Links - 30th April 2012

One Per Cent: Bloated website code drains your smartphone's battery - "Wikipedia uses a custom file Javascript along with a generic library to collapse and expand the various sections on a page, but much of the library goes unused. By rewriting the site's Javascript to just perform the required function, Thiagarajan and colleagues were able to reduce the energy used from 15 to 9.5 Joules... They say that as well as making websites fast and good looking, web designers should also take into account the energy used in loading the page - otherwise users might decide to go elsewhere"
Users who actually decide to go elsewhere based on webpage power usage aren't normal users

STOMP - Singapore Seen - Meet the metrosexual soldier: He's big, brave and...shops for beauty products
Comment: "I used to cleanse, scrub, tone and moisturize my face. every week face mask to keep it hydrated and i taught my colleagues and MY RECRUITS to take of their faces well.
I WAS A PLATOON SERGEANT!!! There is NOTHING WRONG in taking care of your face while in the army.. "

Burger King Japan Offering 15 Bacon Strips for $1 So We Order Whopper With 105 Bacon Strips - "Roughly 10 minutes later, Mr. Sato was finished. We asked him for a comment but he just sat there silently with a look of triumph on his face, his eyes blissfully vacant and far away, until he suddenly came to, murmuring something about having to be home to sign for parcel delivery and running out the door with his hand over his mouth. We’re not quite sure what happened after that and Mr. Sato refuses to talk about it"

Court Rejects PA DAs Attempt To Charge Teens For Sexting Themselves - "About a year ago a prosecutor in Pennsylvania wanted to bring child porn charges against some teenage girls who had taken some "nude and seminude" photos of themselves with cameraphones and sent them to others... This raised an outcry from many who felt it was ridiculous to charge kids with child pornography for taking photos of themselves"
Likewise it is ridiculous to "protect" "minors" who clearly need no protection. Subhas Anandan: "she's a hardcore prostitute who doesn't need any protection. Actually, all our clients are the victims"

Inequality: If I were the 99% I'd try to be the 1% | The Economist - "The post... [was] an unauthorised attempt by an unqualified ethnic-majority person at racial empathy with an imaginary ethnic-minority person, a gesture which is just extremely risky and basically shouldn't be ventured. (Notably, responses by Karl Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who actually know what it's like to grow up as poor black kids, were more even-tempered in their rebuttals than most)... One thing I find paradoxical is that highly numerate people, people in the engineering, business and technical fields... are often most reluctant to consider social problems from a statistical point of view, and prefer to consider them as individual moral or motivational stories"

Girls In Yoga Pants
Wha? Anyway most of the girls here would be featureworthy regardless of what they wore

6 Wordsmiths Who Couldn’t Spell - "[Jane Austen] once misspelled one of her teenage works as “Love and Freindship” and is infamously known to have spelt scissors as scissars."

Ben Southall: Whatever happened to the man who got the best job in the world on desert island paradise? He worked too hard, lost his girlfriend and got stung by poisonous jellyfish

101 Wankers - "101 Wankers is a blog by a woman cyclist in London, about men, or ‘wankers’ as she prefers to call them, who harass her on the streets when she is going about her business in the capital... the focus of 101 wankers is not so much traffic, lack of cycle awareness and dangerous driving, but rather that ubiquitous phenomenon we hear so much about (from feminists) – ‘street harassment’... I thought I’d set up my own ’101 wankers’ and see what it looks like the other way round. I am collecting the names of people who ban me from their blogs and block me from twitter... they have quite a wankerish way of dealing with dissent online. Also it is interesting what kind of categories these ‘wankers’ fall into. In terms of the kind of dissent they are attempting to block or erase"

Lessons from Sheryl Sandberg: Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week - "In the early 1900s, Ford Motor ran dozens of tests to discover the optimum work hours for worker productivity. They discovered that the "sweet spot" is 40 hours a week–and that, while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative... in every case that I've personally observed, the long hours result in work that must be scrapped or redone... I remember a guy in one company I worked for who used the number of divorces in his group as a measure of its productivity... In six of the top 10 most competitive countries in the world (Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom), it's illegal to demand more than a 48-hour work week. You simply don't see the 50-, 60-, and 70-hour work weeks that have become de rigeur in some parts of the U.S. business world... nobody should be apologizing for leaving at work at a reasonable hour like 5:30 p.m. In fact, people should be apologizing if they're working too long each week–because it's probably making the team less effective overall"

Study confirms you're either gay, straight or lying! - "A new study casts doubt on whether true bisexuality exists, at least in men... men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, and that was usually other men.

Feminism, Brotherhood Style - "As one of only nine women elected to Egypt's lower house of parliament (out of 498 elected deputies) in the country's first free elections in more than half a century, you'd think Garf would be at the vanguard for promoting women's rights. Instead, she has made a splash by talking about tightening Egypt's already stringent divorce laws, rolling back the ban on female genital mutilation, and reportedly denying that sexual harassment exists in Egypt... it's just strange to hear the patriarchal party line coming from a woman's mouth. For Garf, though, there's no contradiction at all. For her, and the Muslim Brotherhood as a whole, adhering to a strict interpretation of Islam is the right thing for everyone. Period. What she wants for women, at first glance, doesn't seem that different from what other Egyptian feminists have called for... When I ask her about her role as a woman in parliament, she refuses to be pigeonholed by her gender. "I don't restrict my role as a woman; it is broader than that," she says calmly. "I have to face all the problems Egypt is encountering now, especially in my district, including those facing Egyptian women"... she is talking about legislating sharia now, or as quickly as possible. That's something the Brotherhood has carefully avoided highlighting to the Western media, while duplicitously making assurances to the local media... Garf has been quoted as suggesting the laws [on female circumcision] should be rolled back and women be allowed to make their own decisions -- for "beautification" purposes... 'People are entitled to do what suits them'"
Here is where the problems of both the constitutive paradox of feminism and identity politics get even more interesting with feminarchal impositions

Diary of A Singaporean Mind: The ugly truth about TFR and foreign influx.... - "Yesterday we heard this argument again - if Singapore's fertility rate does not go up, we have to import more foreigners... lets take it that it is correct and reasonable to maintain a workforce of a constant size. That is not what the PAP govt did in the last 10 years - they were not maintaining the workforce but expanding it to ramp up the GDP... The PAP compounded the low fertility problem by importing more people causing the population density to increase and the HDB adds to this vicious cycle by shrinking flat sizes arguing that Singapore families are now smaller when in fact people have fewer children because they cannot afford bigger better housing... TFR in Singapore fell and kept falling until it became the lowest in the world. How did this happen despite PAP govt claims that it was encouraging families to have more children? The PAP efforts to get the TFR back up is tainted by other goals... Instead of simple financial incentive given to all women who have children, the govt decided to give financial incentives in the form of tax rebates... Anyone with common sense knows that giving more money to those who are already highly paid and less or nothing to those who need it most is a bad incentive scheme to encourage Singaporeans to have more children. These schemes are not effective and have failed to boost our TFR... The ugly truth is this ....I don't think the PAP govt cares if the workforce is largely native Singaporeans or imported. Only ordinary Singaporeans care and worry about this. For the PAP, Singapore is Singapore Inc and they take a corporatist view of things"

Population Density is a Key Factor in Declining Human Fertility - "In studying the complex determinants of human fertility, social scientists have given little attention to population density, although reproduction has been shown to be density-dependent for a wide variety of other species. Using fixed effects models on the time series of 145 countries and controlling for key social and economic variables, we find a consistent and significant negative relationship between human fertility and population density. Moreover, we find that individual fertility preferences also decline with population density"

Kazakhstan thanks Borat for sparking tourism boom with his spoof documentary - "After this film the number of visas issued to Kazakhstan grew by ten times. This is a big victory for us and I thank Borat for attracting tourists."

There Is A $1 Million Bounty On Tim Tebow's Virginity

Miss Travel Will Fill Your Flight Or Vacation With Fun! - "Travel dating is one of the hottest new trends, and it is waiting for you! If you are a traveling girl, then you can be sure to find the perfect match. For guys, you will be able to finally travel with the girl of your dreams... Traveling girls will never have to worry about the expensive downfalls of traveling, as MissTravel.com will pair you with the most willing of gentlemen. You will meet honest and professional men, who would love nothing more than to take you on an adventure with them. You will see the sights of your dreams as you fly for free! Gone are the days of traveling alone and unsure, as MissTravel.com will ensure your success as a traveling girl."
HURR HURR; "Note: MissTravel.com is strictly an online dating website. Escorts are not welcome."
In other news the founder's from Singapore - looks like we can be entrepreneurial - overseas! He also set up SeekingArrangement.com, SeekingMillionaire.com and WhatsYourPrice.com - the idea behind all the sites is basically the same