Talking Machine

The side effect of going out with Juny almost everyday ever since I somehow announced to leave Melbie for good is that I started to talk to almost everyone - non-stop. I'm slowly turning into a non-stop talking auntie. Sigh...

My flight from Melbourne to Singapore was boring. The not talking 20ish college boy from S (probably) who sat besides me couldn't bother to initiate any conversation to me. And whenever I started to make lame joke with him, one of them was "Did the stewardess just call me "sir"?" Well, as expected, most of his replies were "I don't know "full stop"". Well, I was to be blamed for that. I wore exactly like a clown that day. In order to carry all my overloaded stuffs back to Indo, I wore a sweater, a normal jacket and a leather jacket. To make the matter worse, I was wearing all my necklaces, my bracelets. He's found not guilty for refusing to chat with a freak :P

Of course I took everything off when I was in Singapore. And that's probably why the guy who sat besides me during my Singapore-Jakarta flight wouldn't mind to chat with me. Well, he probably in his 30ish or early 40ish (the effect is so strong that I don't really care the target is). I saw the lady who sat besides him borrowed his newspaper and I said "Oh, I was targetting for that too, I'm too late". And we ended up talking non stop ever since the flight took off and landed.

The chat was interesting though. He worked in micro finance firm, totally a different field from his PHD in information system field. What is micro finance? I had no idea as well that time. Micro finance provides financial services to poor people. They really target the poorest of the poor. Most of the commercial bank don't provide such service because they requires the financial ability from the borrowers. The idea is great, but one wonders how does it work and how can it possibly benefit the firm.

Interestingly, there's a methology behind it. The way it works is they need to go to the rural area, talk to the villagers and form the system. The system is they pick up 4 women from 4 different families. One woman out of the 4 women is allowed to borrow USD$50 for a year. Only after that woman return the money, the other 3 women are allowed to borrow from the firm. That way, the borrower gets pressurized by her peers. On the other way, the peers are more than willing to help her if she really cannot pay the loan. Well, no doubt, the firm needs to explain to them the concept of borrowing and stuffs in advance. I can foresee the expenses for the operation is high. Workers are probably going to be paid in high amount because they need to go to a place which is probably not that comfortable to them, i.e. no clean water, no hotel and stuffs. I was right, to cover that, they are running 30% interest for any loan. 30% interest?!?!? That's probably a crazy number for us. If I borrow USD$50 means I have to return USD$65. Well I guess education really pays off. Educated people don't need to get ripped like that. Not saying it's bad, because that is really going to help the villagers, I guess.

This methology was written by a Bangladesh guy, Mohammad Yunus, who later received Nobel peace award for his theory. He experimented on 20 poor beggars in Bangladesh. He made friends to them, borrowed USD$1 to each of them. To my surprise, all of the beggars returned the money to him. Isn't that amazing? I'm gonna look for the book and sure gonna enjoy all his wonderful experinces.

I found it really interesting because you need to play with the psychology. And I found poor people or villagers are very innocent. Imagine if you randomly give money to people in big city without any legal document, would they return the money? They would probably think that you're dumb.

Spammer

As usual, I hate spammers. Spammers are the attention seeker people who waste data transfer, web space, public productivity and create fraud investigation cost. Intelligence wise, spammers with no intention but fun is more annoying.

One of my friends posted this on his status update:
This status is being tracked, the owners of facebook have confirmed they will send $1 to the rescue fund for the Haiti earthquake disaster for everytime this is cut and paste as a status. You only have to leave it for a minimum of 1 hour. Lets all do our bit to help - 請把上面的文字 copy/paste 到你的現況分享並至少保留一個小時, FB 會統計這些發布的現況, 每一則現況 FB 會相對捐出美金一元給海地地震救災基金

The first thing that came to my mind was with what algorithm do they keep track of the message? The simplest one I can think of is string comparison, but what is the key word for it? Haiti earthquake? $1 to rescue fund? or the whole sentence? Short string doesn't seem to be good. There was an article of twitter and Facebook users comparison, and if my memory doesn't fail me, there is about 222 million of Facebook users. Assume that 1% of the Facebook users occasionally update their status. I doubt the probability of short string resemblance out of 2.2 million status is insignificant, not to mention new status is occassionally being created by the 2.2 million and Haiti earthquake is the hot search in Google. Whole sentence doesn't make any real sense too. The time and cost to do the search is high. Or Facebook probably can invent some AI tools which are smart enough to understand the meaning of the sentence and to verify the sentence.

After long thought, it came to my mind the most basic thing. Why would Facebook actually give out $1 for the status update regarding Haiti? It was so dumb of me to actually analyze the tracking without putting that into consideration. Even if Facebook would, Facebook would definitely make an official note.

I don't dislike the people who just follow and put that message in their status. Everyone wishes to help the Haitian. I dislike the one who created this status. What is the point of making a false claim and mislead people into the belief and hope that their status might add some fund for the Haiti earthquake? For fun? To see the effect of the status on influencing people? It's okay to play around, but why play with misfortune and disaster.

PS: The spammer should probably take a lesson in his/her Chinese first. FYI, copy/paste is 複製 and FB is 面書 (well, at least to Hongkies and taiwanese).