Links - 20th June 2015

How to Share Your Tweets at Optimal Times: Followerwonk and Buffer Team Up - - The Buffer Blog - "We couldn’t be any more excited to have teamed up with the folks from Followerwonk, an amazing Twitter analytics tool, to deliver the best times to Tweet for you. And from there, you can easily export your optimal Tweeting times straight into Buffer."
Keywords: scheduling, schedule, best time to post, automatically analyse best times to post

Local girls in Singapore seem colder and less friendly - how do you walk up and speak to them without getting blank stares and the cold shoulder? : askseddit - "most of my luck seems to come from engaging foreign/expatriate girls. Last week I made out and exchanged numbers with an Australian/Chinese mixed girl who lives in Perth. A few months back I got an Indian girl's number. When it comes to the local Singaporean chinese though, I end up striking out most of the them. Alot of them seem to love to dance in a group with their friends (so approaching can be intimidating if they're appear 'closed off') or if they're on their own they just generally don't seem interested, or seem very wary of someone trying to hit on them or be creepy. But to be honest, I'm running the same game that I run on other girls too."
"I know there is definitely something with the local female population. Sometimes they're a little conservative. If it's any consolation, it's not always as easy for the expat guys as it seems either. A lot of girls are just looking for a "night club experience" so they'll play around and make a guy think they're up for it, when really they're not going to leave with you because they're afraid of judgement from their friends. So we expats have to sort through a lot of mixed signals to find girls who are really up for it, versus those who just want to feel like they're misbehaving, but don't want to follow-through."

Sea Shepherd conservation group declared 'pirates' in US court ruling - "A US court has declared the conservation group Sea Shepherd to be "pirates" and ordered it to stop its aggressive actions against Japanese whalers. The ruling was issued on Wednesday by chief judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th US circuit court of appeals. In his 18-page opinion, he wrote: "You don't need a peg leg or an eye patch. When you ram ships; hurl containers of acid; drag metal-reinforced ropes in the water to damage propellers and rudders; launch smoke bombs and flares with hooks; and point high-powered lasers at other ships, you are, without a doubt, a pirate, no matter how high-minded you believe your purpose to be.""

Sea Shepherd 'sank its own anti-whaling boat' - "Mr Bethune told New Zealand's National Radio he believed Mr Watson wanted the sinking to "garner sympathy with the public and to create better TV"."

China’s Dangerous Game - "[China] would achieve the greatest territorial expansion by any power since imperial Japan’s annexation of large swaths of Asia in the first half of the 20th century... China’s pushiness has commanded the attention of states around its entire perimeter. Many have begun to form unlikely partnerships with the same interest in mind: restraining Beijing. Referring to one of these new relationships, a Vietnamese diplomat in Southeast Asia told me drolly that India is “prepared to fight China to the last Vietnamese,” meaning it would bankroll Vietnam as a proxy in any conflict with the Chinese... Ultimately, intra-regional balancing like this probably offers the best prospect for avoiding a direct face-off between China and the United States in the western Pacific—and perhaps the best prospect of peace overall... Asked if it were possible for a Chinese leader to speak publicly of compromise with China’s neighbors, Wu Jianmin, a former Chinese diplomatic spokesman and a retired president of China Foreign Affairs University, told the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese daily, “You would be a ‘traitor.’ ”"

How World War I Shapes U.S. Foreign Policy - "The question confronting the United States in 1917 was the same question that confronted Americans in 1941, and again after World War II, and now again as China rises: Who will shape world order? The United States and its liberal democratic traditions? Or challengers impelled by aggressive authoritarian ideologies of one kind or another?... Americans are susceptible to the belief that their country is somehow not a state like other states: It is either something purer and higher, or something unforgivably worse... In his April 2 speech to Congress asking for a declaration of war on Germany, Wilson insisted that the “world must be made safe for democracy.” Not “democratic”—“safe for democracy.” Wilson wasn’t promising to impose democracy on Imperial Germany. He was promising to defend democracy from Imperial Germany... Human beings admire winners. In the year 1940, when democracy looked a loser, Anne Morrow Lindbergh hailed German fascism as “the wave of the future.” Had Imperial Germany prevailed in 1918, there would have been many to argue that Otto von Bismarck’s vision of the future—“iron and blood”—had decisively triumphed over Abraham Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people”... Self-accusation is as American as self-assertion—and as based on illusions"

Did America Win or Lose the Iraq War? - "America’s material strength has another curse. For a global hegemon like the United States, each war is just one of many competing security commitments around the world. For the enemy, however, the conflict is a life-and-death contest that occupies its entire attention. It’s limited war for Americans, and total war for those fighting Americans. The United States has more power; its foes have more willpower... It’s a paradox of war: The United States loses because the world is peaceful. The decline of interstate conflict and the relative harmony among great powers is a cause for celebration. But the interstate wars that have disappeared are the kind of wars that the United States wins. And the civil wars that remain are the kind of wars that the U.S. loses. As the tide of conflict recedes, it leaves behind the toughest and most unyielding internal struggles. It’s also hard to win great victories in an era of peace"

Why It Pays to Be a Jerk - "At the University of Amsterdam, researchers have found that semi-obnoxious behavior not only can make a person seem more powerful, but can make them more powerful, period. The same goes for overconfidence. Act like you’re the smartest person in the room, a series of striking studies demonstrates, and you’ll up your chances of running the show. People will even pay to be treated shabbily: snobbish, condescending salespeople at luxury retailers extract more money from shoppers than their more agreeable counterparts do. And “agreeableness,” other research shows, is a trait that tends to make you poorer... When it came to “aspirational” brands like Gucci, Burberry, and Louis Vuitton, participants were willing to pay more in a scenario in which they felt rejected... What most everyone can agree on, though, is that Jobs was an outlier. As Stanford’s Robert Sutton points out, “If we copied every habit of successful leaders, we’d all be drinking Wild Turkey, like Southwest Airlines’ co-founder Herb Kelleher”... “What I’ve become convinced of is that nice guys and gals really do finish last.” He believes that the most effective people are “disagreeable givers”—that is, people willing to use thorny behavior to further the well-being and success of others"

Relatable romance tugs at the heartstrings - "WHAT is the one sure sign that you are watching a British romantic comedy instead of an American one? Look at the teeth.In stateside flicks, the chompers are unnervingly, blindingly white. In English movies, the state of dental aesthetics is less oppressively perfect. Just look at Pegg's regular, stained teeth here. It points to a fundamental difference in the two branches of the genre. American rom-coms tend to be glossy fairy tales while British ones are more relatable and, often, more genuinely sweet."

Viggo Mortensen Says Peter Jackson Sacrificed Subtlety for CGI

Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

Jihadi threat requires move into 'private space' of UK Muslims, says police chief - "Scotland Yard commander Mak Chishty said children aged five had voiced opposition to marking Christmas, branding it as “haram” – forbidden by Islam... Chishty said there was now a need for “a move into the private space” of Muslims to spot views that could show the beginning of radicalisation far earlier. He said this could be shown by subtle changes in behaviour, such as shunning certain shops, citing the example of Marks & Spencer, which could be because the store is sometimes mistakenly perceived to be Jewish-owned."

8 in 10 Singaporeans are sleep-deprived: Study - "The survey revealed that 82 per cent of respondents are not getting the eight hours of sleep as recommended by SingHealth, and less than half (47 per cent) of them are satisfied with their perceived quality of sleep. These are found to be the top factors that contributed to mediocre sleep:
- Stress from work or personal reasons (59 per cent)
- Uncomfortable room temperature (28 per cent)
- Physical pain (25 per cent)
- Spending time on mobile devices before bedtime (24 per cent)
- Noisy environment (20 per cent)
Meanwhile, respondents said that these factors helped them get a good night's sleep:
- Ideal room temperature (51 per cent)
- Having a bolster or long pillow to hug (30 per cent)
- Exercising during the day (29 per cent)
- Following a routine before bedtime (27 per cent)
- Having the ideal room lighting (26 per cent)
- Taking a bath or shower before bed (26 per cent)"

A reminder that your Instagram photos aren’t really yours: Someone else can sell them for $90,000 - "This month, painter and photographer Richard Prince reminded us that what you post is public, and given the flexibility of copyright laws, can be shared — and sold — for anyone to see. As a part of the Frieze Art Fair in New York, Prince displayed giant screenshots of other people’s Instagram photos without warning or permission."

Good In Bed: Funny Men Give More Orgasms - "the best predictors of the number and intensity of orgasms were how satisfied a woman is with her partner, how much she was attracted to him, his income, and his self-confidence, as rated by his partner. Also, the more orgasms a woman had, the stronger her orgasms were. Other factors that predicted the woman's sexual pleasure were the age when she had sex for the first time (the younger the woman was, the more orgasms she has now), the number of sexual partners (more partners resulted in greater enjoyment). Partner's intelligence, motivation, determination and his ability to concentrate, were also good indicators of a woman's orgasms, which means that even those who are not blessed with other features still have hope."

Women in Bed: What's All the Noise About? (Part II) - "Female copulatory vocalization is highly associated with promiscuous mating, but not with monogamy. Alan Dixson has noted that the females of promiscuous primate species emit more complex mating calls than females of monogamous and polygynous species. Complexity aside, Gauri Pradhan and his colleagues conducted a survey of copulation calls in a variety of primates and found that “variation in females’ promiscuity predicts their tendency to use copulation calls in conjunction with mating.” Their data show that higher levels of promiscuity predict more frequent copulation calls... it seems far more likely that in humans, female copulatory vocalization would serve to attract males to the ovulating, sexually receptive female, thus promoting sperm competition, with all its attendant benefits—both reproductive and social."