Hole in the wall

The hole in the wall that used to be my toilet.

Now that construction work is ongoing, there is drilling every other hour and worse, I have no access to a reasonably clean toilet. There's also dust everywhere, and I do mean everywhere.

To put this into perspective, the drilling is done in a toilet, in the kitchen outside the dining hall. The dust managed to spread all the way to the doorway and even the stairs. 

The guts of my once functional bathroom.

Maslow and his stupid triangle

This is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Nobody seems to understand that this is a hierarchy.

Just to give a bit of background. More and more students are being taught this in schools around the world, but because when this comes about, it's always touch-and-go because no one is teaching psychology at a secondary school level. They are simply using this as a tool to push whatever lesson they have, like English or Social Studies or Character Development or whatever.

This is a very simple example of giving kids tools but not teaching them how to use it. 

The way students misuse this in school is that they like to cite this as an academic theory to prove that people have certain specific needs that they are trying to prove. The needs that people have (according to them) can be anything from needing food to money or even to spiritual needs. This just happens to be the convenient blanket example or theory that proves them right, simply because it's listed here in the pyramid.

Now, adults, let me have a word with you here. With the education that we have, it is simple to see that this theory is meant to prove a hierarchy, that people HAVE to fulfil the bottom (food and sleep) before we go on to the top. We GET that, because we have been bombarded with enough stimuli that we know to expect such a pattern when people show a picture of a pyramid or the word hierarchy.

The thing is, kids don't get that.

To them, they see a convenient list that someone named Maslow wrote down for them that proves that we have all these needs. It doesn't. It simply shows that we have to fulfil basic needs before we concern ourselves with higher-order ones. This is why the poor don't concern themselves with respect by others or why North Koreans don't seem to worry about creativity. 

What we see and what they see is different and even now I find it difficult to get back into the mindset of learning for the first time. I'm not sure whose fault it is and I'm not even sure that matters. Identification of misconceptions like this is important and we need to get a hold of that as soon as possible.

It's very disappointing to see students using a power drill when they don't know how to.

Movie idea from my iPhone

[From 13 Dec 2011]

A rebellion starting up is US led by charismatic person. Turns out to be bankrolled by an enemy of the US like Russia or China even though a British accent sounds better. (Idea idea: conglomerate of nations working against US) Quote/Tagline: It's just good business.

Should the Russians/ bad guys win and the rebellion successful, it will set the US back several years while the other nations overtakes the economy. US citizens will live in a state of grand delusion that they are still the best and consume as they did in the past. The scenery in the country will look like 2010 but other countries will look futuristic.

Birthday idea

[Image not available]
Inspired by this.

Birthday Idea

Set up a table and hopefully signs at a book store and let the birthday person sit there and sign books. Friends and relatives would be forming a line as long as possible (depending on how many friends show up) and take as much time to sign as possible and once it's done, the "customer" takes a walk around the shop or the mall and lines up at the back of the line again to create the illusion of a very popular queue.

Pretty cool, can do as long as you like or until security escorts you out.

Nice idea for the birthday kid.

Legal Gray Areas: Facebook and Rape, Part D'eux

Rape is universally condemned. Actually, wait no scratch that, there are some people who still think men can have sex with women whenever they want, regardless of the women's choice in the matter.

But we're not here to discuss that.

We're here to discuss about LYING about raping, and before I begin, I would like to direct you to 2 links.


1) News story, followed by the video I heard it from (it only talks about that story from after 5:15 mark)

2) "I was raped" "No, we had sex"

While rape has always been clear in definition when it comes to "violent rape", or the first kind of rapey non-consensual sex we think about where a lady walks alone in a dark alley and a man forces himself on her. That, in and of itself, is very hard to misinterpret. The fuzzy definition comes with "sexual assault between non-consenting people." Assault means that there is an element of physical violence or at least the threat of physical violence ("if you struggle, I'll stab you"). That definition however, does not encompass cases like date rape where one is not consenting but there's no violence because she's unconscious from the drugs in her drinks. So some countries broaden the definition to simply non-consensual sex. Simple enough.

Before I get to that minefield, let's tackle the issue of blatant lying in rape accusations. Currently, our system is completely tilted in the woman's favor. It has been documented that men get up to 10 times more severe punishments than woman in cases of similar severity. And it's easy to see why. Think about a man who molested 10 kids. You get pretty disgusted with that scenario, but when a woman molests 10 kids, it does not come off as revolting. So our natural instincts already fail us in this regard. (Note: this is a completely biased/unscientific poll. This is a completely fallacious conclusion stemming from a fallacious train of thought)

Personally, I'm okay with men being treated worse. Call it payback, if you will. What really rustles my jimmies is the assumption of guilt on the father. The fact that when men become accused for raping women, it takes a ridiculous amount of convincing to prove his innocence. In fact, accusing men of rape is actually a threat used by women, particularly when there are no eyewitnesses or alibis (i.e when the 2 people are in the same room or house alone.) In the first case, it wasn't well investigated and police simply took the girl's word for it.

The fact that she would not be charged for this is... I don't even know what or how to feel about this. The official reason for this is not to scare away potential victims from reporting the crime, which by the way is a real problem, particularly in Japan where as many as a quarter (completely unverified statistic) do not report such incidences out of shame or fear. That "sort of" makes sense but then again, shouldn't there be less stigma for reporting cases. This entire issue is very fuzzy and while I don't think she should be free from charges, the fact that she was only 11 should be considered as well as the fact that there will be no restitution  (compensation) for the father.

The second case shows more clearly the idea of non-consensual. When women do that, it not only "makes it hard for real rape victims to be believed, but also insults women who have really experienced rape. If one changes their mind after sex, does that mean that the sex was non-consensual. Wouldn't that be the same as failing to get a degree after studying in college for a few years and then telling people you never attended it? At least that never hurt anyone's reputation. When the woman started to regret sex that night, she cannot call it rape anymore.

Rape is a very serious issue and it cannot be used as a weapon or an excuse. I'm so messed up by this whole issue that I can't even formulate my sentence english like.

Legal Gray Areas: Facebook and Rape

I want to talk about 2 separate issues, not that I'm equating facebook privacy laws are in any way, shape or form similar to rape issues.

Let's talk about facebook first. In the recent months (on the internet), there has been a rising trend of employers asking prospective hires (unemployed people looking for jobs) to hand over their facebook information. Not just the basic profile page url or anything like that, but the account information, including username and passwords. Many companies have reasoned that this is merely "shoulder-surfing", no altering of any details already on the profile. They have also defended this policy by saying it is no different from a standard background check, one that all companies do before hiring to look out for issues such as past criminal activity or drug use, etc. 

Without even researching, we'd know the consequences of this to most of us. This reflects a incredible breach of privacy for the employees, shifting much of the power to the employer.

But what about the employers doing the snooping?

I Hereby Resign by Reginald Braithwaite

This (fictional) resignation letter highlights the possible impacts for the companies, possible conflicts of interest that may arise due to this arrangement. That was an amazing read for me and I literally gasped when I read that the woman could sue the employer while being so casual about handing over her FB information.

Without going too deep into the legal or even moral aspects of this issue, I do have some questions regarding the "background check" aspect of (almost) every hiring.

It's interesting that most people think there is such an obvious reason for background checks. "Well, I definitely don't want to hire an ex-convict". Granted that they are actual valid reasons for denying such people, due to perhaps security reasons. There's no way we could justify hiring a person with a criminal record for issues pertaining to national security, such as in Defence ministries, or even as simple as guarding important people like the President of the United States.

But how far can we stretch such a reasoning? Isn't denying jobs to ex-convicts as discriminatory as denying them to a lesbian? Anti-discrimination laws were set up to provide equality for everyone, but when companies pick their hires, they still have some kind of bias regarding these issues. The fact that handing over facebook information simply streamlines the process for them. It's not as if they don't already check out your profile page on facebook before deciding. When they do that, it's not discrimination because there's no paper trail regarding them checking you out, but in their mind, they would have had the same decision processes with or without your password. It's just a matter of admitting outright whether they do look at your profile. I'll admit that forcing employees to give up passwords imply that their posts are scrutinized no matter what, instead of being able to decide who sees what. 

Facebook also presents a new element to the background checking process. The idea that your thoughts and opinions can be ascertained through your profile. Traditionally, it was very black-and-white type of information. Male/Female, Age, Criminal Activity, Past accomplishments, etc. Now, everything you ever decided to post on public is up for grabs, that includes your political ideology, your attitude, whether you're divorced or committed adultery. There really is no one person who is at fault for such a scenario. On one hand, you could blame the company for snooping around for such information, but on the other, you could blame the user for posting his thoughts on facebook, knowing very well that it can be accessed by everyone (or at least compromised to such a degree). The company is looking at information you chose to post for everyone to see, as opposed to stealing records or hiring private investigators to get that information. Who should be responsible for this? I don't know.

So with that, I leave you with more questions that you came here with. Good night.

Oh and I'll talk about the rape thing in another post because this is becoming too long.