Blog Type

I read this article in the Business week about this Swedish research on analyzing blogs based on data gathered over several years. I decided to give it a shot. I was amazed to see what it came up with about me and my blog..

This is what the exact result was:

Hmm, I kind of like it... Duty Fulfiller!

There was also another link to analyzing the archetype through the blog which was quite fascinating to read too... Here is the result..

I tend to agree with it to a very high degree of about 90% with the result...

The actual article goes something like this, quoted from BusinessWeek:

What Your Blog Says About You

Posted by: Rachael King on March 22

Click here for the complete Article

What is your blog's personality type? A new Web site called Typealyzer will analyze your blog and tell you what it says about you. Typealyzer is a research project that looks at how language reflects a person's psychological type and his or her motivations and interests. The site was created by Mattias Östmar of PRfekt, a Swedish research and development company focused on media analysis

Feel free to test it on your blogs as well.

There is a link to a personality test as well in the article which does a test on the 4 Temperaments for a person based on a few questions about personalities, testing the Extravertness, Intuitiveness, Feeling, Perception (ENFP) of a person. These were the results I got. 

More surprisingly, the suggested Careers for these scores were in Social Services, Professional Writer, Public Relations, Marketing and Education. Surprising these are the bits and pieces of the few things that I am currently doing and love to do. Blindly without a second wink, Let me say "Great, I am on the right track in life.. (at least in a career sense)" A sense of comfort.. Well, let me get back to work now..  

Economics and Maya

Present times, its become a common phenomena for every government, irrespective of its ideological slant, to get committed to sparking a stimulus. Nothing illustrates this better than the breathtaking rediscovery of John Maynard Keynes' body of work in economics by governments and government-sponsored economists. And, as Milton Friedman, the high priest of neoliberal economics, said in 1965, "We are all Keynesian's now." Its time to sing the song again. Keynes' work, laid the ground for a concerted effort by governments across the world to save capitalism from its own excesses. More specifically, it contained prescriptions for governments to lay the basis for a sustained economic revival. Government spending, Keynes famously argued, that this Government spending has a multiplier effect on the economy. A bout of spending in round one, by translating into the expansion of incomes, consumption and investments has a cascading effect, resulting in a further boost to incomes in round two. Simply put, a rupee spent now, will cause incomes to expand by a multiple of one rupee.

Any stimulus package is also critically dependent on the import intensity of an economy. Other things remaining the same, an economy with a greater import intensity is likely to experience a larger "leakage" across its borders. This is because a part of the stimulus will be used to import goods and services resulting in benefits from the package being leaked outside the country.

Is this going to come back to haunt us in the future?

The impact of countries to engage in protectionism seen in this context (this is not the only reason why countries indulge in protectionism) is what is running in the minds of all the economists and analysts around the world. However the increasing Protectionism and Government spending produces an expansion in output, an expansion in consumption, However it also has a significant deterioration effect on the trade balance and the real exchange rate. [1] [2]

The Keynes multiplier effect can be has been constantly debated by the monetarists big and large, However the enormous Government Spendings, bailouts and other stimulus packages certainly mean higher tax rates in the times to come. It certainly is a thin line of ice on which we are playing these games.

Is this a spiral that we are all sucked into?

It is clear, that just as the world is going round and round, these economic activities are going in circles too. However, constantly the economies are shrinking or expanding. Thus instead of just moving in circles, there is a tangential effect from the pull or push from the economies resulting in a spiral movement. Tragically most of the economies the world over, are currently shrinking and due to the inner pull, we are being sucked deep in the spiral. All the major powers are trying to find an equilibrium on this rotating spiral..

Well, jokingly one of my good friends [3] says, it is all 'maya ' and best thing to do is to come out of the spiral, get detached from these economic forces and to get back to spirituality.. In fact, this humor from him is what motivated me to write this piece.

Well, the solution to the economic crisis, being currently signaled to be 'over' definitely does not lie in just government spending and saying 'Buy American!' and 'Only Americans in Jobs' alone.

References:

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w13328.pdf

[2] keynesian-model-positives-negetives

[3] Nishith Parashar, My classmate at EDM in XLRI, Singapore.

iPhone Answer-Reject dilemma

iPhone, the Apple' s answer to Natural Interaction has of course some glitches with regards to Interactive Design. One such problem that comes into notice is the contrasting Interaction techniques resulting due to bad design of UI when the user has to deal with a call (the most important aspect of a Phone!!). 

Problem 1:

There are generally two versions the user interface for answering/rejecting a call:

• UI for Locked State
  
• UI for Unlocked State

When the Phone is Locked and the user gets a call, the user has to slide from left to right to answer the call (as indicated in Figure 1) However, in case where the phone is not locked, there are two buttons presented 'Reject' on Left and 'Answer' on Right (again, figure 1).

Most of the calls received are when the phone is locked, generally the user gets used to touching the left portion of the phone to answer a call and it develops into a natural tendency; but if the phone is in the unlocked state by chance, and the user gets a call, he would have accidentally rejected the call if he touches towards the left of the phone going by his natural tendency.

Problem 2:

The other problem arising due to this is the function of hard button on top of the phone becoming redundant. When the user gets a call in the unlocked state, there is one more redundant way of rejecting the call. This is not a result of design intelligence but by accident. One single task of rejecting a call, now has two ways of achieving it, out of which one is in contrast with the natural tendency and the other just arising out of hmm, how shall I call it, stupidity...

Figure 1

Solutions: 

There could be several ways of solving this. One simple way is to exchange the position of the Answer-Reject buttons in Unlocked State. This however would only solve the natural tendency problem. The redundancy problem of the functionality of rejecting a call cannot be addressed with this solution. (Refer figure 2)

As an alternative, the Reject button on the touch interface can be eliminated and the Answer button can be stretched to the complete width of the screen. This would directly address both the issues and a better alternative to the current situation. (Refer figure 2)

Figure 2

This is a mistake that has probably gone unnoticed by Apple or, it may be that Apple has developed a  ploy to curb the natural tendencies of people and keep them on their toes while answering a call on their iPhone. 

Hmm, thats a thought for another time!