2nd News Article

 I want to share an article on BBC about "Water Mafia". This article is about people in Delhi Sangam Vihar, India. More then 20% of the population don't have access to pipe and clean water so they are forced to buy water from private suppliers. They come into the village with a tank and offer them around 10$ for 200 liters of water. They only come to sell the water once every 10 days and the water usually sold out after 15 minutes. They are those who steal water and resell it all around. In this part of the world gold is nothing compare to water.

Want to read more? click the link below
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-33671836

Living on Mars

Mankind is facing many global problems such as shortage of energy, shortage of resources and materials, global warming and etc. All of there are the effect of one major problem " overpopulation". The best way to solve these problem is colonization of other planet and of course the first planet on our list is Mars. Mars is the most likely place that mankind can have permanent habitation.

Mars is a planet in our solar system which has many similarity to planet earth. One day one Mars has around 30 minutes longer than the earth. Also Mars has a lot of energy resources that haven't been touched. Moreover space ship from NASA found evidence of life on Mars.

Recently, NASA had launch a high speed space rocket that can send astronauts to Mars in 49 days. With the fast developing pace of technology these days, we might be able to travel to Mars within a week. The beginning of life on Mars may be hard, scientists predict that the starting of mankind inhabitant on Mars will begin from the underground to avoid space radiation, we can start planting trees and flowers in the glass house or even emit CO2 to make the planet warmer and then one day in a few decades we might be able to live on Mars's surface.Many Mars lovers are confident that we can turn the red planet into a blue planet like the earth.

Living on Mars will allow 145 million square kilometers for new industry, school, health facilities and many beautiful site on Mars that we can turn into national parks. We would have twice of space that we have now, so China can stop the campaign of "one family one child". In addition, Mars has plenty of resources that  haven't been discovered, including coal and other precious metal maybe copper and "gold". So start mining on Mars!

Imagine how cool it would be if your colleagues ask you where are you going for the holiday and your answer is "Oh! I'm going to visit a friend on Mars."

Are these tests tell who you are? Implicit Association Test VS Political Compass Test

Have you ever done any test about your personality or what career is best for you? If you did, what was the result and is it true about who you are? and if you like this kind of test maybe you should check out the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and Political Compass Test (PCT).
https://www.politicalcompass.org/test
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

The IAT test is a test that shows you photos of different color skin people and positive or negative words for you to match on the instant that you see them.  The test claim to shows the test takers association with skin tone and others.

Another test that I took was the Political compass test. The PCT, shows statements about political, economics, social issues etc. Test takers have to choose the scale of strongly agree, agree, disagree and strongly disagree related to the statements given. After you take the test it will show where you political status lies.

I took the Skin-tone and Gender-career tests for the IAT. My results for the Skin-tone test said that I am slightly prefer light skin over dark skin. While the Gender-career test said that I think of men with career and women with family. The PCT results suggest that I'm a slight libertarian left my spot lies exactly where Nelson Mandela is.  

I think the Skin-tone and Gender-career tests are true. I've never really notice my bias against dark skin people. Even though I'm a little bit dark myself but I grew up in a light skin family so I consider myself white. In my family we've been taught that women are destine to be a house wife, so when you grow up you have your biggest goal is to marry a good husband. Although both my parents work, but still the person who is handling everything to keep the house running is my mother. 

I've never pay much attention to political before I took this class, so I have no idea if the PCT really tells what I want our politics to be like. We live in an authoritarian country and most of my classmate results lies in the Authoritarian left. However I am a Libertarian left, maybe because I don't like how the politics is operates in my country.

The first test shows that I am a very conservative person, but the second test suggest that I am a liberal. I think the IAT is showing who I am and what I think at the moment and the PCT is what I expect the future to be. Do these tests really tells who you are? or it just a statistics. Please don't forget to comment below. 

1st News Discussion - Asian countries talk on Rohingya problems

In our first new discussion class last week, we had talked about several topics including, scorch temperature in India, Cambodia controls its national internet etc. The article that I chose to present was from BBC. It's an article about a meeting that Asian counties leaders held in Bangkok at the end of May 2015. The meeting was to identify and search for solutions to the problems regarding Rohingya immigrants that fled Myanmar and had been abandoned by the human traffickers in the Andaman sea. The authors had sum up that this meeting agreed on  further searching, rescuing and providing temporary shelter for the immigrants. Also the US and UN promise large amount of funding to solve this problems. There are a lot of detail about the Rohingya problems in this article if you want to read more please click the link below:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-32925815

Cognitive Bias that you never noticed you have!

Last week I've read an article about Cognitive Biases in my class. Well this is the first time I've heard of the term cognitive bias. The author explained 12 different types of biases that people have. I think all biases are really interesting and some I can related to, but before reading this article I've never noticed that they existed in my head. You can click on to the link below to learn more about "Cognitive Bias".

http://io9.com/5974468/the-most-common-cognitive-biases-that-prevent-you-from-being-rational

Our teacher Troy had divided us into groups and let each of our group look particularly into three different biases. The ones that our group discussed were post-purchased rationalization, neglecting probabilities and observational selection bias. I found post-purchased rationalization too simple and  neglecting probabilities is a bit too complicated, also I feel like I can most related to observational selection bias, so I would like to talk more about it. 

The authors explained that observational selection bias occur when you experience something and suddenly you see that thing happen more frequently, but in fact it might or might not increased its frequency. The example that he gave was when someone bought a new car he or she will think that the brand of the car that they bought suddenly increased around the streets. because your brain selectively notice this brand and you think that people bought them too. but in reality the numbers of this kind of cars may never change.

I've got an experience on this kind of biases especially when my mom bought a new car. Another example that I want to say here is, in the past I'd never noticed any sports equipment shop around town but after I'd been assigned to buy the volleyball net for our school I suddenly noticed that the sports shop is everywhere. I and thought did they open so many new places.

In conclusion, cognitive biases are very complication but really interesting. I hope I could understand them all. because now that I've read about it but still don't know if it changes the way I see things or not. So I think that maybe after I master it I could rationalize all my biases. 

Well, what do you think about biases? Do you have any interesting article about biases that you could share? don't forget to comment below ^^

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