People – Page 6 – On The 8 Spot

March 6, 2009

Learned Today: Popularity~Success:The Economic Value of Popularity – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com

: Image by peterjaena via Flickr

Thanks to Tyler Cowen of Marginal revolutions for the pointer here, I think his points are interesting and quite valid.
AS for my views.; There is a certain rhythm to interacting with people. There is a certain rhythm in being friends with people. Honestly I had to learn that whole thing in college. Compare the highschool me and the me now, I was socially inept and something of jerk. Now I’m still a jerk, less socially inept , but this is mainly because I learned the types of people that I can interact well with.
And that is I think the thing, Because I am less scared with social interactions now I tend to meet more people now than I used to. I have to credit the understanding that people tend to be good. This knowledge help me to be less afraid of going to situations where interactions were totally not in my control.
How did I gradually become less socially inept?
-Striking up conversations with random people. Helped overcome this fear of talking with people. For me this is easier because I can make myself believe that even if I say something stupid, we are not going to see each other again.
-Striking up conversations with people not really part of your circle of friends but you see relatively often. After having a feel for small talk try talking with people you normally encounter, this may include the office security, custodians, or office mates from different departments.
-Going to clubs(not night clubs, hobby clubs etc)/meetups/organization. This might mean volunteering for something, or doing something together like hobbyist events. You get to meet like minded people, and chances are good that you have at least one topic of common interest!
-Reconnecting with peole form the past. This may mean a simple poke in facebook, or a private message in one of the tens of hundreds of social networks now existing. From personal experience this is best done when combined with actual face to face time. Like if you saw someone at a mall or a grocery but you can’t talk for some reason, or its his/her birthday. From the experience of a friend you may freak out some people if you suggest meeting up to catch up on old times, so this I believe is best done when there is an excuse, like homecoming etc.
-Face to Face meetups are important to personalise increasingly mobile/online connections. This must be done with care because as I stated earlier you may freak out some people. If you are meeting people you used to know well but has since lost touch with; best if you leave you old impressions of him or her ot turn your filter down a little. Remember that change is constant and some people reinvent themselves constantly. If you are meeting someone for the first time my advice would be leave your prejudice or what I call isms at home. Don’t judge people automatically or if you can’t do that at least try to act friendly towards everyone, Its easy to cutoff connections with people Its hard to create connections so don’t let superficial things get in the way of a possible real (not just online) friendship.
hope the few notes help my imaginary reader! have any more advice for people who are socially inept???

They find that each extra close friend in high school is associated with earnings that are 2 percent higher later in life after controlling for other factors. While not a huge effect, it does suggest that either that a) the same factors that make you popular in high school help you in a job setting, or b) that high-school friends can do you favors later in life that will earn you higher wages.

The Economic Value of Popularity – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

March 3, 2009

rePost-Hope This Does Not Come To Pass-Foreign Policy In Focus | Asia: The Coming Fury

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I’ve admired Prof Bello for a long time. I’ve enjoyed stories about him tearing celebrity professors a new one(Celebrity professors/acamedics tend to be more in the communications field and tend to be less in the academic world!).But I sure hope he is wrong about this! Thanks to Angry Bear for the liunk

The Coming Fury
The sudden end of the export era is going to have some ugly consequences. In the last three decades, rapid growth reduced the number living below the poverty line in many countries. In practically all countries, however, income and wealth inequality increased. But the expansion of consumer purchasing power took much of the edge off social conflicts. Now, with the era of growth coming to an end, increasing poverty amid great inequalities will be a combustible combination.
In China, about 20 million workers have lost their jobs in the last few months, many of them heading back to the countryside, where they will find little work. The authorities are rightly worried that what they label “mass group incidents,” which have been increasing in the last decade, might spin out of control. With the safety valve of foreign demand for Indonesian and Filipino workers shut off, hundreds of thousands of workers are returning home to few jobs and dying farms. Suffering is likely to be accompanied by rising protest, as it already has in Vietnam, where strikes are spreading like wildfire. Korea, with its tradition of militant labor and peasant protest, is a ticking time bomb. Indeed, East Asia may be entering a period of radical protest and social revolution that went out of style when export-oriented industrialization became the fashion three decades ago.
Walden Bello is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist, a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, and a professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines.
Foreign Policy In Focus | Asia: The Coming Fury.

February 22, 2009

rePost: THE UNRAVELING OF KANYE WEST: DETAILS Article on men.style.com

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I played guitar hero the first time last night, at a house/birthday party of a friend. What struck me was the intensity of the people playing guitar hero. Let’s just say that most things we have in modern society is distractions and we seem to be concentrating so much in these distractions that we seem to lose energy to do the hard stuff, or maybe we use these distractions to not face having to deal with the hard stuff, as for me, I’m not playing guitar hero any time soon, I’ve been slowly saving up for an electric organ and in 8 month’s I’d probably saved enough for both an instrument and the turntable i’ve been dying to own. Hope I can create stuff!

Inspired by his preteen Super–Sexual Mario Brothers project, West makes a pop-Freudian self-analysis. “People ask me a lot about my drive. I think it comes from, like, having a sexual addiction at a really young age,” he says. “Look at the drive that people have to get sex—to dress like this and get a haircut and be in the club in the freezing cold at 3 A.M., the places they go to pick up a girl. If you can focus the energy into something valuable, put that into work ethic . . . “
THE UNRAVELING OF KANYE WEST: DETAILS Article on men.style.com.