I was riding the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) bus on Halloween when I captured an amazing scene of romance on my cell phone camera. The picture is so breath taking that I had to blog about it in both Persian and English.

It was late night and most of the passengers on the bus were sleepy. One girl who was sitting on a single seat had trouble finding a place to rest her head. That was when her friend kneeled down on his knees next to her seat so that the girl could rest her head on his shoulder. The lover boy remained in that uncomfortable position for nearly 20 minutes while the lucky girl slept comfortably in his arms.

I have some of the best memories of my life from my days as an English language teacher in Tehran, Iran. In one of my classes I had an incredibly bright student who listened very carefully in class and had an unbelievable thirst for learning, to the extent that I would think to myself that if I studied like she did, I would have been a world renounced scholar by now. She was an Afghan woman who had come to Tehran and many of the normal opportunities for education were not given to her in life. This bothered me enormously as I could see with my own eyes how smart she was, and I couldn’t help but think that she could be the next Einstein or find a cure for cancer or a solution to global warming or  something if she had the chance. How shameful the world should be for the opportunities it looses.

My friend and former student Khadijeh, now lives in New York and is enjoying new opportunities for education. She has written about this in an essay that recently won first place in an essay contest. I am proud of her and congratulate her for this achievement. This is her essay:

Participating in the Educational Opportunity Center has made my future brighter. Education is a huge benefit not only for my family and me, but also for other people. With education, I can help my children with their schoolwork. With education, I can complete my humanity.

First of all, I can say that the EOC has become the apex of my life. I am very happy that I have the opportunity to study and continue my education here in the United States. I have been an enthusiastic student since I was a first grader. I was very good at studying my lessons and was able to learn them quickly. Unfortunately, I could not continue and finish school because of the situation in Afghanistan. I traveled to several other countries including Iran, but the Iranian officials did not give me the opportunity to continue my education because foreign people are not allowed to attend school.

Unlike Iran, my participation in the EOC makes my future brighter because eventually my dreams can become a reality. What’s more, with education I feel I am very productive. Everything in the EOC is organized in a manner that fits how I learn. My self-esteem has improved because I am learning new things every day. Furthermore, because of these new skills, I am sure I am going to be a successful person because of the help and support my compassionate, patient, professional, and expert teachers at the EOC. After I finish my education, I plan to be a nurse of pharmacist and can be of assistance to other people.

Furthermore, participating in the EOC has benefited my family. With education, I can help my children with their homework, and I can participate fully in parent/teacher meetings. When my children see how easily I can help them with their schoolwork, they are proud of their mother. They do not need to ask other people for help. Therefore, they experience higher self-esteem. They can also study better and obtain more success in their own lives. I have a friend who is uneducated and could not go to school when she was a child. Her father was very strict. He did not like the girls to study. He thought study was only for boys. My friend is now married to a man who has the same idea as her father. As a result, she never found the opportunity to learn how to read and write. She has great difficulty herself and with her children’ schoolwork. Most of the time, she asks my daughter to help with her children’s homework and asks me to go with her to any school meetings. Whenever I see her and her problems, I have become more aware of the value of education and grateful for the EOC.

Finally, I believe that with education, I will be a better and more complete person with a better sense of humor and an awakened consciousness. With education, my understanding of nuances and my empathy will increase. Therefore, I can understand others and their problems. When I can identify the problems, I will be able to help all people better.

In conclusion, I believe that participating in the Educational Opportunity Center means a lot to me and my future. Continuing my education is the most important thing in my life. By participating in the EOC, I can make my future brighter, and I can help myself and others.

To date, the most popular post on this blog has been the true story of how I got abused by yaari.com. Yesterday, the number of visitors to this post hit a record peak after a much more popular blog linked to it.

I wasn’t the first blogger to start complaining about Yaari.com, and certainly wasn’t the last. You can find evidence that the blogosphere is getting  increasingly fed up with Yaari here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. One of the most prominent bloggers to complain about Yaari is Arun Gupta who ironically has the same last name as Yaari’s founder Prena. His post on the Yaari scam which creatively labels it “Spam 2.0″ is the second link that shows up on a google search for “Yaari.com”! Another creative label is “Social Spamworking”. Wall Street Journal columnist Jeremy Wagstaff has also warned about Yaari.com and has done some impressive background search on it’s founders.

From the comments on my post, you can see that people have tired many ways to fight Yaari.com. Some people tried writing emails to Yaari.com which predictably, did not result in any behavior change on Yaari’s part. I never even bothered to email them. And I feel absolutely no regrets when Prena Gupta, Yaari’s founder emailed me on February 14, 2009 and said “I would have greatly appreciated if you could have contacted me directly and spoken to me about your grievances, so that we could have used your input to improve our process.” Many other people did Prena, and you did not improve your process.

Prena Gupta has apparently sent similar emails to some of the bloggers that wrote in criticism of Yaari, asking them to remove her partner’s contact information, and trying to half-apologize but in such an arrogant manner that it seems actually rude. Allan Herman writes extensively on the letter he recieved from Prena and his response. Aalaap Ghag who has writtern this about Yaari, has had a much shorter response. Prena’s efforts may have been more than just emails since her name appears among the commentators on my post, but I have doubts whether that is really her.

What is important is that Prena Gupta has finally realized that these honest blog posts are really hurting her company, herself and her partner Parag who should be especially worried for the sake of his reputation as a university professor. But I think Prena is doing way too little, way too late. Negative word on Yaari.com is spreading fast, and is too out of control to be contained with these ill-informed, arrogant sounding, semi-apology emails (read the full text of her emails here).

Yaari.com had it coming. You cannot simultaneously be a scam and be high profile, and live through it in one piece. Some research shows that people who hate your product tell 11 people; people who like your product tell three people. One report found that after a negative experience with a company or organization: 80% of US adults decided to never go back to that company; 74% registered a complaint or told others; 47% swore and/or shouted; 29% have had a headache, felt their chest tighten and/or cried; 13% posted a negative online review or blog entry. In addition, after a negative customer experience, 34% have fantasised about emailing friends, family or colleagues asking them to boycott the company or organization. 12% have dreamed of picketing and/or defacing a company/organization’s headquarters.

I have been passionately in love with Ted.com ever since I discovered it around two yeras ago. I was in Iran at that time but luckily I was able to enjoy these talks because I had good internet access through the University of Tehran and the new ADSL services which were then just starting to become widespread in Iran. Also, it really helped that my English was good enough.

Unfortunately however, many of my fellow Iranians and other Farsi-speaking people around the world who cannot understand English are missing out on these amazing talks. TED Talks can open your eyes and your mind to the most recent accomplishments of mankind, take you to the edge of human knowledge, and give you a better picture of where we as a race are coming from, where we stand, and where we are headed. In order to help those Persian or Farsi-speaking people around the world who have trouble with English, I have started a new blog, aiming to discuss TED Talks in the Persian (Farsi) language. Hopefully, the readers will be motivated to learn English and take full advantage of the knowledge out there.

I don’t know how I’m going to have time for this new blog! But experience tells me that passion has a way of finding time.

Well it’s back to school time for the children of Gaza after a taste of hell. Those who were fortunate enough to find their schools in tact found a lot of empty seats in the classroom. A picture, which I was surprised to find on the Fox news website, shows the names of the children who were killed during the Israeli military operation written on signs placed on their former desks in the classroom.

Question: Are the remaining children more likely or less likely to become terrorists now that their friends have been killed?

The Tale of the King Who Banned Farting

Recently, a short story written here by an ingenious anonymous blogger has gained enormous popularity in the Persian blogosphere. It rose to the top of the ranks in Balatarin.com which is the Persian equivalent of Digg.com. Many people are also posting it on their blogs and posting it as notes on Facebook and other social networking sites. I thought it might also be interesting for the English speaking world to read the story that has interested so many Iranians. So I’m going to attempt to translate the story here. Disclaimer: I’m going to translate everything directly and so this post contains language that I don’t normally use in my writing.

Long ago, a foreigner king rose to power in the homeland. He was evil and at the same time cunning, and he had a vizier who was even more evil and cunning. He ordered the vizier “find a way for me to dominate the life and soul of these people without them realizing or revolting.” The vizier contemplated and composed a scroll and handed it out to the king’s heralds to announce it across the towns and villages of the land. The new laws proclaimed that belief in the old faith and education were now illegal. Taxes were raised threefold and the king was granted “first-night” rights to any newlywed bride. The value of the life of countrymen was announced to be equivalent to that of four-legged animals in the neighboring country which was the king’s place of origin. Any protest or disagreement with these rules was to be punished by death. Finally, farting and flatus were also announced illegal.

The king said “Oh vizier! All this pressure is going to cause uprising and were we not supposed to carry out a velvet revolution?” To which the vizier relpied, “Do not worry your highness, you are not considering the last part of the new law, it is percisely the safety valve for them to empty their defiant energy.”

And so it happened as the vizier said. The people spoke up in protest to the obvious injustice. It was natural for the king to promote his own religion or ban education. And kings have always raised taxes and “first-night” rights to newlywed brides is an ancient tradition. And the little value of our lives compared to the neighbouring country stems from the king’s nationalism, but the ban on farting and flatus is just too much! And anyways, the king cannot possibly put guards in every toilet of the land. The more knowledgeable ones cried “emptying the intestines is good for your health and is nothing to be ashamed of. This is the work of uncivilized persons to snoop around in other people’s undergarments.” They were delighted to have found scientific support for their position and to be able to call the opposition “uncivilized” and they nodded their heads in this delight and called themselves intellectuals. And they said, “Does the king not fart himself?!” They made myriads of jokes about the king having exploded from withholding his gas or how the king has put a cork up his ass to control himself or how the king is like a dog sniffing for farts and sticking his nose up people’s behinds. And they would SMS these jokes to each other and laugh and laugh.

The king’s guards spread across the land to enforce the new laws. Once in a while, they would surge into toilets and arrest the farters and take them in for inquisition.  But people continued to fart and break wind in private and considered the odorous noises of their bowels to be huge acts of protest to the government. People would take trips to the desert so that they could fart freely. In the town alleys, they would look around to make sure no one was looking and then fart. They threw underground parties where they would serve beans and have group farts. After a while nobody remembered the ban on education and the forced faith and rape and degradation and taxes and all everybody was concerned with was to defend their last remaining trivial right to fart.

Meanwhile in the palace, the king and his vizier laughed and giggled at how they had drowned the people in their own acidic gases and turned everyone into farters.

So the American presidential elections are finally over and history has been made. Barak Obama’s enormous achievement made Tuesday a great night. So great in fact, that I fear something important will be overlooked: that it was also a terrifying night. Allow me to elaborate.

I’ve recently come to Toronto, Canada and I’ve been taking pictures to send back home to Iran. One interesting event I attended was downtown Toronto’s famous Halloween party. As I was thinking of sending pictures back home, I came across this picture I took with someone dressed as Sarah Palin (Sarah Palin was quite a popular outfit that night):

This photo posed a problem: I was thinking of explaining to some of the folks back home in Iran who may not be familiar with Halloween that it is a night when people put on scary costumes. Was I to send them this photo, I would have to make things more complicated and go on to say that today, people just dress up as any character and it doesn’t necessarily have to be scary. But then I paused and it hit me: Sarah Palin is scary. She’s horrifying!

She’s horrifying in the sense that a 10 year old behind the wheels of a car is horrifying, or in the sense that leaving a baby alone near a fire or electricity hazard is terrifying. It is obvious to the world that she was not ready for this job (She didn’t even know that Africa is a continent, not a country!). And yet, the workings of the modern world are such that in one of the most advanced of countries, someone such as Sarah Palin came this close to being a heartbeat away from the most powerful position on Earth.

This is terrifying indeed.

If the world were a car with a half-functioning break running fast in a high traffic street, would we want someone who doesn’t know how to drive behind the wheel?

I’m afraid the greatness of Obama’s victory will overshadow the deep design flaws in our sociopolitical systems. Yes it is true that history was made, but don’t forget the threat that passed right over our head.

NOTE: This post has become highly popular due to it’s detailed documentation of how Yaari.com abuses internet users. Also, here is an update.

Yaari.com is an intrusive website and I’m not the first to be complaining about it (see below). But I need to express my view towards it, even if just to make up for all the shameless Yaari.com invites that have been sent in my name.

I have never felt so abused by a social networking site. I have joined many of them in the past. I’ve had wonderful experiences with Orkut and Yahoo 360. LinkedIn and Facebook have been cool and useful. Sites like Hi5, Xuqa, and Tagged were useless, but I still have profiles there. I never felt annoyed by them. I did feel a bit annoyed by Fanbox, because of all the emails it kept sending me from people I didn’t know. So I just deleted my account and asked to stop receiving emails. All done, no hard feelings.

But then Yaari.com came along. I started getting invites in my inbox. After so many social networks, the natural reaction was “just another social network, I have no time or no use for it”. So i ignored the invites like I do for many other social networks. But then the number of invites started to increase to an unusual level. It was when I started getting Yaari.com invites from serious people who never send me such invites that I thought maybe this is something different. Then came the invite from one of my professors! That was it, I had to see what this site was all about.

So I accepted an invite and went to the Yaari.com homepage. Everything seemed normal at first. I was asked for some personal info. In line with recent trends in social networking sites, the info I needed to enter to get started was minimal. There was the usual “I agree” check box. Who reads those?! Check. Next I had to click on “Create my account”. Ok, everything is fine up to now, what do we have on the next page? A place to enter my Gmail login information. I never liked this feature in social network sites, but they are very common now. It’s supposed to help make inviting friends easier by importing their email addresses from your Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail etc. Since I don’t like to bother my contacts with invitation emails, I usually skip this step.

Ok so let’s skip the step. Umm, let’s see, where is that “skip this step” button…THERE IS NONE. I scanned every pixel on every possible page and there is none. This is especially annoying since they DO have a “skip this step” button for another step (importing profile info from Orkut). But it is impossible to skip this step! Ok so now I’m starting to get very very annoyed. I will not tolerate such intrusiveness. I moved the mouse towards the x mark on the top right corner of the window… but then I remembered all the invites… and I was also a bit curious…

I know what I’ll do, I’ll enter the login info, and then I’ll tell it not to invite anyone. Sounds like a plan. I entered the login info and on the next page I got what I was expecting: a list of the email addresses in my Gmail address book with check boxes to indicate which ones I want to invite. Ok so I’ll just uncheck everyone. But there are A LOT of emails in my address book. Usually there is an “uncheck all” button to help out though…let’s see…again THERE IS NONE. Again, this is especially infuriating because THERE IS a “check all” button!!

Still, my contacts shouldn’t have to be bothered just because I don’t have the patience to uncheck all these boxes. So even though i was very angry, I took the time to patiently uncheck each and every check box. It seemed like FOREVER until I was done. Ok, finished, everybody unchecked. So no one should be invited now. Ok so what do I do now? How do I go to the next step? There is only one button to press: Send Invites. Ok I’m willing to press it since I have made sure that none of my contacts are checked. Click. Done. Finished. My profile is all set up and now I’m a member of Yaari.com.

So what’s so special about it? NOTHING. Not only that, it seems to be more useless than the most useless sites I’ve encountered. But uselessness is no problem. I’ll just leave.

If Yaari.com was just normally annoying, I would forgive it for not including the “uncheck all” or even the “skip this step” button. I would have never looked back. No hard feelings, no bloodshed.

But then I checked my email a few hours later. I have a ton of “invitation accepted” notifications, and a bunch of inquiring emails from friends and family who know that I’m not the kind of person to just send any invite. “What?! Another social network?!”, “Mohammad! Of all the people, YOU should know better!”, “What’s this Yaari thing, Moh?”, etc.

WHAA…?! I was left dumbfounded. Everyone, EVERY SINGLE EMAIL ADDRESS in my address book had received Yaari.com invites from me. People I don’t even know, people I don’t even like, people that are not even people, emails of organizations, emails of colleagues, professors, bosses, clients, academics and professionals from around the world, ANYONE whose email was for some reason in my Gmail address book, had received a Yaari.com invitation from yours truly! These email addresses include Ph.D. admissions offices of all the universities I applied to (Harvard, INSEAD, UCLA, McGill, York, etc.).

This is just plain absurdity. Yaari.com has played with my reputation. It has abused me and my contacts. The reason I was getting so many invites was that my friends had also been abused. Unfortunately, I can’t make any legal compaints, because that “I agree” thing that I didn’t read states that:

By registering for the Yaari website…a member agrees to the Terms of Service and consents to allow Yaari to automatically send an email from the member to member’s contacts, encouraging member’s contacts to register for the Yaari website.

And there is no mention of the check boxes I spent so much time clearing. Apparently those were just decorations. So Yaari has also abused my time and effort in unchecking them all to no avail.

Legally, I agreed to the terms of service, and so I have no legal rights to complain. But what Yaari.com has done to me and is doing to others is just plain unethical. It has abused the trust that so many other responsible and ethical websites had built in us through their reasonable terms of service.

I think Yaari.com has crossed the red line. This is too much. Too intrusive. I’m infuriated and I will do my best to let everyone in the world know what low ethical standards this site has. I’m not alone. People have been complaining about Yaari (For example here, here, and here). I have deactivated my account on Yaari and I encourage everyone to boycott the site.

Well, it’s been a long time since I last blogged. My Persian Blog is going well, but I can’t seem to really get my English blog on track. The reason is that the English blogosphere is much larger and much more competitive than the Persian blogosphere. You would have to write really high quality content in order to get some attention. So I don’t write about just anything and I wait for some really good ideas for things to blog about. The little things seem to be more suitable for twitter.

But then, when I find good ideas and start to write about them, the document becomes too long to fit into a blog post and some of the ideas seem too good to blog about before they are published. Specially since I don’t live in a country where intellectual property can be protected very well. So these ideas are left in the form of works in progress as word files in my computer.

One of these ideas has been a little more lucky recently. When I thought about writing a post about the “entrepreneurship hype” in Iran, the idea grew into an article abstract I submitted to the International Conference on Entrepreneurship and it was accepted. I later discussed the topic with one of my professors, and since then we have been able to derive two articles out of it. One of them will be presented by Dr. Saeed Jafari Moghadam on May 28th at ICE 2008.

(Update: This article was presented and can now be downloaded from the publications page, along with slides and speech notes.)

Another important thing I’ve started to work on is a review article on the topic of attention. I’ll try to blog about that again soon.

Oh, and I haven’t yet written about the most important thing that has happened in my life. I’ve been admitted to the Ph.D. program at the Schulich School of Business, in York University, Canada. I’m trying my best to get my study permit and visa in time to get there in September. But the bureaucracy in Iran is killing me!

I have been studying the concept of attention, especially in relation to the more recent concept of the attention economy. I started a wiki on the subject but it has been closed to the public until now. Even though it’s still immature I decided to make it viewable and open commenting to the public. Since not many people read this blog however, it’s not so “public” yet. Maybe I’ll promote a bit more in July or August 2008 when I have more time to work on it.

In short, the Attention Wiki is a discipline wiki aiming to facilitate the development of the interdisciplinary study of attention as a limited resource (also known as Attention Economics). A discipline wiki is a type of wiki that is used to organize and integrate the body of knowledge pertaining to a specific area of study.

I believe that wiki-style knowledge organization is something the academics can take better advantage of. But the traditional wiki method as conceived in open content sites such as Wikipedia is not suitable for academic purposes. An academic discipline wiki needs to be managed and moderated, authors should not be anonymous and should be recognized for their significant contributions, and certain structures should be used as the framework for the organization of the content. Read more here.