Links - 7th January 2014

Why Are So Many Girls Lesbian or Bisexual? - "Researchers at Cornell University, examining data collected from a representative sampling of young Americans which included more than 20,000 individuals in 80 communities across the United States, found that 85.1% of the young women identified as heterosexual; 0.5% reported no sexual identity; and the remaining 14.4% were sexual but not strictly heterosexual, i.e. either lesbian or bisexual. Among young men, 94.0% identified themselves as heterosexual; 0.4% of the men reported no sexual identity; and the remaining 5.6% identified as gay or bisexual. See Ritch Savin-Williams and Geoffrey L. Ream, "Prevalence and stability of sexual orientation components during adolescence and young adulthood," Archives of Sexual Behavior, volume 36, pp. 385 - 394, 2007. The proportions in Europe might be higher. For example, in Norway, more than 20% of girls and young women identified as lesbian or bisexual: see L. Wichstrøm and K. Hegna, "Sexual orientation and suicide attempt: A longitudinal study of the general Norwegian adolescent population," Journal of Abnormal Psychology, volume 112, pp. 144-151, 2003. In a study from New Zealand, 16.4% of young women identified as lesbian or bisexual, compared with 5.6% of men who identified as gay or bisexual: see N. Dickson and colleagues, "Same-sex attraction in a birth cohort: prevalence and persistence in early adulthood", Social Science and Medicine, volume 56, pp. 1607 - 1615, 2003... Professor Lisa Diamond has made a compelling case that many women don't discover their "true" sexual identity until their 20's, 30's or even 40's. A woman may reach her 40's, believe that she is a straight woman, and then find herself falling in love with her soulmate - who happens to be a woman"

The easy way:) - The People's Funny Pictures Blog - Quora

Why Eat With A Clown When You Can Dine With The King

New Research: Cheating on Exams with Smartwatches - "A Belgian university recently banned all watches from exams due to the possibility of smartwatches being used to cheat. Similarly, some standardized tests in the U.S. like the GRE have banned all digital watches. These policies seems prudent, since today’s smartwatches could be used to smuggle in notes or even access websites during the test. However, their potential use for cheating goes much farther than that... Future form factors are likely to be even less conspicuous and enable more unique attacks—think smart contact lenses or implantable smartphones. Outright bans may not be desirable or even feasible. In the long run, we will need to adapt in more drastic ways, perhaps by abandoning traditional exams as a form of student assessment."

Danish Muslim leader regrets role in cartoon rage - "A Danish Muslim leader who seven years ago traveled the Muslim world fueling the uproar over newspaper caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad is back in the headlines in Denmark after doing an about-face on the issue. Once a leading critic of the Danish cartoons, which sparked fiery protests in Muslim countries, Lebanese-born Ahmad Akkari now says the Jyllands-Posten newspaper had the right to print them... He appeared to advocate violence against a more moderate Danish Muslim in a secret TV recording, but later said it was just a joke"

Painful lessons from IT outsourcing gone bad - "In the sometimes panicked desire to save money -- especially with the powerful lure of "half-price" workers in places like India, China, and the Philippines -- good execution flies out the window. And that's where the problems flock in. Outsourcing is not for the faint-hearted or the ill-prepared. It just doesn't "happen"... In the pantheon of outsourcing horror stories, the $4 billion deal between the U.S. Navy and global services provider EDS stands out as one of the most horrific. It started back in 2003 when the Plano, Texas, vendor beat out the likes of IBM and Accenture for the contract. The deal was to manage voice, video, networking, training, and desktops for 350,000 Navy and Marine Corps users. But just one year later, EDS was writing off close to $350 million due to its inability to come even close to fulfilling its obligations... pricing took precedence over every other consideration because the executives wanted to show that they saved millions of dollars. Shortchanged in the process were the details of the transition, the development processes, and the governance. Adequate thought was not given to the obligations of the people who were responsible for executing the transition. "The contract was executed from a business perspective, where it looked great, but not enough thought was given to how to programmatically move to the new environment," Martin says."

Do Artificial Sweeteners Cause an Insulin Spike? - "Overall, the evidence seems to suggest little, if any, effect on insulin secretion as a result of tasting or consuming aspartame... The evidence for saccharin’s effect on insulin is mixed, but either way, it doesn’t appear to have too big of an impact in real world terms... according to the literature there isn’t an appreciable insulin effect from most sweeteners."

Nasi padang for MP: $2.50 - ""Mr Baey Yam Keng order this and it cost him only $2.50. I went to the same kopitiam and buy one hour after he posted it and show the owner the photo. He charged me $6.00,” he wrote."

Escort's hot tip: It's not just about the sex, it's about the mind - "Keller, who is 58 and works as a sales manager, says being married to an escort was always tough. To make it more manageable, he says, they established rules. For one, he could go to a hooker any time he wanted and she would pay for it. The other rule was that she could not have an orgasm with a client. After a time, Monet says, they became like any other married couple. They would each come home from work and talk about their day. Except that he came from an office and she had been having sex with other men... For Monet, escorting was a psychological as well as a physical service. She would talk at length with her clients, and get everything out first. By the end of the session, she says, her client would have a "mind-blowing orgasm." "If you blunt any emotion, you detract from your sexuality," she explains. "The two are indelibly connected. They are a package deal." The message of Monet's book is simple: Spend time trying to understand your man. It might sound obvious, she says, but people are reluctant to invest the emotional and mental energy needed to know their mates. "One of the things my clients paid me to do as a courtesan was to share their interests," she writes. "I have been paid to do things as diverse as watching old war movies with one client, or traveling up and down the coastline while another client took photographs of the scenery. When I realized how desperate these men were to find a woman who would show some interest in the things they were passionate about, it made me sad. It shouldn't be too much to ask our partners to share the things we love to do -- at least occasionally." Monet's views of male intimacy run counter to the mainstream. She has found that many men tend to be more intimate, emotional and trusting after sex. "It seems that for many women, just the reverse is true," she writes. At the same time, Monet is an advocate for female empowerment... "People came to grieve the death of a loved one or to prepare for their own death or to try to reconnect with their sexuality after a disability. "Were there horny guys who were just cheating on their wives? Yeah, there were those. But I found if I looked beyond the surface, there were a lot of deeper issues.""

St. Priapus Church - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "St. Priapus Church (French: Église S. Priape) is a North American religion founded in the 1980s that centres on the worship of the phallus. St. Priapus Church was founded in Montreal, Quebec, by D. F. Cassidy and has found a following mainly among homosexual men in Canada and the United States."

Eivind Kjørstad's answer to Asian People: Why are Asian women considered to be attractive but, Asian men not-so in the western media? - Quora - "Being physically small, subservient, docile, passive, polite, well-groomed. All of these are traits that we (correctly or not!) associate both with femininity and with being asian. In contrast, being large, muscular, aggressive and dominant, are all associated both with masculinity, and with being black. (again, correctly or not!) As a result, you should expect male sex-tourists to commonly go to Asia, and female sex-tourists to commonly go to Africa. This seems to match realities pretty well. For the same reason, you should expect racially-mixed couples to also more commonly be mixed in this way"

Motherfucking Website - "Let me describe your perfect-ass website:
Shit's lightweight and loads fast
Fits on all your shitty screens
Looks the same in all your shitty browsers
The motherfucker's accessible to every asshole that visits your site
Shit's legible and gets your fucking point across (if you had one instead of just 5mb pics of hipsters drinking coffee)
Well guess what, motherfucker:
You. Are. Over-designing. Look at this shit. It's a motherfucking website. Why the fuck do you need to animate a fucking trendy-ass banner flag when I hover over that useless piece of shit? You spent hours on it and added 80 kilobytes to your fucking site, and some motherfucker jabbing at it on their iPad with fat sausage fingers will never see that shit. Not to mention blind people will never see that shit, but they don't see any of your shitty shit.
You never knew it, but this is your perfect website...
you have no fucking idea what a website is. All you have ever seen are shitty skeuomorphic bastardizations of what should be text communicating a fucking message. This is a real, naked website. Look at it. It's fucking beautiful."

Charities losing out thanks to Facebook and Twitter 'slacktivism' - "worthy causes could be losing out on Facebook and Twitter thanks to a trend dubbed ‘slacktivism’. A study shows social media addicts are happy to puff themselves up by supporting causes with a ‘like’ – but then contribute nothing financially. It may be because slacktivists are more concerned with letting others see how charitable and fashionable they are without having to put their hands in their pockets. Report author Kirk Kristofferson said: ‘Our research shows that if people are able to declare support for a charity publicly in social media it can actually make them less likely to donate to the cause later on.’ Social media campaigns do raise awareness but that could be at a cost to how much is raised from rattling tins in the high street"
"Awareness" - making the world a better place