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rePost::Can You Trust a Facebook Profile? | PsyBlog

Interesting. What does my profile tell about me???

The surprising truth

After comparing the actual personalities with the idealised and observed, the researchers found that, on average, people were much more likely to display their real personality on the social networking sites rather than their idealised selves.
Overall people were remarkably honest in representing themselves. People were honest—we don’t read those words often enough.
In line with other findings, this study found that, when looking at a stranger’s profile for the first time, some aspects of personality are more difficult to discern. Neuroticism in others is particularly difficult to gauge, whereas people find extraversion and openness to experience relatively easily to assess, even in strangers.
via Can You Trust a Facebook Profile? | PsyBlog.

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rePost::New Behind the Scenes Featurette for Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg | /Film

There is a featurette at the linked site.
I’m a big Ben Stiller fan, even watched night at the museum, hope this one is better than along came polly.

Meet Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller): a dysfunctional 40-year-old at a crossroads in his life. Roger wants to “do nothing” for a while, so he agrees to housesit for his younger and more successful brother, giving him a free place to stay in L.A. While in town, he tries to reconnect with his old friends and band mates but times have changed, and old friends aren’t necessarily still best friends. Greenberg starts spending time with his brother’s personal assistant Florence (Great Gerwig), an aspiring singer and herself something of a lost soul too. During a series of embarrassingly awkward romantic encounters, we sense that perhaps even someone as irascible as Greenberg may have found somebody who is prepared to appreciate him for himself – if he would only stop critiquing Florence’s techniques in bed. Over the course of several weeks, we watch an uncertain and wonderfully vulnerable courtship play out, and learn how funny, and terribly unpredictable, love in the modern world can be.
via New Behind the Scenes Featurette for Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg | /Film.

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rePost::What we can learn from Nepali orphans Boing Boing

Nice read although it ended in a note too happy note.

In January, I spent two weeks with the kids at Ama Ghar, a home for underprivileged children* in Kathmandu Valley. It’s a narrow four-story red brick building off of a busy two-lane road, and it houses 38 children whose parents are dead or debilitated from physical and mental illness. Many of them come from remote villages that are a full day’s walk from the nearest road; communities without electricity that have high illiteracy rates.
Materially, the kids at Ama Ghar have little beyond bare necessities. Their toys are soccer balls made of rubber bands and old car tires. In the mornings they wash their hair and brush their teeth at a cold water tap outdoors, and after school they play with their half-exploded imitation Mizuno volleyball near the neighbor’s pigsty until the sun goes down. Most nights, they do their homework under a single solar-powered backup lightbulb because of scheduled electrical outages, before going to sleep in tiny rooms crammed with second-hand bunk beds.
The most surprising thing about these kids, though, is not their living conditions. It’s their attitude. These are really good kids. Generally speaking, they don’t cheat, steal, complain, sneak off, or flake on their chores. During an eight-hour field trip to a Hindu temple on the other side of the Valley, the children kept tabs on each other without being told to do so, waiting patiently for the adults as they bargained for potatoes on the side of the street. Not one child complained about being hungry or needing to use the bathroom. Like a tight-knit family, they hugged each other often and shared everything without selfishness. The children all studied hard at school, like their lives depended on it — probably because their lives really do depend on it. As Bonnie Ellison, the resident manager, told me: “It’s not easy out there.” Hers is the epitome of tough love; an American who herself grew up in Kathmandu, she is arming them with the skills and attitude they need to survive and thrive in Nepali society. I left Ama Ghar with the strong conviction that these spirited, bilingual, ambitious kids could very well shape the future of this beautiful, struggling nation.
via What we can learn from Nepali orphans Boing Boing.

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rePost:: more, More, MORE! :: Seth's Blog

In the Philippines how well you are treated as a customer is most of the time inversely proportional to how good a customer you are. If you complain a lot you get good service but if you are more of the let it slide type you don’t have such great service. I sometimes wish restaurants do the math and just give great service to their valuable customers. This is partly the reason why I sign up for loyalty cards which help them track your spending, maybe they’d get their act together and figure out that the 80-20 rule / pareto principle probably applies to them. 80 percent of their revenues may come from just 20 percent of their clientele.

You have three choices: put up with the whiners, write off everyone, or, deliberately exclude the ungrateful curs.
Firing the customers you can’t possibly please gives you the bandwidth and resources to coddle the ones that truly deserve your attention and repay you with referrals, applause and loyalty.
via Seth’s Blog: more, More, MORE!.

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Praise::Barefoot doctors – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos

Got this from jayson through facebook. In some ways I can no longer be impartial about this issue primarily because whenever emotions are involved the mind almost always takes a backseat. I was bale to see the interview of one of the children, of one of the doctors who were jailed.  The words were something like “Para na nga sa amin , kukunin pa para itulong sa ibang tao..” said in a tone equal parts admiration and hurt.  Ewan , hope more people are as selfless as those doctors , rebels or not.

Barefoot doctors
By Michael Tan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:20:00 02/16/2010
Filed Under: Health, Human Rights, Prison
MANILA, Philippines—The rain on a health workers’ training workshop in Morong, Rizal, and the arrest of 43 health professionals and workers continue to be front-page news.
The other night on the TV program “Crossroads,” Lt. Col. Noel Detoyato, spokesperson of the Armed Forces’ 2nd Infantry Division, noted that the workshop participants generally had low educational attainment, and cited this as one reason why they were suspected as subversives. Detoyato even enumerated the participants’ educational profile: 5 had elementary education, 4 were elementary graduates, 7 had high school education, 12 were high school graduates, 5 had college education and 4 were college graduates. He then mentioned that one of the participants had only finished first grade, and that this person was wanted for murder.
The colonel’s revelations reflect society’s prejudice against people who have had little formal education. “Uneducated” means ignorant, with connotations of the criminal and the subversive. Moreover, in this case of the health workers, there is the insinuation that the “uneducated’ (read the poor) couldn’t become health workers.
Yet for nearly half a century now, there has been a quiet global revolution going on, where people with minimal education have become excellent community health workers. In the Philippines, such training dates back to the early 1970s, when Filipino health professionals put up community-based health programs (CBHPs) with community health worker (CW) training as its centerpiece.
The Filipino CBHPs drew inspiration from China’s health care system, one which built upwards from the communes and villages. A hallmark of the Chinese system was the training of barefoot doctors, so-called because many had minimal formal education. Yet, with training of six months to a year the barefoot doctors could handle many of the most important health needs in their villages. Some eventually went on to medical school. One of them, Chen Zhu, rose through the ranks to become minister of health.
via Barefoot doctors – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.

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rePost::4 Simple Principles of Getting to Completion | Zen Habits

I was interviewing for a job in a startup last year. The interview was going well then I was asked what have you launched. I wasn’t able to say anything and that was the end of what could have been a partnership.  I have to remind myself that good enough is good enough and that making complicated things are hard and thus strive for simplicity. For a lot of programmers simplicity is harder than complexity. Here are a few advice on getting to completion, advice I extremely need to become a success.

4 Simple Principles of Getting to Completion


Simplify to get it done.

“If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, then this is the best season of your life.” ~Wu-Men

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

When I hear about a great idea that a friend has, I get excited. I can’t wait to see that idea become reality.
Then I ask about the idea a few months later, and it often is not one bit closer to completion.
Ideas stop short of becoming reality, and projects seem to drag on endlessly, because of one thing: complexity.
via 4 Simple Principles of Getting to Completion | Zen Habits.

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rePost::Crash Pilot Appears To Have Written Anti-IRS, Anti-Corporate Screed | TPMMuckraker

Universal Healthcare NOW!!!!

He also appears to denounce the Wall Street firms that helped caused the financial crisis — and even the lack of progress on health-care reform, criticizing Washington politicians for failing to fix “the joke we call the American medical system,” and for doing the bidding of the drug and insurance companies:
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it's time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country's leaders don't see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It's clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don't get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.
Referring to the bailouts of airlines after 9/11, Stack writes: “the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY!”
via Crash Pilot Appears To Have Written Anti-IRS, Anti-Corporate Screed | TPMMuckraker.

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rePost:: Drive safely and don't abuse alcohol, drugs or candy :: Letters of Note

This illustrates how small nudges can have large effects on who we are.  This was very inspiring.

Drive safely and don’t abuse alcohol, drugs or candy

When asked by his teacher to write to a contemporary artist as part of a school project in 1997, 13-year-old Green Day fan Austin Kleon immediately opted to contact collage artist Winston Smith – the man responsible for creating the artwork for the band’s 1995 album, Insomniac – and after finding his address via a gallery curator, Austin sent his letter to the artist and hoped for the best. A few months later when nearly all hope was lost, the stunning 14-page reply seen below, along with pages and pages of artwork, arrived at the teenager’s home. He was ecstatic:
I couldn’t believe it. An artist—a real artist!—had written me back!
To me, it was the equivalent of Rilke writing back to the young poet. He told me about his life and his methods. He urged me to always question authority, stay away from drugs, and keep getting straight As so one day I could pay the bills. (An artist—a real artist!—was telling me it was okay to get straight As!) I’d never heard anybody talk about the kind of things he wrote about—art, America, growing up in a small-town—it was like a time-bomb that went off in my brain.
The letter, and I’m not exaggerating, changed my life.via Letters of Note: Drive safely and don’t abuse alcohol, drugs or candy.

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rePost:: Sentences to ponder :: Marginal Revolution

Hmm. I’m in the don’t plan vacations camp. This troubles me. I may not be maximizing happiness.

Sentences to ponder

The study, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, showed that the largest boost in happiness comes from the simple act of planning a vacation. In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks.
There is more information here.
via Marginal Revolution: Sentences to ponder.

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