Joe Majewski

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs | Influencing Human Thoughts and Behavior

Some people spend their entire lives studying the behavior of human beings, trying to dissect the body and mind in hopes of finding information that can summarize our thought processes. I find the study of human behavior to be very interesting, and if I wasn’t studying Computer Science at my University, I would surely be majoring in Psychology.

I find the human mind to be a fascinating piece of work. It’s amazing how very similar all humans can be, despite us picturing the spectrum to be vast and untapped. All humans share the same instincts for survival.

Let me refer to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Abraham Maslow was born in New York in the early 1900s, and during his time as a psychologist he developed a theory of personality which has continued to be taught in schooling systems to this day due to it’s high level of practicality. I’m going to briefly explain this phenomenon, but if you find it to be interesting, I really suggest clicking the link to learn more in an in-depth explanation of Maslow’s findings.

Maslow theorized that all humans follow the same hierarchy consisting of five levels of needs. If one need is met, the next level in the pyramid will take priority, and so on and so forth. Let’s discuss these five levels:

1. Physiological Needs: These are the basic needs for survival, and they consist of food, water, oxygen, and a constant body temperature. A human will not seek friendship if said person is suffering from starvation.
2. Safety Needs: When the physiological needs for survival are met, and are no longer controlling thoughts and behavior, the next step in Maslow’s hierarchy is safety. This is a lot more noticeable in children than adults. The safety needs for an adult tend to be more passive and difficult to notice except in times of emergency.
3. Love, Affection, and Belongingness: When a person is no longer struggling for survival or safety, the next step in Maslow’s hierarchy involves escaping loneliness by finding friends and / or a soul mate. Feeling alienated can cause a human to focus their thoughts and behavior on ridding themselves of their lonely lifestyle.
4. Needs for Esteem: Once those three needs are all satisfied, a person will begin to focus their thoughts and behavior on self-esteem, and the esteem gained from others. No one likes feeling inferior, helpless, or worthless, so at this point in the hierarchy people will begin to work harder for respect from their co-workers, clean their house for the self-esteem boost, possibly try and eat a healthy, guilt-free meal, and things of that nature.
5. Needs for Self-Actualization: Once all other needs are met, Maslow describes the self-actualization needs as doing what one was born to do. A musician was born to make music, so once all other needs are met, a musician will go back to making music again. In terms of myself, when I am on the fifth level of the hierarchy, I will start programming games in my free time and working on my blog. You get the picture, right?

Maslow was a very intelligent man, and I find his philosophies on life to be rather intriguing, to say the least. So why did I decide to make a blog post on something so off topic? When it comes to computer programming, especially when making games, it’s very important (in my opinion) to understand basic psychological behavior in humans. People that make good games have a great understanding of what humans like. Psychology strikes me as a very important subject that computer programmers should take interest in.

Don’t expect me to write too many articles on this subject, but hopefully someone out there that read this found it to be enjoyable and possibly even enlightening.

My Experimental Blog Post

I had been playing Final Fantasy 13 for quite some time, such that I had neglected to make a new blog post in weeks. Since this perfect game has been consuming every minute of my free time, I decided that I should make an article in it’s honor.

This is not the article. Rather, I created the article yesterday titled Where can I find Ash Titanium Stone in Final Fantasy 13? The reason I decided to make the blog post was as an experiment. I figured that the game is only a couple weeks old, and as a result there would not be that many people with the answer to that question. In addition, I had also encountered this error but could not find an answer on Google.

My idea was that since so many people are playing this game, it would be a common question that many would use Google as a means of discovering the answer. I’m still testing out how the article performs, but it has already received many visitors through Google since just yesterday.

Anyways, in the event that you are reading this blog post to find the answer, you could click the link above, or read on.

Basically, the Ash Titanium Stone is a transformational catalyst that is used for upgrading many weapons such as the Hawkeye into more powerful equipment. The reason that you are having such a difficult time locating the Ash Titanium Stone in Final Fantasy 13 is because the American localized version of the game refers to this item as a Perovskite, and it can be purchased in the Motherlode shop.

Problems with WordPress 2.9: Pings Failing to Alert the Google Blogging Service

WordPress 2.9.1 just released, and it fixed some minor bugs from WordPress 2.9. This is just a theory, but I think that the reason my blog posts weren’t being indexed in Google as quick as they usually were was due to a glitch in the WordPress update, causing certain server configurations to fail when attempting to ping the Ping-o-matic service.

So if you’re a blogger and still using WordPress 2.9, check to see if your articles are being properly indexed, because failing to make the upgrade to 2.9.1 can be costly to you. Installing the newest version should solve your problems.

Ever since I installed the update earlier today, things have been running smoothly as ever in terms of Googlebot indexing my site.

On a side note, I apologize for making so many articles regarding this issue, but it was something that needed to be resolved. I hope that anyone else suffering from this WordPress glitch has it fixed ASAP.

Detective Joe was on the case, and it is now officially closed. Have a nice day.

Google Slow to Index Blog Posts

By using Google’s site operator, you can quickly see a list of pages that Google has indexed on any given website, or even directories or subdomains within a website. For example, performing a Google search for site:www.JoeMajewski.com, you will retrieve a full list of all pages that Google has found on my (this) website.

Usually, my new blog posts are indexed within minutes of being posted. Worst case scenario it would take thirty minutes, but never longer than that. The reason this happens is because WordPress pings a service that lets Googlebot know that new content has arrived upon publishing a new article.

Lately, this has changed. It has been 4 days since I posted an article about Google performing their PageRank update, and that submission has yet to be indexed on Google. This may be ironically due to the PageRank update causing it to be lost during the process, but I cannot think of any other reason as to why it still wouldn’t be indexed.

I have also written an article about an hour ago (that is unrelated to most other entries that I write) that is also not yet indexed by Google. I am assuming that the PageRank update is complete, and that things are back to normal (no more Google Dance, as the SEO geeks call it), so that tosses that theory out the window. But perhaps it is not indexed because of the fact that it’s unrelated to most of my other content.

I would be disappointed if Google changed the way that they archive blog posts, as I always enjoyed seeing my latest submissions show up on the search engine minutes after being published. If anyone has an explanation for as to why it is taking so long to get my articles archived, please comment and let me know.

Another reason this baffles me is because I just received PageRank 2, meaning that I should have more priority than I did before, so if anything was to change, I would expect it to be for the better. I will continue to investigate this issue, as I find it important for my content to be archived as soon as possible for best performance.

As always, I’ll keep you updated if I figure anything out. There must be some reason for the slow indexing that I’m receiving, and I’m curious to know if this is happening to others as well. Over and out.

Aiming For PageRank 1 :: My Insight Into Google’s Algorithm

It wasn’t long before many of the pages on this site began being assigned PageRank 0 (PR0), which baffled me at first. I had always been under the impression that PageRank was something that took many months to update. It seems that perhaps PageRank 0 is the exception, or maybe Google assigns PageRank values based off of the PageRank of the rest of the site.

This simple hypothesis would explain why certain YouTube videos achieve PR3 or PR4 weeks after being released, as they are quickly crawled and assigned a temporary PageRank during the period of time between legitimate updates to preserve Google’s accurate results.

Google’s results are constantly changing due to what they refer to as “rolling updates”, made to keep everything up to date. If it took three months for all new pages on the Internet to become valuable to the search engine then there would be millions of outdated pages that “deserved” to be atop the lists but didn’t make the PR update “cut”.

I wouldn’t want to give myself a bad name, so I am going to stand out and admit that this is all just my simple explanation based off of observations that I’ve made. This would also explain why some websites dramatically rise or fall in PageRank seemingly overnight, as the “legitimate” update rolls through and determines a more suitable PageRank for that specific website.

Who knows? Maybe Google truly believes that this website has already earned a PageRank 2, but because of the fact that the official update has not yet been run through, all I can do is wait and find out. For the time being, all of my pages will either be labeled as PR0 or PR N/A.

There is a lot of mystery behind the infamous PageRank algorithm, and I am slowly beginning to understand more and more about it. It will be a happy day once I log onto the Internet to find that this site has got some green on that bar (you know what I’m talking about).

And oh, how I despise the waiting game.