Zeitgeist... All I can say is wow...

I love conspiracy theories and I was looking on the web and came across this gem. I had heard of it before but never bothered to look into it that much. To summarize, Zeitgeist is a movie that presents Christianity, the attacks of 9/11, and the US Federal Reserve Bank as instruments in plots for social control and world domination. It just completely boggled my mind. Do I believe it??? Maybe some of the things mentioned but I like to be an optimist. I believe that people in the 21th century are free to make their own decisions and not be manipulated by a handful of people. Anyway here is the link to the movie for anyone interested.

http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/

There is a second movie that also came out which I plan to watch next weekend.

The Gathering

So this is the outcome of our experiment where everyone is gathering to discuss the results and how we will present the info. To make life more simple we each gave a member of our own team to the other team to help find the items easier. It was definitely a well planned scheme and I hope it works out. Otherwise we fail. Tomorrow we will know the outcome so lets see how it goes.

Results of the Experiment

Personally I thought what we accomplished as a class is quite rare. To get this many people working together is not an easy task. The only reason that I believe we were able to do this was because we all had one goal to reach. That goal was to get an A in this project and we all felt that would be easiest to accomplish by working together. Prof. Baldwin made this a competitive assignment. One person could have destroyed the whole plan and gotten the A themselves but I think everyone had a fear of failing this assignment. That fear outweighed the reward and everyone thought it would be best to share the load and accomplish the task as a group. Collaboration instead of competition In this case the zero sum case failed because no one gained anything on the behalf of someone else. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others. I think our experiment really fit this description of game theory. Based on the choice of other students in the class, we all individually decided that the best choice would be to agree to the choice made. There were times when the group seemed like it was about to fall apart but everyone stuck together till the end and we got it done. For a social experiment we as a class showed that teamwork is a great solution to any task. Also this showed that no matter how competitive the world is these days with everyone trying to get on top of everyone else, people still prefer teamwork to accomplish their goals. I personally feel everything is a lot easier when you have people to share the burden. One can also say that people would pretty much do anything to get what they want. In our case, getting an A. So this just makes everyone seem a little selfish because if there wasn't a grade attached would their really be this much collaboration? I don't like to look at it that way. I think everyone made the rational and best decision. Everyone knew this assignment would easier working as a team.

Game Theory Experiment

So today was the day that we tested out game theory and zero sum. And I must say the results were definitely surprising. In zero sum there are winner's and loser's so the sum of the both is zero. However, today I think our class found a way to be all winners. I don't want to indulge too much because our project for this experiment is due on Monday and I don't want our professor to find out the secrets. All I can say is that when there is a single goal that needs to be reached, people will sacrifice to work together and achieve that goal.

In our case there could only be one person or one group getting an A while the rest of the class would fail. However, this task seemed difficult because there was competition. The best way to beat the competition was to eliminate the competition. By doing this, the individuals sacrificed some of their own choices to make the smarter choice that would benefit them the best. More on this on Monday.

Game theory I never knew thee

I guess this is why we go to college. I learn something new everyday. This theater class that I am taking is really an interesting class. It's making me think and research about stuff that I never would've looked at before. We are going to be doing an interactive project that tests game theory and especially a certain aspect of game theory called zero sum. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others. The specific type of game theory that we are testing is zero sum which describes a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant or participants. If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.

The way zero sum is represented is that the class will be divided up and given a task to find 6 objects. First one to find them all and document them wins. There will only be one A given while the other losing team will be given an F so the A's will balance out with the F's to add to zero. I am really looking forward to this interesting experiment. Also there is an option of going rogue where you can split from your team and gain the A yourself while everyone else fails. HMMMM.... interesting. Well I am looking forward to being a part of this experiment.

I am slowly losing trust in technology.

I am slowly losing trust in technology because my computer of only 2 years old broke down. For some unknown reason, a machine that was working fine yesterday has suddenly stopped functioning. My desktop is an HP Pavillon a1730n and it has an AMD Dual-Core processor. I believe that the new appliances made in recent years are purposefully made to break down after a certain time. This way appliance companies can have constant revenue. It's all a big scheme to have a steady income. A proof of this is old cars. There are cars from the 50's still going strong but now cars require more maintanance then ever in order to keep them functioning properly.

With everything being on my desktop, I no longer have access to most of my files. I guess I should've really backed up the files on an external hard drive. It really put me in quite a perdicament because now I can't do some of my work for class and I really don't want to take time to install all my files to my laptop. I guess the only solution is to buy another computer, take my hard drive and install it into the new computer. You did it again appliance manufacterers.