academic who may need a bit of a reorientation, since I’ve found that it’s this person who often doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the market needs.
…..
10. Don’t forget what you’re doing all of this for. Whether it’s for God, country, family, fame, or just the chance to get some paid time off to write that novel, or for that down payment on a new apartment or a new car, you have to remember why it’s important to keep writing, and to write well. Good writing can be its own reason for being, and provide its own satisfaction—but it’s even better if it means that much to somebody else.
via Pinoy Penman.
rePost::Don't Call Us, We’ll Call … Well, No, Actually We Probably Won’t… | Psychology Today
My introvert side is really affected by phone calls. I really don’t like it most of the time. I especially don’t like how the phone intrudes when you least want it.
But I hate the phone. Hate it. Hate. It.
I can let the phone ring without picking up. I own a cell phone but don't give out the number. The only people I willingly talk with on the phone are far-flung friends, and only because I know it's necessary to keep those friendships healthy. Even so, as these friends can tell you, I can be difficult to reach, and return their phone calls in my own sweet time, when I feel up to the exertion the phone requires for me.
via Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call … Well, No, Actually We Probably Won’t… | Psychology Today.