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Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Links - 12th November 2014

"Men don't dump young women for older women. Men dump young women for younger women." - from Mistresses (the show)

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The Twisted World of Sexual Organs - "when the Korean woman chewed on the dead male squid’s flesh she triggered the release of his spermatophores. The sperm sacs mistook the woman’s soft mouth for a female squid and implanted themselves there instead. The dead male squid had, effectively, attempted to inseminate a human female... penises may double as weapons during violent combat, or as lassos to snag a mate - often against her will. It’s a world where semen can exert powerful mind control over a female, and vaginas can act to deliberately help or hinder the age-old race of sperm to egg... The sperm of the Norway rat, for instance, have tiny hook-shaped heads that allow them to link together in their hundreds, forming a mega-sperm with several hundred tails that can power towards the eggs faster than single sperm. This gives the sperm a vital edge in the race to reach the egg before a rival’s sperm does. Other rats play dirty. They have developed deliberately malformed ‘kamikaze’ sperm, which seem to linger behind as their peers race to the egg. These sperm are thought by some scientists to join together and form a tangled mess that ensnares the sperm of rival males - although the idea is controversial... It’s only within the last 20 years that biologists such as Eberhard and Barbosa have begun to realise just how much power females hold during mating. It’s easy to understand why this went unnoticed for so long: female control is often subtle and even cryptic compared to the boisterous displays of power and control often put on by males... Men, unusually among male mammals, lack a penis bone (some scholars think the Bible may have been one of the first texts to attempt an explanation for this puzzling fact – Adam may have lost his penis bone, not a rib, in the creation of Eve). Even so, the human penis has probably also evolved to stimulate women. It is freakishly large compared to the penises of most of our closest animal relations - the chimps, gorillas and orang-utans."
Likewise in humans: female control is often subtle and even cryptic. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist

PEOPLE WITH ‘FOREIGN-SOUNDING’ NAMES GET FEWER JOB INTERVIEWS - "Job applicants with ‘foreign-sounding’ names are considerably less likely to be invited for an interview than people with Anglo-Saxon names. That is the central finding of research by Nicolas Jacquemet and Constantine Yannelis, presented at the Royal Economic Society’s 2011 annual conference. This discrimination is of the same size as the often-observed discrimination against African-American names in job applications, suggesting that the discrimination may be due to a general suspicion about differences rather than a particular ethnicity... These results suggest that discrimination arises because of a general mistrust of outsiders rather than a mistrust of specific minorities. The authors argue that government policies that target discrimination against specific minorities will miss out on preventing discrimination against others: governments should turn their attention to removing the chance for discrimination of any kind by making all resumes anonymous... The extent of racial discrimination is now well established, and ranges from a 30-50% drop in the likelihood of receiving a positive answer as a result of the perceived ethnicity of the name appearing on the resume. Perhaps the most striking fact is that this result remains the same across countries, geographic regions and ethnic minorities. This may suggest that discrimination arises because of a general mistrust of any individual identified as an outsider of the dominant group, rather than a targeted mistrust against specific minorities – that is, suspicions of dissimilarities rather than differences... Once call-backs are disaggregated according to whether the employer is in the city proper or the suburbs, it appears the whole discrimination pattern comes from the suburbs, where the ‘white flight’ phenomenon – white families choosing to leave an area once black families begin to move in – has produced very high ethnic homogeneity."
Paper below
Keywords: hiring name interview, make up european sounding name cv discrimination, white made up names resume, unusual names

Indiscriminate discrimination: A correspondence test for ethnic homophily in the Chicago labor market - "Duguet, Leandri, L’Horty, and Petit (2007) observe that applicants with family names of North African origin with Gallicized first names face substantially less discrimination amongst French employers than applicants with both North African first and last names, almost eliminating the difference in call-backs... We pick names that we believe are unidentifiable to Chicago based employers using ethnic groups that are relatively unknown in the Chicago area. To accomplish this task, a set of names is first created by randomly mixing Albanian, Armenian and Georgian first names... Past experimental studies have indicated that substantial gender biases exist (see, e.g., Weichselbaumer, 2004; Booth, Leigh, and Varganova, 2012; Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004), female applicants being more likely to receive a callback offer"
Why don't feminists talk about discrimination against men for callbacks?

French entrepreneurs launch test to detect pork in food

Mixed-race people perceived as 'more attractive,' UK study finds

Q&A: What Is Feminist Biology? - "The University of Wisconsin-Madison is looking for a particular kind of biologist: a feminist one. The university has set up a fellowship, administered by its women's studies department, for life sciences research. While it may sound strange for a social sciences department to host a biologist, the researchers in charge of the new fellowship are hoping to make it more of a norm... The first step is always to say, 'Does this finding replicate?' Because we've so many of these flash-in-the-pan things where a study gets tons of publicity and there's so much competition in biology to be first with your breathless finding. So that's the first question to ask, 'Has anybody else gotten this?'"
So it sounds like 'Feminist Biology" is mostly just Good Biology.

snopes.com: Slow Boiled Frog - "Claim: A frog placed in water that is brought to a boil through gradual temperature increase will make no attempt to escape...
'The 'critical thermal maxima' of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so'"

Why Is Average IQ Higher in Some Places? - "Before our work, several scientists had offered explanations for the global pattern of IQ. Nigel Barber argued that variation in IQ is due primarily to differences in education. Donald Templer and Hiroko Arikawa argued that colder climates are difficult to live in, such that evolution favors higher IQ in those areas. Satoshi Kanazawa suggested that evolution favors higher IQ in areas that are farther from the evolutionary origin of humans: sub-Saharan Africa. Evolution, the hypothesis goes, equipped us to survive in our ancestral home without thinking about it too hard. As we migrated away, though, the environment became more challenging, requiring the evolution of higher intelligence to survive. We tested all these ideas. In our 2010 study, we not only found a very strong relationship between levels of infectious disease and IQ, but controlling for the effects of education, national wealth, temperature, and distance from sub-Saharan Africa, infectious disease emerged as the best predictor of the bunch. A recent study by Christopher Hassall and Thomas Sherratt repeated our analysis using more sophisticated statistical methods, and concluded that infectious disease may be the only really important predictor of average national IQ."

Balaji Viswanathan's answer to Tamil Ethnicity and People: Are Tamilians discriminated against in North Indian states on the basis of culture, language or skin colour? - Quora - "Teasing is not discrimination. In Delhi, we used to make fun of Sardars all the time and sometimes the Mallus, Gujjus and Bongs. So, the Tamils get no special treatment in this. In the same way, Tamil movies often make fun of Marwaris, Telugus and other Indians. There are more Sardar jokes than jokes on all other communities combined. Making fun is not bad. Humor is the antidote to hatred."

What percentage of Singapore’s total population was born in Singapore? - "I have performed a very rough calculation based on other publicly available data to arrive at a rough guesstimate that 45.8% of Singapore’s total population (residents and non-residents) was born in Singapore."

Dog owner threatens to sue kindhearted shelter worker who raised money so he could be reunited with his pet pooch - "

EXCLUSIVE: Milo, Boogie, & Baldwin Apparently Doxxed - "Earlier this evening, TheRalphRetort.com was provided with a pastebin that seems to include the personal information of Milo Yiannopoulos, Adam Baldwin, YouTube personality Boogie2988, Zoe Quinn’s ex Eron Gjoni, as well as another YouTuber, JonTron. I can officially confirm that at least one of the addresses are legit... At the end of the Pastebin, there is a message:
let this be a warning, don’t fuck with zoe or anita anymore or this list grows...
I can say with absolute certainty that at least one very high level supporter of GamerGate has been doxxed"
Doxxing = exposing someone's personal details as a way of attacking them
Comments: "Sure, why take into consideration legitimate criticism when you can just doxx anyone who disagrees with you? Genius!"
"If they've gone as far as doxxing people now, they've already lost. It means that their comments, and statements have lost all traction and the best they can try to do is shut people up by giving information that could cause physical harm to another."
"And this is coming from the same folks who accuse gamers of doxxing with abandon? The double standards are strong in them."


Leftovers Inspiration - Five ways to use up leftover Risotto or Paella....

SuperBrunch - The Jaw-Dropping Buffet Of The Year Is BACK at The Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Singapore

University of Zimbabwe Impose Student Kissing Ban - "Fourth on the list of behaviour that will result in eviction says: "Caught in intimate position (kissing or having sex in public places)". Ms Mazikana, who is the students' gender representative, said that the campus already had strict rules for those fraternising with the opposite sex. In single-sex hostels, for example, residents were only permitted visitors in the foyer and no visits were permitted after 22:00, she said... There were already strict regulations infringing the students' rights to demonstrate - introduced in 1997 - which instilled a fear of being expelled, he said. The BBC's Brian Hungwe in the capital, Harare, says the students often accuse the university authorities of being out of touch with the young. Beer was banned on campus about seven years ago, which proved very unpopular, he says."

Black Actress Who Accused LAPD of Racial Profiling is Charged with Lewd Conduct - "Watts and her boyfriend, celebrity chef Brian Lucas, are being slapped with the charge after Los Angeles City Attorney filed the charges this week after receiving various witness statements suggesting Watts and Lucas were having sex in her car outside CBS Studios and seeing photos of Watts straddling her Lucas with her breasts exposed.Watts and her boyfriend, celebrity chef Brian Lucas, are being slapped with the charge after Los Angeles City Attorney filed the charges this week after receiving various witness statements suggesting Watts and Lucas were having sex in her car outside CBS Studios and seeing photos of Watts straddling her Lucas with her breasts exposed... When responding to the scene after receiving a complaint that “a white male and black female were involved in a sexual act inside a Mercedes” on Sept. 11, officers asked Watts for her identification. Watts did not want to comply with the mandate and instead pulled the race card, the celebrity card and the publicist card in order to wrangle herself out of the situation. And she walked away from a police officer, which could have led to her arrest to begin with. “Somebody called, which gives me the right to be here,” the officer, later identified as Sgt. Jim Parker, is heard saying to Watts. “So it gives me the right to identify you by law.” “Do you know how many times the cops have been called just for being black?” Watts responded. “Who brought up the race card?” Parker asked. “I’m bringing it up because I have every right to be here,” Watts said... Watts and Lucas then went on a public campaign against the LAPD, posting photos of the incident on social media accusing cops of racism and unlawful imprisonment on network TV... “I was handcuffed and detained by 2 police officers from the Studio City Police Department after refusing to agree that I had done something wrong by showing affection, fully clothed, in a public place,” Watts dribbled nonsensically on Facebook. Lucas suggested police “harassed” the couple because they were an interracial couple and they thought Watts was a black prostitute."
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