Have you felt sometimes that most of your friends are travelling around beautiful places and having a good time while you are struggling in a city managing work and home? Or you might feel that everyone in your age group has got married and settled down and you are still searching for a partner and nothing is working!! Why am I single while everyone else is married and possibly living happily ever after? This might be a Majority illusion.

Everyone Else Is Married And I Am Still Single!

The “majority illusion” suggests that under some conditions, individuals will overestimate the prevalence of some behaviours or the absence of a behaviour or certain attributes. Let's say people might feel everyone is leaving the company and joining a start-up, or there is no empowerment in the organization. While this could be just an illusion when we dig deeper. If people who have "felt" attrition is high or there is no empowerment, they will respond like that to a perception-based survey. And most of the surveys we do in organizations are perception based.

Defining The Majority Illusion

The phenomenon called majority illusion can influence the way we answer a perception-based survey on Engagement or culture.The majority illusion happens when few people who are highly connected in the network demonstrate certain behaviours even though these behaviours are relatively rare in the larger organisation.This is because the high-degree nodes(people who are connected to others most), or hubs of a social network, present such behaviours to a lot of different people, creating a skewed perception of the behaviour’s popularity in the network.

The Cause Of Majority Illusion

The red nodes have the capacity to create a majority illusion as they are highly connected in their network and others might perceive reality based on their experience with "just" these three people.

The Majority Illusion Diagram

Have you felt sometimes that most of your friends are travelling around beautiful places like Goa or in the hills and having a good time while you are ... 49 comments on LinkedIn

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

The Majority Illusion

<ul><li>In 1775, Benjamin Franklin raised the idea of getting up earlier to make better use of daylight and avoid nighttime burning of candles</li><li>Around the turn of the 20th century, George Hudson of New Zealand and William Willett of England separately pitched summertime clock changes, each seeking an extra hour of sunlight for personal hobbies</li><li>Daylight saving time wasn’t implemented until World War I, when countries on both sides of the conflict adopted it as a way of saving energy</li></ul>

When and why did daylight saving time begin?

<ul><li>Most of the United States spends 34 weeks, or about seven months, from mid-March to mid-November, on standard time.</li><li>Around the world, most of North America, Europe, and New Zealand as well as some parts of the Middle East, South Africa, and Australia practice a biannual switch, but the dates of the time change vary. Much of Africa and Asia do not switch.</li></ul>

Where is daylight saving time observed?

Twice-yearly switching- Changing the clocks twice a year has become widely viewed by the public, lawmakers and sleep experts as not only an inconvenience, but also as a serious health and public safety concern.Daylight saving time - While the original purpose of daylight saving time was to save energy by extending daylight into the evening, research has cast doubts on that idea. Advocates of daylight saving time also argue that it promotes public safety, with evidence linking the extra daylight in the evenings to a decrease in crime

What are the arguments regarding each time system?

<ul><li>Most Americans had to go to work and school in the dark, with sunrise arriving around 8:30 a.m. in cities including Washington, D.C., New York, and Detroit.</li><li>Disapproval of the switch grew when multiple children were fatally struck by cars while headed to school in dark.</li><li>By late January, the governor of Florida had called for a repeal, and some members of Congress questioned the wisdom of the decision.</li><li>On Oct. 6, not long after Nixon’s resignation, President Gerald Ford signed a bill ending the Daylight Saving Time experiment.</li></ul>

The last time the U.S. tried permanent daylight saving time was in 1974

<ul><li>More than 60 percent of Americans are in favor of stopping the biannual switch</li><li>Of the people who want to eliminate the shift, nearly twice as many prefer permanent daylight saving time over standard time</li><li>The poll found that older adults expressed a clear preference for year-round daylight time while adults under 30 were "closely divided" on whether they wanted more daylight in the morning or later in the evening</li></ul>

What does the public want?

health

Health

timemanagement

Time Management

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Daylight saving time: Explaining the century-old debate

If you're feeling your body contracting or overheating, step away from whatever you're doing and take a deep breath. 
Or if you want to take it a step further, try meditation and mindfulness exercises for beginners.

Breathe

Do something that feels good for your body and helps you get out of your head, whether that's deep cleaning or comfort decorating to create a cozier space, tips on learning a new skill or jump starting your exercise routine.

Get Moving

The kitchen is a safe space for a lot of us. Maybe this is the weekend that you finally re-create Grandpa's famous lasagna, or learn how to make a prettier pie, or maybe just lose yourself in some kitchen organization.

Nourish Yourself

When the news is scary, it's easy to get lost in our own heads. Reach out to loved ones instead. 
That could look like sitting down to write an actual letter to a relative, spending time with neighbors, playing (or creating!) games with family, or even taking the time to write down those generational stories. If your little ones are struggling to go to bed at the end of the day, try talking to them about the heavy news head-on.

Stay Connected

Remember that it's OK not to be plugged into the news. 
By turning off your alerts or checking the headlines once or twice a day, you may be able to feel more grounded and prioritize yourself and loved ones.

Sign Off

News does not stop, increases anxiety and is programmed to be addictive.

The news is overwhelming right now. While we wait for more information, don't forget to care for yourself and loved ones in other ways.

mindfulness

Mindfulness

mentalhealth

Mental Health

5 ways to cope with the stressful news cycle

Party Qs, Inc. is a mobile App that has over 3,000 monthly active users without spending a dime. Today, Party Qs has 786 curated questions and has received lots of influencer love on instagram. It addresses three social problems: social anxiety, awkward silences and phubbing.

I wanted to share a proud moment with my Medium family.

At times, we all struggle in social gatherings, but for some of us, it’s a real problem (Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) affects 15 million adults in the US.)

1. Social anxiety

When nobody knows what to talk about, silence sets in. You know the feeling. Someone might fidget. Another person might hum and look away. Another person might excuse themselves “to use the bathroom.”

2. Surface-level conversations and awkward silences

Phubbing(phone snubbing) is the act of snubbing someone in a social setting by looking at your phone instead of paying attention.

3. Phubbing

We quickly noticed that every conversation starter app had at least one of four problems: <ul><li>They were poorly designed . Clashing colors. Mismatched fonts. Crowded spacing. Typos, misspellings, and a non-intuitive user interface. </li><li>Boring, Close-Ended, or juvenile, the questions were Dodgy and Dismissible.</li><li>Repeated questions from a small library.</li><li>Many of the Apps are old and abandoned. The founders built a questions App because it’s simple and easy.</li></ul>

Plenty of competition is a good thing

A couple of years ago, my wife and I hosted a weekly small group of friends at our one-bedroom apartment in Tennessee. To get everyone on the same page, we started out with a single question. It ranged from deep questions, such as: “what makes you feel most alive?” to fun questions, such as: “if you could snap your fingers and something appeared every time, and you couldn’t pick money, what would you choose?”.

Origin story: how we got into this space

<ul><li>The founder of Partyqs says he uses party Qs with his girlfriend when we’re long distance.</li><li>One user visits his friends in prison and plays Party Qs to talk about something other than prison stuff. </li><li>A school teacher loves asking her class of middle schoolers a couple of Party Qs before class. </li><li>A megachurch youth pastor starts off the weekly youth group with an ice breaker from Party Qs. Party Qs is actually on the printed schedule. </li><li>Another user spends time with his 12-year-old cousin and uses Party Qs to go beyond the usual “How are you”, “How is school” questions. </li></ul>

I hear stories about how people use Party Qs and a smile breaks over my face every time:

I’ve been writing on Medium for over four years. I’m the editor of Entrepreneur’s Handbook, where we publish early-stage stories about entrepreneurs that blend inspiration with practical takeaways…

loveandrelationships

Love & Relationships

startup

Startups

Allow Me to Introduce My New Anti-Phubbing App Company

Good authors divide their books into chapters and sections; good programmers divide their programs into modules. Like a book chapter, modules are just clusters of words (or code, as the case may be).

What modules are

There are a lot of benefits to using modules in favor of a sprawling, interdependent codebase. <ul><li>Maintainability: By definition, a module is self-contained. </li><li>Namespacing: In JavaScript, variables outside the scope of a top-level function are global (meaning, everyone can access them). Because of this, it’s common to have “namespace pollution”, where completely unrelated code shares global variables.</li><li>Reusability: Let’s be honest here: we’ve all copied code we previously wrote into new projects at one point or another.</li></ul>

Why use modules?

The Module pattern is used to mimic the concept of classes so that we can store both public and private methods and variables inside a single object — similar to how classes are used in other programming languages like Java or Python. That allows us to create a public-facing API for the methods that we want to expose to the world, while still encapsulating private variables and methods in a closure scope.

Module pattern

<ul><li>CommonJS is a volunteer working group that designs and implements JavaScript APIs for declaring modules. A CommonJS module is essentially a reusable piece of JavaScript that exports specific objects, making them available for other modules to require in their programs.</li><li>Unlike CommonJS, AMD takes a browser-first approach alongside asynchronous behavior to get the job done. (Note, there are a lot of people who strongly believe that dynamically loading files piecemeal as you start to run code isn’t favorable, which we’ll explore more when in the next section on module-building).</li></ul>

CommonJS and AMD

For projects that require you to support both AMD and CommonJS features, there’s yet another format: Universal Module Definition (UMD).UMD essentially creates a way to use either of the two, while also supporting the global variable definition. As a result, UMD modules are capable of working on both client and server.

If you’re a newcomer to JavaScript, jargon like “module bundlers vs. module loaders,” “Webpack vs. Browserify” and “AMD vs. CommonJS” can quickly become overwhelming. In this post, I’ll unpack these…

The Majority Illusion

Daylight saving time: Explaining the century-old debate

5 ways to cope with the stressful news cycle

Allow Me to Introduce My New Anti-Phubbing App Company

JavaScript Modules: A Beginner’s Guide

Heather Solis