OldSty-le;

Gender Studies Bookmark 09/16/2011

2011-09-16T08:33:00.003+08:00

Are We Living in the Golden Age of Male Objectification? -- Vulture
For decades, while film and television have gotten progressively racier, the objects of the camera's increasingly lurid gaze had largely been women. The reasons for this are so unofficially official they're like unwritten laws, habits that have been codified into "common sense" even if they don't make much sense: Hollywood's a boys' club and male audiences want sex and violence, while women want hearts and flowers. So women are lusted after by the cameras, while audiences looking for a little bit of dude to ogle had to be content with tame rom-coms, subtext, and the dreaded Comedy Penis (see: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Observe and Report, Bruno etc.).

But no more! The Summer of 2011 officially became the summer that the male gaze was reflected back at itself — and with enthusiasm! In the summer's superhero movies, a supremely buff body became part of what made these heroes so super. The Captain America trailer had Dominic Cooper doing the old look-over-the-top-of-my-sunglasses move to get a load of the newly pumped up Chris Evans. In Thor, Kat Dennings's audience-surrogate character spends half the movie talking about how nutso everything is and the other half pointing out that this blond god from the heavens is massively pumped. Fourteen years ago, America lost it when Batman's costume included rubber nipples. Now we've got a Spider-Man whose costume lifts and separates.
Tags: Objectification, Gender Stereotype, Gender Equality, Hollywood
Are We Living in a Golden Age of Male Objectification? « str8bro
Tags: Objectification, Gender Stereotype, Gender Equality
Quick note on divorce « Samson's Jawbone
the point of this video – as indeed I did not realize at first – is to make opposition to homosexual “marriage” seem ridiculous through comparison to divorce. After all, no one in their right mind could possibly want to ban divorce, right? And so… if you won’t oppose divorce, what grounds do you have to oppose gay marriage? If you want to “protect marriage” by opposing homosexuality, you’ve got to “protect marriage” by opposing divorce as well.

And of course the response to this – and the reason I failed to perceive the satire at first – is to agree. To the folks who crafted that video, I say: yes, you’re right. If we are concerned about “protecting the family”, we should – and do – want to ban divorce as well. I may not have written it here, on this blog, but I have agreed for a long time that compared to divorce, homosexuality is a sideshow. No-fault divorce has wrought untold devastation upon the family and should be repealed at once.
Tags: Divorce, Marriage, Homosexuality, Religion
Diva - Successful woman to support house husband, kids
The well-qualified man stayed at home caring for the kids while his wife worked as an IT manager, earning $12,000 a month.

When they got divorced, the court made the woman support her ex-husband and kids.

The ex-husband, was also given 40 per cent of the matrimonial assets (valued at about $700,000) as recognition for his sacrifices, though he had contributed only about 20 per cent.

The court also granted the husband’s application to be entitled to 50 per cent of the value of the wife’s unit trusts, valued at $115,000.
Tags: Divorce, Marriage, Gender Equality
NY Mag Notices How Tarty Men Have Become | marksimpson.com
It’s great that New York Magazine has noticed (and welcomed) how Hollywood has objectified men, and how men have objectified themselves. Difficult to believe, I know, but there are still plenty of people who do their best not to. Or refuse to admit that they’ve noticed. Including some feminists who want to pretend that objectification is something only done by men to women.
Tags: Objectification, Gender Equality, Gender Stereotype

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/16/2011

2011-09-16T08:33:00.001+08:00

How Death Came into the World - body, life, history, time, person, human, Death As a Being, The Garden of Eden, Modern Accounts, Conclusion

Traditional, mythic accounts of the origin of death extend back to the earliest hunter-gatherer cultures. Usually these stories are morality tales about faithfulness, trust, or the ethical and natural balance of the elements of the world.

tags: Death Myth
Science, Reason and Critical Thinking: An Apology from God … Inspired by Johann Hari

When we compiled the bible we found historical accounts that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time they were written, but later didn’t really convey the values we wanted to propagate. Some were quite confusing and unclear. When this happened we simply excluded these accounts from the bible and selected alternative accounts that expressed our current vision for Christianity. At the time I justified this by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the religion should be like.

But I was wrong. A divinely revealed text isn’t a cherry picked selection of man-made narratives and stories to support a particular ideology and currently fashionable set of values. It’s a beautiful articulate and comprehensible celestial dictation of the mind of an all-powerful supernatural entity that transcends current knowledge and confirms subsequently discovered wisdom. If you want to simply compile a cannon of man made ideas, histories and laws there are conventions to let you do that. You write, “The best explanation at the time was” rather than “And so it came to pass”, and instead of “Thus said the Lord” you write “So said some bloke or other with voices in his head”.

If I had asked some of the other deities they would have told me how best to chronicle my myths. It was arrogant and stupid of me not to ask.

tags: Satire Religion Bible
Johann Hari: A personal apology - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

tags: Research Methodology Interview Plagiarism Journalism
pozorvlak: Why we should teach our kids to code

I fully support that idea because I think that 'programming thinking' is an important skill that needs to be taught. Children first need to learn to be literate, then they need to learn to be numerate and finally they need to learn to be 'algorithmate' (yes, I just made that word up)... It's obvious to most people that illiteracy and innumeracy are problems to be tackled at school, but it's not obvious that we are now living in a world where logical and algorithmic thinking are very, very important.

tags: Software Computer Computing Algorithm Education
Leonardo Reviews Home

Probably no one who reads Leonardo publications needs to be convinced of the centrality of software for modern art, culture, or academia. Yet, outside these circles, I think there is demand for such books as David Berry’s The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. At times, software studies still gets some of the crowd squirming in their seats in academic conferences, and either slightly worried or bemused reactions from representatives of more established academic disciplines. Surely code cannot be read and written like Shakespeare, appreciated the way you do Milton or object of such cult as Austen – or the cinephilic attachment in film studies to certain genres and films? However, despite being a newcomer, software studies may not turn into another media studies, which continuously is ridiculed in the UK by the media (the irony) and politicians as a lesser discipline; software (studies) still has that aura of being closer to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects so adored by current policy makers. Yet, as Berry shows, software studies is a good way of smuggling in (my words, not Berry’s) the good ol’ humanities’ way of critically and inventively investigating philosophical and social contexts in which code is executed and executes the world. This is not to implicitly say that STEM is uninventive, and that arts and humanities are the only experimental disciplines – but it is true that we need a stronger articulation of how we can sustain some of the better heritages of arts and humanities topics.

tags: Software Computer Computing Digital Humanities Academia Philosophy
Simulation in Cyberspace and Touch of the Flesh: Kissing, the Blush, the Hickey and the Caress

tags: Simulation Cyberspace Psychology
Stamp out anti-science in US politics - opinion - 14 September 2011 - New Scientist

tags: Science Politics Economy Capitalism
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Somebody Send Paul Nurse a Copy of The Honest Broker, Fast!

One problem is treating scientific discussion as if it were political debate. When some politicians try to sway public opinion, they employ the tricks of the debating chamber: cherry-picking data, ignoring the consensus opinions of experts, adept use of a sneer or a misplaced comparison, reliance on the power of rhetoric rather than argument. They can often get away with this because the media rely too much on confrontational debate in place of reasoned discussion.

It is essential, in public issues, to separate science from politics and ideology. Get the science right first, then discuss the political implications.

tags: Science Politics
NY Mag Notices How Tarty Men Have Become | marksimpson.com

It’s great that New York Magazine has noticed (and welcomed) how Hollywood has objectified men, and how men have objectified themselves. Difficult to believe, I know, but there are still plenty of people who do their best not to. Or refuse to admit that they’ve noticed. Including some feminists who want to pretend that objectification is something only done by men to women.

tags: Objectification Gender Equality Gender Stereotype
The Harvard Classics: A Free, Digital Collection | Open Culture

tags: ebooks
Opinion: Reich: The Limping Middle Class - San Jose Mercury News

When so much income goes to the top, the middle class doesn't have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going without sinking ever more deeply into debt -- which, as we've seen, ends badly. An economy so dependent on the spending of a few is also prone to great booms and busts. The rich splurge and speculate when their savings are doing well. But when the values of their assets tumble, they pull back. That can lead to wild gyrations. Sound familiar?

tags: Income Inequality Capitalism
Diva - Successful woman to support house husband, kids

The well-qualified man stayed at home caring for the kids while his wife worked as an IT manager, earning $12,000 a month.

When they got divorced, the court made the woman support her ex-husband and kids.

The ex-husband, was also given 40 per cent of the matrimonial assets (valued at about $700,000) as recognition for his sacrifices, though he had contributed only about 20 per cent.

The court also granted the husband’s application to be entitled to 50 per cent of the value of the wife’s unit trusts, valued at $115,000.

tags: Divorce Marriage Gender Equality
Quick note on divorce « Samson's Jawbone

the point of this video – as indeed I did not realize at first – is to make opposition to homosexual “marriage” seem ridiculous through comparison to divorce. After all, no one in their right mind could possibly want to ban divorce, right? And so… if you won’t oppose divorce, what grounds do you have to oppose gay marriage? If you want to “protect marriage” by opposing homosexuality, you’ve got to “protect marriage” by opposing divorce as well.

And of course the response to this – and the reason I failed to perceive the satire at first – is to agree. To the folks who crafted that video, I say: yes, you’re right. If we are concerned about “protecting the family”, we should – and do – want to ban divorce as well. I may not have written it here, on this blog, but I have agreed for a long time that compared to divorce, homosexuality is a sideshow. No-fault divorce has wrought untold devastation upon the family and should be repealed at once.

tags: Divorce Marriage Homosexuality Religion
Beyond 'New Atheism' - NYTimes.com

Led by the biologist Richard Dawkins, the author of “The God Delusion,” atheism has taken on a new life in popular religious debate. Dawkins’s brand of atheism is scientific in that it views the “God hypothesis” as obviously inadequate to the known facts. In particular, he employs the facts of evolution to challenge the need to postulate God as the designer of the universe. For atheists like Dawkins, belief in God is an intellectual mistake, and honest thinkers need simply to recognize this and move on from the silliness and abuses associated with religion.

Most believers, however, do not come to religion through philosophical arguments. Rather, their belief arises from their personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center.

In the last few years there has emerged another style of atheism that takes such experiences seriously. One of its best exponents is Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy at Columbia. (For a good introduction to his views, see Kitcher’s essay in “The Joy of Secularism,” perceptively discussed last month by James Wood in The New Yorker.)

tags: Atheism Religion Philosophy
Are We Living in the Golden Age of Male Objectification? -- Vulture

For decades, while film and television have gotten progressively racier, the objects of the camera's increasingly lurid gaze had largely been women. The reasons for this are so unofficially official they're like unwritten laws, habits that have been codified into "common sense" even if they don't make much sense: Hollywood's a boys' club and male audiences want sex and violence, while women want hearts and flowers. So women are lusted after by the cameras, while audiences looking for a little bit of dude to ogle had to be content with tame rom-coms, subtext, and the dreaded Comedy Penis (see: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Observe and Report, Bruno etc.).

But no more! The Summer of 2011 officially became the summer that the male gaze was reflected back at itself — and with enthusiasm! In the summer's superhero movies, a supremely buff body became part of what made these heroes so super. The Captain America trailer had Dominic Cooper doing the old look-over-the-top-of-my-sunglasses move to get a load of the newly pumped up Chris Evans. In Thor, Kat Dennings's audience-surrogate character spends half the movie talking about how nutso everything is and the other half pointing out that this blond god from the heavens is massively pumped. Fourteen years ago, America lost it when Batman's costume included rubber nipples. Now we've got a Spider-Man whose costume lifts and separates.

tags: Objectification Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Hollywood
Are We Living in a Golden Age of Male Objectification? « str8bro

tags: Objectification Gender Stereotype Gender Equality
Should one have a tummy tuck? | Practical Ethics

Even though cosmetic surgery has grown to become a multi billion-dollar industry, it is looked at with some suspicion. Many feel that there is something superficial and, perhaps, slightly desperate about undergoing surgery for aesthetic reasons. In academia, at least, although a hair transplant and a teeth bleaching might pass, chances are that a breast enlargement would raise eyebrows.

It is not be unlikely, however, that the eyebrows in question would be both plucked and colored—for we already do quite a bit to enhance our looks. We work out, try to dress well, shave, and go to the hairdresser. We make sure we get tanned during summer. Some of us are on a diet, wear make up, or dye our hair.

tags: Bioethics Beauty Academia
Should one have a tummy tuck? | Practical Ethics

tags: Bioethics Beauty Academia
Apple bans satirical iPhone game Phone Story from its App Store | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Removal of game that includes references to child labour and factory-worker suicides reignites debate about how Apple treats apps differently to music, books and films

tags: Apple App Censorship Capitalism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 09/15/2011

2011-09-15T08:33:00.003+08:00

New Metro Patriarch « Quiet Riot Girl
‘For decades, The Playboy Mansion has been a playground For Men where Playmates have entertained millions of guests with their bunny costumes, a genius concept perfectly executed by a once young and vivacious idealist. However, that once young man, along with his rabbit tricks, are now old, decrepit and stale. It is time for a new mansion, a new playground where women set the standard. The Hans F Hansen Mansion will be a place of Elegance and Mystery, where guests will reach a level of thorough entertainment not only through it’s intoxicating atmosphere, but also by the exotically beautiful, multitalented, and worldly Hans F Hansen Dames. Isn’t it time for change? We say YES.. It Is.’

The Hans F Hansen Mansion aims to provide an environment where women can be empowered, sexy and adored by… er…gentlemen. You know, like Spearmint Rhino, that famous ‘gentleman’s club’ that the feminists love so much.
Tags: Objectification, Gender Equality, Gender Stereotype

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/15/2011

2011-09-15T08:33:00.001+08:00

Balderdash: Schopenhauer on Suicide

It will generally be found that, as soon as the terrors of life reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his own life...

When, in some dreadful and ghastly dream, we reach the moment of greatest horror, it awakes us; thereby banishing all the hideous shapes that were born of the night. And life is a dream; when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off, the same thing happens.

Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to an answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer."

tags: Suicide Philosophy Religion
New Metro Patriarch « Quiet Riot Girl

‘For decades, The Playboy Mansion has been a playground For Men where Playmates have entertained millions of guests with their bunny costumes, a genius concept perfectly executed by a once young and vivacious idealist. However, that once young man, along with his rabbit tricks, are now old, decrepit and stale. It is time for a new mansion, a new playground where women set the standard. The Hans F Hansen Mansion will be a place of Elegance and Mystery, where guests will reach a level of thorough entertainment not only through it’s intoxicating atmosphere, but also by the exotically beautiful, multitalented, and worldly Hans F Hansen Dames. Isn’t it time for change? We say YES.. It Is.’

The Hans F Hansen Mansion aims to provide an environment where women can be empowered, sexy and adored by… er…gentlemen. You know, like Spearmint Rhino, that famous ‘gentleman’s club’ that the feminists love so much.

tags: Objectification Gender Equality Gender Stereotype

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 09/14/2011

2011-09-14T08:33:00.003+08:00

Shock: No jail time for woman who strangled newborn because Canada accepts abortion, says judge | LifeSiteNews.com
An Alberta judge has let a woman who strangled her newborn son walk free by arguing that Canada’s absence of a law on abortion signals that Canadians “sympathize” with the mother.

“We live in a country where there is no protection for children in the womb right up until birth and now this judge has extended the protection for the perpetrator rather than the victim, even though the child is born and as such should be protected by the court,” said Jim Hughes, national president of Campaign Life Coalition.

Katrina Effert of Wetaskiwin, Alberta gave birth secretly in her parents’ downstairs bathroom on April 13, 2005, and then later strangled the newborn and threw his body over a fence. She was 19 at the time.

She has been found guilty of second-degree murder by two juries, but both times the judgment was thrown out by the appeals court. In May, the Alberta Court of Appeal overturned her 2009 murder conviction and replaced it with the lesser charge of infanticide.
Tags: Infanticide, Abortion, Law
How working long hours affects the wage gap | Women at the Top Blog | Blog on women’s achievements in business from the Financial Times – FT.com
In the past 30 years, US women have become more educated, outperforming men in university graduation rates. During that time, the disparity between the percentages of women and men working full-time has shrunk considerably too – and yet the pay gap persists, a topic this blog has tackled in the past.
Tags: Gender Equality, Work, Pay
The Gay Case Against Gay Marriage and Gay Bigotry | marksimpson.com
Branding Christians and traditionalists ‘bigots’ for being Christians and traditionalists and thus none too keen to fundamentally revise the definition of marriage is a highly unattractive exercise in liberal self-righteousness that makes Miss America look quite sophisticated. Not to mention sounding a lot like pots and kettles rattling. It’s faintly absurd to have to even say this, but it isn’t bigoted to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s just being conventional. And after all, marriage itself is convention and tradition tied up in a big red bow and covered in confetti and sprinkled with Holy Water. Which is exactly why lesbians and gays should have nothing to do with it.
Tags: Sexuality, Marriage, Freedom of Speech, Religion
Is it Time for Masculinism? — The Good Men Project
So we got it. Women are not merely sexual objects of desire. But what happened to men in the process of their feminist education? Poet Robert Bly, in Iron John, was very critical of typical “New Age Sensitive Males” who had essentially cut off their own genitals in the effort to distance themselves from the macho idiots that incur the wrath of women, and to become the thoughtful feeling blokes women claimed they wanted them to be. There was a rude awakening for many of us though, when we discovered that yes, women wanted us to be sensitive and respectful friends and fellow workers, but more often than not, they still often preferred the “bad boys” in the bedroom. We were duped, and gypped.
Tags: Gender Stereotype, Gender Equality, Feminism, Masculinity
Is it Time for Masculinism? — The Good Men Project
Tags: Gender Stereotype, Gender Equality, Feminism, Masculinity

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/14/2011

2011-09-14T08:33:00.001+08:00

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Climate Science and Politics: Still One Way Traffic

tags: Climate Science Policy Politics Framing Reality Data
Is it Time for Masculinism? — The Good Men Project

an effective and true Masculinism Movement would help men very simply reclaim their full-blooded desire in a way that simultaneously demonstrated to women that it is both safe and desirable—for all parties— that men be released from their sexual cages.

tags: Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Feminism Masculinity
Is it Time for Masculinism? — The Good Men Project

So we got it. Women are not merely sexual objects of desire. But what happened to men in the process of their feminist education? Poet Robert Bly, in Iron John, was very critical of typical “New Age Sensitive Males” who had essentially cut off their own genitals in the effort to distance themselves from the macho idiots that incur the wrath of women, and to become the thoughtful feeling blokes women claimed they wanted them to be. There was a rude awakening for many of us though, when we discovered that yes, women wanted us to be sensitive and respectful friends and fellow workers, but more often than not, they still often preferred the “bad boys” in the bedroom. We were duped, and gypped.

tags: Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Feminism Masculinity
Why did Japan surrender? - The Boston Globe

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa - a highly respected historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara - has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that forced Japan’s surrender. His interpretation could force a new accounting of the moral meaning of the atomic attack. It also raises provocative questions about nuclear deterrence, a foundation stone of military strategy in the postwar period. And it suggests that we could be headed towards an utterly different understanding of how, and why, the Second World War came to its conclusion.

tags: WWII War Japan Atomic Bomb
Think Again: War - By Joshua S. Goldstein | Foreign Policy

tags: War Democracy
The Gay Case Against Gay Marriage and Gay Bigotry | marksimpson.com

Branding Christians and traditionalists ‘bigots’ for being Christians and traditionalists and thus none too keen to fundamentally revise the definition of marriage is a highly unattractive exercise in liberal self-righteousness that makes Miss America look quite sophisticated. Not to mention sounding a lot like pots and kettles rattling. It’s faintly absurd to have to even say this, but it isn’t bigoted to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s just being conventional. And after all, marriage itself is convention and tradition tied up in a big red bow and covered in confetti and sprinkled with Holy Water. Which is exactly why lesbians and gays should have nothing to do with it.

tags: Sexuality Marriage Freedom of Speech Religion
How working long hours affects the wage gap | Women at the Top Blog | Blog on women’s achievements in business from the Financial Times – FT.com

In the past 30 years, US women have become more educated, outperforming men in university graduation rates. During that time, the disparity between the percentages of women and men working full-time has shrunk considerably too – and yet the pay gap persists, a topic this blog has tackled in the past.

tags: Gender Equality Work Pay

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 09/13/2011

2011-09-13T08:33:00.003+08:00

Understanding current causes of women's underrepresentation in science
Explanations for women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains. To better understand women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields and its causes, we reprise claims of discrimination and their evidentiary bases. Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no longer valid and, if uncritically accepted as current causes of women's lack of progress, can delay or prevent understanding of contemporary determinants of women's underrepresentation. We conclude that differential gendered outcomes in the real world result from differences in resources attributable to choices, whether free or constrained, and that such choices could be influenced and better informed through education if resources were so directed. Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women's participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers today. Addressing today's causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes. Finally, we suggest potential avenues of intervention to increase gender fairness that accord with current, as opposed to historical, findings.
Tags: Science, Gender Stereotype, Gender Equality

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/13/2011

2011-09-13T08:33:00.001+08:00

The God Clause and the Reinsurance Industry - BusinessWeek

tags: Insurance Risk Climate Change Climate Science Reality
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Risk and Reinsurance

On many topics of risk there are a wide range of legitimate points of view which collectively span a large range, and there is benefit for companies to selectively interpreting such risks in a way that is beneficial to their bottom line.

tags: Insurance Risk Climate Change Climate Science Reality
TPM: The Philosophers’ Magazine | Finding inspiration in Hume

tags: Philosophy Hume
Has postmodernist design eaten itself? | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

With its deceptive surfaces and furniture that doesn't do what it's supposed to, postmodernism is not just the backdrop to but a metaphor for unbridled capitalism, where a plump balance sheet conceals all manner of sins and where marble-effect formica hides chipboard. But was postmodernism really so bad?

tags: Postmodernism Design
Understanding current causes of women's underrepresentation in science

Explanations for women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains. To better understand women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields and its causes, we reprise claims of discrimination and their evidentiary bases. Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no longer valid and, if uncritically accepted as current causes of women's lack of progress, can delay or prevent understanding of contemporary determinants of women's underrepresentation. We conclude that differential gendered outcomes in the real world result from differences in resources attributable to choices, whether free or constrained, and that such choices could be influenced and better informed through education if resources were so directed. Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women's participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers today. Addressing today's causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes. Finally, we suggest potential avenues of intervention to increase gender fairness that accord with current, as opposed to historical, findings.

tags: Science Gender Stereotype Gender Equality
What I Hate About Paglia « Quiet Riot Girl

http://www.neoliberalismo.com/Foucault.htm

tags: Foucault
The Meaningfulness of Lives - NYTimes.com

Philosophy cannot prescribe the particular character of meaning that each of us should embrace. It cannot tell each of us individually how we might trace the trajectory that is allotted to us. But it can, and ought to, reflect upon the framework within which we consider these questions, and in doing so perhaps offer a lucidity we might otherwise lack. This is as it should be. Philosophy can assist us in understanding how we might think about our lives, while remaining modest enough to leave the living of them to us.

tags: Life Religion Meaning Purpose Transcendence Philosophy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/12/2011

2011-09-12T08:32:00.001+08:00

6 Things You’d Never Guess About Google’s Energy Use - Techland - TIME.com

Google uses enough energy to continuously power 200,000 homes.

Google's many data centers around the world burn through 260 million watts—one quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant—the New York Times reports. The company had been cagey about revealing energy usage stats in the past, probably because it didn't want to reveal to competitors how quickly its data centers were growing. It's no longer a secret that Google needs a crazy amount of data centers to keep things running smoothly.

tags: Google Energy Data Cost Resources
What Happens to All the Asian-American Overachievers When the Test-Taking Ends? -- New York Magazine

tags: Asian Discrimination Education Work Bamboo Ceiling Leadership Asian Value
What Happens to All the Asian-American Overachievers When the Test-Taking Ends? -- New York Magazine

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 09/11/2011

2011-09-11T08:34:00.001+08:00

The Beauty Myth « Quiet Riot Girl
For ‘beauty’ and ‘masculinity’ are still not allowed to meet and merge in our culture. Except of course they do. All the time. Everywhere we look. Because culture, now, especially the culture of masculinity, is metrosexy.
Tags: Beauty, Masculinity, Gender Stereotype

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/11/2011

2011-09-11T08:33:00.001+08:00

What Is Science?

tags: Science Empiricism Experience
Rationally Speaking: On ethics, part VII: the full picture

tags: Ethics Philosophy
Rationally Speaking: On ethics, part VI: Egalitarianism

tags: Ethics Egalitarianism
The Beauty Myth « Quiet Riot Girl

For ‘beauty’ and ‘masculinity’ are still not allowed to meet and merge in our culture. Except of course they do. All the time. Everywhere we look. Because culture, now, especially the culture of masculinity, is metrosexy.

tags: Beauty Masculinity Gender Stereotype

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/10/2011

2011-09-10T08:33:00.001+08:00

Twitter Doesn't Give a Damn Who You Are

Google Facebook and Twitter now all have similar products. But Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (somewhat inadvertently) made it clear yesterday that while all three have social networking features and make money from ads, they are in fundamentally different businesses.

At a very basic level, Google+ and Facebook are in the identity delivery business, and Twitter is in the information delivery business. That's a powerful distinction. It reflects a fundamentally different conception of what's more valuable: information or identity. It also gets at who is more valuable, advertisers or users.

tags: Twitter Facebook Google Social Media Identity
Rick Perry: Modern-Day Galileo of Climate Science? - International Business Times

Rick Perry is dominating the headlines for his supposedly inept remark invoking Galileo. Famous for his skepticism of climate change, the Texas governor said, "The science is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans' economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that's not settled yet to me is just nonsense. Just because you have a group of scientists who stood up and said here is the fact. Galileo got outvoted for a spell.

tags: Galileo Climate Science Denial Politics
Climate Reality

tags: Climate Change Activism Social Media Reality Facebook
Would You Donate Your Facebook Account to Al Gore For a Day? | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

On September 14, Al Gore will launch the Climate Reality Project, or “24 Hours of Reality” — this most recent project will have 24 presentations, done by 24 presenters in 13 languages, each broadcast one hour after the other, representing all the time zones of the world. Al Gore will be connecting the dots of climate change, extreme weather and pollution, among other things — but the innovative thing is that he wants to harness the power of his follower’s social media accounts in order to reach more people.
Gore is asking his supporters to lend him their accounts — the Project will be posting status updates in their name, trying to reach many more people as well as start a dialogue on the subject.

tags: Facebook Climate Change Activism Social Media Reality
Fair Taxes? Depends What You Mean by ‘Fair’ - New York Times

Fairness is not an economic concept. If you want to talk fairness, you have to leave the department of economics and head over to philosophy.

tags: Tax Economics Philosophy
Religion: Japan's Crypto-Christians - TIME

Are the Kakure Christians? Jesuit Diego Yuuki calls their faith "a melange of Buddhism, Shintoism, animism and what Kakure think is Catholicism. They have no Bible. The meaning of the Trinity has been lost on them." Nonetheless, the church would like to bring its long-sundered sons and daughters home again. During the first papal visit to Japan last February, John Paul II pointedly embraced four Kakure who turned out to greet him and held a meeting with a number of the sect's chief priests. But one of those who greeted the Pope, Dominico Hayakichi Masuyama, 73, says they had come only to "register the fact that we exist. We have no interest in joining his church." After all, he adds solemnly, "we, and nobody else, are true Christians."

tags: Religion Christianity Buddhism
Religion: Japan's Crypto-Christians - TIME

In 1865, when Japan permitted a Catholic church to open in Nagasaki to serve Western visitors, the Kakure, then numbering around 30,000 in the region, suddenly came out of hiding. But the missionaries took a hard line with the newfound faithful. "Many were bewildered when they were told to throw away everything connected with their ancestral way," explains Father Shigeshi Oyama, who runs the tiny Roman Catholic parish now on Ikitsuki. Only half of the underground Christians decided to reunite with Rome. The others persisted in their insular worship.

tags: Religion Christianity Buddhism
mrbrown: L'infantile terrible of Singapore: Dumbass Remark of the Week: "You need, basically, two people just to maintain one site"

This is the first time I am hearing this. I don't know anybody who uses the internet that expects answers within 24 hours. If they do, they need to get a life.

And respondents go online "sometime after dinner"? Where did that data come from? People go online ALL THE TIME, on their computers, on their smartphones… Why must be after dinner? Research has shown that people can only surf after their hunger is satisfied?

And no, you don't need two people to maintain one site, you need a whole bloody team. But not for the reasons stated.

And once again, you don't call people who use the phone, "Phonetizens". Or people who write letters to the papers, "Lettertizens". The Net is a medium, not a country. People who use the Net are People, not Netizens. Good grief.

tags: Internet Academia Academic Research New Media
Shark fin soup faces extinction in California - CNN.com

Critics of the bill say it unfairly singles out the Chinese community. The bill only restricts the sale of shark fins, which are used almost exclusively in Chinese cuisine. The bill does not apply to other shark products like oil or meat.

tags: Sharks Animal Finning United States Discrimination

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Gender Studies Bookmark 09/09/2011

2011-09-09T08:33:00.003+08:00

Let's get this straight. Gender studies isn't about 'women good, men bad' | Jonathan Dean | Comment is free | The Guardian
A former student at the LSE Gender Institute, Martin claims he had the misfortune of being subject to a torrent of anti-male discrimination during his (very brief) time there, and has cited the Gender Equality Duty to support his case. The irony of attacking feminists by invoking a piece of legislation whose existence is largely down to the energy and commitment of feminist campaigners scarcely needs pointing out.

Martin alleges that the course material he studied during his six weeks at the LSE was systematically anti-male overlooked men's issues, and ignored any research that contested a "women good, men bad" line of reasoning. Furthermore, Martin claims that the Gender Institute drummed into the students, with quasi-religious fervour, a simplistic view of women as victims and men as perpetrators. If his experience is anything to go by, any self-respecting male should steer well clear of such institutionalised misandry.
Tags: Gender Studies, Gender Equality, Discrimination

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/09/2011

2011-09-09T08:33:00.001+08:00

Information’s triumph? Three ways TechCrunch challenges ideas of journalism » Nieman Journalism Lab

tags: Journalism Objectivity
Simplified model in recent climate paper doesn't even conserve energy

We've discussed how a recent paper by a prominent climate contrarian had set off an exaggerated response in some corners of the popular press that ultimately contributed to the resignation of the editor of the journal that published it. But the paper remained part of the scientific literature, which, as we commented at the time, "Should induce his critics to get more thorough criticisms formally published." Apparently one was already in the works, and it was released over the weekend by Geophysical Research Letters. The paper focuses on the simplified model used in an attempt to indicate that clouds could force the climate, and shows that the model may not even be able to reproduce the conservation of energy.

tags: Climate Science Academic Research Academic Journal Publication Selection
Let's get this straight. Gender studies isn't about 'women good, men bad' | Jonathan Dean | Comment is free | The Guardian

A former student at the LSE Gender Institute, Martin claims he had the misfortune of being subject to a torrent of anti-male discrimination during his (very brief) time there, and has cited the Gender Equality Duty to support his case. The irony of attacking feminists by invoking a piece of legislation whose existence is largely down to the energy and commitment of feminist campaigners scarcely needs pointing out.

Martin alleges that the course material he studied during his six weeks at the LSE was systematically anti-male overlooked men's issues, and ignored any research that contested a "women good, men bad" line of reasoning. Furthermore, Martin claims that the Gender Institute drummed into the students, with quasi-religious fervour, a simplistic view of women as victims and men as perpetrators. If his experience is anything to go by, any self-respecting male should steer well clear of such institutionalised misandry.

tags: Gender Studies Gender Equality Discrimination

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/08/2011

2011-09-08T08:33:00.001+08:00

Cities begin planning for a very different future | Marketplace From American Public Media

tags: Climate Change Politics Policy Public Relations Communication
Freakonomics » The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. But It Will Be Tweeted

If the quantity of information available to citizens is sufficiently high, then the regime has a better chance of surviving. However, an increase in the reliability of information can reduce the regime’s chances. These two effects are always in tension: a regime benefits from an increase in information quantity if and only if an increase in information reliability reduces its chances. The model allows for two kinds of information revolutions. In the first, associated with radio and mass newspapers under the totalitarian regimes of the early twentieth century, an increase in information quantity coincides with a shift towards media institutions more accommodative of the regime and, in this sense, a decrease in information reliability. In this case, both effects help the regime. In the second kind, associated with diffuse technologies like modern social media, an increase in information quantity coincides with a shift towards sources of information less accommodative of the regime and an increase in information reliability. This makes the quantity and reliability effects work against each other.

tags: Information Revolution
Monica Osborne Reviews Rudolph Herzog's "Dead Funny: Humor In Hitler’s Germany" | The New Republic

Jokes about Hitler, Nazis, and concentration camps were pervasive before and during World War II: the least amusing era in history produced its own quantities of humor. Its jokes were told and heard by German citizens of all walks of life, which reveals an even more distressing piece of knowledge: Germans may not have been aware of every aspect of Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews and eliminate political dissenters, but they had an acute understanding of the diabolical nature of his vision, and instead of acting against it they sometimes laughed about it. Herzog’s new book uses Nazi-era German humor as a basis for exposing the ethical shortcomings not only of those directly involved in crimes against humanity, but also of those who remained silent or claimed ignorance. In many instances, Herzog suggests, even the most critical jokes told by average Germans “ultimately served to stabilize the system.”

tags: WWII Hitler Third Reich Jokes Philosophy
If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine

tags: Brain Cranium Evolution Biology Intelligence Science
If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine

tags: Brain Cranium Evolution Biology Science Intelligence
If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine

tags: Brain Cranium Evolution Science Biology Intelligence
‘Torchwood’ Gives Glimpse of Eternal Life - NYTimes.com

The real question posed by the “Torchwood” scenario is: what would happen to all our death-defying systems if there were no more death? The logical answer is that they would be superfluous. We would have no need for progress or art, faith or fame. Suddenly, we would have nothing to do, yet in the greatest of ironies, we would have endless eons in which to do it. Action would lose its purpose and time its value. This is the true awfulness of immortality.

tags: Mortality Life Religion Science Civilization Death
The problem with tolerance | Madeleine Bunting | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
WIll Lab-Grown Meat Revolutionize Global Food Production? | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

tags: Science Meat Vegetarianism Ethics
Epiphenom: Is The God Delusion more disgusting than the Koran?

Ever wondered why we get disgusted by things that taste bad and also by things that are morally outrageous? Well, it seems that they really are connected in a very deep way - moral disgust seems to have evolved as an extension of physical disgust.

And that means you can play a neat trick: you can measure moral disgust indirectly by looking to see how it affects our physical sense of disgust.

tags: Research Methodology Religion Morality

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/07/2011

2011-09-07T08:33:00.001+08:00

Recent College Graduates Wait for Their Real Careers to Begin - NYTimes.com

tags: Academia Education Capitalism Job

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 09/06/2011

2011-09-06T08:33:00.003+08:00

More to hiring staff than just eye candy | Career Resources | ST701 Jobs
Tags: Employment, Discrimination, Looks

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/06/2011

2011-09-06T08:33:00.001+08:00

More to hiring staff than just eye candy | Career Resources | ST701 Jobs

tags: Employment Discrimination Looks
Naturalism and Its Limits - NYTimes.com

Naturalism tries to condense the scientific spirit into a philosophical theory. But no theory can replace that spirit, for any theory can be applied in an unscientific spirit, as a polemical device to reinforce prejudice. Naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit.

tags: Naturalism Science Philosophy
Ian Bogost - Beyond the Elbow-Patched Playground

tags: Digital Humanities Academia
Ian Bogost - Beyond the Elbow-Patched Playground

On the one hand, humanists want to retain a place in the lower faculties, arguing that their work cannot be probed for predictable value. But then on the other hand, humanists constantly claim to have measurable value propositions. And worse yet, those value propositions are always so vague as to be essentially meaningless: "critical thinking," "lifelong learning," "communication," "cultural perspectives," and so forth. Palumbo-Liu's "solace and aid" is a reasonable candidate for this list as well.

tags: Humanities Academia
Lee Kuan Yew denies venom « Yawning Bread on Wordpress

Who has the final word on what is Islam? Why should the state get involved? If the state shouldn’t get involved in defining Islam and taking sides in the pro- and anti- Ahmadiyah interpretations, why should our state get involved in taking sides on the question of radical jihadist Islam?

tags: Religion Extremism Islam Singapore Postmodernism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 09/05/2011

2011-09-05T08:33:00.003+08:00

Mr ‘Thing’: Pejic and his Prophet | marksimpson.com
Pejic, who sometimes models women’s fashion, sometimes men’s (though guess which gets more attention), is the chap memorably described by US FHM in a widely-reported hissy fit as a ‘thing’ that prompts them to ‘pass the sick bucket’ — despite his popularity with their own readers. And more recently as a ‘creature’ and ‘a fake’ and symbol of ‘abject misogyny’ by outraged female columnists citing him as the ‘final proof’ that they were right all along, that high fashion is run by an evil gay paedo conspiracy against women that wants to do away with ladies altogether and replace them with ‘young boys’.

Though perhaps the outraged feminists of both left and right should welcome Pejic with garlands since he means that women can finally opt out of the fatal gay embrace of high fashion altogether and leave the gays and their Ganymedes to it….

Whatever Pejic does or doesn’t symbolise about the world of high fashion it seems to me that he and the scandale surrounding him definitely, dramatically personifies something that is going on in the wider culture that feminists, along with everyone else, are often far less keen to notice
Tags: Gender, Androgyny, Gender Stereotype, Fashion

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/05/2011

2011-09-05T08:33:00.001+08:00

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Faith-Based Education and a Return to Shop Class

In 2008 Dick Nelson and Dan Sarewitz had a commentary in Nature (here in PDF) that eloquently summarized why it is that we should not expect technology in the classroom to reault in better educational outcomes as they suggest we should in the case of a tehcnology like vaccines

tags: Technology Education ICT
Smithsonian's Crowdsourced "The Art Of Video Games" Exhibition Comes Under Fire | The Creators Project

tags: Crowd-Sourcing Video Games Crowd Curation Art
Mr ‘Thing’: Pejic and his Prophet | marksimpson.com

Pejic, who sometimes models women’s fashion, sometimes men’s (though guess which gets more attention), is the chap memorably described by US FHM in a widely-reported hissy fit as a ‘thing’ that prompts them to ‘pass the sick bucket’ — despite his popularity with their own readers. And more recently as a ‘creature’ and ‘a fake’ and symbol of ‘abject misogyny’ by outraged female columnists citing him as the ‘final proof’ that they were right all along, that high fashion is run by an evil gay paedo conspiracy against women that wants to do away with ladies altogether and replace them with ‘young boys’.

Though perhaps the outraged feminists of both left and right should welcome Pejic with garlands since he means that women can finally opt out of the fatal gay embrace of high fashion altogether and leave the gays and their Ganymedes to it….

Whatever Pejic does or doesn’t symbolise about the world of high fashion it seems to me that he and the scandale surrounding him definitely, dramatically personifies something that is going on in the wider culture that feminists, along with everyone else, are often far less keen to notice

tags: Gender Androgyny Gender Stereotype Fashion

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/04/2011

2011-09-04T08:33:00.001+08:00

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Retraction, Remote Sensing and Due Process

The blogosphere is all atwitter over the news that the editor of the journal Remote Sensing has resigned to atone for what he believes to be a failure of his oversight of the journal by allowing what he asserts is a fatally flawed paper by climate skeptics to pass peer review and to be published.

The editor explains in an editorial published today that the paper in question "is most likely problematic" with respect to "fundamental methodological errors" and "false claims" and consequently "should therefore not have been published."

tags: Academic Journal Publication Selection Climate Science
Greg Mankiw's Blog: Theory versus Practice

tags: Theory Practices

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/02/2011

2011-09-02T08:33:00.001+08:00

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 09/01/2011

2011-09-01T08:33:00.001+08:00

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Comment of the Day: The Wrong Side of History, Science and Policy

Nowadays, climate is not as much a scientific or policy issue, as it is a cultural phenomenon (read your Mike Hulme). For years I have advised my students that there is little point in doing a policy analysis of the abortion issue, as the topic was entirely political. Perhaps one day I'll be saying the same about climate.

tags: Climate Science Politics
Balderdash: On terms perceived as offensive

The reality about "offensive language" is that there's a euphemism treadmill. The PC terms we come up with today will be considered offensive tomorrow. "Idiot" and "retarded" used to be medical terms.

How long will the list of words and terms that we should avoid using be, if everything that could potentially offend someone is avoided?

tags: Racism Discrimination Language
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Not Anti-Science, Just Utterly Uninformed

tags: Climate Science Disaster Politics
Why one death is more moving than a million

tags: Statistics Death Psychology
Statistical Numbing: Why Millions Can Die and We Don’t Care | Psychology Today

Mother Theresa said "If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." Josef Stalin said "One death is a tragedy. One million is a statistic." Numerous experiments have helped verify the truth behind what both the saint and the mass murderer knew intuitively, that we relate more closely to what happens to one person than to what happens to large numbers of people.

tags: Statistics Death Psychology
Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a "keep out" sign on the gates.

You might resent Murdoch's paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That'll be $31.50.

tags: Academic Journal Academic Research Publication Capitalism Knowledge

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/31/2011

2011-08-31T08:33:00.001+08:00

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Certain Ignornace versus Uncertain Uncertainty

The flood disaster arguably was exacerbated by poor decision making under flawed decision processes -- decision makers chose the certainty of ignorance over the uncertain nature of uncertainty judgments. Indeed, as van den Honert describes the rainfall forecasts were inaccurate, but this did not mean that they would have been without value.

Ultimately, the only way that Queensland gets out of this situation will be to build sufficient water retention capacity to simultaneously meet the conflicting objectives of flood mitigation and water storage as a drought buffer. In other words, there is a technological fix here that can dramatically reduce uncertainties -- but such a strategy will cost money.
POSTED BY ROGER PIELKE, JR. AT 8/30/2011 06:55:00 AM

tags: Uncertainty Ignorance Rain Climate Science
National University Rankings 2011 | Washington Monthly

Below are the Washington Monthly's 2011 national universities rankings. We rate schools based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories: Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country). For an explanation of each category, click here. For more information about the overall goals of the rankings, click here. To learn more about our methodology, click here.

tags: University Academia Mobility Social

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Bookmarks 08/29/2011

2011-08-29T08:33:00.001+08:00

Singapore, Curry Day and scapegoating | Fusion Despatches

Singaporean Chinese were discriminating against Indians and complaining about the smell of their food long before one million mainlanders flooded the country

tags: Singapore Racism Stereotype Discrimination Xenophobia
Balderdash: Religious Tolerance in Singapore

religious tolerance in Singapore amounts to religious ignorance, and this is just perpetuated by the moral panic imposed from above and replicated by most - which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In other words, if you keep telling people that race and religion are sensitive issues in Singapore, they become even more sensitive issues.

Perhaps this is a reminder that the sort of religious extremists who want to blow things up are not the only sort we should be concerned about.

tags: Religion Singapore
FQXi Community

tags: Time Physics
The crystallising Universe | plus.maths.org

many physicists believe that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously in a block Universe and our perception of time is just an illusion. Sure, you can watch one scene in your movie morph into the next, but they are all pre-recorded on that little DVD. As for free will — well, that went out with Beta tapes.
But now, George Ellis at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, is challenging that notion and trying to restore the idea that "now" is special and that free will exists with his model of a crystallising block Universe. "Free will is such a controversial thing," says Ellis, yet, "it is indeed one of the underlying things which motivated me."

tags: Time Physics Free Will Model Reality
What is time? | plus.maths.org

tags: Time Physics
Rationally Speaking: On ethics, part V: Contractarianism

tags: Ethics Contractarianism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 08/28/2011

2011-08-28T08:34:00.001+08:00

The Privilege Delusion « Quiet Riot Girl
“Having privilege isn’t something you can usually change, but that’s okay, because it’s not something you should be ashamed of, or feel bad about. Being told you have privilege, or that you’re privileged, isn’t an insult. It’s a reminder! The key to privilege isn’t worrying about having it, or trying to deny it, or apologize for it, or get rid of it. It’s just paying attention to it, and knowing what it means for you and the people around you. Having privilege is like having big feet. No one hates you for having big feet! They just want you to remember to be careful where you walk.”
Tags: Privilege, Gender Equality, Gender Stereotype, Discrimination
What Do Men Want? | marksimpson.com
I read with interest this YouGov survey published this week which provides some confirming data on the fashionability of face fuzz and its accessorization by males today: ‘stubble’ is reportedly the most popular form of facial hair today – especially with 18-24 year olds (51% say they have facial hair and 80% of those describe it as ‘stubble’). Stubble of course being the most easily adopted and discarded form of facial hair.

But the survey – called ‘Let’s Face It’ — is much less interesting for what it reports than for what it doesn’t. What it’s not facing. At all. The assumptions behind it and the way that compulsory heterosexuality is used to deprive all men of a voice, even about their own bodies.
Tags: Gender Stereotype, Gender Equality, Heterosexuality, Sexism, Objectification
Let’s face it | YouGov
Tags: Gender Stereotype, Gender Equality, Heterosexuality, Objectification, Sexism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/28/2011

2011-08-28T08:33:00.001+08:00

Let’s face it | YouGov

Are you male and looking for a date? It might be a good idea to shave beforehand, our survey suggests, as we discover that two thirds of British women prefer the appearance of a man without a beard, compared to less than one in ten who like the more hirsute type.
Perhaps relatedly, our poll also discovered that nearly two thirds of men do not currently have facial hair, leaving just over a third of men a little on the hairy side. However, of those who do have facial hair, more than half describe it as stubble, while just three in ten hairy men have a full beard and moustache.

tags: Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Heterosexuality Objectification Sexism
What Do Men Want? | marksimpson.com

I read with interest this YouGov survey published this week which provides some confirming data on the fashionability of face fuzz and its accessorization by males today: ‘stubble’ is reportedly the most popular form of facial hair today – especially with 18-24 year olds (51% say they have facial hair and 80% of those describe it as ‘stubble’). Stubble of course being the most easily adopted and discarded form of facial hair.

But the survey – called ‘Let’s Face It’ — is much less interesting for what it reports than for what it doesn’t. What it’s not facing. At all. The assumptions behind it and the way that compulsory heterosexuality is used to deprive all men of a voice, even about their own bodies.

tags: Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Heterosexuality Sexism Objectification
The Privilege Delusion « Quiet Riot Girl

“Having privilege isn’t something you can usually change, but that’s okay, because it’s not something you should be ashamed of, or feel bad about. Being told you have privilege, or that you’re privileged, isn’t an insult. It’s a reminder! The key to privilege isn’t worrying about having it, or trying to deny it, or apologize for it, or get rid of it. It’s just paying attention to it, and knowing what it means for you and the people around you. Having privilege is like having big feet. No one hates you for having big feet! They just want you to remember to be careful where you walk.”

tags: Privilege Gender Equality Gender Stereotype Discrimination

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/26/2011

2011-08-26T08:32:00.001+08:00

Philosophy Talk: The Blog: Health Care – is it a right or a privilege

As I understand Obamacare, which hadn’t yet passed when we recorded this program, the basic answer the U.S. is going to provide about rights is that things stay unchanged. You have a right to get healthcare, in that you don’t have to pay for it up front, but you still have to pay for it, or at least be in debt for what you get.

The big new change is that it's not going to be a right but a duty; everyone has to have health insurance. So it seems to be that we have a right to healthcare without paying cash out of hand, but we have a duty to be able to pay for it, and this means having insurance.

But that is an important change, that affects our rights, namely our right to have health insurance. You can’t have a duty to buy insurance, unless you can buy insurance. And right now, we don’t all have that right. Some people can’t buy insurance at all, and others can’t buy decent insurance at a reasonable price. So if the plan is to make sense, the duty to have insurance will have to be paired with affordable, available insurance for everyone.

So our new right won’t be to healthcare, but to affordable insurance. At least, that’s the outcome some people are hoping for.

tags: Health Care Rights Duty
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Globalization Schmobalization

A new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco comes to the counter-intuitive conclusion that,
Although globalization is widely recognized these days, the U.S. economy actually remains relatively closed.

tags: Globalization Economy
Associated Press

MADRID (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI has denounced the profit-at-all-cost mentality that he says is behind Europe's current economic crisis, and says morals and ethics must play a greater role in formulating economic policy in the future.
Benedict made the comments Thursday as he traveled to Madrid for the Catholic Church's World Youth Day, a weeklong Catholic event taking place against the backdrop of the European debt crisis, which has hit Spain hard.
The pope said, "Man must be at the center of the economy and the economy must not be measured only by the maximization of profit but according to the common good."

tags: Economy Economics Religion
Social Media Findings Reveal Most Digital Savvy Presidential Candidate and Singaporean Sentiments

tags: Social Media Election Singapore
Balderdash: The limits of authority

tags: Authority Limits
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: A Democracy Working

The Economist has a great letter this week from Marc Ginzberg of Rye, NY:
SIR – The process in Congress that led to the deal to raise America’s debt ceiling was not “ludicrously irresponsible” (“Time for a double dip?”, August 6th). Extreme views were passionately expressed, policy positions maintained and pressure from party leaders withstood. But there were no shootings, no riots, no bribery, not even an appeal to the Supreme Court.

Right-wingers opposed to the deal either believed in the correctness of their position or they reflected the ideas of their constituents and want to be re-elected; what is wrong with that? If I had been a dictator, I would have imposed a very different conclusion on the debt-ceiling fracas; so, it seems, would you. But although you may regret the terms that the compromise reached, do not regret the process.
Well said!

tags: Democracy Economy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 08/25/2011

2011-08-25T08:33:00.003+08:00

Bisexual Men Exist! But Does Scientific Sex Research? | marksimpson.com
Tags: Sexuality

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/25/2011

2011-08-25T08:33:00.001+08:00

Why Finland’s Schools Are Among The Best in the World | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

Finland! It’s the land Americans think of when they think of … the country that’s located next to Sweden. But did you know it has one the best education systems in the world? When its students took the standardized Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2009, they scored second in science, third in reading and sixth in math when compared to more than a half million students from around the world. How did the Finns get so smart?

tags: Education
No Surprise for Bisexual Men - Report Indicates They Exist - NYTimes.com

In an unusual scientific about-face, researchers at Northwestern University have found evidence that at least some men who identify themselves as bisexual are, in fact, sexually aroused by both women and men.

tags: Sexuality
Bisexual Men Exist! But Does Scientific Sex Research? | marksimpson.com

‘scientific’ findings very kindly allow men who like cock and pussy to actually exist.

tags: Sexuality

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/23/2011

2011-08-23T08:33:00.001+08:00

Crowd-Sourcing Global Warming Solutions with MIT’s Climate CoLab | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

tags: Climate Science Crowd-Sourcing
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Ink Blots, Ambiguity and Outcomes in the Real World

A fundamental problem with climate science in the public realm, as conventionally practiced by the IPCC, is the essential ink blot nature of its presentation. By "ink blot" I mean that there is literally nothing that could occur in the real world that would allow those who are skeptical of scientific claims to revise their views due to unfolding experience. That is to say, anything that occurs with respect to the climate on planet earth is "consistent with" projections made by the climate science community. Some scientists go further and argue that climate science cannot be shown to be incorrect based on experience because its projections are probabilistic. The result is that people tend to see in climate science other things than those that can be resolved empirically -- which fosters politicization and tribal behavior.

The ink blot nature of climate science would be a non-issue if it were a field like philosophy or cosmology in which people were debating non-empirical claims for academic interests. But climate science -- or at least a very visible part of that field -- has set forth on an evangelistic path in trying to convince the unconvinced of their views among politicians and the general public.

tags: Climate Science Uncertainty Science Economics Presentation
nanopolitan: Academic Man

Delhi University has a digital archive of its off-copyright books. Browsing through it, I came across Academic Man: A Study in the Sociology of a Profession (1942) by Logan Wilson. Here's Wilson about the need for such a book-length study:

... [O]n the basis of present sociological literature the future historian would have less difficulty in ascertaining the social behavior of the railroader, or the professional thief than he would have that of contemporary university professor.

A quick search tells me that this book is a classic in sociology, and that Wilson is one of the people credited with coining the phrase "Publish or Perish."

tags: Sociology Academic Academia
DSpace@University of Delhi: Academic man: a study in the sociology of a profession

tags: Sociology Academic Academia
Rationally Speaking: On ethics, part IV: Virtue ethics

Anscombe and other modern virtue ethicists (principally Bernard Williams and Alasdair MacIntyre), point out that one of the major consequences of shifting the question in ethics is that one is no longer forced to seek rigid, universal answers to “what’s the right thing to do?” but can instead appreciate the variety of ethical dilemmas and approach them from a more flexible perspective. Another way to put the difference is that while standard modern ethics is about laws (duties, rights), virtue ethics is about an individual’s character. If the individual has managed to develop a good character she will also tend to do the right thing.

tags: Ethics Virtue Ethics Philosophy
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: More Fun With Uncertainty Guidance

In its AR4 report the IPCC says:
The uncertainty guidance provided for the Fourth Assessment Report draws, for the first time, a careful distinction between levels of confidence in scientific understanding and the likelihoods of specific results. This allows authors to express high confidence that an event is extremely unlikely (e.g., rolling a dice twice and getting a six both times), as well as high confidence that an event is about as likely as not (e.g., a tossed coin coming up heads). Confidence and likelihood as used here are distinct concepts but are often linked in practice.
Here are some specific definitions to help you answer some questions.

A. "high confidence" means "about 8 out of 10 chance of being correct".
B. "extremely unlikely" means "less than 5% probability" of the event or outcome
C. "as likely as not" means "33 to 66% probability" of the event or outcome

So here are your questions:

1. If the IPCC says of a die that it has -- "high confidence that an event is extremely unlikely (e.g., rolling a dice twice and getting a six both times)" -- how should a decision maker interpret this statement in terms of the probability of two sixes being rolled on the next two rolls of the die?

2. If the IPCC says of a die that it has -- "high confidence that an event is about as likely as not (e.g., a tossed coin coming up heads)" -- how should a decision maker interpret this statement in terms of the probability of a head appearing on the next coin flip?

Please provide quantitative answers to 1 and 2, show your work.

tags: Uncertainty Confidence Probability

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/21/2011

2011-08-21T08:33:00.001+08:00

Epiphenom: If religion makes you happy, why are people turning away from it?

Religion doesn't necessarily lead to happiness. In countries where there are relatively few religious people, and in which living conditions are generally good, religion doesn't improve well being and religious people may actually be less happy.

And what makes people religious is not their direct experience, but rather the society that they live in.

tags: Religion Happiness Sociology
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Fun With Epistemic and Aleatory Uncertainties

tags: Odds Probability Chance Uncertainty
debating identity « The Mind Game

identity isn’t given to you on a piece of paper or by other people, it is found, formed and forged by the individual. (and when you realise that the answers don’t really matter, fuck it.)

tags: Identity
Secularism and Its Discontents : The New Yorker

the Virginia Woolf Question, after a passage in that most metaphysical of novels “To the Lighthouse,” when the painter Lily Briscoe is at her easel, mourning her late friend Mrs. Ramsay. Next to her sits the poet, Augustus Carmichael, and suddenly Lily imagines that she and Mr. Carmichael might stand up and demand “an explanation” of life:

For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs. Ramsay!” she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face.

Why is life so short, why so inexplicable? These are the questions Lily wants answered. More precisely, these are the questions she needs to ask, ironically aware that an answer cannot be had if there is no one to demand it from. We may hope that “nothing should be hid” from us, but certain explanations can only ever be hidden. Just as Mrs. Ramsay has died, and cannot be shouted back to life, so God is dead, and cannot be reimplored into existence. And, as Terrence Malick’s oddly beautiful film “The Tree of Life” reminds us, the answers are still hidden even if we believe in God. Lily Briscoe’s “Why?” is not very different from Job’s “Why, Lord?”

tags: Secularism Life

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 08/18/2011

2011-08-18T08:33:00.003+08:00

The Secret Language Code: Scientific American
Tags: Linguistics, Gender Stereotype
All Man’s Land - Rakesh Mani - Project Syndicate
“What should be done when a woman uses her power over her own body to discriminate against female fetuses?”
Tags: Gender Equality, Infanticide, India, Culture, Capitalism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/18/2011

2011-08-18T08:33:00.001+08:00

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Obituary: John Marburger

THERE are two kinds of ignorance: the kind removable by education, and the other kind, which is defined by the limits of current knowledge. It seems to me that in extolling the virtues of higher education we have overemphasized the removable ignorance and encouraged the notion that more is knowable than is actually the case. This has mischievous consequences.

tags: Ignorance Knowledge Limit
Balderdash: Good Cultural Relativism vs Bad

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work. They stay aloft, and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don't*. If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummt into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right. Western science, acting on good evidence that the moon orbits the Earth a quarter of a million miles away, using Western-designed computers and rockets, has succeeded in placing people on its surface. Tribal science, believing that the moon is just above the treetops, will never touch it outside of dreams.

tags: Science Culture Relativism
Ethics, by Peter Singer

tags: Ethics
How Randomness Rules Our World and Why We Cannot See It: Scientific American

Imagine that you are a contestant on the classic television game show Let’s Make a Deal. Behind one of three doors is a brand-new automobile. Behind the other two are goats. You choose door number one. Host Monty Hall, who knows what is behind all three doors, shows you that a goat is behind number two, then inquires: Would you like to keep the door you chose or switch? Our folk numeracy—our natural tendency to think anecdotally and to focus on small-number runs—tells us that it is 50–50, so it doesn’t matter, right?

Wrong. You had a one in three chance to start, but now that Monty has shown you one of the losing doors, you have a two-thirds chance of winning by switching. Here is why. There are three possible three-doors configurations: (1) good, bad, bad; (2) bad, good, bad; (3) bad, bad, good. In (1) you lose by switching, but in (2) and (3) you can win by switching. If your folk numeracy is still overriding your rational brain, let’s say that there are 10 doors: you choose door number one, and Monty shows you door numbers two through nine, all goats. Now do you switch? Of course, because your chances of winning increase from one in 10 to nine in 10. This type of counterintuitive problem drives people to innumeracy, including mathematicians and statisticians, who famously upbraided Marilyn vos Savant when she first presented this puzzle in her Parade magazine column in 1990.

tags: Probability Statistics
The Secret Language Code: Scientific American

To me, the use of nouns -- especially concrete nouns -- reflects people’s attempts to categorize and name objects, events, and ideas in their worlds. The use of verbs and pronouns typically occur when people tell stories. Universities clearly reward categorizers rather than story tellers. If true, can we train young students to categorize more? Alternatively, are we relying too much on categorization strategies in American education?

tags: Linguistics
The Secret Language Code: Scientific American

tags: Linguistics Gender Stereotype
The Secret Language Code: Scientific American
Any set of figures needs adjusting before it can be usefully reported | Ben Goldacre | Comment is free | The Guardian

I will now demonstrate, with a nerdy table illustration, how you correct for things such as social and demographic factors. You'll have to pay attention, because this is a tricky concept; but at the end, when the mystery is gone, you will see why reporting the unadjusted figures as the finding, especially in a headline, is silly and wrong.

tags: Statistics Headline Journalism Science Communication
In the immortal words of Tom Petty: “I won’t back down” | Science Sushi, Scientific American Blog Network
On Green Dread and Agricultural Technology - NYTimes.com

To summarize, a quarter century of careful assessment by risk-averse Europe has found no evidence of harm to the environment or health from genetically modified crops, yet environmental activists continue their anti-technology raids and rants.

It’s clear to me that genetics, intensified agriculture, organic farming, crop mixing, improved farmer training, precision fertilization and watering, improved food preservation and eating less wastefully and thoughtlessly will all play a role in coming decades — each in its place.

This is the hybrid approach taken by Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund and Pamela Ronald, a plant geneticist, and her husband Raoul W. Adamchak, an organic farmer.

If you start scratching options off that list — as with choices in energy — just keep track of the overall challenge.

Give that feelings trump facts, I know this argument won’t sway many people. I just hope it initiates some self reflection.

tags: Organic Food Food Farming Science Naturalistic Fallacy Technology
Mythbusting 101: Organic Farming > Conventional Agriculture | Science Sushi, Scientific American Blog Network

Here’s the thing: there are a lot of myths out there about organic foods, and a lot of propaganda supporting methods that are rarely understood. It’s like your mother used to say: just because everyone is jumping off a bridge doesn’t mean you should do it, too. Now, before I get yelled at too much, let me state unequivocally that I’m not saying organic farming is bad – far from it. There are some definite upsides and benefits that come from many organic farming methods. For example, the efforts of organic farmers to move away from monocultures, where crops are farmed in single-species plots, are fantastic; crop rotations and mixed planting are much better for the soil and environment. My goal in this post isn’t to bash organic farms, instead, it’s to bust the worst of the myths that surround them so that everyone can judge organic farming based on facts. In particular, there are four myths thrown around like they’re real that just drive me crazy.

tags: Organic Food Food Farming Science Naturalistic Fallacy
Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve : NPR

some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: "That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all."

tags: Religion Science Christianity
All Man’s Land - Rakesh Mani - Project Syndicate

“What should be done when a woman uses her power over her own body to discriminate against female fetuses?”

tags: Gender Equality Infanticide India Culture Capitalism
Rationally Speaking: On ethics, part III: Deontology

tags: Ethics Deontology
Epiphenom: Religious differences and murder

tags: Religion Murder Death Society Linguistics Ethnicity

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 08/16/2011

2011-08-16T08:33:00.003+08:00

Jonathan Kay: Take it from me — ‘gender-free’ parenting doesn’t work | Full Comment | National Post
As any (normal) parent can attest, such vignettes are entirely typical of parties featuring young boys and girls — who generally are so different in their behavior as almost to compose different species. Stocker is entirely wrong: There is no other single datum of information about a young child that will tell you more about his or her temperament, interests, energy level and maturity level than his or her sex.

Nor does it hold water to say that such differences are “socially constructed.” In my own way, I was even more socially progressive than the Footloose Family — dragging my two daughters out on to tennis and squash courts when they were just three years old, and aggressively discouraging them from “princess parties” and the like. My motives were purely selfish: I wanted my daughters to become racquet addicts, like me, so I could combine my sporting and family loves in the same weekend activities. The project was a total failure: On court, Alexa and Daniela would discard their racquets, and squat down over the balls, pretending they were “mama chickens, laying eggs.” Soccer was also a disaster: Alexa, in particular, just wandered around the field, picking clover and occasionally talking to other girls, most of whom looked equally bored. The prospect of actually touching the ball terrified her.
Tags: Gender Stereotype, Gender Equality, Parenting
Little girl found - FT.com
But as my daughters grow up I become more aware that vague generalisations about the one-child policy are not the same as concrete facts about where they were born, and when, and to whom – and the real reasons why their parents could not keep them. I was living in the US when I adopted, and that is where my daughters spent the first few years of their lives. Soon after we moved to China three years ago, we returned to the hometown orphanage of my oldest girl for the first time. She was eight then, and not long after our visit she challenged my version of her abandonment myth: “She could have paid the fine,” she said to me one night. “Who could have paid what fine?” I replied, dissembling: I knew she meant that her mother could have chosen to pay the stiff penalty (sometimes as much as a year’s income) imposed on those who break family-planning rules.
She wanted me to stop making her abandonment story into a fairy tale about the good parent and the evil one-child policy: maybe her mother was a businesswoman who was just too busy to have a baby. Maybe she could have paid the fine.
Tags: China, One-Child Policy, Policy, Gender Stereotype, Gender Equality

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/16/2011

2011-08-16T08:33:00.001+08:00

Opinion - The Globe and Mail

tags: Benevolence Welfare Ethics
If you're strapped for cash at a Starbucks, use Jonathan's card – Tech Products & Geek News | Geek.com

tags: Social Media Starbucks
There Is Such A Thing As A Free Coffee | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

Programmer Jonathan Stark, vice president of Mobiquity, has begun a truly cool experiment: sharing his Starbucks card with the world. While researching ways one can pay-by-mobile, Stark took an interesting perspective on Starbucks’ system. He realized there was (at the time) no app for Android users, so he simply took a picture of his card and posted it online. He loaded it with $30 and then encouraged others to use it — and reload it, if they see fit. Not surprisingly, people took him up on it.
Since those $30, the card has seen over $9,000 worth of anonymous donations. Stark says that “every time the balance gets really high, it brings out the worst in people: Someone goes down to Starbucks and makes a huge purchase. I don’t know if they are buying coffee beans or mugs, or transferring money to their own card or what. But as long as the balance stays low, say $20 to $30, it seems like it manages itself. I haven’t put any money on it in a while. All the money going through the card right now is the kindness of strangers.”

tags: Social Media Starbucks
50 Famous Scientists & Academics Speak About God: Part II | Open Culture

tags: Science Religion Academic
50 Famous Academics & Scientists Talk About God | Open Culture

tags: Science Religion Academic
Jonathan Kay: Take it from me — ‘gender-free’ parenting doesn’t work | Full Comment | National Post

As any (normal) parent can attest, such vignettes are entirely typical of parties featuring young boys and girls — who generally are so different in their behavior as almost to compose different species. Stocker is entirely wrong: There is no other single datum of information about a young child that will tell you more about his or her temperament, interests, energy level and maturity level than his or her sex.

Nor does it hold water to say that such differences are “socially constructed.” In my own way, I was even more socially progressive than the Footloose Family — dragging my two daughters out on to tennis and squash courts when they were just three years old, and aggressively discouraging them from “princess parties” and the like. My motives were purely selfish: I wanted my daughters to become racquet addicts, like me, so I could combine my sporting and family loves in the same weekend activities. The project was a total failure: On court, Alexa and Daniela would discard their racquets, and squat down over the balls, pretending they were “mama chickens, laying eggs.” Soccer was also a disaster: Alexa, in particular, just wandered around the field, picking clover and occasionally talking to other girls, most of whom looked equally bored. The prospect of actually touching the ball terrified her.

tags: Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Parenting
How youth-led revolts shook elites around the world | World news | The Guardian

tags: Revolution Youth Activism
Little girl found - FT.com

But as my daughters grow up I become more aware that vague generalisations about the one-child policy are not the same as concrete facts about where they were born, and when, and to whom – and the real reasons why their parents could not keep them. I was living in the US when I adopted, and that is where my daughters spent the first few years of their lives. Soon after we moved to China three years ago, we returned to the hometown orphanage of my oldest girl for the first time. She was eight then, and not long after our visit she challenged my version of her abandonment myth: “She could have paid the fine,” she said to me one night. “Who could have paid what fine?” I replied, dissembling: I knew she meant that her mother could have chosen to pay the stiff penalty (sometimes as much as a year’s income) imposed on those who break family-planning rules.
She wanted me to stop making her abandonment story into a fairy tale about the good parent and the evil one-child policy: maybe her mother was a businesswoman who was just too busy to have a baby. Maybe she could have paid the fine.

tags: China One-Child Policy Policy Gender Stereotype Gender Equality
Skepticblog » MS and the Promise of The Genome Project

By all accounts the HGP was a huge success. But 8 years after the completion of the first human genome map there is the vague sense in the public that the promise has not been fulfilled. The public was promised that the HGP would allow us to identify genes associated with diseases, and then craft cures based upon that knowledge. So where are all the genetic cures we were promised?

tags: Gnome Science Media Communication
journalism.sg » PM's National Day Rally calls for more rational online spaces

tags: New Media Internet Politics Singapore

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/14/2011

2011-08-14T08:34:00.001+08:00

Skepticblog » Defending the Null Hypothesis

Null hypothesis papers are also much less likely to be submitted for publication in the first place. This results in what we call the file drawer effect. Most research, which tends to have non-startling results, gets filed away; while the small number of results that show unexpected result

tags: Hypothesis Null Science Falsifiability Publication Selection
nanopolitan: Misconduct in India and the West: A Key Difference

Richard Steen's paper, Retractions in the scientiﬁc literature: do authors deliberately commit research fraud?, and discussions of some of its controversial findings were the ones that motivated me to take a detailed look at retractions of papers by Indian authors. Here's one of Steen's findings:

Retracted papers are more likely to appear in journals with a high impact factor (IF), are more likely to involve certain ‘repeat offender’ authors and are more likely to involve authors from the USA. [Bold emphasis added by me]

Just the other day, Retraction Watch linked to a study which looked at retractions by a bunch of journals spanning a wide range of impact factors, and found "a surprisingly robust correlation between the journal retraction index and its impact factor."

tags: Publication Academic Journal Academic Research Capitalism
At the Wild Rice forum « Yawning Bread on Wordpress

tags: Singapore Politics Economy Policy
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Surging Retractions in Scientific Publishing

[T]here were just 22 retraction notices that appeared in journals 10 years ago, but 139 were published in 2006 and by last year, the number reached 339. Through July of this year, there were a total 210 retractions, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science, which maintains an index of 11,600 peer-reviewed journals.
Meanwhile, retractions related to fraud rose more than sevenfold between 2004 and 2009, exceeding a twofold rise traced to mistakes, according to an analysis published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. After studying 742 papers that were withdrawn from 2000 to 2010, the analysis found that 73.5 percent were retracted simply for error, but 26.6 percent were retracted for fraud. Ominously, 31.8 percent of retracted papers were not noted as retracted (read the abstract).

The conclusion? Either there is more fraud or more policing? Ivan Oransky, the executive editor of Reuters Health and a co-founder of the Retraction Watch blog that began recently in response to the spate of retractions, writes us that the simple use of eyeballs and software that can detect plagiarism has made it possible to root out bad papers.

tags: Academic Journal Academic Research Publication Capitalism Academia Plagiarism
Two (+1) new uncertainty papers | Climate Etc.

tags: Climate Change Climate Science Probility Uncertainty
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: How Many Findings of the IPCC AR4 WG I are Incorrect? Answer: 28%

Jonassen, R. and R. Pielke, Jr., 2011. Improving conveyance of uncertainties in the findings of the IPCC, Climatic Change, 9 August, 0165-0009:1-9, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0185-7.

Abstract Authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) received guidance on reporting understanding, certainty and/or confidence in findings using a common language, to better communicate with decision makers. However, a review of the IPCC conducted by the InterAcademy Council (2010) found that “the guidance was not consistently followed in AR4, leading to unnecessary errors . . . the guidance was often applied to statements that are so vague they cannot be falsified. In these cases the impression was often left, quite incorrectly, that a substantive finding was being presented.” Our comprehensive and quantitative analysis of findings and associated uncertainty in the AR4 supports the IAC findings and suggests opportunities for improvement in future assessments.

tags: Climate Change Climate Science Policy Probility Prediction Projection IPCC
A 'Philosophy' of Plastic Surgery in Brazil - NYTimes.com

In 1988 a newly democratic Brazil ratified an ambitious constitutional right to health care. Public hospitals, though, are poorly funded and often beset by long lines, crumbling infrastructure and rude service. (My middle class Brazilian friends, who pay enviably low premiums for private health insurance, generally would not set foot in one.) A right to beauty thus seems to value a rather frivolous concern in a country with more pressing problems — from tropical diseases, like dengue, to the diseases of civilization, like diabetes. Yet to an outsider trying to understand a new society, such a view had a whiff of condescension. I remembered the remark of a Carnival designer: “Only intellectuals like misery, the poor want luxury.” I wanted to try to understand what this medical practice meant to the people who practiced it and claimed they benefited from it.

After a long wait, I began new fieldwork among a “tribe” of Cariocas (residents of Rio) less familiar to me: socialites and their maids, divorced housewives, unemployed secretaries, aspiring celebrities, transvestite prostitutes and other patients who were making Brazil, as a national news magazine bragged, the “empire of the scalpel.”

tags: Beauty Plastic Surgery Philosophy Psychoanalysis
No Science, No Choice: Children’s Vulnerability to CAM and Pseudoscience « Alternative Medicine « Health « Skeptic North

First, there are plenty of practitioners and manufacturers of alternative medicine out there who market themselves to parents. There are also plenty of parents who are suspicious enough of conventional medicine that they will seek out alternatives. Too often, they seek out CAM in lieu of treatments known to work. Also too often, practitioners and parents will defend their choices insisting that they are the ones with the child’s best interest in mind, and that they have the right to make the choice anyway, evidence notwithstanding. As this is happening, children’s rights and needs are pushed aside.
Who advocates for the child when parents are bombarded by misinformation, are marketed to vigorously, and the agencies charged with protecting consumers are unable or unwilling to intervene? I don’t know, but I’d like to start the conversation. I will suggest that we all begin to pay closer attention to when the pseudoscience we’re dealing with affects children disproportionally. It’s not just about the science, it’s also, and more importantly perhaps, about the victims.

tags: Children Parenting Vaccine Skepticism Law
Balderdash: The Morality of Suicide

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/10/2011

2011-08-10T08:33:00.001+08:00

The Maze of Moral Relativism - NYTimes.com

Relativism about morality has come to play an increasingly important role in contemporary culture. To many thoughtful people, and especially to those who are unwilling to derive their morality from a religion, it appears unavoidable. Where would absolute facts about right and wrong come from, they reason, if there is no supreme being to decree them? We should reject moral absolutes, even as we keep our moral convictions, allowing that there can be right and wrong relative to this or that moral code, but no right and wrong per se. (See, for example, Stanley Fish’s 2001 op-ed, “Condemnation Without Absolutes.”)[1]

tags: Relativism Ethics Morality Paradigm
Trying to Live Forever - NYTimes.com

tags: Correlation Causation Life Information Overload Health Medicine Science
Studies of studies show that we get things wrong | Ben Goldacre | Comment is free | The Guardian
Rationally Speaking: On ethics, part II: Consequentialism
Rationally Speaking: On ethics, part I: Moral philosophy’s third way

tags: Ethics Absolutism Relativism Morality
Model for in vivo progression of tumors based on co-evolving cell population and vasculature : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Group

With countless biological details emerging from cancer experiments, there is a growing need for minimal mathematical models which simultaneously advance our understanding of single tumors and metastasis, provide patient-personalized predictions, whilst avoiding excessive hard-to-measure input parameters which complicate simulation, analysis and interpretation. Here we present a model built around a co-evolving resource network and cell population, yielding good agreement with primary tumors in a murine mammary cell line EMT6-HER2 model in BALB/c mice and with clinical metastasis data. Seeding data about the tumor and its vasculature from in vivo images, our model predicts corridors of future tumor growth behavior and intervention response. A scaling relation enables the estimation of a tumor's most likely evolution and pinpoints specific target sites to control growth. Our findings suggest that the clinically separate phenomena of individual tumor growth and metastasis can be viewed as mathematical copies of each other differentiated only by network structure.

tags: Data Model Mathematics Average Statistics Cancer Health Care Medicine
Mathematical Model Will Soon Allow Personalized and Accurate Cancert Treatment | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

One of the most difficult things about treating cancer is that each case is a very individual process; tumors recruit blood vessels in order to grow, yet also send out new vessels of their own. This harnessing of the body’s resources is what eventually allows a tumor to metastasize — be carried into other parts of the body where growth continues. On the other hand, sometimes tumors don’t grow at all. Predicting each patient’s unique response to cancer and its progression is a large part of the battle, as an accurate estimate is required to begin appropriate treatment. The field of Oncology is always seeing exciting developments, and this latest one is no different — its benefits touch future and existing cancer patients, alike. Knowing that hindsight is 20/20, it would be a lot easier if there was a “fast-forward button” with which doctors could view each unique case before it develops.
Physicist Sehyo Choe and colleagues at the University of Heidelberg, Germany have developed such a button in the form of a mathematical model. By inputting data about the tumor and its current location of blood vessels, the model allows doctors and researchers to see how the tumor will grow and move — if at all — giving them a very accurate helping hand when it comes to prompt and accurate treatment. Tested on mice, the model accurately predicted the progression of all cancer-stricken subjects, giving researchers that amazing “fast-forward” capability.

tags: Data Model Mathematics Average Statistics Cancer Health Care Medicine

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/09/2011

2011-08-09T08:33:00.001+08:00

Scientists Look for Signs of the Multiverse | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

Physicists at the University College London, the Imperial College London and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada are looking for evidence that our universe has collided with other parallel universes. Yep, you read that right. Believe it or not, the theory of parallel universes has a place in mainstream physics, and a lot of researchers have spent significant time and energy developing the math to support it.

tags: Universe Multiverse Physics Science Cosmology
Epiphenom: Do the rich use religion to keep the poor in their place?

many wealthy individuals, rather than simply allowing redistribution to be decided through the democratic process as such median-voter models assume, respond to higher levels of inequality by adopting religious beliefs and spreading them among their poorer fellow citizens. Religion then works to discourage interest in mere material well-being in favor of eternal spiritual rewards, preserving the privileges of the rich and allowing unequal conditions to continue.

tags: Income Inequality Religiosity
Epiphenom: Do the rich use religion to keep the poor in their place?

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/08/2011

2011-08-08T08:32:00.001+08:00

A guide to typography (Infographic) | check it out!

tags: Typography Infographic
Rationally Speaking: Why you should hold your beliefs at arm’s length

tags: Ideology Opinion Identity Communication Fragmentation
Balderdash: Don’t Follow Your Passion

If you want to run a successful café — and enjoy it — you need to love a lot more than coffee. You’ve also gotta get some kind of pleasure, even grim satisfaction, out of the daily grind.

tags: Passion Work Career
Singapore’s religious landscape from Census 2010 « Yawning Bread on Wordpress

Catholics and other Christians make up about 35 percent of the group living in private properties, the highest proportion out of four pie charts.

Yet, if you will recall, out of 24 new candidates introduced by the People’s Action Party prior to the May 2011 general election, twelve of them (50%) declared themselves to be Christian or Catholic. In other words, not only were they far from representative of Singaporeans as a whole, they weren’t even representative of the economic elite from which they were drawn. I think this remarkable skewing of political weightage is something we should bear in mind each time they open their mouths about Singaporeans’ “values” or the “tone of our society”.

tags: Religion Income Inequality Singapore

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Bookmarks 08/07/2011

2011-08-07T08:33:00.001+08:00

Balderdash: Links - 6th August 2011

tags: Evidence Religion Christianity

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 08/05/2011

2011-08-05T08:33:00.001+08:00

What Makes People Gay? - The Boston Globe
Tags: Sexuality, Homosexuality, Nature, Nurture, Conceptualization, Paradigm, Genetic
When the rapist is a she - Sexual abuse - Salon.com
the notion that a woman cannot rape a man has been around for quite a while and still persists. In the late '70s it was argued in the book "Sex, Crime and the Law" that "for obvious biological reasons, a woman cannot be guilty of raping a man ... certainly a woman cannot bring about sexual intercourse with a male against his will." What's certain is actually the opposite, that it's physiologically possible for a woman to impregnate herself by raping a man. (Also, note that rape doesn't have to include penis-in-vagina penetration.) Researchers have studied this very thing, in fact. A study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that "the belief that it is impossible for males to respond sexually when subjected to sexual molestation by women is contradicted" and it also corroborated "previous research indicating that male sex response can occur in a variety of emotional states, including anger and terror." Much as woman can experience lubrication and even achieve orgasm during rape, men's physiological response can act independent of consent or desire -- and in neither case does it make it any less rape-y.
Tags: Gender Stereotype, Rape
When the rapist is a she - Sexual abuse - Salon.com
Tags: Gender Stereotype, Rape

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/05/2011

2011-08-05T08:32:00.001+08:00

Times Higher Education - Looks good on paper...

tags: Academia Publication Academic Journal Education
Are Smart People Getting Smarter? | Wired Science | Wired.com

The Flynn effect has always been tinged with mystery. First popularized by the political scientist James Flynn, the effect refers to the widespread increase in IQ scores over time. Some measures of intelligence — such as performance on Raven’s Progressive Matrices in Des Moines and Scotland — have been increasing for at least 100 years. What’s most peculiar is how scores have increased:

1) Scores have increased the most on the problem-solving portion of intelligence tests.
2) Verbal intelligence has remained relatively flat, while non-verbal scores continue to rise.
3) Performance gains have occurred across all age groups.
4) The rise in scores exists primarily on those tests with content that does not appear to be easily learned.

tags: IQ Intelligence Test Measurement
What Makes People Gay? - The Boston Globe

tags: Sexuality Homosexuality Nature Nurture Conceptualization Paradigm Genetic
Epiphenom: Well that settles it: income inequality really does go hand in hand with religion

tags: Income Inequality Religion
In a College Study, Grading Curves Follow Partisan Lines - NYTimes.com

A new study by Talia Bar and Asaf Zussman looked at patterns in how Republican and Democratic college professors graded students. It is based on a data set of grades, courses and SAT scores of 17,062 students at an unnamed “elite university.” The researchers then determined the political affiliation of the professors assigning those grades, based on listings on local voter registration rolls (for the 511 professors who were registered with a party, anyway).

The authors were interested in whether Democrats professors gave out a more egalitarian distribution of grades, since liberals believe more strongly than conservatives “in the justification for governmental action to reduce inequality.”

And their hunch appears to be right.

tags: Grade Education Academia Politics
Balderdash: Links - 3rd August 2011

tags: Racism
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Wanted: Less Spin, More Informed Debate

tags: Carbon Trade Climate Change Pragmatism Public Relations
When the rapist is a she - Sexual abuse - Salon.com

tags: Gender Stereotype Rape
When the rapist is a she - Sexual abuse - Salon.com

the notion that a woman cannot rape a man has been around for quite a while and still persists. In the late '70s it was argued in the book "Sex, Crime and the Law" that "for obvious biological reasons, a woman cannot be guilty of raping a man ... certainly a woman cannot bring about sexual intercourse with a male against his will." What's certain is actually the opposite, that it's physiologically possible for a woman to impregnate herself by raping a man. (Also, note that rape doesn't have to include penis-in-vagina penetration.) Researchers have studied this very thing, in fact. A study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that "the belief that it is impossible for males to respond sexually when subjected to sexual molestation by women is contradicted" and it also corroborated "previous research indicating that male sex response can occur in a variety of emotional states, including anger and terror." Much as woman can experience lubrication and even achieve orgasm during rape, men's physiological response can act independent of consent or desire -- and in neither case does it make it any less rape-y.

tags: Gender Stereotype Rape

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/03/2011

2011-08-03T08:33:00.001+08:00

Some Scientists Fear Computer Chips Will Soon Hit a Wall - NYTimes.com

A paper presented in June at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture summed up the problem: even today, the most advanced microprocessor chips have so many transistors that it is impractical to supply power to all of them at the same time. So some of the transistors are left unpowered — or dark, in industry parlance — while the others are working. The phenomenon is known as dark silicon.

As early as next year, these advanced chips will need 21 percent of their transistors to go dark at any one time, according to the researchers who wrote the paper. And in just three more chip generations — a little more than a half-decade — the constraints will become even more severe. While there will be vastly more transistors on each chip, as many as half of them will have to be turned off to avoid overheating.

tags: Technology Moore's Law Innovation Electricity
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: A Democracy Paradox in Studies of Science and Technology

If scholars of science and technology draw on deliberative democrats’ normative account of legitimacy, but reject the principles for legitimate rule prescribed by the same theory, how do we know that deliberative expert practices are more legitimate than those they seek to counter?
In short, shouldn't experts in the interface of science and society be bound by the same criteria of legitimacy that they apply to other types of expertise? The answer would seem to be "yes," but this is not how it works in practice.

tags: Deliberation Democracy STS Science Technology
Should Religion Play a Role in Politics? - NYTimes.com

Proponents of conservative views that require sober argument from empirical facts and generally accepted principles, instead merely assert them with religious fervor. Opponents are understandably irritated by the irrationality of claims that distinctively modern questions about capitalist economics and democratic government were answered in the Bible 2000 years ahead of time. Eschewing this sort of appeal to religious considerations would be a good start toward reducing the acrimony and frustration of our political debates.

tags: Religion Politics
Nicholas Lemann: Rules for the Press : The New Yorker

Journalists are indispensably well positioned to expose abuses of power, but a press pass is not a moral unlimited-ride card.

tags: Journalism News of the World Phone Hacking Privacy Freedom of Information

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Bookmarks 08/02/2011

2011-08-02T08:33:00.001+08:00

Climate Change as a Business Problem - G. Truett Tate - Project Syndicate

Some political problems can be solved overnight; others take years to tackle. But, in the distant future, when the financial crisis and the euro’s troubles are long forgotten, we will still be facing the consequences of climate change.

A challenge of this scale and depth demands an unprecedented level of cooperation – between countries, between political parties, and between government, business, and citizens. It is for this reason that some of Britain’s biggest businesses, including Lloyds Banking Group, came together in the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change (CLG). In other words, we have committed ourselves to working together to confront this challenge, and our work so far has been extremely promising: we supported the Climate Change Act; we helped set strong, scientifically robust targets for carbon reduction; and we have supported each successive Carbon Budget up to the latest, fourth installment.

tags: Climate Change Capitalism Politics
Australian media take note: the BBC understands balance in climate change coverage

On Wednesday the BBC Trust released their report “Review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s coverage of science”. The report has resulted in the BBC deciding to reflect scientific consensus about climate change in their coverage of the issue.

As a science communicator I applaud this decision. I understand and support the necessity to provide equal voice to political parties during an election campaign (indeed, I have done this, as an election occurred during my two years writing science for the ABC).

But science is not politics. And scientists are not politicians.

Much of the confusion about the climate change debate stems from a deep ignorance among the general population about how science works. And believe me this really is something “science” as an entity needs to address.

tags: Climate Change Journalism Objectivity Politics Science Climate Science Communication
'BBC's biased climate science reporting isn't biased enough' claims report – Telegraph Blogs

Before commenting on the BBC Trust’s report into the BBC’s science coverage, I thought I’d take the trouble of reading the actual document rather than the press previews. I’m very glad I waited because the finished product is an absolute corker. Let me take you through some of my favourite moments.
The report, as you may be aware, was written by my fellow Telegraph columnist Steve Jones. Besides being a fine and engaging writer, Dr Jones is a geneticist of distinction and I would certainly never dream of questioning his judgement in his fields of expertise (notably Drosophila and snails). Fortunately, as becomes quite clear reading the report, climate science isn’t one of them.

tags: Climate Change Journalism Objectivity
BBC News - Climate unit releases virtually all remaining data

The University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, target of "ClimateGate", has released nearly all its remaining data on temperature measurements following a freedom of information bid.

tags: Data Climate Science ClimateGate Countries Privacy Ownership
Jo Chandler | Feeling the heat | Clouds parted on the data debate

THE battle about climate science is, at its heart, a battle about science itself. Climate science represents the material world in abstract form. It turns the everyday experience of weather and other phenomena into a language that speaks beyond a particular place or thing. Think of global average temperature - built of myriad data readings drawn from direct and indirect sources going back centuries - or of sea level rise. They are abstract constructions that contribute to another, larger picture of reality.

tags: Climate Science Objectivity Facts Data Representation Experience Empiricism
Throwing dice gets to the truth about killing leopards - life - 29 July 2011 - New Scientist

Getting honest answers about behaviour that is illegal or frowned-upon – such as taking drugs or visiting prostitutes – is notoriously difficult. But survey researchers have devised a neat way to get people comfortable with revealing their indiscretions.

Each time the researcher asks the respondent a question, the respondent throws dice before answering – crucially, the researcher cannot see what numbers come up. The rules of the game will be something like this: the respondent will always answer "yes" if they throw a six and "no" when a one comes up, but should tell the truth otherwise.

Because a "yes" doesn't necessarily mean that the respondent actually committed the undesirable behaviour, people seem to open up. The forced "yes" and "no" answers introduce some "noise" into the results, but overall this "randomised response technique" (RRT) gives better answers. For instance, RRT questions get much closer than conventional surveys to the actual incidence of drug use that is revealed by screening tests on hair

tags: Research Methodolatry
Chinese retailers hijack the Ikea experience | Reuters

Increasingly sophisticated counterfeiters no longer just pump out fake luxury handbags, DVDs and sports shoes but replicate the look, feel and service of successful Western retail concepts -- in essence, pirating the entire brand experience.

tags: Simulacrum Counterfeit Brand China
Angry Doctor: Donation Economics

tags: Donation Tax
Animal suicide sheds light on human behavior - Technology & science - Science - DiscoveryNews.com - msnbc.com

Animal and human suicides are no longer seen as willful acts but as responses to conditions.
What that suicidal Newfoundland was telling us, then, is not so much that animals and humans think alike, but that it is, as Joiner said "...a fatal consequence of biologically-based and extremely serious illness."

tags: Suicide Animal

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 08/01/2011

2011-08-01T08:33:00.003+08:00

Balderdash: Researching the Rape Culture of America
Tags: Culture, Rape, Gender Equality, Class, Inequality

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 08/01/2011

2011-08-01T08:33:00.001+08:00

Balderdash: Researching the Rape Culture of America

By distinguishing between acts of random violence and acts of violence against women, the sponsors of the Violence Against Women Act believe that they are showing sensitivity to feminist concerns. In fact, they may be doing social harm by accepting a divisive, gender-specific approach to a problem that is not caused by gender bias, misogyny, or "patriarchy"-an approach that can obscure real and urgent problems such as lesbian battering or male-on-male sexual violence

tags: Culture Rape Gender Equality Class Inequality
Evangelicals Without Blowhards - NYTimes.com

religious people and secular people alike do fantastic work on humanitarian issues — but they often don’t work together because of mutual suspicions. If we could bridge this “God gulf,” we would make far more progress on the world’s ills.

tags: Science Religion

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 07/31/2011

2011-07-31T08:33:00.001+08:00

Back to school for ‘kiasu’ parents

Well-to-do, highly educated parents are volunteering to help at elite schools to raise the chances of their children being admitted there, and thus gain a headstart in the paper chase.

tags: Education Singapore Meritocracy
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Scientists: You Are No Longer Politically Useful

Charles Monnett is a a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement in the US Department of the Interior. He has published in the peer-reviewed literature on polar bears. He also has just been suspended by the agency (PDF) under claims of possible scientific misconduct related to his polar bear research and was recently interviewed by criminal investigators.

The Guardian reports that the timing is suspicious due to forthcoming DOI action on oil drilling in the Arctic

tags: Climate Science Politics
Jack of Kent: On capital punishment

tags: Death Penalty

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 07/28/2011

2011-07-28T08:33:00.001+08:00

Data Leads to Powerful Wisdom - GovLoop - Social Network for Government

In our amazingly fast digital world, the collection of data has become very powerful. The power in numbers to help a client operate more efficiently, to help a lawmaker make a critical vote that will impact her constituents in countless ways, or even how an individual buys a car or house – all of these decisions are shaped by data gathered, analyzed, and acted upon. I like to think of it as data provides wisdom to make more powerful decisions.

The power in data comes from the analysis itself. It just cannot be a set of numbers in an Excel spreadsheet. What do they mean? Where are they from? What do they mean in relationship to one another? What trends do you see? What trends don’t you see? How does your data compare to some baseline? These are all types of questions that must be asked by those that want to use data to further their business, government, and/or personal decision making skills. The really cool thing about data analysis is that it is an incredibly creative and exciting process.

tags: Data Information Decision
Winehouse, Breivik and Deadly Ideals - NYTimes.com

There is an obvious tension between our self-evident diversity and a highly normative concern with or idealization of appearance. While Amy Winehouse turned her overly normative critical apparatus on herself, Breivik applied his with monstrous consequences on just about anyone other than himself (as has been pointed out, unlike so-called “spree killers,” Breivik never had any notion of seeking his own destruction). One was a self-hater, the other would appear to be more a delusional self-lover. But both seem to have been suffering from hypernomia.

tags: Norms Culture Suicide Durkheim Sociology Death
Geographic Information Systems Help Scholars See History - NYTimes.com

Advanced technology similar to Google Earth, MapQuest and the GPS systems used in millions of cars has made it possible to recreate a vanished landscape. This new generation of digital maps has given rise to an academic field known as spatial humanities. Historians, literary theorists, archaeologists and others are using Geographic Information Systems — software that displays and analyzes information related to a physical location — to re-examine real and fictional places like the villages around Salem, Mass., at the time of the witch trials; the Dust Bowl region devastated during the Great Depression; and the Eastcheap taverns where Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Prince Hal caroused.

tags: Humanities Technology Web 2.0

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Gender Studies Bookmark 07/27/2011

2011-07-27T08:33:00.003+08:00

The Logic and Morality of Feminism - At the Intersection of Faith and Culture
Tags: Feminism, Religion, Statistics

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 07/27/2011

2011-07-27T08:33:00.001+08:00

The Hartwell paper - The Hartwell paper - LSE Mackinder programme for the study of long waves - units - Research and expertise - Home

Rapid advance in addressing climate change is now possible for the first time in 15 years because global climate policy crashed in 2009, according to 'The Hartwell Paper', a new international report co-ordinated at LSE.

Climate policy, as it has been understood and practised by many governments of the world under the Kyoto Protocol approach, has failed to produce any discernable real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in 15 years.

The underlying reason for this is that the UNFCCC/Kyoto model was structurally flawed and doomed to fail because it systematically misunderstood the nature of climate change as a policy issue between 1985 and 2009.

The result of three months' intensive work by a group of 14 authors from Asia, Europe and North America, 'The Hartwell Paper' argues that a radical change of approach is required, given that the 1992 United Nations international climate policy framework has failed to produce any discernable real world reductions in greenhouse gases. The crash of 2009 is a crisis that must not be wasted

tags: Climate Science Pragmatism Politics Policy
When design kills: The criminalization of walking | Grist

Bad design kills people.

That's right. It's not a matter of aesthetics, or of politics, or of opinion. It's a plain fact: When you design streets solely for cars, people die as a result. The underlying conditions that are responsible for those deaths are rarely or never challenged. The victims often get blamed for their own injuries or deaths.

Don't believe me? Well, let me refresh your memory about Raquel Nelson, the Atlanta-area mother who was recently convicted of vehicular homicide, second degree -- but not for anything she did behind the wheel. No, she was crossing a busy road with three children when her 4-year-old son was struck by a car and killed.

tags: Car Justice Community Design Poverty Law Inequality
Communities Designed For Cars Aren’t Just Unsustainable, They’re Deadly | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

You might have heard about the story of Raquel Nelson — nearly a year ago, her 4 year-old son was killed by a drunk driver as they crossed the street with the rest of their family. Nelson and her daughter were injured, too. The drunk driver ended up serving six months of prison, and was released, despite having two prior hit and run violations on his record — Nelson, meanwhile, was charged for manslaughter because she failed to use a crosswalk that was a third of a mile away. She faces up to three years in prison.
Outrageous absurdities abound in this case — punishing a mother more than the killer chief among them — but there’s one that hasn’t gotten due attention. And that’s the absurdity of building and maintaining communities in which it’s not only difficult to walk, but downright dangerous to do so — and then favoring the drivers within the legal system. As Grist’s Sarah Goodyear points out, bad city design literally kills.

tags: Car Law Justice Community Design Poverty
BBC News - Printer produces personalised 3D chocolate

A 3D printer that uses chocolate has been developed by University of Exeter researchers - and it prints layers of chocolate instead of ink or plastic.

tags: Food Printing
Undergraduate grade inflation

In the 1930s, the average GPA at American colleges and universities was about 2.35, a number that corresponds with data compiled by W. Perry in 1943. By the 1950s, the average GPA was about 2.52. GPAs took off in the 1960s with grades at private schools rising faster than public schools, lulled in the 1970s, and began to rise again in the 1980s at a rate of about 0.10 to 0.15 increase in GPA per decade. The grade inflation that began in the 1980s has yet to end.
This bump and difference in GPA carries with it implications:
These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools.

tags: Education Academia
The Breakthrough Institute: Climate Pragmatism: Innovation, Resilience and No Regrets

tags: Pragmatism Climate Science Policy Politics
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Climate Pragmatism

any debate over whether climate policy should move is a more pragmatic direction has been decided -- decisively. It has and will. the only real question is how quickly climate activists and policy experts decide to sail; with the prevailing winds, rather than against them.

tags: Pragmatism Climate Science Policy Politics
Singapore is not so clean, Mr Murdoch | Chee Soon Juan | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

If ministers need to be paid the amounts that they are in Singapore to prevent corruption, which is a criminal act, why can't we pay people like Letchmi enough to sustain her livelihood and health so that she doesn't resort to stealing?

tags: Minimum Wage Law Crime Corruption
Mozart and Quantum Mechanics: An Appreciation of Victor Weisskopf - Physics Today February 2003

Ask a scientist who is not a physicist and you might hear that we physicists are an arrogant bunch. And to a layperson, scientists in general often seem arrogant. No, we shrug, we're not really arrogant, we are just very objective and thus usually right!

tags: Physics Science Objectivity
The humble physicist - Points of View

tags: Science Physics Academic
The Logic and Morality of Feminism - At the Intersection of Faith and Culture

tags: Feminism Religion Statistics

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 07/26/2011

2011-07-26T08:35:00.001+08:00

Chris Mooney | Good Communication is Good Scientific Practice

this science communication trend is certain to continue--as it should. Naysayers aside, making science more relevant to the public that is affected by it is an idea that is here because the merits support it. Science matters; the public both needs and also deserves to know this; and scientists need to help them understand why. It's that simple...and it also changes everything.

tags: Science Communication Climate Science
Art of persuasion not so simple

People believe what they want to believe, often in defiance of fact and logic.

When the CSIRO launched its Changing Atmosphere website last month, research leader Paul Fraser insisted the timing was not in response to recent criticism of climate science. Rather, the peak scientific organisation simply wanted to let the facts speak for themselves.

However, a rather inconvenient truth needs to be borne in mind: recent research shows that ''facts'' alone rarely persuade us to change our minds on anything significant. In fact, they frequently entrench a contrary view.

Numerous studies underline how impervious to evidence our strongly held convictions are. Whether on political, religious or ethical issues, it seems our minds have an unusual power to reorganise contrary facts in order to support our beliefs.

tags: Data Climate Science Belief
Take the Data to the People

Efforts to improve climate literacy may prove ineffective because they don’t reach their intended audience, or perhaps because those people who disagree with conclusions from climate scientists need more than explanation. People don’t want to be told that they are science illiterate. They may disagree with the scientific consensus because of misconceptions about the process of science or because of distrust. They want to see the data for themselves and make their own conclusions.
We at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC, think we should help them do just that. Scientists and writers at the NSIDC have been experimenting with such an open approach to data sharing since 2006. Through the Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis website, we not only make near-real-time data available to the public, but also explain it in basic terms. The project is a collaboration between scientists and science writers at the center, and made possible by our access to near-real-time data.

tags: Data Climate Science Open
Neuroskeptic: Violent Brains In The Supreme Court

Back in June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Californian law banning the sale of violent videogames to children was unconstitutional because it violated the right to free speech.

However, the ruling wasn't unanimous. Justice Stephen Breyer filed a dissenting opinion. Unfortunately, it contains a whopping misuse of neuroscience.

tags: Neuroscience Violence Games Law
Seven Creepy Experiments That Could Teach Us So Much (If They Weren’t So Wrong) | Magazine

When scientists violate moral taboos, we expect horrific consequences. It’s a trope in our storytelling that goes back at least to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: However well-intentioned our fictional scientists may be, their disregard for ethical boundaries will produce not a peer-reviewed paper in Science but rather a new race of subhuman killers, a sucking wormhole in space-time, or a profusion of malevolent goo.

In the real world, though, matters aren’t so simple. Most scientists will assure you that ethical rules never hinder good research—that there’s always a virtuous path to testing any important hypothesis. But ask them in private, perhaps after a drink or three, and they’ll confess that the dark side does have its appeal. Bend the rules and some of our deepest scientific conundrums could be elucidated or even resolved: nature versus nurture, the causes of mental illness, even the mystery of how humans evolved from monkeys. These discoveries are just sitting out there, waiting for us to find them, if only we were willing to lose our souls.

What follows are seven creepy experiments—thought experiments, really—that show how contemporary science might advance if it were to toss away the moral compass that guides it. Don’t try these at home—or anywhere, for that matter. But also don’t pretend you wouldn’t like to learn the secrets that these experiments would reveal.

tags: Experiment Research Ethics
Agricultural Information, the Global Food Crisis, and Effective Use « Gurstein's Community Informatics

Community Informatics colleague Ajit Maru, in a posting on the Community Informatics Research elist suggests some disturbing questions concerning the relationship between “Information Access” and “effective use” and its possible links to the rising food crisis globally.
He comments on the increasing shift of governments to making agricultural information available primarily in electronic form via the web or through mobile access. This is inevitably linked to declining support for the provision of agricultural information through the more traditional face to face connections of agricultural extension

tags: Data Effects Access Open Food

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 07/25/2011

2011-07-25T08:33:00.001+08:00

Christian Jihad? Why We Should Worry About Right-Wing Terror Attacks Like Norway's in the US | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet

There is a growing movement in America that equates godliness with hatred of our government in fact hatred of our country as fallen and evil because we allow women choice, gays to marry, have a social safety net, and allow immigration from other cultures and non-white races.

tags: Christianity Extremism Terrorism Rightwing
Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world | Video on TED.com

Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control.

tags: Algorithm Technology Social Construction Ghost in the Machine
Media Reacts to News That Norwegian Terror Suspect Isn't Muslim - Global - The Atlantic Wire

Yesterday's first reports on the massacre in Norway suggested that there was a link between the horrific attacks, which left 92 dead at latest reports, and Muslim extremists. Only later was the news released that the suspect taken by police, Anders Behring Breivik, was apparently a conservative, right-wing Christian with strong anti-Muslim and anti-immigration beliefs. Many in the media were left reeling over the fact that others were so quick to report and comment that Muslims were involved, before there was clear evidence. Rupert Murdoch's newspaper The Sun had as a headline on the front page, "Al Qaeda Massacre: Norway's 9/11." The Wall Street Journal posted an editorial on the bombings that begins with references to Islam.

tags: Rightwing Terrorism Extremism Norway Christianity Islam
Norway attacks: We can no longer ignore the far-right threat | Matthew Goodwin | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

I recently reviewed an academic book that ended with the prediction that the next wave of terrorism in Europe will come not from al-Quaida-inspired groups, but rather rightwing groups that want to respond to this threat and reassert the position of their wider group. It is far too early to tell whether Breivik's actions will inspire copycat attacks, but one thing remains clear: the threat from rightwing extremist groups and ideas deserves far greater attention.

tags: Rightwing Terrorism Extremism Norway
journalism.sg » News Corp inquiry raises questions about media accountability

The pressure to meet a daily strike rate on scandals and denouements made his UK tabloid editors slide beyond legality into allegedly criminal practices now being more thoroughly investigated by the Met and Parliament. NoW or The Sun were not alone in this. Phone-hacking and payoffs to police are alleged to be widely practiced by all the tabloids.
All of this raises existential questions about the un-wisdom of allowing such media ownership concentration and the urgent need to: quarantine media from politicians, government and Big Business; protect citizens from intrusive paparazzi and privacy invasion; establish a press ombudsman with real statutory powers, and hold editors accountable for sins of commission and omission.

tags: News News of the World Accountability
Rationally Speaking: Pseudo-Xology
Religiosity and income inequality « Yawning Bread on Wordpress

Among the key formative experiences of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) is that of racial and religious conflict as happened in the 1950s and 1960s. To this day, Singapore’s PAP government remains wary of religion as an organising force for political ends. Yet, their economic policies may have had the effect of promoting religiosity, such that the ground is always fertile for the rise of political religion. The PAP’s governance may be producing the very conditions they fear most.

tags: Religiosity Income Inequality

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Bookmarks 07/23/2011

2011-07-23T08:33:00.001+08:00

Rationally Speaking: Economics should not be divorced from morality

Last week, our friend Massimo Pigliucci published an essay here in which he argued for an idea I have long thought to be true: that economic considerations cannot be divorced from moral ones. Here is the appropriate passage from Massimo’s article:
“I simply do not buy the fundamentalist (yes, I’m using the term on purpose) libertarian idea that economics is all there is or that should count in pretty much all human transactions and social problems. The hallmark of a just society is precisely that it does consider issues of intrinsic rights — not just to life and property, as the libertarians would have it — but also to health, education, housing and jobs. The whole point of living in a structured society, as opposed to Hobbes’ war of all against all, is so that our lives are not going to be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ Which means that what [Larry] Summers dismisses as ‘social concerns’ really ought to be central to the way we structure our societies. Economic systems ought to be the servants of human flourishing, not its masters.”

tags: Paradigm Data Economics Reality Morality

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Bookmarks 07/21/2011

2011-07-21T08:33:00.001+08:00

The Data Divide: Some Positive Developments « Gurstein's Community Informatics

tags: Data Data Divide
Are social media creating the laziest generation? - CNN.com

Is social media becoming our opiate of the masses seducing us into being slacktivists, believing that simply because we make a cyber comment, we are somehow actually affecting our world? Will our generation leave a lasting legacy or just millions of snarky tweets?

tags: Social Media Reality Slacktivism
Skepticblog » A Consilience of Observations

tags: Denial Climate Science Science
Fake Chinese Apple Store Looks Amazingly Real

Don't be deceived by the slick marketing materials and blue shirts with Apple logos. This is not an Apple Store. It's a cheap knock-off located in Kunming, China.

These photos were taken by a pair of Americans who stumbled on this store in southwestern China. It looked like an Apple store, had display material consistent with an Apple store and the employees even believed they worked for an Apple store. But it's fake, fake, fake.

There are several subtle signs, not the least of which is that Apple does not operate a store in Kunming, that suggest this store is one amazingly realistic ripoff. One clue is the sign which has the Apple logo and says "Apple Store". And the badges which have the word staff, but not the employee names on them. And, lastly, the store itself which on close inspection looks shoddy. Craziness

tags: Apple Simulacrum Reality Counterfeit

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 07/20/2011

2011-07-20T08:33:00.003+08:00

Balderdash: Negligence of Male Rape: what you get when you're obsessed by Privilege
Amusingly, one feminist complained in the comments (ignoring what was the most disturbing part of the article for me: how feminarchy is trying to silence, sideline and ignore male rape):

"Why the hostility toward feminists in some of the readers' comments? Are feminists to blame for male rape (as well as every other evil in society these days)? I doubt any feminist reading the article feels anything but revulsion with regard to the rapists (who were not feminists - just in case you were confused) and I'm quite sure all of us feel nothing but sympathy for the victims. Blame the perpetrators."

Someone pointed her to one of her previous comments:

"Really - should society allow men to comment on crimes of sexual violence?"

She "clarified" that she meant "Should society allow men to comment on crimes of sexual violence against women?", but this just exposes feminarchy even more blatantly.
Tags: Rape, Victim, Gender Equality, Gender Stereotype
The rape of men | Global development | The Observer
Tags: Rape, Victim, Gender Equality, Gender Stereotype
After Adorno: Letter To Simpson « Quiet Riot Girl
Women, in this ‘post-feminist’ age, are indeed able to wear trousers, snog their friends when they are pissed, take up jobs previously reserved for men, and even fart and belch like truckers. But this does not mean they are not just as anxious about masculinity or femininity as ever.
Tags: Cultural Industries, Gender Stereotype, Gender Equality, Metrosexuality

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 07/20/2011

2011-07-20T08:33:00.001+08:00

After Adorno: Letter To Simpson « Quiet Riot Girl

Women, in this ‘post-feminist’ age, are indeed able to wear trousers, snog their friends when they are pissed, take up jobs previously reserved for men, and even fart and belch like truckers. But this does not mean they are not just as anxious about masculinity or femininity as ever.

tags: Cultural Industries Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Metrosexuality
on the contemporary church: criticism, culture & crisis | the blink times

Are denominations at risk of extinction? Judging from the current trend, it seems quite obvious that apart from the monolithic traditions and a few eccentric separatists, the differences between various Christian groups aren’t really there anymore. All of them—in the name of an Evangelical banner, no less—believe in the inerrant nature of the Bible, the importance of proselytising and the need for personal salvation. There’s nothing wrong with these tenets, but several social transformations seem to suggest that the Church is making a desperate attempt to stay relevant and politically engaged.

tags: Religion Christianity Proselytizing Parsimony Grand Narrative Narratives
How 3-D Printing Could Change the World (Video) | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

We’re a few steps closer to the Star Trek-style replicator that could conjure objects upon demand. Of course, that raises a bunch of interesting questions itself, like what a capitalist economy would look like when you can get everything you need with the press of a button.
Regardless, the convenience and ecological benefits of not having to ship goods around the world should prove a major boon to societies everywhere.

tags: 3 Dimension Printing Capitalism Consumerism
Cash-Strapped Scientists Turn to Public Crowd-Funding | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

These websites started primarily as a way to provide funding for creative projects involving film, music and other art mediums. Scientists using crowd funding is a relatively new phenomenon. Here’s how The New York Times described it:
“As research budgets tighten at universities and federal financing agencies, a new crop of Web-savvy scientists is hoping the wisdom — and generosity — of the crowds will come to the rescue.”

“Most crowd funding platforms thrive on transparency and a healthy dose of self-promotion but lack the safeguards and expert assessment of a traditional review process. Instead, money talks: the public decides which projects are worth pursuing by fully financing them.”

tags: Science Crowd-Sourcing Funding Academic Research Cultural Industries
Facial Recognition Software Singles Out Innocent Man | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

While a boon to police departments looking to save time and money fighting identity fraud, it’s frightening to think that people are having their lives seriously disrupted thanks to computer errors. If you are, say, a truck driver, something like this could cause you weeks of lost pay, something many Americans just can’t afford to do. And what if this technology expands beyond just rooting out identity fraud? What if you were slammed against a car hood as police falsely identified you as a criminal? The fact that Hass didn’t even have a chance to fight the computer’s findings before his license was suspended is especially disturbing. What would you do if this happened to you?

tags: Image Facial Recognition Law Technology
The rape of men | Global development | The Observer

MattyRoy1015
17 July 2011 8:53PM
I would appreciate the report more if the Guardian dropped its trademark liberal condescension, which habitually appears in their reports on developed countries.

And it's just so obvious...the picture and vivid descriptions of the traumatized "native" just above the picture of a confident, manly western saviour and passages like:

"his eyes cast towards the ground, as if in apology for his impressive height. He has a prominent upper lip that shakes continually – a nervous condition that makes him appear as if he's on the verge of tears....I am aghast"

Is this necessary?

And of course, the rape victims are willing to talk, "thanks largely" to a magnanimous white man willing shoulder some of their burden. Really, Guardian? I would have thought the rape victim's willingness to talk was "thanks largely" to personal agency.

tags: Rape Victim Gender Equality Gender Stereotype
Balderdash: Negligence of Male Rape: what you get when you're obsessed by Privilege

Amusingly, one feminist complained in the comments (ignoring what was the most disturbing part of the article for me: how feminarchy is trying to silence, sideline and ignore male rape):

"Why the hostility toward feminists in some of the readers' comments? Are feminists to blame for male rape (as well as every other evil in society these days)? I doubt any feminist reading the article feels anything but revulsion with regard to the rapists (who were not feminists - just in case you were confused) and I'm quite sure all of us feel nothing but sympathy for the victims. Blame the perpetrators."

Someone pointed her to one of her previous comments:

"Really - should society allow men to comment on crimes of sexual violence?"

She "clarified" that she meant "Should society allow men to comment on crimes of sexual violence against women?", but this just exposes feminarchy even more blatantly.

tags: Rape Victim Gender Equality Gender Stereotype

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 07/19/2011

2011-07-19T08:33:00.003+08:00

The rape of men | Global development | The Observer
Tags: Rape, Victim, Gender Equality, Gender Stereotype

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 07/19/2011

2011-07-19T08:33:00.001+08:00

The rape of men | Global development | The Observer

tags: Rape Victim Gender Equality Gender Stereotype
Tracking the Trackers: Early Results | Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Over the past several months researchers at the Stanford Security Lab have been developing a platform for measuring dynamic web content. One of our chief applications is a system for automated enforcement of Do Not Track by detecting the myriad forms of third-party tracking, including cookies, HTML5 storage, fingerprinting, and much more. While the software isn't quite polished enough for public release, we're eager to share some unexpected early results on the advertising ecosystem. Please bear in mind that these are preliminary findings from experimental software; our primary aims at this stage are developing the platform and validating the approach to third-party tracking detection. Many thanks to Jovanni Hernandez and Akshay Jagadeesh for their invaluable research assistance.

tags: Cookies Digital Trail Privacy Tracking Data
Epiphenom: Risk averse Taiwanese are also more religious

tags: Religion Risk

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 07/18/2011

2011-07-18T08:33:00.001+08:00

An interview with Chen Show Mao - Asymptote

tags: Language Culture Democracy Identity Literature
Against religious freedom: A debate: Against Religious Freedom

there are two quite distinct ideas that fly under the banner of "religious freedom." The first is that people have the right to practice a faith, consistent with the rights of everyone else. We think this is vital and unassailable. However, as we will contend, it is misleading to label this idea "religious freedom." The second idea is that religions deserve some special accommodations under the law that are not available to comparable secular institutions or commitments.
Traditionally cherished and unquestioned though it may be, this latter notion of religious freedom is philosophically unsound, legally incoherent, and morally indefensible. To make real progress in the conversation about church and state, we must give it up.

tags: Secularism Religion Discrimination
Green Bootleggers and Baptists - Bjørn Lomborg - Project Syndicate

In May, the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change made media waves with a new report on renewable energy. As in the past, the IPCC first issued a short summary; only later would it reveal all of the data. So it was left up to the IPCC’s spin-doctors to present the take-home message for journalists.

The first line of the IPCC’s press release declared, “Close to 80% of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies.” That story was repeated by media organizations worldwide.

Last month, the IPCC released the full report, together with the data behind this startlingly optimistic claim. Only then did it emerge that it was based solely on the most optimistic of 164 modeling scenarios that researchers investigated. And this single scenario stemmed from a single study that was traced back to a report by the environmental organization Greenpeace. The author of that report – a Greenpeace staff member – was one of the IPCC’s lead authors.

The claim rested on the assumption of a large reduction in global energy use. Given the number of people climbing out of poverty in China and India, that is a deeply implausible scenario.

tags: Green Energy Assumption Model Optimism Poverty Economy
Study shows forests have bigger role in slowing climate change | Energy & Oil | Reuters

* Forests still major CO2 "sink" despite massive deforestation-study

* World's forests lock away more than 10 pct of CO2 pollution

* Findings could be boost for REDD forest carbon credit scheme

tags: Deforestation Carbon Emission
Why Employers Are Slow to Fill Jobs: Business Class - Bloomberg

tags: Job Recruitment Economy Unemployment Training

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 07/16/2011

2011-07-16T08:33:00.003+08:00

Irresistible Defense: Out of Tekong into the tragicomedy of Singapore « Molitics
We want defense to protect a nation. And nations are made of human beings. If in the process of national defense, human beings are dehumanized, is defense itself not anti-human and anti-defense? But we would rather indulge in self-defeating militarism, turning defending subjects into objects of defense.
Tags: Conscription, Masculinity
Balderdash: Modes of Feminist Rhetoric
More sexism you won't see AWARE protesting: single men cannot adopt girls

Text of Adoption of Children Act: Restrictions on making adoption orders.

"An adoption order shall not be made in any case where the sole applicant is a male and the infant in respect of whom the application is made is a female unless the court is satisfied that there are special circumstances which justify as an exceptional measure the making of an adoption order."
Tags: Gender Stereotype, Gender Equality, Adoption, Children, Sexism, Feminism, AWARE

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 07/16/2011

2011-07-16T08:33:00.001+08:00

Keen On… Michael Fertik: Why Data is the New Oil and Why We, the Consumer, Aren’t Benefitting From It | TechCrunch

In today’s Web 3.0 personal data rich economy, reputation is replacing cash, Fertik believes. And he is confident that his company, Reputation.com, is well placed to become the new rating index of this digital ecosystem.

But Fertik isn’t ecstatic about the way in which new online products, such as facial recognition technology, are exploiting the privacy of online consumers. Arguing that “data is the new oil,” Fertik believes that the only people not benefitting from today’s social economy are consumers themselves. Rather than government legislation, however, the solution, Fertik told me, are more start-up entrepreneurs like himself providing paid products that empower consumers in our Web 3.0 world of pervasive personalized data.

This is the second and final part of my interview with Fertik. Yesterday, he explained to me why people will pay for privacy.

tags: Data Power Open Privacy
When information is power, these are the questions we should be asking | Online Journalism Blog

control of information still represents the exercise of power, and how shifts in that control as a result of the transparency/open data/linked data agenda are open to abuse, gaming, or spin.

tags: Data Power Open
Balderdash: Modes of Feminist Rhetoric

More sexism you won't see AWARE protesting: single men cannot adopt girls

Text of Adoption of Children Act: Restrictions on making adoption orders.

"An adoption order shall not be made in any case where the sole applicant is a male and the infant in respect of whom the application is made is a female unless the court is satisfied that there are special circumstances which justify as an exceptional measure the making of an adoption order."

tags: Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Adoption Children Sexism Feminism AWARE
BBC - Wonder Monkey: Can religious teachings prove evolution to be true?

I’ve just come across an intriguing piece of research that may, to coin a phrase, put an evolutionary cat among the believing flock of creation scientists, many of whom believe in the literal account of Genesis.

One scientist has decided to use creation science to test the validity of evolution.

Because, he says, if it turns out that creation science proves evolution, then by its own logic, it will have to reject its own canon of research that previously denied it.

tags: Science Religion Evolution Creationism Creation Science
Crashing Into Stereotypes, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

If you really want to improve your group's image, telling other groups to stop stereotyping won't work. The stereotype is based on the underlying distribution of fact. It is far more realistic to turn your complaining inward, and pressure the bad apples in your group to stop pulling down the average.

tags: Stereotype Movie Statistics
The Fundamentalist Stereotype: A Vindication, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

Yesterday my colleague Larry Iannaccone, the world's leading expert on the Economics of Religion, gave a provocative lecture on Christian fundamentalism. His thesis: Almost all the stereotypes about this group are false. Now I'm one of those people who believes that stereotypes are usually true statistical generalizations, so naturally I was skeptical.

To check my suspicions, I turned to the General Social Survey.

tags: Religion Stereotype Generalization Statistics Data
China's Manufacturing Jobs Moved Overseas - TIME

In what is supposed to be a land of unlimited cheap labor — a nation of 1.3 billion people, whose extraordinary 20-year economic rise has been built first and foremost on the backs of low-priced workers — the game has changed. In the past decade, according to Helen Qiao, chief economist for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, real wages for manufacturing workers in China have grown nearly 12% per year. That's the result of an economy that's been growing by double digits annually for two decades, fueled domestically by a frenzied infrastructure and housing build-out — one that, for now anyway, continues apace — combined with what was for a time an almost unquenchable thirst for Chinese exports in the developed world. Add to that the fact that in the five largest manufacturing provinces, the Chinese government — worried about an ever widening gap between rich and poor — has raised the minimum wage 14% to 21% in the past year. To Harley Seyedin, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in South China, the conclusion is inescapable: "The era of cheap labor in China is over."

tags: Labour Cost Price Minimum Wage China
Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain: Scientific American

The article, “Religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in late life,” by Amy Owen and colleagues at Duke University represents an important advance in our growing understanding of the relationship between the brain and religion. The study, published March 30 in PLoS One, showed greater atrophy in the hippocampus in individuals who identify with specific religious groups as well as those with no religious affiliation. It is a surprising result, given that many prior studies have shown religion to have potentially beneficial effects on brain function, anxiety, and depression.

tags: Religion Neuroscience
Diver Snaps First Photo of Fish Using Tools - ScienceNOW

While exploring Australia's Great Barrier Reef, professional diver Scott Gardner heard an odd cracking sound and swam over to investigate. What he found was a footlong blackspot tuskfish (Choerodon schoenleinii) holding a clam in its mouth and whacking it against a rock. Soon the shell gave way, and the fish gobbled up the bivalve, spat out the shell fragments, and swam off. Fortunately, Gardner had a camera handy and snapped what seem to be the first photographs of a wild fish using a tool.

Tool use, once thought to be the distinctive hallmark of human intelligence, has been identified in a wide variety of animals in recent decades. Although other creatures don't have anything quite like a circular saw or a juice machine, capuchin monkeys select "hammer" rocks of an appropriate material and weight to crack open seeds, fruits, or nuts on larger "anvil" rocks, and New Caledonian crows probe branches with grass, twigs, and leaf strips to extract insects. In addition to primates and birds, many animals, including dolphins, elephants, naked mole rats, and even octopuses, have shown forms of the behavior.

tags: Animal Tool Technology
China Food Safety | China food scandals: China wrestles with food safety problems - Los Angeles Times

tags: Food China Safety
Study of Alpha Male Baboons Shows It’s Stressful at the Top - NYTimes.com

tags: Primatology Stress
Meditation Is A Powerful Painkiller | Wired Science | Wired.com

Consider a study by scientists at Wake Forest University. After only a few days of meditation training—teaching people to better focus their attention, concentrating less on the discomfort and more on a soothing stimulus—subjects reported a 57% reduction in the “unpleasantness” of their pain. Such improvements are roughly equivalent to the benefits of morphine.

A brain scanner showed how the intervention worked. Learning to meditate altered brain activity in the very same regions, such as the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, that are targeted by next-generation pain medications. It’s as if the subjects were administering their own painkillers.

tags: Meditation Pain
Will Smokers React to Scare Tactics Like Graphic Warning Labels? | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

According to researchers from the University of Bonn, non-smokers thinking of taking up the habit might think twice when they look at those pictures, but it’s going to require more than scare tactics to change the ways of chronic smokers.

tags: Fear Emotion Advertising Smoking PSA
You should probably quit your job

occasionally someone remembers that our lives are so short, the time is so precious, and they push aside the pile to look again on the "Promised Land." And then they do something important. They quit their job.

This happened to Kai Nagata this week. Kai was a Canadian TV reporter who suddenly resigned because he realized he could be doing more if he was doing something else. In his words:

"I quit my job because the idea burrowed into my mind that, on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life."

tags: Life Job
Search Engines Change How Memory Works | Wired Science | Wired.com

Thanks to search engines, most simple facts don’t need to be remembered. They can be accessed with a few keystrokes, plucked from ubiquitous server-stored external memory — and that may be changing how our own memories are maintained.

A study of 46 college students found lower rates of recall on newly-learned facts when students thought those facts were saved on a computer for later recovery.

If you think a fact is conveniently available online, then, you may be less apt to learn it.

tags: Memory Search Google Transactive Memory
Irresistible Defense: Out of Tekong into the tragicomedy of Singapore « Molitics

We want defense to protect a nation. And nations are made of human beings. If in the process of national defense, human beings are dehumanized, is defense itself not anti-human and anti-defense? But we would rather indulge in self-defeating militarism, turning defending subjects into objects of defense.

tags: Conscription Masculinity

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 07/15/2011

2011-07-15T08:33:00.001+08:00

Rationally Speaking: On being a fulfilled atheist

tags: Atheism
The unplanned impact of maths | plus.maths.org

a group of mathematicians from the British Society for the History of Mathematics have collected some examples of the unplanned impact of maths, which are reported in the 14th July issue of the journal Nature. Peter Rowlett, who coordinated the collection, said, "Although most mathematicians know that mathematics has this surprising nature, many that I have spoken to aren't aware of more than one or two specific examples. I thought the British Society for the History of Mathematics could help by searching through history for examples that are less well known. We hope this collection will only be the start and that more mathematicians will send their favourite stories to us."

tags: Mathematics
Greening the screen » Scienceline

For environmentalists trying to use entertainment to shape broad public attitudes and behaviors, nothing could be more important than understanding how to reach these hard-to-get people. Something that will speak to them, something that will change their minds, and most importantly, something that will incite them to action. A documentary might not be that something.

tags: Environment Media Image Entertainment Hollywood Cultural Industries Climate Change Narratives Emotion
Experimental Philosophy: A Modest Proposal

X-Phi is a branch of psychology that specializes in how the mind actually works when we make judgments about philosophically interesting topics.

tags: X-Phi Psychology Science

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 07/14/2011

2011-07-14T08:33:00.003+08:00

Face to face | plus.maths.org
How would it feel to look in a mirror and see not your own reflection but instead how you would look as the opposite sex? You can explore this strange alternate reality at this year's Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition where Peter McOwan and his colleagues from Queen Mary, University of London and University College London will use mathematical wizardry to produce gender reversed images of faces.
Tags: Mathematics, Content Analysis, Gender

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 07/14/2011

2011-07-14T08:33:00.001+08:00

More than just passing notes in class? The Twitter-enabled backchannel

Twitter is
being used increasingly as a means of continuing and extending
dialogue, commentary and networking amongst academic
conference participants and is rapidly becoming the default
technology used to support what is known as the ‘backchannel’.

tags: Twitter Social Media Presentation Academic
How to Present While People are Twittering — Pistachio

tags: Twitter Social Media Presentation
The Truth Behind Why Healthcare Costs Are So High (Infographic) | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

With all of the fiery rhetoric surrounding the healthcare debate, it was hard to tell who was telling the truth. One thing is for sure: Americans spend far too much on healthcare and get very little in return. Why does healthcare cost so much? This infographic from Medical Billing & Coding [via Co.design] takes a stab at explaining it. Apparently the problem isn’t obesity, malpractice lawsuits or an aging population; it’s seemingly more fixable things like administrative costs and medicine that costs 118 percent more here than it does in other countries. So why can’t we seem to figure out a way to fix it?

tags: Infographic Health Care United States Cost
The philosophy of applied mathematics | plus.maths.org

"Applying mathematics means using a mathematical technique to derive an answer to a question posed from outside mathematics." This definition is deliberately broad — including everything from counting change to climate change — and the very possibility of such a broad definition is part of the mystery we are discussing.

tags: Mathematics Practices
Understanding uncertainty: The big risk test | plus.maths.org

Risk is a very complex topic, since it's all about things we can't predict, which just about includes everything. Many aspects of risk are studied by researchers all over the world. In the Big Risk Test, which is now live as part of BBC Lab UK, we want to find out how people deal with risk, particularly to try and understand what makes people have such different opinions and feelings about life's chances.

tags: Risk Uncertainty Mathematics
Face to face | plus.maths.org

How would it feel to look in a mirror and see not your own reflection but instead how you would look as the opposite sex? You can explore this strange alternate reality at this year's Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition where Peter McOwan and his colleagues from Queen Mary, University of London and University College London will use mathematical wizardry to produce gender reversed images of faces.

tags: Mathematics Content Analysis Gender
Huaxi Journal - Sharing the Wealth in a Tiny Chinese Village - NYTimes.com

When China effectively embraced capitalism in the 1980s, Huaxi was an agrarian hovel, reachable by dirt roads. Mr. Wu, then the local Communist Party secretary, seized on the new market freedoms to shift the Huaxi economy from farming to manufacturing and trade, but with a twist: the residents would throw their money into a collective pot and share in the take from whatever new businesses they bought.

tags: China Communism
Huaxi Journal - Sharing the Wealth in a Tiny Chinese Village - NYTimes.com

When China effectively embraced capitalism in the 1980s, Huaxi was an agrarian hovel, reachable by dirt roads. Mr. Wu, then the local Communist Party secretary, seized on the new market freedoms to shift the Huaxi economy from farming to manufacturing and trade, but with a twist: the residents would throw their money into a collective pot and share in the take from whatever new businesses they bought.

tags: China Communism
Huaxi: The Communist Utopia in China Where Everyone’s Filthy Rich | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

while the vast majority of the nation opted to partake in a society based on private ownership, one tiny village with 2,000 resident decided to hold firm to the principals of Mao-inspired communism. That meant shared sacrifice and shared investment. And in this case of the town of Huaxi, it meant shared wealth beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

tags: Communism China
Peer-led Group Therapy & Sense of Community Help Ease Schizophrenics’ Pain | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

Along with most other mental health issues — depression, bi-polar disorder and post traumatic stress disorder, for example — schizophrenia has fallen victim to stigma through society’s attempt to simplify what it doesn’t understand. Such stigma has improved over the years through education and awareness, but we still have a ways to go before scientists figure out exactly what’s going on up there.

tags: Stigma Mental Illness Psychiatry Drugs
Why Dirty Socks May Be The Answer to Fighting Malaria | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

Dr. Okumu has discovered that malaria-carrying mosquitoes gather on dirty-sock-smell four times more than they gather on humans. So putting in some old socks — or a synthetic equivalent — will make this mosquito-trapping device really effective. Okumu says that feet are one of the key sources of the odor which allows mosquitoes to identify humans.

tags: Malaria Hygiene Health
Are Robots Going to Take Your Job? | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

tags: Job Robotics Technology Society
A cherry picking tale, and an update on spinal manipulation science « Alternative Medicine « Health « Skeptic North

you can always “find research to support” anything you like, and I commented to that effect. Indeed, that is exactly how I used to work, before I knew better. Probably until at least 2005, I was still much more of a massage therapist than a science writer. (I quit massage more than a year ago.) I thought like a therapist, had therapist thoughts, and therapist theories. I would bring those ideas to my desk and look for scientific papers in PubMed that backed me up — pretty much the definition of “cherry picking” — and then (groan) fancy myself to be quite the smarty pants. I really hadn’t the faintest clue that scientific papers could be so incredibly misleading, or how trivial a single experimental result was — the sound of one hand clapping.

tags: Research Science Cherry-picking
Skepticblog » An eyeful of creationist IDiocy

A few weeks ago my email box was full of gloating messages from creationists claiming that the latest discovery of complex eyes in the Cambrian “proved” creationism and “refuted” evolution. As usual, creationists demonstrate a remarkable ability to completely misunderstand and misinterpret real science, and get the message of the paper ass-backward. The article to which they referred is an excellent new paper on the appearance in the Early Cambrian of compound eyes, slightly earlier than they were known previously. But creationists doesn’t know enough science to understand the paper—all they do is read “complex eyes” and “Early Cambrian” in the title, and to them, “Darwinism is falsified.” It never ceases to amaze me how they can mangle legitimate research to mean just the opposite of what was written, but so strong are their belief filters that they hear only what they want to hear, and completely miss the point of most of the world of science that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions.

tags: Creationism Evolution
Young Muslim Malaysians want Quran to replace constitution « Yawning Bread on Wordpress

Of Muslim youths aged 15 – 25, “More than 70% — among them slightly more males than females — want the Quran to replace the Federal Constitution of Malaysia,” said the survey report recently published on the website of Merdeka Centre, an opinion survey organisation.

tags: Sharia Law Religion Islam Quran Extremism Youth Age
The Meaning of Accountability - GovLoop - Social Network for Government

The word “accountability” ranks right up there with “freedom,” “justice,” and “democracy” – words commonly used and thought to be understood by all. But that is wrong. It is a term that is complex and misunderstood, and subject to abuse in political discourse. But more importantly, because there is a lack of clarity, there are many different approaches used by politicians and public administrators to pursue it.

tags: Accountability Politics Democracy
Microsoft Helps Army Avoid ‘Death by PowerPoint’ | Danger Room | Wired.com

tags: PowerPoint Microsoft How-To
Gregory Rodriguez: The virtue of 'I don't know' - latimes.com

Do we really need a beauty queen to tell us how to solve our local school curriculum controversies? Maybe so, but only if she's actually thought it through and can articulate her argument. Just once, instead of dishing up happy talk regarding nuclear disarmament, I'd like to see Miss Wherever stand tall on her stilettos and say, "You know what, I've honestly never given it a thought and have no clue."

tags: Data Survey Unknown Neutrality Opinion
RealClimate: Revisiting historical ocean surface temperatures

tags: Climate Science Uncertainty Politics
Bucket Adjustments: More Bilge from RealClimate « Climate Audit

tags: Uncertainty Climate Science Politics
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Making Stuff Up at Real Climate

tags: Climate Science Uncertainty Politics
RealClimate: Revisiting historical ocean surface temperatures

tags: Climate Science Uncertainty Politics
TODAYonline | Tech & Digital | Digital | Facebook may sell you out

By law, neither Facebook nor the government is obliged to inform a user when an account is subject to a search by law enforcement, though prosecutors are required to disclose material evidence to a defendant.

Twitter and several other social-media sites have formally adopted a policy to notify users when law enforcement asks to search their profile.

Last January, Twitter successfully challenged a gag order imposed by a federal judge that forbade them from informing users that the government had demanded their data.

Twitter said in an email message that its policy was "to help users protect their rights." The Facebook spokesperson would not say whether the company had a similar policy to notify users or if it was considering adopting one. REUTERS

tags: Data Law Facebook Twitter
The Fall of the House of Murdoch - Jonathan Schell - Project Syndicate

tags: Media Politics News of the World Phone-Hacking Power Plutocracy
A Data Divide? Data “Haves” and “Have Nots” and Open (Government) Data « Gurstein's Community Informatics

tags: Digital Divide Data Data Divide
Rationally Speaking: Why I don’t like Larry Summers

while reading Debra Satz’s Why Some Things Should not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets, which I highly recommend to my libertarian friends, as much as I realize of course that it will be entirely wasted on them. The book is a historical and philosophical analysis of ideas about markets, and makes a very compelling case for why thinking that “the markets will take care of it” where “it” is pretty much anything of interest to human beings is downright idiotic (as well as profoundly unethical).
But I’m not concerned here with Satz’s book per se, as much as with the instance in which she discusses for her purposes, a memo written by Summers when he was chief economist of the World Bank (side note to people who still don’t think we are in a plutocracy: please simply make the effort to track Summers’ career and his influence as an example, or check this short video by one of my favorite philosophers, George Carlin). The memo was intended for internal WB use only, but it caused a public uproar when the, surely not left-wing, magazine The Economist leaked it to the public. Here is an extract from the memo (emphasis mine):

tags: Economics World Bank Inequality Plutocracy
Lying Adapts to New Technology - NYTimes.com

Many believe it is easier to lie by text than by phone or in person, but emerging research indicates that’s not necessarily true.

We’ve always lied; new technologies are merely changing the ways and the reasons we lie. Witness the “butler lie,” a term coined by Cornell University researchers in 2009 to describe lies that politely initiate and terminate instant messaging conversations. (“Gotta go, boss is coming!”) Like butlers, they act as social buffers, telling others that we are at lunch when we are just avoiding them.

tags: Technology Lies Anonymity
On Experts and Global Warming - NYTimes.com

Experts have always posed a problem for democracies. Plato scorned democracy, rating it the worst form of government short of tyranny, largely because it gave power to the ignorant many rather than to knowledgeable experts (philosophers, as he saw it). But, if, as we insist, the people must ultimately decide, the question remains: How can we, non-experts, take account of expert opinion when it is relevant to decisions about public policy?

tags: Expertise Knowledge Democracy Decision Sense
Balderdash: More on the Problem of Good

"[On miracles supposedly being existence for a good god] Suppose that the evil-god hypothesis is true. This malignant being may not want us to know of his existence. In fact, it may help him maximize evil if he deceives us about his true character. An evil and omnipotent being will have no difficulty duping human beings into believing he is good. Taking on a ‘good’ guise, he might appear in one corner of the world, revealing himself in religious experiences and performing miracles in response to prayers, and perhaps also giving instructions regarding what his followers should believe. He might then do the same in another part of the globe, with the exception that the instructions he leaves regarding what should be believed contradict what he has said elsewhere. Our evil being could then stand back and watch the inevitable conflict develop between communities to whom he has now misleadingly revealed himself, each utterly convinced by their own stock of miracles and religious experiences that the one true all-good god is on their side. Here we have a recipe for ceaseless conflict, violence and suffering."

tags: God Religion Conflict Violence Evil
Balderdash: IT Security vs Human Idiocy

"Staff secretly dropped computer discs and USB thumb drives in the parking lots of government buildings and private contractors. Of those who picked them up, 60 percent plugged the devices into office computers, curious to see what they contained. If the drive or CD case had an official logo, 90 percent were installed.

“There’s no device known to mankind that will prevent people from being idiots”...

Tactics such as spear-phishing -- sending a limited number of rigged e-mails to a select group of recipients -- rely on human weaknesses like trust, laziness or even hubris.

tags: Security Technology Hacking
The Good Short Life With A.L.S. - NYTimes.com

We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative — not governing — in order to be free.

tags: Death Euthanasia Bioethics
Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: American Politics in a Single Graph

tags: Politics United States
IPS post-GE2011 survey, part 2 « Yawning Bread on Wordpress

Compared to the general election of 2006, the electorate in 2011 appears to be more mature, in that a larger number of them are swing voters. They are less easily pigeonholed into pro-People’s Action Party or pro-opposition camps.
Even so, among young adults, the tertiary-educated and those in upper-middle-class households, the pro-opposition camp is about twice as large as the pro-PAP camp.
These findings came from a survey of about 2,000 eligible voters conducted by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) in the fortnight after Polling Day.

tags: Election Singapore Education Politics Polarization
Epiphenom: Normal people more likely to recover from depression (probably)

tags: Religion Data Statistics Patternicity
3quarksdaily: Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers Discuss Deceit

Noam Chomsky: ...Throughout history it’s been mostly the property holders or the educated classes who’ve tended to support power systems. And that’s a large part of what I think education is—it’s a form of indoctrination. You have to reconstruct a picture of the world in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes, and this involves a lot of self-deceit.

tags: Chomsky Cultural Industries

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Bookmarks 07/13/2011

2011-07-13T08:33:00.001+08:00

Why one biscuit is never enough: Doctors reveal the science of hunger pangs - and what you can do about them | Mail Online

Most people think hunger pangs are brought on by their stomach. In fact, that feeling is generated inside your brain.

tags: Food Hunger Brain Desire

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gender Studies Bookmark 07/12/2011

2011-07-12T08:33:00.003+08:00

Balderdash: Eroticism vs Pornography in Literature
Tags: Pornography, Literature, Erotica, Sociology, Gender
Balderdash: How Romance Novels screw women up
"With their chiselled menfolk and swooning heroines, Mills & Boon novels are a guilty pleasure.

They are also a cause of marital breakdown, adulterous affairs and unwanted pregnancies, according to a warning published by the British Medical Journal.

Far from being a slice of innocent escapism for millions of female readers, romantic novels are a danger to relationships and sexual health. That is the verdict of an article in the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, which said women struggle to distinguish between romantic fiction and real life.
Tags: Fiction, Romance, Gender Stereotype

Posted from Diigo. The rest of XD3102 - Gender Studies group favorite links are here.

Bookmarks 07/12/2011

2011-07-12T08:33:00.001+08:00

Paris Review – Harvard and Class, Misha Glouberman

tags: Class Education Inequality Elitism Actors Network Theory Social
IPS post-GE2011 survey, part 1 « Yawning Bread on Wordpress

In his opening remarks, Janadas Devan (right), the new Director of IPS, pointed out an intriguing overlap between the results map of the 2011 general election and that of the early 1960s. The areas where opposition parties did relatively well this year were the areas that supported the People’s Action Party (PAP) fifty years ago, whereas those areas where the PAP did well in 2011, were areas that had supported the Barisan Sosialis.

How to explain this?

He postulated that this pattern might be due to the fact that the districts that supported the PAP in the 1960s were the built-up areas while those that tended to support the Barisan were rural. Today, the former are areas with private housing, whereas the once-rural areas are mostly filled with public housing.

What this then suggests is that class distinctions are important in understanding political views.

tags: Politics Class Inequality Singapore
Balderdash: How Romance Novels screw women up

"With their chiselled menfolk and swooning heroines, Mills & Boon novels are a guilty pleasure.

They are also a cause of marital breakdown, adulterous affairs and unwanted pregnancies, according to a warning published by the British Medical Journal.

Far from being a slice of innocent escapism for millions of female readers, romantic novels are a danger to relationships and sexual health. That is the verdict of an article in the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, which said women struggle to distinguish between romantic fiction and real life.

tags: Fiction Romance Gender Stereotype
Balderdash: Eroticism vs Pornography in Literature

tags: Pornography Literature Erotica Sociology Gender
An Israeli algorithm sheds light on the Bible

Software developed by an Israeli team is giving intriguing new hints about what researchers believe to be the multiple hands that wrote the Bible. The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book.

tags: Bible Book Content Analysis Computer Religion Gender Writing

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.