Upfront Magazine "Gauging the Cheerleader Affect"

In the article "Gauging the Cheerleader Affect", it is explained that in our modern society, the cheerleader affect has been affecting the popularity and hottness of a person. It is a very psychological idea that seems like it should be false but it plays with our minds and causes us to thing differently. As first noticed on the tv show How I Met Your Mother, the cheerleader affect was stated to be as something that causes girls to look better with friends but terrible by herself. Now this caused commotion in our modern society causing experiments to begin about this concept. An experiment was held in the University of California given out to random people to test their minds.

In the experiment, a group of 300 students were given pictures of different people, sometimes in groups and sometimes just solo shots. Then the students were told to rate the attractiveness of the person. The outcome of this experiment was ad expected, the same person was rated more attractive when in a group. So there must be a reason. According to the article, "The reseachers think the brain is melding together the group's facial features into a composite average, mentally Photoshopping out all the idiosyncrasies that become obvious when observing just one person's face." I believe this is true because of the other people (aka the distraction) cause the test subjects to look at the group rather than the fault in the woman/man's face.

All in all, this experiment was a success. It means that having wing men and women may be a successful dating strategy because of the outcome of this experiment. This has been agreed with by the psychologists in Psychological Science. With this discovery will also come many new experiments regarding all sorts of popularity myths and ideas and cause more than the average Joe or Jane to think differently when being socially active in our modern day pop  culture.

Blog Post on Motorolla Password Pill

The idea of change and reform in technology has been a recent trend in our popular culture. As social networking has been becoming more popular the need to remember all of your passwords has been quite a stress for most. But is there a solution? According to the article"A Password Pill?" from the January 13th edtition, the electronics brand Motorolla™ has come up with a prototype for opening all of your passwords, it is in the form of a pill. Some people like the idea for many reasons but many people also dislike the idea for other reasons. 

Personally I believe that this password pill is ridiculous and stupid because of its form, how its consumed, and its funtions.The first reason why I believe this is ridiculous is that it releases chemicals into your body. According to the article, "the edible password vitamin will use the acid in your stomach to turn itself on." This is not good because any object that is not melted by stomach acid cannot be healthy to have inside of you. The second reason why I think this password pill idea is bad is that ot has to be taken daily. I believe that the only daily pill should be a multivitamin. This tiny chip being released into your body cannot be good. Lastly, it's not even that neccesary. According to the article, "the average person logs in a password about 39 times a day, and it takes 3.2 seconds  each time." In actuallity, modern phones stay logged in to your account so you don't need to re-log in every time you open up that site/app. That is why this pill is practically useless. 

The password pill is useless because of how it is not needed at all. Its is just useless, unsafe, and just not good in general, people can just take the extra 3.2 seconds to log in instead of saving those "precious" seconds so badly needed. Also, it probably is made to cost an overwhelming amount of money every year. Companies like this are just trying to take advantage of their customers.

Omvivore's Dilemma

In the book Omnivore's Dilemma, the author goes around doing research on fast food and local farms and any sort of places where restaurant meat is produced. During this great adventure, he has many great discoveries about meat production these days, the slaughter houses, the  living conditions, the hard work, and the payoff. He realized all of the terrible things about slaughtering these animals and the entire process of food.
At first his opinion towards food is like any other american consumer. He loves food but he is curious to know more about it. He creates appointments with McDonalds chicken center, Cascadian Farms, and local farms and he goes shopping at his local supermarket. Once he sees the terrible things in fast food production places, he photograph them and analyzes the facts to find out how to feel at the next places he goes. Now at the local farm, he is allowed to slaughter the animals. The thought of that instantly causes him to stop eating meat and become a vegitarian. The thought of this ridiculous thing makes me feel terrible inside but it still wont  cause me to want to become a vegitarian. Next the author cooks a home meal, anylyzing the places where food comes from that he bought and he checked out how the farms were. They were mostly very good and he decided that the best way to go was a good old home cooked meal.
In this field style experiment, the author explains his full adventure, his feelings, his actions, what he will do in the future and more. I think his idea was very interesting in the way that he decided that he would sacrifice his time to find out the information that he needed. His experiment was a success because he was able to share all the secrets about these big name businesses that were kept secret before.