Links - 25th October 2010

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." - Anatole France

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The Conversation: Male Vs. Female Bosses - "The findings of a 2008 study from The University of Toronto revealed that women working under a sole female supervisor reported more distress and physical stress symptoms than women working under a lone male supervisor. The same stress levels were reported for a male/female supervising team, hinting that the very presence of a woman in a position of power is a stress trigger for female employees."

best of craigslist: Advice to Young Men from an Old Man - "10. Don’t undermine your fellow young men. Mentor the young men that come after you. Society recognizes that you have the potential to be the most power force in society. It scares them. Society does not find young men sympathetic. They are afraid of you, both individually and collectively. Law enforcement’s primary purpose is to suppress you.
11. As a young man, you’re on your own. Society divides and conquers. Unlike women who have advocates looking out for them (NOW, Women’s Study Departments, government, non-profit organizations, political advocacy groups) almost no one is looking out for you."

Homer Simpson 'is a true Catholic' - "It is not the first time that the Vatican newspaper has praised The Simpsons. Last December, as the television series celebrated its 20th anniversary, the paper said that "the relationship between man and God" is one of its most important themes and that it often mirrored the "religious and spiritual confusion of our times""
Apparently they know better than the producers

Is a man's bladder larger or smaller than that of a woman? - "This gives the physiological capacity of the adult male and female as 500 ml, and notes that there is probably no inherent difference between male and female... THE QUESTION may be prompted by women's apparent need to go to the WC more frequently than men do. Some have suggested this is due to the woman's bladder pushing against interior parts that cause discomfort, whereas the male bladder bumps up against less objecting parts, so that the discomfort is far less"

Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal -- Schultz et al. 319 (7225): 1596 - "It took years, a lobby, undesired publicity, and a godsend (two tablets of sildenafil 25 mg) to obtain our images. They show that such pictures are feasible and add to our knowledge of anatomy. We did not foresee that the men would have more problems with sexual performance (maintaining their erection) than the women in the scanner. All the women had a complete sexual response, but they described their orgasm as superficial. Only the first couple was able to perform coitus adequately without sildenafil (experiments 1 and 2). The reason might be that they were the only participants in the real sense: involved in the research right from the beginning because of their scientific curiosity, knowledge of the body, and artistic commitment. And as amateur street acrobats they are trained and used to performing under stress"
This seminal paper is online!

HPV Oral Cancers on Rise as Oral Sex Becomes More Popular, May Spread Human Papilloma Virus - "Doctors say that changing sexual behaviors -- earlier sex, more partners and especially oral sex -- are contributing to a new epidemic of orpharyngeal squamous cell cancers, those of the throat, tonsils and base of the tongue. These cancers can be deadly, and are striking men at a younger age and in increasing numbers"

God Soup - "The belief that all religions are the same at their core runs not only through religious academia but also popular culture... The problem with this pleasant-sounding philosophy, Prothero argues, is that it encourages people to remain ignorant of the genuine differences between religions. It’s not just that different religions provide varying answers to the same question, Prothero asserts, but most religions aren’t even asking the same questions... there is one quality that unites all belief systems. “Every religion,” he writes, “asks after the human condition. Here we are in these human bodies. What now? What next? What are we to become?”"

Why women get more miserable with age - "Women in particular tended to be more unhappy as they grew older because they had outlived their husbands and their children had grown up and moved away.... Sir Michael suggested that this could be because men were enjoying retirement more than going to work every day, finding the time to concentrate on hobbies and spend time with friends and family"

Sanitary Pads and their relevance to intelligence - "I have asked a boyfriend once to buy me a pack, and twice he came back with nothing because (a) he got confused with winged pads and non-winged pads (b) he didn’t want to look gay buying one (c) it was too bloody confusing. Light days? Heavy days? Night flow? What the hell? The third time I asked him to help get one, he came back with maternity pads from the nearby tabib China. I gave up after that. There are some things you cannot train a man to do"
Presumably you can train a woman to do anything, so they make better servants. Comparative advantage!

Partisan bias: The danger of the partisan mind | The Economist - ""[O]ur partisan predispositions affect not just what we think about candidates, or about policy proposals, but how we think about the objective facts of the world"... The advent of the Obama era has evidently put Democratic minds at ease. But why? Is government now, as a matter of fact, less of a threat to American citizens? President Obama seems no better than George Bush on those issues that presumably led a majority of Democrats to view Washington as a threat. Indeed, the continuity between the Obama and Bush administrations on these issues is so complete, it would be misleading to characterise Mr Obama as "Bush light". Mr Obama's stance on civil liberties and executive power amount to a vigorous affirmation of the very policies he openly deplored during the campaign... each party's base of supporters is more or less blind to government's threat to freedom when their favoured team is in power"

Student Surveys Contradict Claims of Evolved Sex Differences - "In order to evaluate the relative proportion of mating effort devoted to short- and long-term mating in the two sexes, the proper method is to use a scale such as time or money, which has the same interval between units, not the seven-point rating scale that Buss and Schmitt used... Miller and her colleagues carried out their own version of Buss and Schmitt's work, asking how much time and money college students spent in a typical week pursuing short-, intermediate- or long-term relationships. The proportion of mating effort dedicated to short-term mating was the same for men and women. Similarly, both men and women showed an equivalent tendency to lower their standards for sex partners, and men did not report feeling constrained to have far fewer sexual partners than they truly desired"
This sounds like a very interesting paper - though there is likely some fatal flaw

Porn in your mobile phone? It’s an offence - "In sentencing, district judge Liew Thiam Leng said that the primary concern in sentencing for such cases was the protection of the public. The type of sentence will depend on the circumstances, the quality, quantity and the nature of the films and whether there is any element of commercial gain. Said the judge: "A non-custodial sentence is reserved for isolated offences where the number of films are small (usually less than 20), and it is for personal use, where there is no commercial element and the accused has pleaded guilty and is a first offender." Tan was found with 38 such clips, which the court noted was a large number. And it was also unusual to store so many on a mobile phone for private viewing"
Majulah Singapura! If you must store porn in your phone or computer, have 5 3-hour-long movies instead of 30 one-minute-long clips

Study: Women across nearly every income level give significantly more to charity than men - "The data used for the study was not broken down by gender, so researchers looked solely at households headed by single men or single women, including adults who have been divorced, widowed or never married. They looked at the donating patterns of about 8,000 American households"
This is a very crappy headline

Fight Erupts Over Health Insurance Rates For Businesses With More Women - "Insurers and brokers who sell policies readily defend current rating practices in the group market. "Insurance is about risk, and we can demonstrate objectively that women are a higher risk," says Henry Stern, an insurance broker near Dayton, Ohio. "If you don't base it on risk, you don't have insurance. You have income redistribution," meaning others would have to pay more... until their mid-50's, women cost significantly more than men. For example, according to the risk chart of one major insurer, the average 25- to 29-year-old woman generates nearly three times as much medical spending as men of that age"
Besides gender rating, guess what else is discriminatory? The Visa Waiver Program!

Rich, Black, Flunking - "The average black student in Shaker Heights put little effort into schoolwork and was part of a peer culture that looked down on academic success as "acting white"... 'When anybody in this culture today talks about black responsibility for their problems, they are condemned and ignored'... many scholars are eager to blame everything but black culture... Ogbu found a near-consensus among black students of every grade level that they and their peers did not work hard in school... "There's a shibboleth in the academic world and that is that the only culture that has any negative traits is the white, middle-class West"... McWhorter's own book, based largely on the author's experiences as a black man and professor, blames a mentality of victimhood as the primary reason for most of the problems in black communities... "Discrimination is not enough to explain the gap," he says. "There are studies showing that black African immigrants and Caribbean immigrants do better than black Americans even though some of them come with language barriers. It's just not race"... Other parents also agree with Ogbu, Jones says, and will admit it privately, but publicly, it's too politically charged. "When you're in a public setting people are less apt to speak their mind if they think it's politically incorrect""

Bankers got a kick out of the Crunch, says academic - "Dr Paul Crosthwaite claims that the willingness of banks to deal in sub-prime loans and related derivatives, which were bound to result in disastrous losses, can only be understood if the bankers unconsciously desired the destruction of their own institutions... Dr Crosthwaite uses psychoanalysis to explain the successive booms and busts that have shaken markets over the last two decades... [they] expressions of the innate urge for self-destruction which Sigmund Freud termed the 'death drive'."
1) Perhaps those who were not fired
2) It's the Journal of the THEORETICAL humanities
3) It's psychoanalysis. You know why it's under Literature, and not Psychology - it doesn't need empirical verification