Update

The GNH Index has been updated here is the link again so you can look at it yourself. But if you are lazy I will tell you that the Nations happiness plummeted the Monday after the Health Care bill passed. The positive levels are below zero.

Gross National Happiness

I recently found this application for facebook, it's called the Gross National Happiness Index I have seen many of my friends on facebook use a counter to calculate the words they most use. Apparently this is now being done on a larger level evaluating all users of facebook to distinguish the levels of happiness in a country.

By counting the positive and negative words used in status updates they can generate a percent of happiness and compare it to specific days. Not surprising, in general positive attitudes drop significantly on Mondays and peak on the weekends. Holidays also tend to shoot up in positive statuses as well as have the greatest drops in negative statuses. Maybe it is just my sociological mind but I find these graphs very interesting to see and then try figure out why they look the way they do.

I first discovered this application when I came across this article about Australia's happiness index. In the article it refers to the "sorry day...That was the day Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered an apology to indigenous Australians." I then was curious at what the GNH index for the United States was when the Health Care bill passed. Unfortunately the graph currently only goes until 1:00 AM Sunday Morning before the debate had even started. I don't know about you but I will be checking back in a couple days to see the results. I'll post them when I find out.

Are you friends with your parents on facebook?

It may just be me but I really enjoy studying people and just observing their behaviors. The transition to parents joining facebook and the uproar it has caused has been very amusing to observe. I wondered to myself why is it that big of a deal? Until I thought about how I would feel if my parents had joined facebook.

I personally did not get a facebook account until I moved out of the house because my mom was so against the idea of any social networking site. She thought they were of the devil, this may be a little extreme but it's the best way I can come up with to express what she thought. Since then I have slowly been trying to show here the benefits of facebook and help her see that change isn't always that bad. It's been working. She has not yet joined facebook but I am constantly having to relay messages for her through it or I will get on with her every once in a while to give her updates of family members and good friends. I feel victorious in convincing her that it's not that bad but I still wonder how I would feel if she actually joined.

Honestly I have nothing to hide so I guess I wouldn't mind too much it's just a weird thing to think about. In this article about the petitions to keep parents from joining facebook Taylor is quoted, I would have to agree with him.
"People shouldn't be putting anything inappropriate on Facebook anyway," Taylor said. "Why would you want what you're doing in public? It'll come back to haunt you in some way or another."

Even if you don't have inappropriate thing posted there could still be times where older adults and parents really should just avoid it but then again we wouldn't have awkward funny stories to tell check out this website where you can post your own experiences with your parents on facebook, some of them are almost painful but hilarious

Pointless yet entertaining

In my search of things to blog about this week I found a lot of different articles about lawsuits, rapes, facebook climbing in popularity, more businesses jumping on the bandwagon, etc. There were some interesting and appalling things that I could mention but a lot of it seemed negative and I was sick of it. I know there are bad things but facebook also has many benefits. I did come across this article, it made me laugh and reflect on all the pointless things that take place on facebook. I believe many people see them as such but yet we all participate for one reason or another.

This particular article (which I mentioned above) is about the fan page "MY SISTER SAID IF I GET ONE MILLION FANS SHE WILL NAME HER BABY MEGATRON." I remember seeing this and thinking it was kind of dumb and there is no way that was going to happen but apparently they got the fans. Who knows if it is real but I sure did find entertainment in the idea and the fact that it has generated so much attention. I then thought about the other fan pages I have either seen or personally joined which were based on this same idea of looking for a specific number of fans. Did they reach their goal? In case you were curious here are the stats of the couple that I did join...

"I bet BYU fans can get 1,000,000 fans before Utah can!"

BYU Fans = 73,035
U of U fans = 68,127

I think BYU is winning, although we both still have a ways to go.
I love how Utah state and Weber had to join in on this as well

Utah State fans = 17,818
Weber fans = 3,798 (funny thing about this one though is they bet they could get 78 fans before BYU or Utah could get 1,000,000. I think they won!)

I know the rest of you may not care about this one but I have to keep up a little bit of my high school pride between us, Bingham, and our biggest rival, Alta there was a bet to see who could get 1,000 fans first. Apparently Bingham got their fans first but Alta got them faster. Here are the currents stats.

Bingham = 3,027
Alta = 2,529

This is all pointless right? it really doesn't mean anything but yet even the most down to earth person can get caught up in it.

Random facts about Facebook

1. The original concept for Facebook was borrowed from a product produced by a prep school Phillips Exeter Academy which for decades published and distributed a printed manual of all students and faculty, unofficially called the "face book"

2. The very beginnings of facebook started when Mark Zuckerberg had just been dumped by a girl and needed a way to get her out of his mind. Here is what he wrote on his personal blog that night.

"I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 p.m. and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive."

He ended up hacking the Harvard server to get pictures of students to post on line and created Harvard's own "Hot or Not" (to read more of this story read the history of facebook on Wikipedia)

3. Facebook has officially been around since September of 2006

4. It currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide

5. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria, China, Vietnam,and Iran.

6. With that said 70% of facebook users are outside the United States

7. In December 2009 the New Oxford American Dictionary declared their word of the year to be the verb "unfriend"

8. In 2009 it was named the most popular Social networking site with MySpace following.

9. How about this for a little shocker. In December of 2008 the Supreme Court of Australia ruled that a summons posted on Facebook is legally binding.

10. The average user spends more than 55min. per day on facebook

11. In March of 2008 facebook had over 500 full-time employees and was worth $15 billion and is still growing.

12. over 500,000 applications on the facebook platform

13. Those who use facebook Mobile are 50% more active than non-mobile users

14. Facebook is translated into 70 different languages

15. More than 2.5 billion pictures are uploaded each month


For more random facts and also where I got my iformation visit facebook statistics
Random Facts webupon and Wikipedia