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Friday, June 27, 2008

"We must make do with the imperfect evidence that we can find, not merely lament its deficiencies." - Robert Putnam
Cannot, then much of the Social Sciences will be out of jobs

***

Too many black and Asian faces on TV, says BBC director Samir Shah - ""I don't think that such over-representation is a brilliant idea. Another thing that's not real is some of the casting of non-whites in fiction," he added. He pointed to the casting of the Ferreira family in EastEnders as an example. "If you were to cast an Asian family in the East End, it should have been Bangladeshi. Instead we had a family of Goan descent," Shah said. "The plain fact is that this tick-box approach to equal opportunities has led to an inauthentic representation of who we are: a world of deracinated coloured people flickering across our screens - to the irritation of many viewers and the embarrassment of the very people such actions are meant to appease.""
So instead they are going to have inauthentic quotas for senior executives. Brilliant.

Brain Aging and Midlife Tofu Consumption - "Poor cognitive test performance, enlargement of ventricles and low brain weight were each significantly and independently associated with higher midlife tofu consumption. A similar association of midlife tofu intake with poor late life cognitive test scores was also observed among wives of cohort members, using the husband’s answers to food frequency questions as proxy for the wife’s consumption. Statistically significant associations were consistently demonstrated in linear and logistic multivariate regression models. Odds ratios comparing endpoints among "high-high" with "low-low" consumers were mostly in the range of 1.6 to 2.0."

Drugs returned to red-faced Customs - "A SHOCKED airline passenger has returned a million yen's worth of cannabis that Customs staff planted in his bag in a bungled sniffer dog exercise."
If you find pot in your bag in Singapore, you're better off disposing of it otherwise you might have to prove you're not a drug trafficker.

Gay rodeo undermines sexual stereotypes - "Philadelphia's gay community sought to dispel some sexual stereotypes when it held the city's first gay rodeo... But the event - like other longer-established gay rodeos elsewhere in the United States - distinguishes itself from mainstream rodeos by injecting a little fun along with the strength and skill required to control a bucking animal. Interspersed with familiar events like steer riding and calf roping were "goat dressing" - in which pairs of contestants try to put hot-pink underwear on the hind quarters of an uncooperative goat in the shortest time - and "steer decorating" in which one partner of a team has to tie a ribbon on the tail of a struggling steer while the other tries to hold on to its horns."
I'm sure they undermined many sexual stereotypes.

Atheists caught having sex in cathedral - "The agency said the pair -- a 31-year-old laborer and a 32-year-old teacher -- defended their conduct saying: "We are atheists and for us, having sex in church is like doing it any other place." However, Bishop Antonio Lanfranchi of Cesena-Sarsina took said the couple's behavior was "an outrage of notable proportions which bespeaks unutterable squalor." He added that a special ceremony would be held to purify the confession box."
RC (TiT): "It could have been worse: they could have been using a condom."

The hardware way to boost your productivity - "What makes the Northgate OmniKey so special? First, the keyboard weighs in at almost five pounds. Its "Alps" key switches — the gizmos underneath the keys themselves — are rated for 10 million pushes. I bet most of Northgate's switches can stand up to ten times that number of presses, and I should know because I've pushed at least that many Alps switches over the years... Some keyboard purists feel that the Avants don't live up to the OmniKey ideal. For example, the letters on the Avant key caps are printed, while those on the OmniKey are embossed into the key caps themselves. This isn't a huge deal until you press a key 10 million times or so."

Learn to Be Nice to Your Wife, or Pay the Price - "A change in Japanese law this year allows a wife who is filing for divorce to claim as much as half her husband's company pension. When the new law went into effect in April, divorce filings across Japan spiked 6.1 percent. Many more split-ups are in the pipeline, marriage counselors predict. They say wives -- hearts gone cold after decades of marital neglect -- are using calculators to ponder pension tables, the new law and the big D... The husbands association ranks its members on a scale of 1 to 10. A "1" is a well-meaning but clueless guy who has done little more than show up at a group meeting. A "10" is a husband who has reached a Zen-like state of being able to show his wife through his daily behavior that he truly loves her -- and even manages to spit out the words "I love you." It is not common in Japanese culture for men or women to say those words, even in happy marriages, according to marriage counselors. So far, the husbands association has unearthed only one "10."... Asked whether he has yet mastered the art of telling his wife that he loves her, he replied: "I can say, 'I love you,' if I am drunk.""
Great. You slog for your family for decades and then get dumped and screwed out of your pension.

Intelligent people 'less likely to believe in God' - "Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average. A decline in religious observance over the last century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence, he claimed. But the conclusions - in a paper for the academic journal Intelligence - have been branded "simplistic" by critics."
Unless the critics had anything more than vague accusations lined up, this is like the classic accusation that someone is a 'pseudo-intellectual', ie "We can't refute what you're saying, so we'll try a Jedi mind trick and hope no one notices we haven't actually refuted you". It is heartening that he does controversial research linking intelligence to things other people would rather not link them with. Hopefully he won't lose his job.
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