Wow – this blog is almost at teh stage where it drives itself! Cool! i admit not to adding much recently, but hey, otehrs lives are more interesting anyway! Thanks for the post from South America Ange!

Politics seems to be generating a little bit of heated debate, although i know mick is a passionate person sometimes I think he just loves to throw his vocab around! Quite impressive.

i think Australian Politics is very interesting at the moment, and has been for some time. being a business person I do appreciate that Costello is possibly one of the best treasureres we have had and that under the Howard regime the economy has done very well. However, Allan Greenspan was claimed to also be one of the US reserve banks best chairman and he still managed to fall from graces with some terrible choices, particularly throwing his weight behind George Bush endorsed tax cuts to the wealthy. It cost him his job.

Similarly, Costello and Howard have made some choices which I believe go against the best interests of the majority of Australians, especially in regards to tax cuts which favour the upper middle class, and especially in the last year. Also of concern are the AWA’s and the anti-terrorism laws which infringe on citizens privacy. International disasters and threats should not be used for political leverage and as such, should create common ground between political parties – we have not seen that in Australia.

I jsut wanted to touch on these topics and invite people to express their opinion of what they think Howard has done well and waht Howard has done bad. Personally I think his worst mistakes have been made in regard to immigration and environmental policy – and it extends beyond refugees to things like security, but most importantly our sense of national identity. Whilst I do agree with restricting immigration to ‘acceptable’ applicants, the definition of acceptable is definately debatable not to mention the process.

As an aside, I’m going to go see Coldplay tonight! Thanks to Mick and his great forward thinking!

I think the blog is becoming a little to much I this, I that… And besides, Nick has been complaining he isn’t getting enough stimulating conversation these days. Apparently thats why he’s heading to Europe where we know all they do is play soccer, eat good food, drink expensive grog and have kinky sex. I guess he is banking on the pillow talk stimulating something!
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Have you ever considered what makes you change your mind? Are there patterns to it? Does the same thing make you change your mind all the time? I’m not talking black cats and ladders, but what about price, quality, appearance, how much you had had to drink, mood, presentation, the list goes on and on, but I wonder what is the most predominant. Lets call these things ‘Alpha Characteristics’.

It depends. It depends on a lot of things like; what your buying, how much you need it, how much time you have, Whether its a luxury or necessity, if its high value or low value, and on and on. Lets call these things ‘Beta Characteristics’.

There are millions of factors of many different things that our mind takes into account before we even realize. Namely Alpha Characteristics and Beta Characteristics. These characteristics are conditional upon each other and they grow together – the more Alpha charachterisitics, the more Beta Characteristics.

Where am I going with this? I don’t know. But, does everyone appreciate this would not be a linear equation? Its exponential (I think), as the independent variables (Alpha & Beta Char.) get bigger, the dependent variable (Total) increases by an increasing rate.

Sooooo, if your making a decision anytime soon, just give up trying to analyse all those factors and accept the idea that your brain has already done it for you. But because you never listen to it (your brain) anyway, it has to tell your gut, to tell your brain, that your gut feel is Cola flavoured toothpaste is wrong, even if you do get a free stomach pump with it.

External validity is a measure of how readily youc an generalise a statement or research. High external validity implies you can make a very broad statement.

Technically we would say you have high external validity if you are basing your statement on a large number of observations. For example, if the caravan you buy from a pikey doesn’t make it out the gate, and its the only thing you have ever bought from a pikey, and you claim that all Pikeys are thieving dishonest con artists, your statement has very low external validity.

On the other hand a consumer report which collected a sample of 1,000 customer satisfaction reports from people who bought caravans from pikeys would have a much higher external validity.

So the next time you stereotype or generalise (as we are all [especially me] prone to do), think of exactly how many observations you have and consider your external validty.

Its been a very interesting 2 weeks and I’m sure it’ll be one of those periods in a persons life that changes who they are.

I wonder how people go about becoming who they are sometimes. I admit i have a habbit of being a bit pushy on the whole ambition front, and at times hypocrytical. I guess everybody has stages of high motivation and low motivation, times when they want to be a world changer and times when they would rather just live in a shack on the beach and go surfing everyday.

I have a little system that helps me keep changing and I hope improving who I am and providing me with challenges and incentives. Every now and again, when I’m day dreaming and looking at my wrold map (best present ever!), I’ll write my daydream down on a scrap of paper and put it in an envelope. On the envelope I write a suitable title depending what the daydream was, for example; “Open this on completion of university” or “Read me when your sick of Sydney” and even “Thinking of having kids? Read me first!”. Hehe.

In the last two weeks, I haven’t written any new ideas down, but I got the feeling it might be time to open a new envelope, find a new direction. I’m still waiting for some pieces to fall into place in what could be described as an autobiographical infinity piece puzzle, but at least i think I’ve got the edges!

Moral of the story; I’m going to be out and about a bit more! So give me a call and I’ll make more of an effort to catch up with you. I’ve been dissapointed by the disspersion of my friends, but I intend to make amends.

Hope you have all had a good weekend!

Following on from the previous conversation, I received a lesson on the brain:

I’ll arrive at reality one day. says:
Do you know how the brain records stuff?
Magda- i Finpan says:
well, we put everything we see in categories and store them first in our short-term memory, or working memory as the researcher like to call it now. Some things can end up in several categories, that leads to spreading activation. If u think of cat u think of either something in the same category like cat food or the opposite category like dog
I’ll arrive at reality one day. says:
right…
Magda- i Finpan says: If you stored something after seeing it 5 times, that would be a study technique, and it would store unnecessary things like, mr larsson lives next to me, and there is 1987 trees on my way to uni etc. Plus, if u “force” the brain to store things after u’ve seen it 5 times, your long-term memory wolud be full so fast
I’ll arrive at reality one day. says:
mmm, not much long term memory hey… I’m not so sure we would remember useless stuff if our brain had a capacity problem… because we seem to have a great nack of discarding useless stuff over time and remembering important things… and its all relative. My brother never knows where his matching socks are, but he could fill you in on the philosophies of Hercules or theories of Einstein no problems.
I’ll arrive at reality one day. says:
Well, I guess if the process is efficient enough, you wouldn’t need to store anything in your brain… you sure would be screwed if you lost your portable web-brain though! Hehe

I was struct by a molecule of enlightenment whilst procrastinating from doing my presentation paper tonight… It may be best understood in the following MSN conversation: (Cause I can’t be bothered writting it out again!)

I’ll arrive at reality one day says:
I like learning… but i wish it wasn’t so hard!
I’ll arrive at reality one day says:
I just had an awesome idea that would make loads and loads of money if it was possible! Our brain is essentially just a storage device right?
Magda- i Finpan says:
aha…
I’ll arrive at reality one day says:
we have the ability to recall information, theories and memories instantly, if we remember them… From whatever we remembe, we add other bits of information we have in our head… and voila, you have a new idea or the solution to a novel problem…
Magda- i Finpan says:
right, so?
I’ll arrive at reality one day. says:
We go through a very long learning process to get all that stuff inside our head right… so we can recall it instantly… when we need it…. wherever we need it….
Magda- i Finpan says:
yeah?
I’ll arrive at reality one day. says:
So… really the world wide web, is like a massive brain, except it can’t recall things instantly, and it doesn’t sort our ideas for us… its an inefficient brain if you will. What we need… is a portable storage device… which has all the information on the web contained within it…. and we need to be able to connect it to our brain so that whenever we need a piece of information, our brain can sort through everything on the web, and provide us instantly with what we need. The best part is: Once you have got that piece of information, its in your brain -not on the web, kinda like a really big internet history! hehe. Of course this web-brain storage device would have to be wireless so you can update your brain with all the new ideas other people are coming up with.
Magda- i Finpan says:
aha! but how r u gonna do that?
I’ll arrive at reality one day. says:
Well, teh brain is just a whole bunch of electronic nodes right? We just need to overlay the brain with a fine mesh which can transmit electronic pulses…
Magda- i Finpan says:
If we’re gonna keep everything that comes in wouldnt that result in big giant heads since the brain grows to fit information?
I’ll arrive at reality one day says: Hmm… but don’t we not use like 80% of our brain? No – only store stuff you have used…. or maybe it could be two way – your brain is temporary storage, and if you use one piece of information more then say, 5 times – it gets stored! As I see it the problem is not connectivity, its compatability. How do we make the data on the web compatible with our brain…
Magda- i Finpan says: Hehe but listen, if it gets stored after seeing it 5 times, that would be a study technique, and it would store unnecessary things like, mr larsson lives next to me, and there is 1987 trees on my way to uni etc

PART 2 coming to a mentally unstable person near you soon!

Sorry to all those who have seen this at noodlum or the old blithe blithering (its too memrable John) but since my full name came up with the same as nick: master of story telling, and my first name was: smelling of turnips at all times, I thought i’d proxy name choice for possible accounting policy choice to provide you all with an analogous idea of what earnings figures can look like:

Nomad Odyssey — [adjective]: Visually addictive ‘How will you be defined in the dictionary?’

A few of you may recall that I often claim that Dictionairies rule the world. I bought one the other day. It was on special. It cost $8. Its worth… $8.

Dictionairies are essentially a massive cirular reference. If you look up the definition of a particularly tricky word, you oft have to look up a word used to define the original word you where researching. Dictionaries use words to define other words. If you didn’t have a vocabulary already (you know no words) a dictionary would be useless to you. How do we then learn our first word?

Lets make a romantic assumption that the first word we all learn is ‘mum’. There are essentially a couple of ways we could learn it, the most likely in my mind, is by sound association. We learn of the object ‘mum’ through experience and then we associate the sound ‘mum’ with the object that feeds, cleans and takes care of us. From the sound association we eventually learn to spell the word ‘mum’ and vola, we have our first word.

A more likely example is ‘aaaaaarrrrrrgggwhaaawhhaaaa’ which we associate with the possibility of getting fed, or cleaned, or not-being-held-in-that-particular-way-that-makes-my-nappy-go- right-up-my-bum. of course we wouldn’t know any of this right? It would more likely be an association with x, y, z. Where x, y, z represent those things. Do you see the problem here?

Unless we have some innate ideas when we are born, we are not going to know anything. We will not know what hungry is, we are not going to know what x, y, and z stand for. How do we even know to go ‘aaaaarggggghhhhwhhhaa?’

Hi Alvin and the Canada Crew!

To carry on the identity/success debate:

I think mum is right in a lot of respects. The focus of the previous post and the ensuing comments was a little too materialistic orientated. What I was trying to get at was the existence of those people who identify their personal success in life with some degree of success at work, measured in part by their personal work ethic, achievement of firm goals and objectives, personal recognition within the firm, and other factors which could describe ‘a job well done’.

However, as before, this all needs to be tempered in light of materialistic influences as well, which is why management accounting is so problematic! Their are just too many variables and too many paradigms to describe the relations between those variables.

As for the working to pay the bills idea, I’m sorry, but thats only for suckers stuck in the rat race (Which if you are one, don’t worry, their are plenty of other people with you). Plenty of evidence exists to indicate that motivation of highly skilled and highly paid employees is not determined predominantly by money (Surprising hey!) and that once an employees personal ‘comfort thresh-hold’ has been reached they will no longer be motivated by pecuniary compensation. Makes you wonder why these CEO’s get so many stock options, don’t it!

What is a persons comfort-thershold? I’m not sure, but is basicaly a point in life or level in income at which they are no longer concerned with money for survival. Money essentially becomes an object of luxury. So, for all those people in the rat race, its probably half way through retirement when your living on the income of your offfspring. It changes between individuals and varies a great deal and is predominantly lower for disadvantaged famalies/countries. It is hypothesised to have something to do with the reason why poorer society is so often easily satisfied in comparison to western countries (ie no history of consumption or luxury).

As for the body image, I think Magda is correct. Our society is rife with people who achieve a high authoratative status because of their body image. By Authoratative status I mean that they exert an above average influence on society. Eg. Hollywood.

As for body image in the workplace, I wonder if it is a more agreeable theory if we consider it in terms of poor body image. Its unlikely a person with (very)poor body image will achieve a position of authority at work. Yes maybe your boss is overweight, but are they obese? Keep in mind the ideal Body image changes across cultures, Eg. Budha.