Links - 11th December 2011

World’s first spiny dogfish fishery receives MSC certification for sustainable fishing — MSC - "Kerry Coughlin, MSC Americas Regional Director, said: “On a global basis, many species in the shark family are vulnerable to overfishing. The BC spiny dogfish fishery is the first of its type to demonstrate, through assessment to the MSC’s rigorous, scientific standard, that the fishery is being conducted and managed in a sustainable manner. We hope this will inspire other fisheries harvesting this species to achieve this bar.”"
Sustainable Shark's Fin!

Oscar Wilde's Paris tomb made safe from kisses - "Oscar Wilde tomb in Paris is fitted with new glass barrier to shield the monument from greasy kisses"

Graduate Employment Survey 2010 (published 2011) - "In terms of employability, NTU Art, Design & Media is once again … last"

STOMP - Singapore Seen - New trend to pose inside lockers? They could damage property and hurt themselves
"All they are doing is preparing for the future. That is how small future HDB flats are going to be."

Stripping the Gurus—Hello, Dalai! - "One of the early Dalai Lamas was particularly known for his love of women. It was common practice for households in which a daughter had received the honor of the Dalai Lama’s transmission through sexual union to raise a flag over their home. It is said that a sea of flags floated in the wind over the town"

Use WhatsApp on your PC with Android Emulator

Eng's Wanton Mee and four others win Hawker Master awards - "The second edition of the Hawkers Masters take place soon after the good news that the Singapore government will build 10 new hawker centres and they will be run on a different governance model. I hope that one of the new centres will also function as a cooking school of hawker food."

Creating space for both smokers and non-smokers: Vivian
Amusingly this had nothing about creating space for smokers

Conflict, theology and history make Muslims more religious than others, experts say - "Muslims are much more likely than Christians and Hindus to say that their own faith is the only true path to paradise, according to a recent global survey, and they are more inclined to say their religion is an important part of their daily lives... there has been no "Enlightenment" in Islam as there was in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, weakening the link between church and state in many Christian countries"

The world's first sex school: An instant guide - "Of course, contraception is available at no extra cost, and, says Nick Jardine at Business Insider, students will board in mixed-sex dormitories, "to make doing homework a little easier""

Kaiser Willhelm's urinal found at bottom of Baltic

Diversity and Donations: The Effect of Religious and Ethnic Diversity on Charitable Giving - "Diversity has a detrimental effect on charitable donations. A 10 percentage point increase in ethnic diversity reduces donations by 14%, and a 10 percentage point increase in religious diversity reduces donations by 10%. The ethnic diversity effect is driven by a within-group disposition among non-minorities, and is most evident in high income, but low education areas. The religious diversity effect is driven by a within-group disposition among Catholics, and is concentrated in high income and high education areas"
Scandinavian social democracy has been similarly explained

Hard Truths declared haram by Malaysia's islamic authority

Teen Commits 'Suicide by Piranha' - Bolivian leaps into river swarming with flesh-eating fish

Married men be warned – being happier than your wife could end in divorce - "Researchers have found that if the man of the house is less happy than his wife then the couple are much less likely to split up. Alternatively if the husband is much happier, then his partner is much more likely to leave him... The happiness gap widened when wives were lumbered with most of the housework, if they had different social backgrounds to their husbands, or if they had higher than average incomes. But the gap was closed when couples were matched in social backgrounds, if they had a common religion, if the chores were shared or if the woman was a housewife, a student or retired"
I wonder if there's a feminist (mis)interpretation of this study

Frequent sex protects marital happiness for neurotic newlyweds - "For spouses with high levels of neuroticism, frequent sexual intercourse improved their marital satisfaction. The effect of frequent sexual activity was enough to completely wipe away the "happiness deficit" that neurotic spouses usually have"

Thin Wives Make Happy Marriages - "“Husbands were more satisfied at the time of marriage, and remained more satisfied over time, to the extent that their wives had lower BMIs than their own,” the researchers report. “Wives who had lower BMIs than their husbands remained more satisfied over time,” they add, “whereas wives who had higher BMIs than their husbands demonstrated steeper declines in their satisfaction over time”... In other words, size matters — but everything is relative"

17-Year-Old Girl Creates Nanoparticle That Kills Cancer

15 Year Old Girl Wins Excel World Championship, That Exists - "15 year old student, Rebecca Rickwood from the UK, has won the most recent Microsoft Excel World Championship. Also, there is a Microsoft Excel World Championship. I’m really not sure which one is the bigger story"

JPMorgan, Goldman Rank Among Best Workplaces for Gays, Lesbians - "JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are among 22 financial firms that received top marks today as the best workplaces for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees. The three banks were among 207 U.S. companies that offer health insurance covering medical services for transgender employees seeking sexual reassignment...　Financial firms outperformed most other industries in adopting and enforcing non-discrimination policies＂
Most LGBT activists would be against the finance industry. How ironic

Survival of the fittest: Linguistic evolution in practice - "A new study of how compound word formation is influenced by subtle forms of linguistic pressure demonstrates that words which "sound better" to the speakers of a language have a higher chance of being created"

Breaking News: Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details... - "The level of secrecy in this case makes it sound like a terrorist investigation, not the censorship of a popular music blog"

Graduates paying to work for free - "We campaign hard against unpaid internships because they exclude the vast majority of young people who cannot afford to work for free. There is something even more perverse about expecting young people to have to pay to work"

Raised by Indians: The Searchers, The Last Of The Mohicans (1992), Little Big Man - "Indians were idealized where they’d previously been demonized, portrayed as noble victims of U.S. expansion. To my eyes, that’s closer to the truth than the inverse, but idealization is its own kind of condescension. When portrayed only as noble, uncomplicated victims—all Chingachgooks and no Maguas—Native Americans become simultaneously less than and more than human"

Why Men and Women Cant be friends - YouTube - "Answering the age old question, Young Independent Filmmakers Jesse Budd and Patrick Romero set out to simply prove a point."
Intellectual Whore theory! However, they only interviewed reasonably attractive girls, so...

Bacon sandwich really does cure a hangover - "Food doesn't soak up the alcohol but it does increase your metabolism... Bingeing on alcohol depletes neurotransmitters too, but bacon contains a high level of aminos which tops these up, giving you a clearer head"
No wonder both are haram

Bikini models in H&M ads are four real heads all photoshopped onto the same CGI body

Atheists Who Go to Church: Doing It for the Children - "Many atheists want their children exposed to religion so that they can make up their own minds on what to believe."

What would Jesus do?: The rise of a slogan - "For Conrad Gempf, a US evangelical who teaches the New Testament at the London School of Theology, as well-meaning as it is, WWJD? is the wrong question. "When we look at what the early church did in the Bible," he says, "they didn't copy Jesus. They did what Jesus told them to do. Jesus spoke in parables, his disciples didn't - they preached about him and they told it straight. They didn't walk on water. Jesus didn't tell us to do what he did, he told us to do even greater things." There are other potential problems with the simple-sounding question. Can we really know WJWD? The life of a first century Judean carpenter, let alone messiah, is hard to compare to that lived by western teenagers today. "There was never a time when it was appropriate for Jesus to play the saxophone. But there may be a time when it's exactly the right thing for you to do. That bracelet will mislead you," Gempf suggests... hanging around with prostitutes and trashing the temple. Is that the kind of behaviour church youth leaders want to encourage?"

Attackers of white girl: They're as Muslim as you are intelligent - "It is official: Racial attacks against white people are excusable. Much of the judicature can be relied upon to deliver justice according to liberal-left, Frankfurt School ideology.  What other explanation is there for Judge Robert Brown’s decision to excuse a quartet of “Muslim” girls that attacked Rhea Page, kicked her in the head and tore out her hair. In case there was any doubt that the attack was racially aggravated, the four-piece gang (actually clan, as they comprised of three sisters and a cousin) yelled “kill the white slag”. Now, if the racial profile was reversed and four white girls attacked a person of another race, while cajoling and exhorting one another to “kill”, then I’m pretty confident a custodial sentence would have been passed. Juxtapose this event with the famous “tram” incident widely disseminated on YouTube, in which Emma West, holding her young child on a tram, launched a rocket of profanities against Poles, black and brown people and argued with other passengers. West has been remanded in custody pending trial on the 3rd of January 2012. We are told it is for her own protection. Maybe it is. Or maybe remanding her is politically motivated. I have watched the YouTube video of the event twice now. The version I saw was not complete, and I don’t know what incited her to rant (reports say she was drunk)"
There are claims that intoxication is a mitigating factor for sentencing, not for culpability, but I'm very sure if you get drunk and knock somebody down, or rape someone, you are NOT going to get probation