Links - 27th July 2015

Mata.Mata: History of The Singapore Police | Remember Singapore - "The year 1969 was a significant year for Singapore and its police force. It was the 150th anniversary of the founding of modern Singapore. The Singapore Police Force, already 6000-strong by then, received a brand new design in their uniforms. A stark contrast as compared to the former colonial ones, the new dacron blue uniforms, completed with long-sleeved shirts, trousers and peak caps, would play an important role in helping the policemen maintain a professional look. The material used for the new uniforms was also well suited in a tropical climate."
In Singapore, policemen wore shorts until 1969

War on the edge of nowhere - "An untold story is how the Falklanders treated the invading army: like vermin. Though utterly at the Argentines' mercy, the people of the Falklands refused to co-operate in any way: They would give no directions; make no conversation. Children were sternly told not to accept candy or gifts. Despite the invaders' initial efforts to be friendly, they were seen as Martians and frozen out... There were two Canadian protagonists, too: Bill Curtis and his wife Barbara from Mission, B.C. Convinced there was going to be a nuclear war, they moved to the safest, most remote spot on the planet: the Falklands. It seemed like a great idea, but six months after they arrived, so did the invading Argentine army."

Long-Life Secrets From An (Almost) 115 Year Old Woman - "she loves bacon. Every morning she eats four strips of it, followed by scrambled eggs and grits... She also seems to be a minimalist when it comes to interfering with her health. The only medication she takes is a multivitamin and a pill for her blood pressure. Blind from glaucoma since she was 100, Jones refused cataract surgery, and her nieces say Jones has never had a colonoscopy or a mammogram. Lavilla Watson, 82, another one of her nieces, said a doctor recommended a pacemaker, but she refused. She sees a primary care physician every three to four months... The world’s oldest person, 116-year-old Misao Okawa of Osaka, Japan, says the answer to a long life is eating sushi, while the oldest American, 115-year-old Jeralean Talley of Michigan, says it’s pigs’ feet. Some studies argue that long life has to do with being a conscientious, giving and most importantly, happy person. Other research says that strong personal connections play a big role, which may in part explain Jones’s long life... Becoming a supercentenarian likely has to do with genes, says Thomas Perls, a professor of medicine and the director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston Medical Center, the largest study of centenarians and their families worldwide. “You have to have some relatively rare combinations of a whole bunch of genes, probably hundreds, that will help people age more slowly or protect people from age-related diseases [dementia, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer],” he says. “The super-centenarians, they not only delay disability toward the very end of their lives but also diseases. In fact, they’re often functionally independent and disease-free, except for some things you can’t get away with like cataracts and osteoarthritis.”"

Are Women More Emotional Than Men? - "From an evolutionary perspective, it is likely there are some sex differences in emotion. Indeed, the odds of men and women having evolved the exact same emotional psychology are basically zero. It would be nothing short of a Darwinian miracle for men and women to have evolved precisely identical emotional designs... Probably the most compelling evidence for sex differences in emotion exists in the domain of negative emotions... Most studies show women tend to score higher on the personality trait most closely associated with negative emotionality—neuroticism... The sex gap in depression is wider in high gender equity societies than in low gender equity societies. Hopcroft speculates that this is due in part to differential effects of children on feelings of depression for women in high and low equity countries. For women in high gender equity countries, children promote feelings of depression, whereas for unemployed women in low gender equity countries the reverse is true. There is little difference in the effect of children on feelings of depression for men in high and low gender equity countries. This can explain the paradoxical finding that while gender equity boosts mental health on average, it creates a wider sex gap in depression... in countries with greater gender equity (e.g., Finland, Sweden), women attribute substantially more importance to benevolence and universalism values than men do. In more patriarchal cultures, sex differences in benevolence and universalism and much smaller. The authors of the values study speculate that increased independence and equality of women in the labor force may encourage women to express their “inherent” values rather than to accommodate their values to those of their husbands. Maybe. What is clear is that if sex differences are assumed to result from gender role socialization, it is extremely odd for the largest sex differences to be found in Scandinavian cultures and the smallest in more patriarchal cultures. Yet, we also find this with studies of tested cognitive ability and even physical traits... Del Guidice et al. (2012) examined sex differences in personality using Cattell’s 16 factor model of personality traits, finding an overall multivariate D of 2.71 for the personality domain. This is huge difference, with less than 10% overlap in men’s and women’s personalities"
Women are indeed more emotional than men: it's not just, as some would have it, that they are socialised into displaying their emotions more

Women Want Short-Term Mates, Too? - "It seems just about every year a new group of researchers asserts they have “debunked” some basic tenet of evolutionary psychology. A recurring claim is evolutionary explanations of human sex differences must be wrong if researchers are able to show women are at all interested in short-term mating, particularly when they seem just as interested as men are (Schacht & Mulder, 2015). In truth, finding women are acutely interested in short-term mating is entirely unsurprising to evolutionary psychologists. In fact, they have been predicting and confirming women’s short-term mating tendencies for decades... That women possess highly evolved short-term mating strategies has been a foundational feature of evolutionary psychology since the early 1990s (Buss & Schmitt, 1993*; Kenrick et al., 1990), and several programs of research, many supported by literally dozens of studies, strongly support this assertion. Historically, evolutionary psychologists were among the first psychologists to treat women’s short-term mating as an adaptive reproductive strategy (most other psychologists did, and still do, treat short-term mating as entirely dysfunctional or pathological, a failure to "bond" with your one true love; I call it the Disney-fication of women’s sexuality by majority of sex researchers who follow the Standard Social Science Model)... when pursuing a short-term mating strategy, women tend to desire high quality over high quantity (Thornhill & Gangestad, 2008). In contrast, men tend to be less insistent on high quality when short-term mating... it is not that women are never willing to have sex with strangers. He's got to be pretty good-looking, though... Men have higher general sex drive than women across almost all measures and all studied cultures, with a culture’s size of sex differences in sex drive being unrelated to sociopolitical gender equity... sex differences in casual sex desires typically vary from medium to large across cultures, the differences almost never completely disappear."

India has a public masturbation problem—and no real solutions
When in India, do what the Indians do

Why many rape victims don’t fight or yell - "One such response is tonic immobility. In freezing, brain and body are primed for action. But in tonic immobility, the body is literally paralyzed by fear – unable to move, speak, or cry out. The body goes rigid. Hands may go numb."

10 ways you might be breaking the law with your computer - "In January 2007, a substitute teacher in Norwich, CT, was convicted of four felony pornography charges, although she claimed the offending pictures were the result of pop-ups and that she did not knowingly access the Web sites in question. The conviction was set aside after forensics and security experts examined her hard drive and found the school's antivirus software was out of date and the computer had no anti-spyware, firewall, or pop-up blocking technology. The teacher ended up pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge... In another 2007 case, a 16-year-old was charged with possession of child pornography and got 18 months probation and over a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees, even though he passed polygraph tests in which he denied knowledge of the images and an examination of the hard drive found more than 200 infected files and no firewall."

Michigan man arrested for using cafe’s free WiFi from his car - "This is not the first time someone has been arrested for piggybacking on a WiFi connection. In 2005, a Florida man was arrested and hit with a third-degree felony for surfing an open WiFi network from his SUV. Similarly, an Illinois man was arrested in 2006 for, again, using an unsecured WiFi network from his car. He pleaded guilty to the charges and was given one year's court supervision and a $250 fine. A Washington man was also arrested in 2006 for parking outside of a coffee shop and using the open WiFi connection without purchasing anything. And just earlier this year, an Alaska man was arrested for using the WiFi network from the public library after hours to play games from—you guessed it—his car in the parking lot"

New Zealand is making trolling illegal - BBC Newsbeat - "- Incite or encourage another individual to commit suicide.
- Denigrate an individual by reason of his or her colour, race, ethnic or national origins, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability.
Digital communication should not:"
So now you can't campaign for euthanasia or make fun of cults in New Zealand?

YourClassical from American Public Media - "For many years, Corigliano’s father was the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. Corigliano Junior recalls: “He did everything he could to discourage me. He knew firsthand that the composer was the lowest man in the musical hierarchy. ‘Performers don’t want to bother with your work, and audiences don’t want to hear it. So what are doing it for?’ he would say.”"