Thinking about my funeral:

June 18th, 2010

I have been reading Scott Adams’Stick to Drawing Comics,Monkey Brain!  for a while now. It’s a deviation from what he does best, and maybe that’s why this collection of short articles from Scott Adams were a let down for me. Anyway, one article titled ‘Planning my funeral’ caught my attention. I thought I should give it a shot as well…..just that instead of ‘planning’ my funeral, I am ‘thinking’ of it.

Why am I dying?

I have no reason to believe that I will die. In about 20 years, when I am closer to dying (I will be 55, then), I expect the Stem Cell Technology to have improved, with scope to extend the lifetime of an adult human being to 200+ years. That’s why we have lots of potted plants in our house – we don’t want to be running short on ‘Stems’ when the need arises.

But then I think, Stem Cell technology or no Stem cell techonology….why wouldn’t I die? I mean, they say God is dead. If God can be dead….why can’t Jammy be dead? But then again, when I think that Elvis isn’t dead….I wonder, why would Jammy be dead?

If I am not going to die due to natural causes (thanks to Stem Cell Technology & all those plants that I am growing at home), will I end up committing suicide? Hmm….let me think….maybe not. Primarily because I live my life with the help of Do-It-Yourself books and books on ‘How to commit suicide’ are never available in libraries. Apparently, nobody ever returns them. Some of the other books that don’t get returned are ‘How to make a bomb,’ ‘How to murder your mother-in-law’ and ‘How to tame a lion in one hour’.

For the sake of moving this article forward, let us assume that Jammy dies. And when that happens, people who didn’t even know that Jammy lived…will be informed that Jammy has died. As one of my favourite humor writer GK Chesterton once said: “Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

The big question is, how would the Television Channels and Newspapers and Weekly Magazines handle my death? I know I am not famous right now, but let us assume for the sake of this article that in 20 years time I am famous. Will I make it to the cover of the magazines? If yes, will they cover my coffin and then take a picture or will they move the lid across and show my drop-dead-gorgeous face? What about the Television Channel – will they run 30-minute slots titled “A day with Jammy inside his coffin” or maybe “Jammy’s funeral wardrobe – how to get dressed for that last journey”.

Me dying, how will it affect me

If I die today, I will hold many grudges when I roam around in my ghost form. I have never managed to get a statue of mine erected in the middle of a traffic junction. I have never managed to get a park or a bus stand or a wedding hall or a road named after me. I didn’t get a college auditorium named “Lord Jammy’s Auditorium”.

Another grudge I will nurse will be that of not finishing my autobiography. I shouldn’t have listened to Kushwant Singh and agreed that the best time to write an autobiography is after death. Coz, after death I might find out that there are no pens and no paper. Besides, how do you find publishers willing to publish your articles after you are dead….if finding them when you are alive is so difficult.

Me dying, how does it affect my family

There will be two parties most affected by my death – my daughter and the pet honeybee we have in our house. Honeybee will get over it in a week’s time and die in the next one month (yes, they live only for up to 40 days).

My daughter will miss me for sure. I will miss her too. But being the ghost, I will be able to tag along with her to her school ….and not leave the sight of her….something that I am unable to do now. So, this will work out as a huge advantage.
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Types of Surveys

June 14th, 2010

Data are usually collected through the use of questionnaires, although sometimes researchers directly interview subjects. Surveys can use qualitative (e.g. ask open-ended questions) or quantitative (e.g. use forced-choice questions) measures. There are two basic types of surveys: cross-sectional surveys and longitudinal surveys. Much of the following information was taken from an excellent book on the subject, called Survey Research Methods, by Earl R. Babbie.

bulletCross-Sectional Surveys

Cross-sectional surveys are used to gather information on a population at a single point in time. An example of a cross sectional survey would be a questionaire that collects data on how parents feel about Internet filtering, as of March of 1999. A different cross-sectional survey questionnaire might try to determine the relationship between two factors, like religiousness of parents and views on Internet filtering. Read the rest of this entry »

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SURVEY CAVEATS AND LIMITATIONS

April 10th, 2010

The results presented here are based on an online survey, which ran for seven days (from January 14th to January 21st, 2004). During that time, 492 people responded to the online questionnaire. Out of those responses, 486 were selected for data analysis  the remaining 6 responses were incomplete and, therefore, were disregarded.

Respondents to this survey were not selected on a random basis. Announcements for the online survey were posted to mailing lists within MIT as well as on a few high-traffic blogs published by people known to the author of this survey. The viral nature of blogs meant that the links to the survey page quickly spread to many other blogs. Nevertheless, this does not qualify as a random sample of the blogger population and, as such, the results from this survey cannot be generalized to the entire blogging community; instead, these results are representative of the state of affairs in certain portions of the blogging world.

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Expectations of Privacy and Accountability: An Initial Survey

April 10th, 2010

Introduction

Blogs, more formally known as weblogs, have captivated the media and, by extension, the public’s imagination. The number of blog writers and readers has grown consistently in the last few years.1 Moreover, blogs are permeating most niches of social life, addressing a range of topics from scholarly and political issues (Glenn, 2003) to family and children’s daily lives (Turnbull, 2004). As blog writers become increasingly prolific, however, they are likely to encounter issues of privacy and liability. For example, accounts of bloggers hurting friends’ feelings or losing their jobs because of materials published on their sites are becoming more frequent (Bray, 2004; Nussbaum, 2004; O’Shea, 2003; Pax, 2003; Phillips, 2003; Sarnataro, 2003; St. John, 2003; Whitworth, 2003).

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How to create survey in blogspot

April 10th, 2010

It is very easy to add a survey with one question (poll) in blogger blog. Blogger have built-in functionality to survey your visitors by adding a poll to your blog. Visitors can choose one answer from multiple choice and see how other visitors votes. Very nice feature.
But there is restriction, you can add only one question in the poll and visitors can only choose from one multiple choice question. For example with Poll you can’t give visitors option to enter some text to describe their opinion

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