Pakistan and My Identity

Shame on Amir Liaquat hussain (Exposed) Pakistan geo news

2011-08-15T02:59:00.000-07:00

Blast in morning show

2011-08-13T00:27:00.000-07:00

Welcome 2007

2011-08-12T05:44:00.001-07:00

Dhamaal movie full

2011-08-12T05:41:00.001-07:00

Hulchal Movie

2011-08-12T05:30:00.001-07:00

Cristy Come Home (2005)

2011-08-12T05:21:00.000-07:00

AMIR KHAN vs ZAB JUDAH (Knock Out by Young Boxer)

2011-07-25T00:57:00.000-07:00

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf live

2011-06-25T06:57:00.000-07:00

Watch live streaming video from ptiofficial at livestream.com

Never give Up

2011-06-09T14:06:00.000-07:00

Washington Post (Mental Accounting)

2011-06-07T03:55:00.000-07:00

Mental Accounting
Why It's Easy to Blow the Tax Refund and Hard to Catch a Cab in the Rain

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Let's say you are headed to a movie. As you are about to enter the theater, you reach into your pocket and find to your dismay that you have lost your ticket. You don't have a receipt, so if you still want to see the movie, you have to pay another $10 for a new ticket.

If you are like most people, you would probably think twice. You may still plonk down the money, but you will now feel that you paid $20 for a $10 movie.

But let's construct the scenario differently. You are going to a movie. As you stand in line at the box office to buy your ticket, you discover that you have dropped a $10 bill on the Metro. You are disappointed, of course, but would this affect your decision to buy the movie ticket? Again, if you are like most people, you may feel sore about the lost money, but it probably won't affect your decision to buy the ticket.

Psychologists once conducted an experiment along these lines. They found that only 46 percent of those who lost a ticket were willing to buy a replacement ticket, whereas 88 percent of those who lost an equivalent amount of cash were willing to buy a ticket. Since the lost ticket and the lost cash had the same value, their loss should have been experienced in the same way -- so why were nearly twice as many people willing to ignore the lost cash but not the lost ticket?

The difference is because of a psychological phenomenon known as mental accounting -- and it has enormous consequences in everyday life. It affects how people spend money and how they save. It influences how people deal with losses and windfall gains. It tells us what to do as we weigh different kinds of payment plans for a luxury item. The effects of mental accounting are felt in domains that seem far removed from the conventional understanding of economics -- it may even help explain why it is so hard to find a cab on a rainy evening. (More on that later.)

Here is the simplest definition of mental accounting: People carry around different running tabs in their heads. You have, for example, an "entertainment account." Losing a movie ticket and having to buy a second one takes $20 out of your entertainment account when you planned to take only $10. Lost cash, on the other hand, is not charged to the entertainment account -- which is why most people don't hesitate to buy a movie ticket after they lose some cash.

However, compartmentalizing income and spending into different mental accounts violates one of the basic rules of economics -- that money is fungible, or interchangeable. The $10 movie ticket is supposed to be worth exactly the same as $10 in cash. Supposed to be, of course, is the operative phrase. This is not the way human beings actually think, which is why economic models of human behavior often turn out to be wrong.

"The source of the money affects how it is spent," said Suzanne Fogel, who heads the marketing department at DePaul University in Chicago. When she was a graduate student, Fogel waited tables to help pay the bills. She found that she carried around a figure in her head; the amount she wanted to make each day. On any day she passed that target, any additional income became "free money" -- even though this money ought to have been a cushion for the days she did not meet her income target.

"Someone gives you money for your birthday and they don't say, 'pay your electric bill,' but money is money and completely fungible, and if you are behind on your electric bill, you should definitely spend your money on that," she added. "But there is a reluctance to do that."

Mental accounting is really the household equivalent of financial accounting, said Richard Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago who was the first to describe how the phenomenon works. Just as an office expense-account maven might tell you that your budget for lunch is no more than $25, you make projections on how much you will spend using your own money. This mostly ends up saving you time. You don't have to think twice (although maybe you should) about the $3 latte you get each morning because you have a mental account that says you are entitled to a $3 latte each day.

The alternative to having mental accounts, Thaler said, is to consciously ask yourself to ask what every purchase is worth and compare it with every other purchase. Is a latte worth the same as a pair of socks? Just as your boss doesn't want to be bothered with trivial decisions on whether you charge the company $20 or $22 for a meal, you don't want to waste time thinking about trivial purchasing decisions.

The effect of setting up accounts, however, has paradoxical effects -- in exactly the same way that office accounting can create problems in a workplace, Thaler said. At the end of the financial year, your boss may not be willing to let you buy a new laptop, because the hardware budget is down to zero, but will allow you to take a trip to Los Angeles because there is money left in the travel budget. Your argument that you need a laptop more than the trip falls on deaf ears.
Here are some other examples from everyday life:

· A friend of Thaler's once went to buy a bedspread. Where a double, queen and king size usually cost $200, $250 and $300, all three sizes were now priced at $150. Thaler's friend happily snapped up the king-size bedspread -- although she planned to use it on a double bed. The woman had a mental idea of what a bedspread should cost. Buying the double bedspread, which is what she needed, saved her only $50, but buying the king saved her $150. Mental accounting explains why many people eagerly snap up deals on items they do not need: When something sells for below the mental price we have assigned it, the deal takes precedence over the actual utility of the item.

· A man buys an expensive membership in a tennis club. Right after he puts down the money, which is nonrefundable, he hurts his ankle. He grits his teeth and continues to play through the pain -- even though not playing would mean much less agony. Mental accounting is behind the problem. Playing is the only way to ensure that the tennis club membership remains in the man's mental category of money well spent. To not play would be to write off the membership cost as a loss, which is more painful to the man than the agony of hobbling through games on an injured ankle.

· Another friend of Thaler's used mental accounting to devise an insurance plan against life's vicissitudes. He made a mental contribution to the United Way Campaign at the start of the year and then, every time he was unfairly given a parking ticket or had to fork over money for some other annoyance, he mentally deducted the amount from the sum he had set aside for charity. Assigning the money to charity allowed the man to feel that the money he was paying for parking tickets and other annoyances did not really belong to him anyway. (While this strategy is unlikely to be embraced by charities, Thaler's friend was careful not to set his annual target so low that he was left with nothing to give to charity at year's end.)

Mental accounting also explains why, when people are given a choice to get a cash bonus or a gift such as a free vacation for doing well on the job, they invariably choose cash. That's because people think they want the flexibility of cash. The problem is that flexibility comes with a price. You have to remember your obligations, such as fixing that leaky roof.

This is why studies show that employees who are not given a choice and are given a gift instead of cash usually turn out much happier. A vacation or a gift is "guilt-free" -- yours to enjoy. If you get cash instead, you could spend it buying yourself the same vacation or gift, but mental accounting would remind you that you are wasting money on frivolities.

Ohio State University psychologist Hal Arkes once found that mental accounting influences how people deal with sudden gains, such as lottery winnings. The same phenomenon influences millions of Americans at tax time, when they gleefully look forward to refund checks from the government -- even though refunds are really their own money being returned to them, minus interest. In terms of mental accounting, lottery winnings and refunds are invariably counted in the category of "free money" -- which is why people spend such dough not on health care, utilities and eliminating credit card debt but on discretionary items such as vacations or new patios.

Arkes and his colleagues once cited an anecdote in a study: Employees of a publishing firm who were in the Bahamas for an annual meeting were each given a cash bonus for getting a big contract. Almost to a person, the bonus recipients took the money to a local casino and blew it. What is interesting is that most of these people did not lose more than the $50 -- they slowed down or stopped when they felt they were playing with their "own" money rather than with the $50 of "free" money. The irony, of course, is that the $50 these people lost was their own money, too.

What does mental accounting have to do with the other puzzle we discussed at the start -- the difficulty of finding cabs on rainy evenings? Mental accounting, like financial accounting, requires people to close the books and balance their accounts. But people in different professions unwittingly balance their books at different times -- wage employees may balance books on a biweekly or monthly basis, whereas cab drivers often balance their mental books on a daily basis. Business is brisker on rainy evenings, so once cabbies meet their mental income targets for the day, they go home, leaving fewer cabs on the street, Thaler said.

Viviana Zelizer, a sociologist at Princeton University, noted that a similar phenomenon even affects how prostitutes think about their income. She cited a study of the Oslo prostitution market, which showed that prostitutes tend to spend money acquired through welfare checks and health benefits on essentials such as rent and bills and are far more likely to spend their income acquired from selling sex on drugs and alcohol, even if it means they have no money left over to pay for essentials.

Ready 2011 Salman Khan

2011-06-04T06:01:00.000-07:00

Part 1

part 2

part3

part 4

part 5

part 6

part 7

Part 8

Hangover 2

2011-06-04T05:56:00.000-07:00

Pakistani achieve Everest

2011-06-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

Islamabad Hostels website launched

2011-05-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

Every kind of information regarding hostel will be available on
www.hostelisb.com
Visit there and if you know any hostels please let us know

Thanks !

party at SL

2011-04-27T14:13:00.000-07:00

Explore Second life !

2011-04-18T08:40:00.000-07:00

Well i was exploring Second life and came across a Pakistani Land Called "Paki Dera"

Really fun out there

Google to place some restrictions on handset manufacturers- The Inquirer

2011-04-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

Google to place some restrictions on handset manufacturers- The Inquirer

Necessity, not Scarcity, is the Mother of Invention by Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer

2011-03-28T07:41:00.000-07:00

Bravo for companies that are starting to focus on innovation again! It's about time. But even with this renewed attention to innovation, some managers keep projects resource-starved, in the belief that scarcity drives creative invention. Although ingenuity can sometimes spring up when means are scarce, managers beware: It is a dangerous miscalculation to think that starving innovators will feed innovation.

Consider the case of electronic ink. A hefty percentage of the people reading this post will have used an Amazon Kindle or some other e-ink-based reader within the past 24 hours. The story of e-ink's creation would have resonated with Plato, who said that necessity is the mother of invention. Here, the idea's spark came not from scarcity but from an unmet need striking a fertile mind. The inventor, physicist Joe Jacobson, was lounging on a beach one day, when he finished the book he was reading and realized he hadn't brought another. Plenty of sun left in the day, but no more prose to fill the afternoon. At that moment, Jacobson envisioned an electronic book with light, thin, pages that, at the touch of a button, could receive the words of an entire book or newspaper through the airwaves. And, at the touch of a button, a different book or newspaper would appear. Using no back lighting, readable in direct sun and at any angle, the image would draw no power once it had appeared — enabling the device to avoid heavy batteries. Even now, years after that idea became a real product, it almost sounds like magic.

What's remarkable about this life-changing invention is that no one imposed any artificial scarcity or limits on Jacobson. This was not to be a man-in-a-garage-with-duct-tape project, but one requiring the resources of the MIT Media Lab and over $150 million in financing for the startup, E Ink.

E Ink is hardly an isolated example. Two of the wealthiest tech companies on the planet right now, Apple and Google, continue to introduce stunning products. They were recently ranked as among the five most innovative companies in the world by both Business Week and Fast Company. Modern China appears to be hitting its innovation stride, fueled by its white-hot economic boom and government support.

So, does this mean that, when it comes to innovation, the more resources, the better? No, that's not right, either. In introducing the first successful PDA, the much smaller, leaner Palm Computingsucceeded where Apple had failed with its Newton.

But the scrounging that resource-strapped entrepreneurial companies like Palm have to do doesn't necessarily foster their creativity, either. They succeed in spite of it, or (more often) they fail because of it. Besides, that sort of scrounging is very different from would-be innovators in established companies having to jump through hoops to get the resources for promising projects. This artificial scarcity can make people creative all right, but it makes them creative at finding resources, not at solving the central problem or inventing the next big thing. Moreover, it kills their motivation by making them feel that they and their work are devalued. Innovation is the successful implementation of creative ideas or inventions. Without at least sufficient resources to develop those ideas and inventions, innovation becomes impossible.

Here's the key to the conundrum for managers who want to stoke the innovation fire: That close cousin of scarcity, constraint, can indeed foster creativity — by providing the stimulus for invention, much as Jacobson's unmet need helped him define the parameters for e-ink. Many people freeze if they are given a blank sheet of paper and told to draw something creative. But if they are given a blank sheet of paper with a squiggly line on it, and asked to elaborate on that squiggle, they often have fun turning out something pretty interesting. The human mind requires stimuli — inputs for response — and certain forms of constraint serve as stimuli for creative responses. That's why theCreative Problem Solving Process (CPS), one of the oldest and most empirically validated methods for improving creativity, includes techniques like presenting randomly-generated images to provoke new solutions to a given problem.

Creativity-friendly constraints include (1) a clear problem definition with clear goals, like the specific challenges of on-line innovation competitions, or the Iron Chef "secret ingredient" constraints; and (2) a truly urgent, challenging need, like bringing the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to earth. But intentionally strangling resources below a sufficient level, in a misguided effort to spur new thinking, will likely spawn only aborted attempts at innovation. The same goes for constraints that straightjacket the autonomy needed to passionately search for new solutions.

Japanese haiku, a lovely and time-honored art form, is full of tight constraints; the classic three-line poem must have five syllables, then seven syllables, then five more. But, because the form offers a clear and challenging set of parameters, and because there's no scarcity of words in any language, creativity can blossom. Which leads to a question...with apologies to the great masters of haiku...

Innovation Haiku #1
Starving or stoking,
Scrounging or brandishing tools,
How do you create?

Teresa Amabile is Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She researches what makes people creative, productive, happy, and motivated at work. Steven Kramer is a psychologist and independent researcher. They are the authors of the forthcoming book The Progress Principle.

Finally NBS Fall Semester Gets the Welcome :-D

2011-03-21T20:57:00.000-07:00

Hackers tackle secure ID tokens

2011-03-21T20:19:00.000-07:00

Hackers have stolen data about the security tokens used by millions of people to protect access to bank accounts and corporate networks.

RSA Security told customers about the "extremely sophisticated cyber attack" in an open letter posted online.

The company is providing "immediate remediation" advice to customers to limit the impact of the theft

It also recommended customers take steps, such as hardening password policies, to help protect themselves.

Proof positive

In the open letter, written by RSA boss Art Coviello, the company said that the data stolen would not help a "direct" attack on the the SecurID tokens.

It did not disclose exactly what had been purloined and only said that the information "specifically related to RSA's SecurID two-factor authentication products".

RSA's SecurID tokens are used by millions of people alongside passwords to beef up security.

As its name suggests, two-factor authentication involves improving security using two methods of identifying a user. The first factor is usually the traditional login ID and password combination.

The second factor can be a SecurID token that is paired with back-end software that generates a new six digit number every minute.

A token paired with this software generates the same numbers so only the holder will be able to type in the right digits and get access.

RSA said the information stolen could reduce the effectiveness of this two-factor authentication system if a company came under a broader attack by malicious hackers.

This could potentially put a lot of people at risk as RSA claims to have millions of people using its security technology to secure online accounts and access to corporate systems.

RSA recommended that firms monitor social network sites to spot if hackers were trying to capitalise on what they now know about RSA's systems.

This could be because hackers have got information about who has which token and might try to exploit that to trick employees into giving them access.

RSA also recommended reminding users about the dangers of responding to suspicious e-mails, to limit who can access critical infrastructure systems and to reinforce all policies surrounding SecurID token use.

There could be "tremendous repercussions" if criminals piggy-backed on what they know to stealthily get at corporate and other critical systems, said Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst at security firm IT-Harvest.

"You'd never have a sign that you've been breached," he said.

Big tussle Ahead !

2011-03-15T08:10:00.000-07:00

Pakistan cricket team has to meet in last round match on 19 march with Australia. This would be the real test of our players.

All our wishes are with Pakistan cricket team