Articles, essays, and talks of Rey Lugtu

(Published in Manila Standard Today under the Greenlight Column, January 10, 2011) I was recently invited by a Communications Arts class of De La Salle University to talk about the ill effects of Facebook among the youth. “Ill effects among the youth?”, I asked. I have studied the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of Facebook in the workplace. We always see its good side because most of us are active users. But the dark side in the work place is apparently the decline of productivity based on a number of studies. But understanding the ill effects among the youth struck me because I have two teenage daughters who spend hours in the veritable social network site; and I oftentimes ask them to stop and instead concentrate on studying. So this topic interested me as I wanted to understand its potential ill effects to my kids. Surveying Facebook users To put some credence in the talk, I asked the student organizers and my daughter to help me to conduct an exploratory study through a...

(Published in Business Mirror under the Mirror Image Column, January 5, 2011) I attended the silver reunion of Batch ’85 of the Manila Science High School on December 29. The ice-breaker the organizers ran was a rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game. This entailed pairs from the 30-plus who attended the reunion to run one round of RPS, with the loser giving P20 to the winner. The winners in the previous rounds were then pitted against each other, and the winnings were given to the victor of the succeeding rounds, until finally there was just one big winner with over P1,000 in prize money. Being a confessed ex-geek, I knew there was a strategy in this game and not pure chance. I read some studies on RPS that the most likely choice of a player was scissors. So my strategy was to always choose rock in the first round. True enough, during the game, I won several times using the rock strategy, until finally only Jude, a batchmate, and I were left. Unluckily, I succumbed to my opponent’s supe...