Life is a cocktail

Life is a cocktail – so varied, so sweet or sour, so rough or smooth – You name it! The one thing I know about cocktails is that they have to be balanced. So here is the my perfect recipe:

The spirit

The spirit or the mixture of spirits is the soul of every cocktail. It provides the main characteristics of a drink as it is the best taste-maker of all. It also delivers the curtain amount of alcohol needed to tickle all your senses and make You want another one. The spirit is determinant and brings life to the cocktail as our personality and nature shape the life we are living.
Boring as vodka or complex as a good rum, your personality will determine your everyday. So bear in mind the spirit You are made of and measure the other ingredients very wisely.

The sour part

Get some lemon or lime and add some sourness to your life. Well, You probably wouldn’t enjoy it on its own but it’s an incisive part of it, right?! Bottom line, You won’t truly be able to smile before having made that squeezed-a-lemon-in-my-eye face. In other words, cherishing the ups without experiencing the downs. Missing the sour part would make the cocktail one-dimensional and You will have a hard time bottoming it up after the third sip.

The sweet part

A curtain amount of sweetness will make You enjoy the drink, so don’t forget to sugar up your life. Don’t over-sweeten - balance is the key!

The liqueur or bitters

Certainly not a must-have ingredient but surely a nice-to-have one. Some liqueur or aromatic bitters will allow You to add a new delicate taste to the cocktail and strengthen its body without mixing up the balance. It is like a hobby, broadening your horizons and intensifying the flavor of the drink. So do some blogging, go kite surfing or travelling, whatever would match up with the spirit.

The preparation

Now, that You have all the ingredients, measure and mix them, stir or shake them and don’t worry if it doesn’t turn out every time. You still have your whole life to perfect it. Cheers!

Minority report – Sci-Fi or reality?

SOS London

Over the last week London and some other cities in the United Kingdom were overrun by chaos. The riots and looting spread across the country as a result of a man shot by the police force.
Thousands of young people turned London upside down looting, smashing and torching everything on their ways. It was a social act of insubordination that made the whole world hold its breath.

And surprisingly or not social media has played a great role in it. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter or messaging services like Blackberry Messenger have been misused to coordinate criminality. That’s how the rioters managed to be one step ahead of the authorities. As Tweeter and Facebook helped people to magnify an incident (afterwards they were very helpful in fighting the chaos as well), BBM was used to make it happen by setting targets and gathering points as BlackBerry is by far the most popular handset amongst Britain youth.

BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) is a free instant messaging service that allows you to get in touch with one or hundreds of people even beyond your own contacts. But unlike the public social networks the messages are private and encrypted therefore very hard to be decoded and monitored by the police – the hidden weapon of the rioters.

Taking charge

How to cope with the problem? Well let them shut down social media and private messaging, right?! Guess what – it won’t happen. The communication technology has advanced so much over time that there are no feasible and legally enforceable measures to set us back to using pigeons even for a day or two. Nevertheless Facebook and Twitter are very cooperative and have taken drastic measures by cancelling accounts and groups plotting violence in the last few days.

It is now clear that the authorities will make themselves more familiar with the way how social media works and what role it could play in generating chaos and criminality. The technological and related legal capability of the police will be undoubtedly improved. The government would like some kind of early warning system, to alert “when trouble is being planned”, so “anyone inciting violence on social networks will have to deal with the authorities”.
Of course, the more data they get, the better they can deal with commotion. Therefore paradoxically the government should be encouraging people to join social networks, instead of cutting them off.

Minority report

So imagine a world where everything you say on social networks is being monitored by the police, every sign of violence evaluated. No way! Think again, a part of it is already happening.

A young man from Colchester was arrested and charged with ”encouraging or assisting in the commission of an offence” using his private cell phone to organize a water fight with a friend. In the light of the resent events the authorities now use the technology to keep BBM and all social networks under surveillance and to monitor such correspondence. According to a spokesman for the police “the planned water fight is not all that it seems”. Seriously?!

And if this is hopefully just a single act of overambitious precaution in England the technology keeps improving and could make cases like this one happen on regular basis.
Twitter can detect trends. It makes it possible to apply a trend detection techniques to social streams which can be defined by the topic of conversation, the intent of the message or even the location.
Think about Google and Facebook which analyse every click or search query You make and then a few hours later supply You with adverts matching your interests by taking your behaviour on social media into count. There are many more companies of that kind that specialize in the so-called social media analysis, or in other words they monitor what users do online. Others can dig into users’ online past to conduct background checks. They retrieve data not only from social networking sites but from comments on blogs, photos where people are tagged in, or comments users post to video and photo sites.

So can this huge amount of information about every single man on Earth with an internet connection be used for surveillance by the authorities in order to fight criminality?
Even the most advanced technologies are not complex and smart enough to analyse a man’s conversation. So computer can detect words, topics and actions online but not the context and the meaning we apply to words. Consequently real humans are still needed to analyse our social media communication or private messaging and the police can’t yet interact based on computer’s judgment. Not yet!

Sci-Fi or reality? You tell me…

Social robots

The alarm clock is ringing…
Wake up, check Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Xing etc. and then what? Well, go to bed, of course, it’s already midnight!

I’m pretty sure that You are all aware of the infinite advantages of Web 2.0 and social networking. And because they are so crucial for us we spend nearly 30% (and still rapidly increasing) of the time online on socializing. Here some key facts:

Facebook claims 3 Billion button servings a day.
Twitter generates 350 million tweets a day.
Google+ reached 10 million users only within 16 days and 25 million within 28 days.

Develop a profile of backgrounds and interests, communicate with friends and strangers, share thoughts, photos, links and social You are… Are we?
Actually being social means that your attitude and behaviour take the interests, intentions and needs of other people into count. Basically, as we comment, like or retweet we give a kind of respond and evaluation of the online actions of other people. So far, so good.

But I doubt that all of our actions on social networks are well thought through and really respond to our opinion and believes. In other words when we “like” or “+1″ something, do we? Have You ever wondered why there is no “don’t like” or “-1″ button?! The only way to express a negative attitude to something is to comment. But let us be honest, it is not really often the case, is it. Of course, we have the option not to “like” or comment and therefore we would be claimed not social enough!? Come on!

So more or less we have to express an opinion in order to fit it and it would be positive almost every time because the people who design the social networks said so. Having this in mind I think that a lot of our actions on social networks are automatic, instinct driven and standardized.

The experiment

I recently carried out an experiment on Facebook by setting my birthday on a random date. It convinced me that a part of our socializing is just a must-do-because-I-am-expected-to or everyone-does-it-so-am-I. Please, don’t get me wrong because I’m far away from thinking that the people’s greetings were false. The crucial point was the time line! Here is what I mean:

As you know even when you normally have your contacts all together on Facebook and not divided by groups, they still make out subgroups like classmates, colleagues, family and so on. So what I did was – I observed when a particular person congratulated me and whether there was a connection between the people posted their greetings nearly at the same time. And in the matter of fact there was. From overall 63 posts nearly 2/3 of them were published temporally close to each other (less than 45 minutes) by members of the same subgroup of contacts . Coincidence – You’d say – sure, but not all of them. I’ve literally become greetings on stacks from each subgroup.
As more mutual contacts post, like or comment on the same topic the more popularity and visibility they generate. It results in some kind of a peer pressure and causes that the more people automatically do it as well.

Bottom line, the best proof of this theory is that a lot of my contacts, who actually very well know when my birthday is, admitted afterwards that they didn’t even tought about it and simply instinctively published a post.

The end

The truth is that the social networks are designed to make money. That’s why they offer us so many ways to communicate and share and won’t stop developing others. Social networks are predestined to be multifarious and complex in order to gain and retain popularity. Activity is paramount. It’s up to us to make the best of it!

Pay it forward

“If someone did you a favor – something big, something you couldn’t do on your own – and instead of paying it back, you paid it forward to three people…
And the next day, they each paid it forward to three more…
And the day after that, those 27 people each paid it forward to another three…
And each day, everyone in turn paid it forward to three more people…
… in two weeks, that comes to 4.782.969 people.”

The movie

The movie is about an assignment which is given by a social studies teacher to his seventh grade class. The assignment is to think of a way to change the world and put it into action. One eleven year-old student takes this assignment into heard. The boy believes that it is possible for a single man to change the world. Inspired by his faith he comes up with a plan - every man ever got a favor should do the same for three other people. Powered by the passion of the little boy the people close to him boost his idea. Unbeknownst to them, “pay it forward” breaks out and spreads across the nation.

The message

It is not about giving money to charity. Actually, it is not about money at all! It is about helping other people and being kind to them, about showing them how a human could act and how people could be to each other.
- “Nonsense! No one ever gave me something for free!”
- “Than be the first one to do it” – I would say.
In the everyday life we are fighting so hard to get that we easily forget to give. Give help, give attention, give an advice, give of your time, give a smile, give a hug…
And don’t wait to get paid for it. It is not about You, it is about the others. In most cases to do someone a favor would only cost You a bit of your time – nothing more, nothing less. And somehow this tiny flash of goodness is more valuable than loads of cash. Inspiring the others to do good would be priceless.

The little boy from the movie doesn’t care about the rent, the inflation or the unemployment. It simply believes desperately in the good in the people. And if we could overcome the egoism in our lives and be that little boy for only one hour every day, the world certainly would be a better place.

The question

Is it really so hard?

Swizzl’s from scratch

As this is the first post on Swizzl’s, I’ll try to sum up how it all began…

The idea of a blog

The idea of writing a blog came very spontaneous. It was powered by the desire of getting deep into the issues of the everyday life. And somehow a blog is the best option to create something personal and to share it at the same time. Well almost personal as I’m blogging on WordPress. That’s because Swizzl’s is not a low-budget blog, it is more like a no-budget-ray-of-starfish blog. Still I’ve tried to shape it as I would have wanted it to be. Afterall the content is mine. So don’t look around and read!

The name

Swizzl’s is inspired from bartending and more specifically from a bar tool – the swizzle stick. It is a simple stick made of a specific wood and it is used to “swizzle” a drink. That means to stir it very intensive by spinning the stick fast from the top to the bottom of the glass and the other way round.
As my head is always swizzled by a variety of thoughts, issues and challenges I found the name very suitable for the blog. It doesn’t look so scrambled, yet. But just wait for the posts. For now, sit back and enjoy the mumble jumble swizzling through my head!