Links - 9th February 2012

"Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science." - Henri Poincare

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FT launches first major HTML5 mobile news app - "Assanka firmly believes that the craze for native apps is a short one and we are already seeing it on the wane. Native apps, which need to be distributed via a proprietary app store controlled by an operator or device manufacturer, also suffer from being restricted to the platform for which they are built, necessitating an almost complete rewrite for each different platform. Maintaining separate, functionally equivalent apps for Android, iOS, Blackberry OS6, Playbook, WebOS AND Windows Phone is an expensive and time consuming business, something that major publishers realise only too well. Native apps have other limitations too. Web technology has matured over 15 years to provide a rich set of tools for making web applications that are open, accessible and linkable. The very ethos of web development is that it is fundamentally an open platform, inviting integration, connecting, linking and sharing of information. Native apps construct a silo around themselves and operate in their own artificially constructed world. Everything in that world may be beautiful and the user experience may be dazzling, but the value is locked into that container."

The Inheritance of Education — Marginal Revolution - "Higher parental income predicts higher child income but only for biological children and not for adoptees. Now what about education?... 'Having a college educated mother increases an adoptee's probability of graduating from college by 7 percentage points, but raises a biological child's probability of graduating from college by 26 percentage points.' The effect for father's years of education is even larger... Similarly, parent income has a negligible effect, small and not statistically significant, on an adoptee completing college but an 8 times larger and statistically significant effect on a biological child completing college"
The only convincing criticism I had previously come across of adoption studies is that adopted parents are not the same as parents in the general population, since they are screened to not be psychotic and otherwise be not unsuitable parents. However I have just been made aware of this further finding, so the findings of adoption studies are indeed very generalisable

Did The Media Treat Bachmann Unfairly Because She's An Insane Woman? | Onion News Network - "'Is Bachmann treated differently because she's a woman with a frighteningly apparent psychological instability?'
'Oh, I don't think there's any question. Every time she says something that's objectively bizarre about how God told her to adopt two dozen children, or how same sex marriage is the number one threat to this country, the press jumps down her throat"
Acura is actually a real brand!

“‘We Hate Math,’ Say 4 in 10 — a Majority of Americans”

Judge Orders Florida Man To Take His Wife on a Date - "Just in time for Valentine's Day, a Florida judge ruled on Tuesday that a man involved in a scuffle with his wife treat her to an evening at a local bowling alley and a romantic meal at Red Lobster"

Nick Patrick - Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? - "Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. That’s not too surprising. What’s surprising, though, is that those accents were much closer to today’s American accents than to today’s British accents. While both have changed over time, it’s actually British accents that have changed much more drastically since then."

BBC tells its staff: don’t call Qatada extremist - "n order to avoid making a “value judgment”, the corporation’s managers have ruled that he can only be described as “radical”. Journalists were also cautioned against using images suggesting the preacher is overweight... A British court has called Qatada a “truly dangerous individual” and even his defence team has suggested he poses a “grave risk” to national security... “Given the evidence about this man, it makes you wonder what you have to do for the BBC to call you an extremist”"

Man jailed for indecent acts on underage sister-in-law - "The teen was diagnosed with herpes and doctors at the KK Women's and Children's Hospital also discovered that her hymen was not intact. A police report was made"
I thought they had moved beyond the idea of First Blood

New breed of 'piranha women' who are preying on rich men to get them pregnant - "'Marriage doesn’t seem to have the same resonance it once had. Instead women want a baby. Babies are becoming a lot more fashionable – they are becoming trophies. For some women having a baby is a career move. They are paid to stay at home and look after their baby. It is a meal ticket for the next 18 years of their life.’ Mrs Benussi runs a large matrimonial law firm in Birmingham specialising in high-value divorce cases and has over 30 years’ experience. Last night she warned how a one-night stand or fling could leave men with a long-term financial hangover if it leads to pregnancy... she does not put the blame solely on the woman. She added: ‘Any man that has unprotected sex is stupid. He is asking for a big dent in the pocket’" Victim blaming! On the upside I've finally found out where "RAW IS WAR" came from

Is online dating destroying love? - "In the hypermarket of desire, as in a large Tesco's breakfast cereal aisle, it's almost impossible to choose... "Charming, sporty, generous, funny, 'no mind games', good-looking, sensual ... They practically guarantee you'll be on cloud nine." When everyone is presenting themselves as practically perfect in every way... "Dates are not about sitting in the room and interviewing each other about questions; they're often about experiencing something together in the real world"... in the new millennium a new leisure activity emerged. It was called sex and we'd never had it so good... it had nothing to do with marriage, monogamy or motherhood but was devoted to enjoyment, to that scarcely translatable (but fun-sounding) French word jouissance... In a sense, though, sex and love are opposites. One is something that could (but perhaps shouldn't) be exchanged for money or non-financial favours; the other is that which resists being reduced to economic parameters... in the new world of speed dating, online dating and social networking, the overwhelming idea is to have short, sharp engagements that involve minimal commitment and maximal pleasure... Kaufman's utopia, then, involves a new concept he calls tentatively LoveSex (which sounds like an old Prince album, but let's not hold that against him). Kaufmann suggests that we have to reverse out of the cul de sac of sex for sex's sake and recombine it with love once more to make our experiences less chilly but also less clouded by romantic illusions. "We have to discover ways of loving on a strictly temporary basis.""

The mystery woman involved with ex-SCDF, CNB chiefs - "According to a report in the Lianhe Wanbao, the female IT executive is an attractive divorcee in her 40s, with two children, a boy and a girl, while a report by the Straits Times puts her age at 36, with no mention of her being divorced. The same report has friends and contacts describing her as tall, slim, long-haired and vivacious. Petite with long hair and big eyes, she is said to have the nickname 'pretty woman'"
Nickname FAIL!

Flirt with losing your reputation - ""She was wearing a miniskirt with a very low cut top and seemed to be soaked in perfume," he says. "Not only was she very pushy with the sales talk, she even sat on the meeting table with her legs crossed and kept touching her thighs... He then called the supplier and told them to send another sales representative. They sent a man at the rescheduled meeting. He maintains that he did not misread the signals because "she was on the meeting table". He adds that the difference with men in selling is that they focus on technical details and not on body language... "The men in the company know what they're selling and how to sell it convincingly"... Says Michelle, who is single: "Of course, like any other industry, there's harmless flirting once you're more comfortable with the clients""

The (real) secret to hot sex - "They want spontaneity. Well, you know? You can’t have that. How many 40-year-olds who have any sort of a life do anything spontaneously? I mean, look at you and I, we wanted to have a conversation and we had to plan it. We didn’t say, you know, when you’re in the mood, give me a call. This yearning for spontaneity is so poignant, because what people are really saying is, ” I yearn for the uncomplicated life that I used to have where sexuality was at my disposal 24 hours a day, rain or shine”... Most people who want to know what’s sexually normal, they’re not going to use that information in a wholesome way. Most people want to know what’s sexually normal so that they can compare themselves or their mate to that standard... if you want to know what’s statistically common when it come to sex, as I say in the book, it’s that people have sex when they’re tired and when they feel self-conscious about their bodies."

Flavorwire » Movies Banned in Foreign Countries for Weird Reasons - "Any movie featuring time travel, banned in China (2011)
We could probably fill up this whole list with weird things that China has forbidden in cinema, but what really takes the cake is their ban on “fantasy, time-travel, random compilations of mythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even propagating feudal superstitions, fatalism and reincarnation, ambiguous moral lessons, and even a lack of positive thinking.”"

The Komen fiasco: How to drive Planned Parenthood out of the abortion business. - "If you want to put Planned Parenthood out of the abortion business, what should you do with your money? The answer is: Give it to Planned Parenthood... What happens when you provide condoms and contraceptive services? Women who don’t want to get pregnant don’t get pregnant. Which means fewer women are in the market for abortions. The abortion business dries up... the proportion of women living under liberal abortion laws is inversely associated with the abortion rate in the subregions of the world"

Uninvited kiss lands man in jail
Francis Ngien Tai Ho's 2 weeks jail for kissing a girl's hand was bad enough. This guy got 6 months for adding a shoulder grab to the kiss. Again, you won't hear AWARE or feminists talking about this