Why women nag?

Let's face it; most women are always going to nag because all men are imperfect and they are not. It is, quite simply, their nature. So since we know that she's going to nag for no apparent reason anyway, we might as well try to understand why women do what they do and find some way to deal with it.

Most women nag because they become hard wired to do so. They grew up watching most of the women around them doing it and were taught that it was the best way to handle men and their occasional inability to function on a normal human level. This applies even more so to the women who are just coming of age, as they were brainwashed even more by television shows in which the entire emphasis is on pointing out men's many failings.
Sometimes women nag over some seemingly insignificant thing in order to work their way onto larger issues. She knows that it is going to get you peeved and plans on using that anger later to bring up whatever it is that is really bothering her.

A female nagger can be classified in one of four groups:

The Innocent: This is the one nagger that doesn't really mean to nag. She brings up problems that she has to make you aware of, but tries to do so without making you angry or starting an argument. Chances are her intentions are good; she just needs a little work on her approach.

The Chatterbox: This nagger never seems to stop. But her nagging rarely escalates into real fights because you've probably learned to effectively zone her out .

The Riddler: Ah, the nagger that nags without nagging (say that five times fast). She says things like, "Would you like to try and guess why the green plates are not in the cabinet?" You have no idea what she's talking about and she knows it, otherwise why would she be asking in the first place?

The T-Rex: If she doesn't rip your head off while screaming at you, you got away lucky. It seems as though she actually grows horns when the nagging starts, the room gets a little darker, you know it's coming and there's no place to run.

Don't start feeling guilty just yet because chances are that her nagging has very little to do with you. But in all fairness, if she "asked" you to take out the garbage ten times and then "tells" you to do it before she empties it on your convertible, then you could be part of the problem. Nevertheless, she is overreacting a bit.

In any case, based on a lot of research, I am told, there are some time tested ways to handle it:

Anticipate it

1- If you're coming home late and didn't call, be ready for it when you walk through the door. Bring her flowers and tell her that you had to drive around for hours trying to find a place that's still open.

2- Most women give off signals when they're unhappy. If she gets unusually silent, ignores you, or just seems generally different, it's about to hit the fan.

3- Listen to her. Whether you want to believe it or not, most women will generally tell us at least once or twice what it is that they are ticked about; we just don't hear them because they speak in a special code that only other women can understand. But if you listen really closely, you might get enough out of what she's saying to try to save yourself some of the hassle.

Deal with it

1- The zone-out method. We all do this subconsciously, you just have to learn to develop the talent to a point where she won't notice you're doing it. This is where you simply nod, smile and agree with her while not hearing a single word she says. In one ear, out the other. Just learn to be responsive to the phrase "Are you listening to me?" But if she says, "What did I just say?" you're on your own buddy.

2- The "You're right" method. This one gives you the element of surprise. As soon as she starts in, you beat her to the punch. "I know sweetheart, I should have mowed the lawn last week, sometimes I don't even know why I forget to do these simple things." She will probably be so amazed at the words, that she'll let you off the hook so you can get back to ESPN.

Avoid it

1- Do something unexpected and counteract any nagging that may potentially be on the way, kind of like stocking up on anti-nag fluid.

2- Try to figure out what she's angry about before she tears into you, and fix it. If you're proactive she won't have anything to gripe about and you can move onto more important things like the Packers game.

The fact is that sometimes we put on our best behavior for strangers but the people, who are closest to us, who should really receive our best side, gets to see the ugly side of us simply because we're close, familiar with them and feel completely at ease with them. Strange isn't it? Think of nagging in the same way to console yourself. She only does it because she really, really deep down really loves you and sees your immense potential! Nagging is her way of letting you know that she still cares!

And then there is the story of the scorpion and the frog. A scorpion asks a frog for help crossing a river. Intimidated by the scorpion's prominent stinger, the frog demurs.
``Don't be scared,'' the scorpion says. ``If something happens to you, I'll drown too.'' Moved by this logic, the frog puts the scorpion on his back and wades into the river. Half way across, the scorpion stings the frog.
The dying frog croaks, ``How could you -- you know that you'll drown?''
The scorpion calmly replied ``I know. But that is my nature

Gelotophobia ?

Did you know what is gelotophobia? No, it is not people who love Italian ice cream or gelato. It is rather a peculiar disorder which describes people who have a “fear of being laughed at” and comes from the Greek for laughter gelos and fear phobia.

While most people do not like being laughed at, there seems to be a sub-group of people that carry this fear to an excessive degree. Without obvious reasons, they relate laughter they hear e.g., in a restaurant to themselves and feel unease when confronted with laughter. They seem to forget that laughter is an emotional expression that is innate in human beings and that laughing at others is a universal phenomenon. However, the fear of being laughed at causes some people enormous problems in their social lives and seems to afflict people in all cultures alike.

According to experts, people can be classified within two opposite poles involved in the fear of being laughed at – the 'insecurity reaction' dimension (trying to hide one's lack of self-confidence from others, or believing that one is involuntarily funny) and 'avoidance reactions', whereby one avoids situations in which one has been laughed at, and the dimension of low-high tendencies to suspect that if others are laughing, they are laughing at you.

Although this phenomenon is shared by all cultures, the study shows there are certain differences. Countries such as Turkmenistan and Cambodia are represented within the first dimension of insecurity reactions, while people in Iraq, Egypt and Jordan are much more likely to avoid situations in which they have been laughed at. Spain is "slightly inclined towards the insecurity pole".

Another strange result is that people in Finland are the least likely to believe that if people laugh in their presence they are laughing at them (8.5%), while 80% of people in Thailand believe this to be the case.

What are the consequences of gelotophobia:

• Social withdrawal to avoid being ridiculed
• Appearing ‘cold as ice’ or humourless
• Psychosomatic disturbances e.g. blushing, tension headache, trembling, dizziness, sleep disturbances
• ‘Pinocchio Syndrome’ or reacting in a wooden manner
• Lacking of liveliness, spontaneity, joy
• They do find humour or laughter as relaxing and joyful social experiences

Morbidly averse to being the butt of a joke, these folks will go out of their way to avoid certain people or situations for fear of being ridiculed. For them, merely being around others who are talking and laughing can cause tension and apprehension. Until recently, such people might have been written off as spoilsports. But in the mid-1990s, an astute German psychologist recognized the problem for what it is: a debilitating fear of being laughed at. It is true that most people fear being laughed at to some degree and do their best to avoid embarrassment. But one thing that sets gelotophobes apart is their inability to distinguish ridicule from playful teasing. For them, all laughter is aggressive, and a harmless joke may come across as a mean-spirited assault.

“They seem to have problems interpreting humor correctly,” says psychologist Willibald Ruch of the University of Zurich. “They probably do not understand the positive side of humor, and cannot experience it in a warm way but rather as a means to put others down.”

When asked about recent occasions where they were laughed at, gelotophobes don’t list more occurrences than others do. They do, however, experience such events as more painful. Many admit to some fear of being laughed at, but gelotophobes feel this fear, often along with shame, to the extreme. Studies using cartoons to illustrate people laughing in various situations show that those with a fear of being laughed at are more likely to assume that the laughter is directed at them. Other studies using laugh tracks show that gelotophobes have problems distinguishing a happy har-de-har from a scornful snicker.

The funny thing about laughter is that it’s seldom about what’s funny. When Robert R. Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, took to the streets and coffee shops to record instances of laughter, he found that most laughter had little to do with humor. People laughed when they’re nervous, hesitant or just making polite conversation. Most smiles and laughs occur when other people are around. For most, laughter simply serves as a signal for mutual liking and well-being.

But, unfortunately, not everyone feels the joy of laughter. To provide a more complete picture of how people deal with laughter, Ruch and his colleagues have recently expanded their studies to describe two other humor-related concepts: The joy of being laughed at — or gelotophilia — and the joy of laughing at others, or katagelasticism.

“Humor and mockery are part of a complex interaction —namely, someone does something wrong and gets laughed at,” Ruch says. “But there’s also someone who laughs, and likely a bystander who maybe doesn’t do the ridiculing but approves of it. But …why is it that something so human, which brings enjoyment to most everyone, is actually experienced so negatively by a few.”

The myths of multitasking

In modern times, hurry, bustle, and agitation have become a regular way of life for many people—so much so that we have even coined a word to describe our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: multitasking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible.

While multitasking has become pervasive in our society, it does not mean it is a good thing. It is fed by a number of myths that need to be dispelled.

Myth 1: multitasking is efficient. Actually it is not.When you multitask, you may think you are getting a lot done, but there's a cost when the tasks compete for the same (and limited) cognitive resources (e.g., attention, working memory) and draw on the same brain circuitry. This is true, no matter how good you think you are at multitasking. There's just too much competition for the same neural circuits and what you end up with is a compromise. Neither task is performed as well as it is when performed alone.

Multitasking messes with the brain in several other ways as well. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on. Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction thus prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos may merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may well cause it to atrophy.

Research now shows that multitasking may actually lead to lower productivity. It seems that e-mail, instant messaging, cell phones, and personal digital assistants (PDAs), which keep us all connected and allow many of us to do our jobs, can instead diminish productivity. A study by Basex, Inc., a knowledge-management research firm in New York, reported that knowledge workers waste an average of two hours a day due to interruptions from e-mails, co-workers, and cell phones. Another study found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task. This recovery time from each interruption comes with a stiff price tag for the American economy: $650 billion every year.

Myth 2: women are better multitaskers than men. The conventional wisdom is that women are better at multitasking than men. Unfortunately despite research, this is not validated by data.

Myth 3: multitasking is safe and efficient. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, a research study by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.”

So multitasking is neither efficient nor safe. Indeed it comes with a price- premature aging and lowered IQ. This is the great irony of multitasking—that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. This state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,” with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.

When we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention. People who have achieved great things often credit for their success a finely honed skill for paying attention. When asked about his particular genius, Isaac Newton responded that if he had made any discoveries, it was “owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.” Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”

A To-Do List for Afghanistan

As President Obama considers what to do about Afghanistan, it is important that he hear perspectives from all sides concerned about that critical region. Here is a very pragmatic and interesting view from Prince Turki al-Faisal who was the longtime director general of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service, the Al Mukhabarat Al A'amah.

“In Riyadh,” he states “it is clear that the Taliban is weak in Afghanistan. Their record in government is well remembered by Afghans, including large numbers of Pashtuns, all of whom suffered greatly at the hands of Mohammad Omar's Taliban cohorts. The Taliban is not a cohesive or uniform political party with a chain of command and a political manifesto. Rather, any disaffected, rebellious or aggrieved Afghan who overtly opposes the government by military means and otherwise has come to be identified as a member of the Taliban. Osama bin Laden has become not only the symbol of opposition to world order in general and to the United States in particular, but he is looked upon by disaffected youths -- and not just Muslims -- as an indomitable, untouchable Robin Hood. Even if he no longer organizes and executes terrorist acts, the fact that he survives reinforces that appeal every day and adds to his charisma. Bringing him to account is a necessity, whether by capture or by death.”

So, what should the Obama administration do?

- Overcome the misguided handling of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who was initially shunned and denigrated by the administration, forcing him to reach out to unsavory politicos and "warlords" to win the recent elections. If there were a viable opposition to Karzai, then you could undermine him. But there is not. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's main opponent in the election, is a Tajik, and he will not be accepted to lead the country by either the Pashtuns or the Uzbeks, the two largest components of Afghanistan's tribal structure. Abdullah's "Westerly ways" further undermined his credibility among nationalists. Once the commission investigating the recent election fraud declares its conclusions, the United States should move on and concentrate on setting benchmarks for Karzai, especially on development projects.

- Change the media theme from attacking the Taliban and calling them the terrorists to concentrating on al-Qaeda and "foreign terrorists." By removing the stigma of terrorism from the Taliban, you can pursue meaningful negotiations with them. Mohammad Omar has never enjoyed the full support of Pashtuns. He is a lowly figure in tribal terms, and he is blamed by many of them for the calamity that has befallen Afghanistan. Reaching out to tribal leaders is what will move negotiations.

- Fix the Durand Line. As long as this border drawn by the British is not fixed, Pakistan and Afghanistan will be at loggerheads and always suspicious of one another. A joint development project for the border area, announced by both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and supported by the United States and the world community, will direct people's eyes to the future rather than the past.

- Convene a meeting of the security-intelligence departments of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia to devise ways of eliminating al-Qaeda's leadership. China, Russia and Saudi Arabia have a long-standing vendetta with al-Qaeda and will contribute intelligence and other resources to rid the world of this cancer.

- Push India and Pakistan to fix Kashmir. That is doable, once both countries see a determined effort by the United States in that direction. Both countries are beholden to the United States -- Pakistan for the military and financial support it receives and India for the nuclear energy agreement it has signed with Washington.

- Take on the heroin trade. The challenge can be met by a program that America used in the 1960s in Turkey, where opium poppies were extensively grown and processed into heroin. The United States bought the entire crop from the farmers directly and allowed them to plant alternative crops for their livelihood. There is no more heroin trade in Turkey.

All of these are creative and interesting ideas and worth exploring.

Circles of friends

Friends are the jewels that one accumulates over a lifetime. Each one is precious and different and they lie around our necks like garlands. Friendship is the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue.

Our friends are also like the rings on a tree telling us also of our own growth over the years or as Anais Nin puts it "each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." If we were at the center, our friends would be around us like circles or like the planetary system. The circle closest to us would be, of course, our family and close relatives. The next circle would be friends we made when we were in school. Then would come the circle of friends that were our closest comrades during the undergraduate days in college. These also tend to be the ones that we retain the longest. In the next circle are friends that we often make in the work place although these tend to be for some reason fewer and less deeper than the other circles. The last circle is of friends that become so – and some of them are really close- because of proximity—they are parents of kids that our kids go to school with, or neighbors, or attended some intense course of study.

In examining these circles of friends, one thing struck me as quite curious. While each of these circles remain closely tied to us, they rarely mix with each other for some reason. Thus it would be rare that our school friends would also be friends with from our workplace. These circles do not intersect. Perhaps it is because each represents a different facet of our personality and knows only side of us or perhaps because, subconsciously, we keep these circles apart and cultivate them as a part of our own multifaceted growth.

Sometimes, however, these circles do intersect and in curious and serendipitous ways. This was brought home to me last week when I received a phone call from Bill Danforth. Bill had been a classmate during a management development program that we had attended at Harvard Business School but that was some decades ago. I was surprised since it was almost 36 years ago that we had last talked to each other. How did he remember me all of sudden? So I asked him how he was able to locate me.

“Well”, he confided, “I was on biking trip with a friend and we decided to go to Vietnam. In preparing for this trip, we read a book called “Vietnam Now” written by David Lamb. And in that book, David quotes you on numerous occasions and says that you were his “ace in the hole” whenever he needed to understand the country! From there it was easy to locate you through the power of Google!”

But what was really interesting was that David Lamb and his wife Sandy had been our neighbors in Vietnam for four years and indeed Sandy had helped edit my first book!

Ever since our marriage some 38 years ago, Ena and I had started a family custom of an “open house” on new years day where all our friends of all our circles were invited. It is a custom that both of us are inordinately proud of and we invite all our friends to turn up on the new years days in the future wherever we are.

Predicting the future

Everyone wants to know the future. The problem is that we do not know how. In the past, kings and queens relied on gods and goddesses. Present day leaders make a beeline for seers and astrologers. It is only recently that science has been harnessed to replace both the gods and the astrologers.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a professor of political science at New York University, has shown how to mobilize game theory to predict the future. His success and accuracy over the past two decades has led many observers to dub him the "New Nostradamus." The previous Nostradamus was a 16^th Century Frenchman who used astrology and visions gotten from meditations and then wrote the resulting predictions of the future down in a series of obscurely worded quatrains that have been the subject of controversy and discussion for centuries. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, on the other hand, uses a mathematical formula based on games theory to predict future political developments. And according to the CIA, for whom he consults, he has been right 90% of the time.

He started on this journey by accurately predicting the rise and fall of Charan Singh as prime minister of India in 1979 using his nascent software based on games theory. Games theory comes in two primary flavors: cooperative game theory, invented by John von Neuman and Morgenstern in 1947 which deals with players who engage each other, trying to anticipate moves and countermoves, but only in setting where they will do exactly as what they say will do. Hence cooperative game theory has as its essence an optimistic view of human nature. But along came John Nash in the early 1950’s who invented a different kind of game theory- the non cooperative game theory- where players make promises that they have no intention of keeping unless it is to their benefit. This view is of people as cold, ruthless and self interested is at the heart of the Nash game theory thinking.

Among Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's successful predictions have been: he forecasted the second Intifada and the death of the Mideast peace process, two years before it happened; defied Russia specialists by predicting who would succeed Brezhnev, his model identified Andropov, who nobody at the time even considered a possibility; predicted that Daniel Ortega and the Sandanistas would be voted out of office in Nicaragua, two years before it happened; foretold four months before Tiananmen Square, that China's hardliners would crack down harshly on dissidents. And of course there is the CIA endorsement of his accuracy.

To predict how leaders will behave in a conflict, Bueno de Mesquita starts with a specific prediction he wants to make, then interviews four or five experts who know the situation well. He identifies the stakeholders who will exert pressure on the outcome (typically 20 or 30 players) and gets the experts to assign values to the stakeholders in four categories: What outcome do the players want? How hard will they work to get it? How much clout can they exert on others? How firm is their resolve? Each value is expressed as a number on its own arbitrary scale, like 0 to 200. (Sometimes Bueno de Mesquita skips the experts, simply reads newspaper and journal articles and generates his own list of players and numbers.) His predictions are thus based on self-interest and needs to look at all of the influencers on the key decision maker. If you merely sort the players according to how badly they want a particular result and how much support they have among others, you will end up with a reasonably good prediction. But the other variables enable the computer model to perform much more complicated assessments. In essence, it looks for possible groupings of players who would be willing to shift their positions toward one another if they thought that doing so would be to their advantage. The model begins by working out the average position of all the players — the “middle ground” that exerts a gravitational forces on the whole negotiation. Then it compares each player with every other player, estimating whether one will be able to persuade or coerce the others to move toward its position, based on the power, resolve and positioning of everyone else. After estimating how much or how little each player might budge, the software recalculates the middle ground, which shifts as the players move. A “round” is over; the software repeats the process, round after round. The game ends when players no longer move very much from round to round — this indicates they have compromised as much as they ever will. At that point, assuming no player with veto power had refused to compromise, the final average middle-ground position of all the players is the result — the official prediction of how the issue will resolve itself.

But the most interesting claim of his book is that it is possible for us to anticipate actions, to predict the future, and, by looking for ways to change incentives , to engineer the future across a stunning range of considerations that involve human decision making.

He presents examples of how a long term commitment of $ 1.5 billion per year to Pakistan would ensure its support for a meaningful fight against the Taliban but that it would never fully eliminate the Taliban since doing that would eliminate any need for further aid. In another example, he similarly shows the correct long term strategy for dealing with North Korea.

His analysis starts from the premise that what Kim Jong Il cares most about is his political survival. As Bueno de Mesquita sees it, the principal reason for his nuclear program is to deter the United States from taking him out, by raising the costs of doing so. “The solution, then, lies in a mechanism that guarantees us that he not use these weapons and guarantees him that we not interfere with his political survival,” he says. Perhaps not coincidentally, the recent agreement that the United States reached with the government of Pyongyang closely resembles the one that Bueno de Mesquita’s model suggested: Kim agrees to dismantle his existing nuclear weapons but not his existing nuclear capability. “He puts it in mothballs with IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspectors on site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And in exchange, we provide him with $1.2 billion a year, which we label ‘foreign aid,’ of course.” The “foreign-aid” figure published in the newspapers was $400 million, which concerns Bueno de Mesquita. “I read that and I said, I hope that’s not the deal because it’s not enough money. He needs $1.2 billion, approximately, to sustain the loyalty of his cronies in the military and so forth. It’s unpleasant, this is a nasty man, but we’re stuck with it. The nice part of the deal is that it’s self-enforcing. Each side has a reason to credibly commit to their part of the deal.”

He also used such a model to predict the outcome of the Iran’s stand off on nuclear power. According to his model, the Iranian government will tone down its nuclear ambitions to the point where it will develop weapons-grade nuclear material only for research purposes. Real power rests not with the mullahs or even with the Supreme Leader, but with what he calls the “moneyed interests” of Iranian society: “the banker, the oil people, the bazaris”. In a talk at TED, he lays out the rationale of his prediction that Iran will not move towards a nuclear bomb.

He even ventures into the minefield of how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”

It really would be interesting to see what he predicts for the health care debate in the US congress or on the Afghanistan strategy?