Social Media Culture

Social media networks are widespread on the internet. However, this experience is good for some people but very bad for others. The bad experiences often lead to hightened states of depression. Social media invariably is all about popularity. But, this popularity is also overshadowed by not only influence but also the level of negative sentiments one can receive from people. In most cases, the person that subscribes or follows a person is totaly a stranger. This strangeness and unfamilarity of people leads to a very cold and defensive state of interaction especially among women. Removing someone from your follower/subscriber count may mean nothing for one person while could mean the world to another. In other cases, not getting reply from a person can be quite an issue for others. Other cases might involve blocking which the person might take quite personally. In general, people of celebrity status have had it quite easy as they already can gain plenty of followers from just influence or even hiring a separate marketing agency to manage their social accounts. However, other people likely would have to work towards it. People often may only reply to you based on your popularity as that would increase their follower count. Social media also seems to be a network of hierarchies. In many cases, it reflects the way people climb the social ladder, in associating with people who are more popular or influencial. When people get a very high follower or subscriber count they also have a tendency of becoming quite bigheaded and proud of their achievement. You never really know whether you are talking to a human or a bot on social media. And, whether someone's post is a scheduled post or something they directly replied to. In fairness, this could also be a reason why so many people are less empathetic. Social media as a result tends to be more about playing the game. It also seems to be a very cold place to hang out. Some people obviously don't care for popularity, influence, nor take the whole experience that seriously and this likely also negatively impacts their experience. Often the way the person looks also effects their popularity. Social media networks tend to be a breeding ground for shallow people, like an ego network. Recommendations are also geared towards popularity of content which further compounds the biases. No doubt social media can be addictive. But, it has also become a battle ground for people who want to display their frustrations, their hypocrisy, and be who they want to be outside of the confines of the real world. This often leads to some people being very unempathetic towards the people they interact and communicate, often with an unconscious bias. In many respects, social media reflects the real world, only worse. It also can be an opportunity to take a glimpse through the looking glass as to the reality of character and ideological mindset of people, especially as so many feel they can say whatever they like and treat people however they like without much regard for consequence. They are also great for mining data and analyzing human behavior. Take a step away from social media and see how the world suddenly feels simpler, more productive, likely less stressful, and frustrating.

The Satanic Verses

'The Satanic Verses' can be downloaded from the archive for free. Don't bother buying the book as it is not a good read. In fact, it is garbage from any sense of the word. The entire book is filled with embedded hate speech. The author dispels many of his hate through the personification of characters. Not only does he hate everything and everyone, he seems to also hate himself. The book was written to offend and provoke, much of which can be seen from the quote at the beginning of the book from Daniel Defoe. The more significant bit of hate speech is directed towards women that not only incites hate but also violence. In 1989, an incident occurred against a woman in New York where six individuals after reading passages from the book went out to put it into action that conjured up their imaginations. The book not only hates on blacks, but also jews, brits, whites, women, hindus, and across the protected characteristics. In US, hate speech laws don't really exist much outside of incitement. However, in UK/EU the hate crime law can provide a way towards censorship of the book. After all freedom of speech is not absolute. One finds it surprising that there is a lot of focus around the hate for a given religion while much of the other forms of hate in the book are completely overlooked. Perhaps, this is because of racism and bigotry shared in much of the western societies towards Islam and the book provides a weapon to incite hate towards it. But, it is shocking that many do not notice the level of hate speech mentioned in the book towards women. The author is an opportunist. Who wanted to gain notoriety by being as controversial as possible. In fact, a lot of the writing is in broken sentences and swearing that do not amplify any form of literary quality. The author cannot even make up his mind whether he wants to swear in hindi or english. It reads like an indian version of an urban dictionary. This leads one to wonder why on earth would someone want to consider it for the Booker Prize. The book sales is an indicator of how it is viewed in society. Book sales increased after the fatwa. They further increased after the attack on the author. But, in between such events book sales were virtually unheard of. Many people who support the book are jumping on the bandwagon of crowd follower mentality and have never even read the book. However, the man that attacked the author may also be exercising their freedom of speech and expression. This could be compared to the egg attack on John Prescott who returned it with a punch. Book burning is also another form of freedom of speech and expression. And, apparently, one cannot even challenge the holocaust behind the curtain of freedom of speech and expression. Or, even challenge the use of additional pronouns in freedom of speech and expression. We live in a society of hypocrites.

Extracts from 'The Satanic Verses':

• "White women -- never mind fat, Jewish, non deferential white women -- were for fucking and throwing over. What one hates in whites -- love of brown sugar -- one must also hate when it turns up, inverted, in black. Bigotry is not only a function of power." 
• "Torture. Maggie the Bitch."
• "N****r eat white shit?"
• "Black shit is bad?"
• "Sister Fucking British"
• "This country that's stuffed full of fucking old corpses"

Prologue (by Daniel Defoe, from 'The History of the Devil'):

"Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste of air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is....without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon." 

Endless Road of Tests

Life seems to be a never-ending cycle of tests. One is tested from the day they are born through the life's many struggles and obstacles. Tests in schools. Tests for uni. Tests for jobs. Tests for medical diagnosis. Tests for friendship. Tests from parents. Tests from background screening. Tests from banks. Tests from insurance. Tests of emotions. Tests in relationships. Tests of spirituality. Tests of love. Tests of blood. Tests of mental agility. Tests of behaviors. Tests of personality. Tests of psychology. Tests of languages. Tests of standardization. Tests and more Tests. It is like one can never recover from all these unnecessary tests that come our way. Academic tests measure absolutely nothing. Job tests measure absolutely nothing. The world has gone mad with testing people all the time. At times, the one testing does not even bother to even evaluate it and just goes for the score. Is life really reduced to a score and a race to the finish? Have we reduced the life to a mere competition rather than a lesson? We are increasingly living in shallowness, superficial, one-dimensional, mundane, depthless and trivialized world of cosmic energy. 

Beneficial AI

The six stages of AI alignment towards human values:

• The agent does what is instructed by a person
• The agent does what is intended by a person
• The agent does what human behaviors suggest they prefer to do
• The agent does what a rational and informed human wants it to do
• The agent does what is objectively in a person's best interests
• The agent does what is moral as defined by individuals or society

How To Read A CV 101 For Recruiters

Recruiters and HR representatives are one of the most clueless people in any organization. When it comes to hiring processes they don't appear to know the most fundamental aspect of reviewing applications: knowing how to read a CV. This is a big issue as perfectly good candidates get rejected. And, the ones that do come through the filters are normally not a good match for the role. The primary reasons for this are highlighted below:

• Recruiters sift through CVs without understanding the context, they only read through job titles or whatever was the last job title of the candidate.
• Many don't even have the time to read through hundreds of CVs so they only scan their way picking out keywords or even how many times they are mentioned.
• From the hundreds of CVs they have they might review the first five to ten CVs on the pile, put another five to ten on hold, and reject the rest without even reading through them.
• Sometimes they already have their preferred candidate pool who they go to first rather than bothering to sift through the entire pile of new candidates.
• Sometimes they might reject the candidate because they don't answer their call on first instance so they assume that the candidate is only passively looking.
• They may even favor candidates that are already in a role and looking for a change, compared to the ones that are actively looking and not in a current role.
• On other occasions they just can't make sense of the CV so they reject it.
• On other occasions if the CV does not contain certain keywords they reject it, ignoring the fact that the same keyword could have been used in alternative synonym forms.
• Sometimes they will reject the candidate simply because they are racist and make the assumption that they want a typical white person for the job as a safe bet or the fact they stereotypically assume that a non-white won't have the skills to do the job. In fact, in many cases they might even label it as a cultural fit issue.
• In many cases, it also boils down to the fact they don't have the necessary understanding and skills of the domain that is being recruited for to be able to review the applications.
• Sometimes, it is the case that the role was only advertised to meet compliance but that direct applicants are automatically rejected in favor of agency supplied candidates.
• On other occasions, it could be the fact that they might have had a bad experience in past with the candidate and decided to blacklist them for future roles.
• Or, it could simply be that the role never really existed and was merely a marketing gimmick to showcase that the organization has alot of work on the go.
• Sometimes they might like the look of the CV but just not like the candidate personality, the way they come across in-person or on the phone.
• In some organizations, a CV is not even looked at and a separate scoring grid matrix may be used just as in public sector jobs and if this has been filled out by a recruiter then there is likely to be some discrepancies.
• Sometimes the recruiter may ask the candidate to custom tailor the CV for the job, which usually means they either don't think it is a match based on missing keywords or don't have a clue of what they are even looking for in their application screening process. 

The way to get around this hurdle is for organizations to use smarter more intelligent tools that can provide better context-specific matching of candidates, measure of their associated risk selections, and to resolve for biases in such screening processes. And, fundamentally to remove the human-in-the-loop biases as much as possible. However, this process should not stop here but also be extended to review of interview processes as on many cases the interviewer can also bring their own sense of biases. There also needs to be a way of picking out fake job ads especially ones that don't quite make sense where the job titles don't match the job description or they simply don't exist. There is an endless process of improvements that could be achieved through AI in the human resources and recruitment sectors. However, in many cases this starts out with identifying the right places were AI can make the greatest impact. Perhaps, sending HR and recruiters on a 101 course in how to read a CV could be the first point of training. It is understandable that a recruiter may not have the technical background to know about all the domain skills in every specific type of job that they recruit for an organization. However, there are various tips in reading that can be used to make the job effective such as: 5W1H question/answering, SQ3R, using a tool that uses probabilistic NLP models and knowledge graph to bring context and aspects of match/filter functions to light.

Flawed English Language

The english language is flawed and inherently embedded in historical racism and sexism. This often stems from the cultural normalization of words and phrases that don't quite work in the modern day society. In some cases, the words have evolved in the pronunciation and spelling. While in other cases they have been linguistically defined and created over time. It is surprising how feminists don't take issue with changing significant aspects of the language. The following are some examples of words, phrases, and their usage that should really change and provide some uniqueness to genders as well as the ways in which race is contextualized as part of every day speech.

Words like mankind, manipulate, mansplaining, etc - that have the word man in them

Words like womansplaining - that have the word man in them

Female and Woman - that have the word male and man embedded in them

Blacklist and Whitelist - that make it obvious that black is bad, white is good

CMU-MOSEI

CMU-MOSEI

Sentiment Analysis with SenticNet, Onyx, & Marl

SenticNet
Marl
Onyx

Models and Vocabularies

Beer Slangs

Homebrew uses beer analogy as a MAC package manager. Beer is also a staple for social gatherings with the data science field. It has become an essential element of society. Over the years it has evolved with a diverse set of regional slangs as well as the variety of flavors from around the world. Even an ontology can be produced for the consumable term for beer in form of a concept or thing as well as a product with a set of ingredients, categories, and tastes. In process, helping people to explore and produce a recommendation graph to associate to their evolving tastes, merry meet ups, and as a choice for food accompaniment. 

beer slang
thrillist
beerslanging
15 brewtastic ways say beer
craftbeer
alldownunder
irishdrinking
1800s beer slang

Sentiment Ontologies

SenticNet
Marl
Onyx
EmotionML
EmotionML Vocabularies
Lemon
FOAF

Sentiment Analysis in Social Networks

Semantic Web For Dance

Dancing is deeply ingrained in almost every society on the planet. The art is so varied in routines and styles often providing depth into the cultural diversity of a society. It is an open expression, an exercise in one's freedom, and provides for unlimited ways of displaying creativity as well as a way for humans to identify with their individuality. With the ever growing styles of dancing, it also is an added complexity in keeping up to new changes in moves and routines. It also makes it complicated for learning as well as in keeping track of all the different types. Semantic web could come in handy in area of dance for insurmountable ways. It could help choreographers with planning routines. It could also help enhance learning in dance. It could even help semantically categorize all the different dance styles, trends, and moves as well as provide for better ways to track them. It could also help annotate dance videos and general content on the web for indexing. It could even help in knowledge discovery through linked data. Also, such approaches could go further in historical context towards understanding the cultural diversity, evolution, and the importance of dance in various societies over time. They could even help towards gaining insights for developing even newer dance styles. Dances also have embedded messages within them in form of expression, one can attempt to understand the semantically rich feelings and attitudes of an individual with the moves and choice of routines.

List of dance style categories
List of dances
IDTA
Popular Dance Styles
most popular dance moves from music videos 2013
top 10 list

Emoji

Emojis and emoticons can be extremely useful in capturing subliminal messages and moods within the social context of conversations. An almost perceived sentiment is captured with such simplicity can give added information to a document with actionable intent. However, they may be difficult to define in metadata translation unless each iconic derivation can be interpreted from their pictograph representations. And, as such most have a Unicode representation with a standard pixel grid size. These ideograms add much variety to text speak in reducing verbage but also adding valuable meaning. May be, even a semantic data could be incorporated over such emojis supported with such open sentiment dictionaries like sentiwordnet. They are portable as well as quite varied, available as plugins, website services, on desktops, and mobile phones. Symbols and signs have always held valuable cues in our society from traffic signs, health and safety, to various other domains. The semiotics of such symbols holds much value in understanding language pragmatics over the web to discern, relate, pattern recognize in their universality, and then to even catagorize with their specific distinctions. In general, such pictograph ideograms can be categorized into the level of abstractions they provide for an individual from quality of feeling, to reaction and relation, and for their explicit representations. Such interpretations can often be provided through philosophical logic influenced in part by their psychological and sociological implications for inference.

Selfies

Selfies have hit big time on the social media scene. As everyone seems to be doing it. Even Google has started to provide a shelfie for selfies or more colloquially named for shareable selfies. What is so trendy about taking snaps of oneself, other than to display how self-obsessed one is in their life. At least, they do spell the three fundamental words: me, myself, and I. Taking snaps has always been about depictions of surroundings and of others. At least, that is what has always made photography interesting. What is this craze about a selfie that makes one want to snap every instance of their waking life? Strangely enough, they are also more popular among celebrity culture and teenagers. May be, it has also been influenced by the forward-facing cameras on mobile phones of making them so accessible, for the sheer reason of starting a craze, or the simple need to explore the options on the phone. Being able to share and showcase one's life in an instance could be exciting and addictive for some. But, it does show a very shallow society and also an indication that some people just have far too much time on their hands. In a way, they are a historical pre-dated concept from taking photos at a photo booth, to using the self-timers on an antique camera, to even the old kodak moment, to the polaroid instant photos, and even the instant moments caught on a postcard. And, as people document their lives on social media they will inevitably take snaps to depict their every day lives whether boring to some and interesting to others with the added benefit of having little need to explain the moment in words to have them posted on instagram or pinterest.

The Web of Sentiments

Increasingly, the web is opening up new avenues for customers and consumers to voice their service and product issues and share it on the Internet. In process, with the viral growth of sentiments, it is bound to make a company or an individual notice and respond. There are a multitude of avenues opening up for customers: blogging, review sites, Google ads, Facebook, Twitter, and even Twitter Promoted Tweets. The sensational way of viral marketing can be utilized for voicing opinions all from the Internet. This will no doubt make many companies rethink their approach to public relations, after sales services, customer satisfaction, and in quality assuring their products.

Subjectivity