Facebook Info Box

So, I've been pretty bored over the Christmas break (at least, until I got about ten new books for Christmas), so in my boredom, I came up with a great idea for another Greasemonkey user script for Facebook. This one was much more adventurous than my previous Facebook script.

I was inspired by the new popup box that Facebook is using for poking people. It even uses some Ajax, which is very cool. I decided I wanted to something like that, but even cooler. I was also partly inspired by another user script called inYOfaceBook, which has a popup of large profile images, when you hover your mouse pointer over smaller profile images (like you find in searches, the mini-feed, etc). I decided to combine the two, and add a few more features.

So, after installing this script, a Facebooker can hold down the Alt key, and hover the pointer over a picture, or a name (usually linking to a Facebook profile), and a box will pop-up with that person's picture, and various useful things to do (message, poke, view wall, etc). You can also click on the image, and it will cycle through the various sizes (mini-thumb, like you see on a wall-post, mid-size-thumb, like you see in a search, and full size, like on the profile). Soon, I'll add the person's Networks (or at least the main one) in the box too.

The other feature I'm planning on adding is being able to pop-up just the person's full-size picture, maybe by holding Shift, instead of Alt, and hovering over the link, or picture.

Here's a screenshot.

Project Implicit: Speed vs. Accuracy & Men, Women, Science, Art

Here's another set of Project Implicit results for me:

Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for Accuracy compared to Speed. Depending on the magnitude of your result, your automatic associations may be described as 'slight', 'moderate', 'strong', or 'little to no preference (or identity)'.

That seems to be pretty spot on for me. I prefer to do things right, than do them fast. And here's another set of results:

Your data suggest a strong association of Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts compared to Female with Science and Male with Liberal Arts. If your performance is described as '(slight, moderate. or strong) association of Science with Male and Liberal Arts with Female' compared to the alternative pairings, it means you responded faster when Science and Male words were classified with the same key than when Liberal Arts and Male items shared a key. If your association was stronger for 'Liberal Arts with Male, Science with Female' you were faster when using the same key for Liberal Arts and Male items.

I think these results must be the result of culture, rather than actual personal feelings on my part. Also, their definition of Liberal Arts didn't quite jive with mine. They included Music, which I consider to be a Fine Art, rather than a Liberal Art.

Project Implicit and First set of Results

I recently signed up for a study being done by Harvard Research. It's called Project Implicit, and the point is to determine what certain people implicit feel. Here's what the site says:

It is well known that people don't always 'speak their minds', and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology. This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.

The most common type is automatic preferences for one thing over another. On their list of demonstration tests, for example, they have tests that show if a person has an automatic preference towards light- or dark-skinned people (I have none either way), or if a person has a preference towards Judaism or other religions (I have a strong preference towards Judaism).

If one registers for the study, whenever they log in to the site, they'll be given a random test, and then given the results of said test. So, I decided it would be interesting to post some of the results of the tests I've taken. I'll just quote them exactly, and I'll put one result in a post. The following is regarding my preference for US places over Foreign.

Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for American Places compared to Foreign Places. Depending on the magnitude of your result, your automatic associations may be described as 'slight', 'moderate', 'strong', or 'little to no preference (or identity)'. How implicit associations affect our judgments and behaviors is not well understood. Also, the score described above may be in_uenced by a number of variables including your familiarity with the categories and the particular items used to represent the categories. As such, the score should serve as an opportunity for self-reflection, not as a definitive assessment of your implicit thoughts or feelings. This and future research will clarih the way in which implicit thinking and feelings affects our perception, judgment, and action.

I'll post more results soon.

Facebook Script

The other day, I was talking to a friend, who mentioned that another friend had her birthday tomorrow.

"Really?," I asked. "Why wasn't it on Facebook?"

"It was."

"Then why didn't I notice it?"

So, I decided to create a small Greasemonkey script to move the Birthdays to the top of the page, and increase the font size.

Here's a screenshot.

If you have Firefox, you can install the greasemonkey extension, and then install the user script yourself.

Beauty: the flight of a bird

I had a profound experience this morning that I wanted to share.

I was walking to the bus stop to get to school. I had accidentally slept in, so I was much later than I normally would be. As I turned a corner, I happend to look up and see a bird.

I don't know what type of bird it was. It wasn't huge, but it was a small bird. Its wingspan was about twice, perhaps a little more than, that of a crow's.

I stood there and watched the bird for some time. I saw it turn; I saw it glide; I saw it soar upward; I saw it dip down. The bird seemed to own the breeze. As it flew, it carried with it a certain majesty that I'm not sure I've previously seen in any of God's creations.

What I saw before me was a work of art, created by the hand of God. Not simply the bird was a work of art, but the entire sight: the light breeze which the bird bent to its will, the way the bird shifted its wings, the blue sky with light clouds serving as a backdrop. It was beautiful.

As I watched this flight, a feeling came to me that God himself had painted this picture especially for me. I knew at that moment that God was watching me, and mindful of me, and desirous that I be happy. I have in the past had experiences that told me that God was real, and mindful of us, but few of these experiences brought that truth into my heart more fully did this masterpiece did for me at this time.

I feel that this experience will remain with me for a long time. I'm so grateful for the beauty that god shows us day by day, and this particular experience that brought this feeling to me. With so much in our world that is ugly, we must every day remember everything around us that is beautiful.

More Facebook changes

Ok, well my last post was about Facebook, and so will this one. Facebook has decided to make another big change, but hasn't quite implemented it yet. Until now, Facebook was only open to college students (faculty, stuff, alumni), high school students, and people working at a few businesses. Originally, of course, it was only open to college students. This created a nice environment for college students that only connected them to other college students, but without connecting them to anybody else in the world.

However, The higher-ups at Facebook have decided to open up Facebook to anyone with an email address. Specifically, Facebook has created several Geographical networks, which anyone can join. This means that if you are a member of a geographical network, anybody else that lives in that area (or claims to live in that area), can see your profile. This is a danger to our privacy, and not what we signed up for. If we wanted anyone to be able to see our profiles, and add us as friends, we would've signed up for Myspace. We didn't sign up for Myspace, we signed up for Facebook.

I urge everyone to cancel their accounts if Facebook makes this change. There's no reason to accept Myspace when you signed up for Facebook. It's completely wrong.

Facebook Changes

Ok, so pretty much every college student in this country is familiar with the Facebook. Recently some changes have been made. Actually, some major changes. I've heard a lot of complaints. Let me go over some of the changes.

Mini-feed. There is now a new "feed" of changes that people make. This is, probably, the most contreversial change. It allows anyone who can view your profile to see all the things you've done on facebook recently: any photos upon which you've commented, any status changes, new groups you've joined, relationship changes, etc. Some are complaining that it makes Net Stalking too easy.
Ok, so here's the real deal. Next to each of the items in your "Mini-feed," there is an X, which allows you to delete any of the items. If you don't want your girlfriend to know that you commented on some hot girl's picture, just delete the item right after you make the comment.

There's another News Feed. I haven't figured out it's purpose yet, but it's on your Facebook home page.

Notes were recently added. They're basically a blog. In fact, you can simply import a news feed from another blog into your Facebook notes.

Finally, the other main complaint I've been hearing is about the new Profile page layout. It's changed. Oh freakin' well. It's changed in the past, and it'll change again in the future. If it bugs you that much, just learn Javascript, and write a user script to change things around: Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox, or Turnabout scripts for IE.

I'm taking this really neat linguistics course this semester. It's called Invented Languages: Klingon and Beyond. It's all about constructed languages like Klingon, Vulcan, Esperanto, Ido, Elvish, etc.

Anyway, we just finished our first assignment. The assignment was this: Imagine that for some reason something happened to languages and only 100 Words were left. What do you think should be left?

So, I really liked this assignment, and decided to post my answer here. I hope you find it interesting.

Aside from a few noted exceptions, all the verbs are Latin, and everything else is English.

100 Words

Nouns

1. person
2. male
3. female
4. parent
5. child
6. uncle
7. nephew
8. cousin
9. friend
10. lover
11. spouse
12. enemy
13. truth
14. faith
15. God
16. Messiah מָשִׁיחַ (Hebrew: annointed one)
17. spirit
18. heaven
19. earth
20. hell
21. word
22. science
23. art
24. law
25. plant
26. animal
27. object
28. machine
29. way
30. aloha (Hawaiian: love, compassion, mercy, hello, goodbye)
31. time
32. top
33. bottom

Verbs

34. amare (to love)
35. contemnere (to hate)
36. esse (to be)
37. ducere (to calculate, reckon)
38. vivere (to live)
39. habitare (to dwell, reside)
40. habere (to have, possess)
41. dare (to give, offer, furnish)
42. facere (to make, do, bring about, perform, experience, sacrifice, be of service)
43. cantare (to sing)
44. videre (to see)
45. ire (to go, progress)
46. manere (to stay, remain)
47. cogitare (to think)
48. dicere (to speak)
49. edere (to eat, consume, waste)
50. bibere (to drink, quaff)
51. faulenzen (German: to laze about, idle)
52. laborare (to work, toil)
53. discere (to study)
54. scire (to know, understand)
55. feiern (German: to party, revel, celebrate)
56. quaerere (to ask, enquire, seek, [sometimes] obtain)
57. incipere (to begin, commence)
58. finire (to end, conclude, bound, enclose, restrain)

Adjectives/Adbverbs

59. zero
60. one
61. two
62. three
63. four
64. red
65. yellow
66. blue
67. white
68. black
69. not
70. very
71. many
72. few
73. big
74. small
75. good
76. bad
77. fast
78. slow
79. hard
80. soft
81. real
82. fake
83. clean
84. dirty
85. light
86. dark

Prepositions

87. in
88. out
89. through
90. over
91. under

Miscellaneous

92. please
93. and
94. or
95. nor
96. yes
97. no
98. domo ど (Japanese: hello, thank you, beg your pardon, goodbye, etc.)
99. sumimasen すみません (Japanese: excuse me, I'm sorry, thank you: expressing that one can not properly reciprocate or accomodate)
100. hallelujah הַלְּלוּיָהּ (Hebrew: Praise the Lord)

I decided that if we had lost all but 100 words, we would quickly create new words based on the ones left, so I tried to pick words that could be easily combined to make new words (e.g. house could be habito-object, and door could be in-habito-object). I also tried to pick words that already had many meetings (hence, aloha and ど). Most of the rest of the words are simply words I think are very useful, or words important to me personally. I only have zero through four because I figured we could just switch to base-5, instead of base-10, since we could still easily count on our fingers with such a number system. I decided not to include aunt and niece because that can be female-uncle, and female-nephew. Likewise, parent, sibling, etc. can be distinguished by gender in the same manner.

New Nephew

Well, I'm sitting in my Physics class, bored by the teacher because he's reviewing Calculus that I learned in high school, so I decided this would be a good time to post about my new nephew. Shawn Logan Deshazer (he's being called Logan), was born last Wednesday. He's my big sister's first child, and it's my first time becoming an uncle. He's an adorable little boy.

If you're using a major web browser other than Internet Explorer, you'll see a picture of him and I here.

My First Post

This is the first post to my blog. If you decide to read this, you'll get to know more about me as you read. This will be mirrored on my Facebook notes, on my Facebook profile page.