King  Gary 

Well, bye bye to the first Google service to go, Google Answers; this information is straight from the official Google blog. Right from the get-go, it didn’t have too much activity going on there. I doubt that it was maintained much after the launch; it didn’t even get that much exposure after the launch, so all of these factored into the shut down of the service. The introduction of Yahoo! Answers didn’t help much at all, too; it’s a much better execution of the idea, although the demographics there seems to be for a more younger audience.

I think that one of the things that Google still doesn’t get is that a social aspect to websites can really improve their popularity. Google Answers has a really blank look to it; I’m sure one of the primary reasons is so people can go there, do what they need to do, and then leave - just like the Google search engine itself. But, you can’t apply that methodology to all websites. Yahoo! Answers has a much, much more social aspect and community feeling to it; you can see a lot of questions being asked on the home page, and everyone is encouraged to answer the questions of others. This is unlike Google Answers, which only allows professionals, whom you pay, to answer your questions, which really decreases the number of people who would want to use the service. Plus, a lot of people who ask questions online don’t even have credit cards yet!

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Okay, so it isn’t such a big question to ask; but, work has, for a long time, been something that people did in order to pay the bills and to buy the occasional item that they desired but didn’t require. It wasn’t something that they were supposed to enjoy; no, instead, the very idea of work as something that people could love doing was just out of the question.

Why, then, do people today still choose to work in professions that they don’t quite enjoy? Stereotypes shouldn’t be applied, and yet, even without trying to, they are seen all over university campuses everywhere. Take the University of Waterloo, which is where I am currently enrolled. Programs such as accounting have a much higher ratio of Asians-to-Caucasians than, say, engineering. Even gender stereotypes still exist; the male-to-female ratio in the Faculty of Mathematics is 72:28, and in the Faculty of Engineering, it’s 78:22. But in the Faculty of Arts, the ratio is 29:71. One of the primary causes for this huge imbalance is stereotypes.

In my English course that I’m taking this term, we’re doing research projects on one of four topics; one of the topics is ‘women in mathematics.’ The goal of that topic is to come to a conclusion of why there are such low enrollment numbers of women in the Faculty of Mathematics, and how this can be resolved. A good chunk of the women in mathematics are in it because - surprise, surprise - they actually love it.

I just came back from my English class today, where all the groups did their presentations on what they’ve learned and researched. One of the groups that did their presentation on Women in Mathematics mentioned that what we should do to increase popularity and change the views of women about math, is to make bigger changes at a younger age. So for instance, in pre-school, girls usually play with dolls, and the boys usually play with building blocks (a stereotype, yes, but one that’s pretty accurate.) The boys building blocks is more than just a way to spend their time; it also helps them with their analytical and problem solving skills. They figure out where blocks go to build the desired object that they wish to build. Girls play with dolls, and the primary thing that they get out of it is creativity, but in a very limited way, because dolls aren’t as abstract as blocks and therefore can’t be applied to as large a field of subjects. Blocks are very abstract, and so boys can take the knowledge that they learned in pre-school, build on it and hone their skills, and then apply block building to, say, building computer software, or constructing the next Eiffel Tower.

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Now isn’t this the best dorm room carpet or what?

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This is an open letter to the students whom I know that can’t seem to get their sleeping patterns right:

Procrastination. It’s something that almost every teenager learns to do while they are in an educational institution. And I don’t mean procrastination in a light sense; I mean it in the heaviest sense. In the sense that, handing an assignment in to the drop box at university 5 minutes before it’s due is deemed acceptable, as long as it’s handed in. The ends justifies the means… doesn’t it? The educational system teaches that, as long as we hand in our assignments BEFORE a specified date and time, then we are in the free. School is the perfect place to help us teenagers hone our procrastination skills, and in higher education, there is no single better place for us to improve our procrastination skills to the fullest extent. I mean, why should we hand in our assignments a day or two before it’s due, when we live on campus, and thus, we can work on our assignments the night it’s due, walk to the drop box and hand it in before that 8:20 am due date? Pshaw!

Oh, right. Our health. Irregular sleeping patterns! But, that’s all secondary, anyways. Who needs health when we have our youthful youthness? And our caffeinated Tim Horton’s coffee, famed Iced Cappuccino’s, and much beloved Jolt Cola and Bawls? Not us! We’d rather procrastinate our work to as late as possible, and instead, spend our time peeking in every nook and cranny of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in order to find all the easter eggs to fulfill our life’s goal of finally completing that darn game to 100%.

“But wait, I heard that procrastination was bad for you!” Well, Johnny, you must have heard wrong. Because in fact, it stimulates action at the most predictable times - hours, or minutes, before some task is due. Who wants that unpredictability of having work done several days or weeks before it’s due? It’s far better to be able to know that you’ll start on a project a few hours before that dreaded due date instead. It adds that predictability factor to our lives. Plus, we can throw time management out the window, as the only thing we have to keep in mind is the due date, and then we’ll automatically scramble to complete our work once the time has come. So, it all works out in the end, doesn’t it?

The statements made in this blog entry are in no way the views and opinions of Gary King, the author of this blog, and do not represent his way of thinking. You can blame it on the little devil who sits atop his right shoulder instead, since that’s the guy that takes all the blame, anyways.

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I’ve been having a problem these past few days: I sleep from 5 am - 3 pm. And, personally, I think I suffer from a mild case of insomnia, so that doesn’t make it any easier to fall asleep - especially when I’m not tired; even when it’s, say, 3 am, I’m not tired. Heck - it’s 5:15 am right now as I’m typing this post, and I can’t get to sleep!

There are really three options to go with to try to solve this problem:

1. Force myself to sleep and then wake up at 7:30 am, which is when I wake up during school days. The advantage of this would be that I’m set into my regular sleeping pattern immediately, but the disadvantage would be that I would be on roughly 1 hour of sleep for a day - which isn’t any fun at all.
2. Force myself to sleep and then wake up at a later time, say, 11 am, so that I more gradually get into my regular sleeping pattern again, which is the advantage. The disadvantage would be that I might not be sleepy by 11 pm or so, which is when I’m trying to get to bed so that I can wake up in time the next day at 7: 30 am.
3. Don’t sleep tonight and just sleeping the next night. Advantage? Not requiring to force myself to sleep. The disadvantage? No sleep for a day.

So there you have it. I’m aiming for option #2 since I know I’d suffer from lack of sleep with #1. I also have an algebra midterm this monday (tomorrow) and a calculus midterm the next monday, so I really should get well rested for those.

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