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Friday, September 08, 2017

Links - 8th September 2017 (2)

The effects of water and non-nutritive sweetened beverages on weight loss and weight maintenance: A randomized clinical trial. - "Water and NNS beverages were not equivalent for weight loss and maintenance during a 1-year behavioral treatment program. NNS beverages were superior for weight loss and weight maintenance in a population consisting of regular users of NNS beverages who either maintained or discontinued consumption of these beverages and consumed water during a structured weight loss program. These results suggest that NNS beverages can be an effective tool for weight loss and maintenance within the context of a weight management program."

Man jailed for sharing photo of dead Grenfell Tower fire victim on Facebook - "A man who posted pictures on Facebook of the body of someone believed to have leapt to his death from the Grenfell Tower fire has been jailed for three months."
Don't they have better things to do like test cladding on tower blocks?

What’s Wrong With the Democrats? - " If the stagnation of the middle class and the self-reinforcing advantages of the rich are among the largest issues of our time, the Democrats have done a bad job of attuning themselves to them. The party that has prided itself on representing regular people has struggled to make a dent in the problem—and at times has given the impression of indifference to it... Polling by the group Priorities USA Action shows that a stunning percentage of the voters who switched their allegiance from Obama to Trump believe that Democratic economic policies favor the rich—42 percent, nearly twice the number who consider that to be true of Trump’s agenda."

Facebook photos: Oregon State study finds sexy profile pics have a down side - ""Adolescent girls and young adult women who post sexualized profile photos will likely be judged by their female peers as being less physically and socially attractive and as less competent," according to a study conducted by researchers at Oregon State University Cascades and the University of California Santa Cruz."

Police Across Germany Raid Homes of People Who Posted Offensive Comments Online - "Twenty-three police departments were deployed across 14 german states, to enter the homes of 36 suspected hate posters and confiscate their internet connected devices, according to a press release from the German ferderal police (BKA). Police apparently focused on political hate speech, and moved against two leftwingers and one from the Reichsbürger movement, a group that believes the current German government is illegitimate."
I guess this is easier than stopping terrorists

Indian market trader 'caught spray-painting unripe fruit' to boost sales - "Footage passed to The Independent shows a man at stall in Dehli applying the paint to a mound of unripe lychees. Despite the filmmaker warning him of the dangers, the trader explains he cannot wait for them to ripen and needs the money to survive. India's food adulteration epidemic has long been an issue of concern, with food safety officers warning that milk, oil and spices are most commonly altered, along with fresh fruit and vegetables. In 2015, India’s food regulator found 20% of Indian food had been adulterated in some way or misbranded. Dyes and chemicals are used by some farmers to disguise unripe or rotting fruits and vegetables, including known carcinogens malachite green and calcium carbide. Produce can also be coated in silicone or wax to give it a fresh-looking shine and to act as a preservative"

Black Professor: Whites Are 'Inhuman A**holes' And Should 'F**king Die' - "A black sociology professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, said whites should “f**king die,” calling them “inhuman a**holes,” on Twitter. Johnny E. Williams, associate professor of sociology at Trinity since 1996, who has authored African-American Religion and the Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas and Decoding Racial Ideology in Genomics and is the author of the upcoming The Persistence of White Sociology, was voicing an opinion that is reminiscent of comments he has made before. Roughly ten years ago, Williams reportedly said that because he was black, “I’m uncomfortable all the time on this goddamned campus.”"
Again, this isn't coming from a 20 year old college student

New earpiece translates foreign languages as you have a conversation - "Crucially, it doesn’t need to be connected to your phone via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi in order to work, meaning you can use it in remote locations, and without fear of draining your handset’s battery."

German court acquits 'Sharia Police' in Wuppertal - "A German court has ruled that seven Muslim men who formed a Sharia street patrol did not break laws against political uniforms. The group sparked outrage in the western city of Wuppertal in 2014, when they approached people in orange vests bearing the words "Sharia Police". They demanded that locals stop gambling, listening to music, and drinking alcohol... Wuppertal's district court ruled that the seven vigilantes could only have broken the law - which was originally aimed at street movements such as the early Nazi party - if their uniforms were "suggestively militant or intimidating", a court spokesman said. In this case, it found that the vests were not threatening, noting that one witness mistook the gang for a stag do... So-called "Sharia patrols" by ultra-conservative Muslim men have been seen in other European cities including London, Copenhagen and Hamburg."

Dogs, Cats, Other Pets: Would They Eat You If You Died?

Facebook (FB) built an AI system that learned to lie to get what it wants

The relation between sex drive and sexual attraction to men and women: a cross-national study of heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual men and women. - "Recent research suggests that, for most women, high sex drive is associated with increased sexual attraction to both women and men. For men, however, high sex drive is associated with increased attraction to one sex or the other, but not to both, depending on men's sexual orientation (Lippa, R. A., 2006, Psychological Science, 17, 46-52). These findings were replicated in a very large BBC data set and were found to hold true in different nations, world regions, and age groups. Consistent with previous research, lesbians differed from other women in showing the male-typical pattern, that high sex drive is associated with attraction to one sex but not the other. Bisexual women and men were more similar to same-sex heterosexuals than to same-sex homosexuals in their pattern of results. The correlation between same-sex and other-sex attraction was consistently negative for men, was near zero for heterosexual and bisexual women, and negative for lesbians. Thus, same-sex and other-sex attractions were, in general, more bipolar and mutually exclusive for men than for women. The current findings add to evidence that sexual orientation is organized differently in women and men and suggest a biological component to this difference."

Spurned married lover jailed for unlawfully stalking cabby - "Over 11 months in 2015, a clerk harassed her ex-lover by sending him numerous text messages and calls accusing him of having extramarital affairs. Malaysian Ding Lay Hua, 45, also dumped rubbish outside the cabby's flat, cancelled his wife's phone lines, left photographs of his daughter near his home and suggested in notes that she was a prostitute."

New Scarlett Johansson Female Buddy Comedy 'Rough Night' Flops. Was it Too Anti-Male? - "Rough Night might have been overwhelmingly female-centric but many women made their feelings known on social media about their unease with the movie’s plot line, which involves a male stripper dying in a cocaine-and-booze-fueled accident being played for laughs. In addition to women being horrified by the fictional fate of a stripper, some movie insiders believe the male comedic audience was alienated by Rough Night‘s relentless ‘made-by-women-for-women’ message. You would have thought Sony, which released the movie, would have learned its lesson from last year’s Ghostbusters fiasco."... While speaking to Business Insider, Aniello commented about the fact she was the first woman to be directing a high-profile R-rated comedy since 1998: “The fact that there’s this additional curse thing that has been broken…I just hope in some small way if this movie is able to pave the way for anybody else to make an R comedy by women for women, then I think it’s done its job.” Far from ‘doing its job,” Rough Night may have set the celluloid comedy sisterhood movement back several years."

Governor General apologizes for saying Indigenous people were immigrants - "Johnston was referring to his comment during an interview with CBC Radio's The House Saturday. "We're a country based on immigration, going right back to our, quote, Indigenous people, unquote, who were immigrants as well, 10, 12, 14,000 years ago," he said. "
When you need to apologise for speaking the truth...

Should the world eat more like the Cantonese? - "Intriguingly, Al Shawaf found that food neophobia also seemed to correlate with self-reported disgust in other domains – including sex – and it even appeared to be related to the kinds of relationships they preferred. “Those who are more oriented toward short-term mating and casual sex tend to be more food neophilic than those who are more inclined toward monogamy and committed mating,” says Al Shawaf, who is now based at Bilkent University in Turkey. Al Shawaf therefore wonders if a tendency to try new foods may also be a way of demonstrating the fact that we have a robust immune system, capable of dealing with the potential pathogens that may come from eating new foods."

While Otto Warmbier Languished in North Korea, Salon and HuffPo Mocked Him for 'White Privilege' - "Warmbier was an American citizen held by a hostile foreign government, but all these obsessed outlets could think about was his male whiteness. Identity politics over country, after all. The pieces resurfaced after Warmbier died on Monday from extensive brain damage he suffered in the North Korean camps... Sha also shrugged off Warmbier’s harsh punishment, saying it was comparable to the “callous reaction” her mother had to Singapore’s 1994 caning of Michael Fay. He was “another young white man who went to an Asian country and violated their laws, and learned that the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.” The piece wasn’t just callous. It reveled in Warmbier’s destruction... HuffPost and Salon have had a year to apologize or even quietly remove the pieces. They could have chosen to do so when he was released and returned to the United States with extensive brain damage, but they did not."
This doesn't help make the case that liberals don't hate white men

Otto Warmbier has extensive brain damage, doctor says - "Otto's father, Fred, dismissed whatever efforts were made on behalf of his son by the Obama administration, which asked the family to keep a low profile when news of Otto’s arrest became public. “The results speak for themselves,” he said in a news conference, adding that President Trump, by contrast, reached out to him personally. “Last evening, we received a very nice phone call from Pres. Trump, who told us that Sec. of State Tillerson worked hard to bring Otto home. We are extremely grateful for their efforts and concern,” he said."

Women's Blog Jezebel Throws a Tantrum Over Father's Day - "Hell yeah. It’s Father’s Day. The one day I can say “boys rule, girls drool” without being called a misogynist, or at least I think that’s what the holiday’s all about. But not everyone’s down with this annual patriarchal enthusiasm. Gawker’s women’s blog Jezebel is having an absolute meltdown over literally one day a year where we give credit to men, where we aren’t supposed to un-ironically tweet about how all men are trash... Yep, the one person we should totally be thanking on Father’s day is mom. It’s not like there’s an entire day literally one month ago we could do that"

66% of Cancers Are Caused by DNA Error, Not Environment or Lifestyle, Finds Johns Hopkins Study - "The vast majority of cancers are just a mistake, an error in DNA replication, researchers say. In this way, developing cancer in many cases is unavoidable... Geneticist Bert Vogelstein and mathematician Cristian Tomasetti, at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, conducted the study, a follow-up to an earlier one, which arrived at the same conclusion."

How to evaluate stools with Bristol stool chart - "Researchers at the Bristol Royal Infirmary—a hospital in Bristol, England—developed a visual guide for stools. It is called the Bristol Stool Form Scale, or BSF scale for short. It helps skittish patients and doctors to distinguish normal stools from abnormal without getting embarrassed over personal details."

Older men enjoying frequent sex have increased risk of heart problems - "To make matters worse, the men who enjoyed sex the most were more likely to suffer heart conditions than those who were not so bothered... Hui Liu, a sociologist who led the study, said that older men may come off badly because they exhaust themselves more than younger men in an effort to reach an orgasm. She said that would “create more stress on their cardiovascular system in order to achieve climax”... While an active sex life appeared to harm the physical - if not mental - health of older men, it had no such impact on women. Instead, the study revealed the better news that enjoying sex in old age protected women from developing high blood pressure and so likely reduced their risk of future heart problems"

‘Gut feelings’ help make more successful financial traders - "The researchers found that traders performed significantly better at the heart rate detection tasks compared to the controls: the mean score for traders was 78.2, compared to 66.9 for the controls. Even within the group of traders, those who were better at the heart rate detection tasks also performed better at trading, generating greater profits. Strikingly, an individual’s interoceptive ability could be used to predict whether they would survive in the financial markets. The researchers plotted heartbeat detection scores against years of experience in the financial markets and found that a trader’s heartbeat counting score predicted the number of years he had survived as a trader...
The findings also appear to contradict the influential ‘Efficient Markets Hypothesis’ of economic theory, which argues that the market is random, meaning that no trait or skill of an investor or trader – not their IQ, education, nor training – can improve their performance, any more than these traits and skills could improve their performance at flipping coins."

I'm black and gay. Black Lives Matter Toronto doesn't speak for me - "In fact, a lot of black people in Toronto and elsewhere don't agree with the group, but they are afraid to speak out. Many are worried about being called an "Uncle Tom" or a "House Negro" for expressing their opinions. American writer Zora Neale Hurston captured this idea when reflecting on her own disassociation with the black political elite, famously saying, "My skin folk ain't my kin folk"... I can honestly say I feel uncomfortable at Caribana due to black homophobia, which Black Lives Matter casually ignores. I am constantly looking over my shoulder in fear of being attacked, simply because I am a gay man. In recent years, I have stayed away entirely. Yet there is virtually no dialogue about anti-LGBTQ prejudice within the black community. Black Lives Matter could use their political and social power to actually raise awareness about this issue, but it is apparently easier for them to target the white gay community than it is to tackle black homophobia. And Pride Toronto yields to their requests, as if the black community is a monolithic entity represented by a single group. In her essay "The Problem of Speaking For Others," feminist writer Linda Alcoff writes about the quandary of certain individuals or groups speaking on behalf of marginalized communities, which she argues can stifle the diversity of voices being heard. Indeed, that seems to be happening here"

Why we cry - "Gender differences in crying, for example, have been explored for decades and across the world, and all of the studies reached the same conclusion: Women cry more than men... A study of people in 35 countries found that the difference between how often men and women cry may be more pronounced in countries that allow greater freedom of expression and social resources, such as Chile, Sweden and the United States. Ghana, Nigeria and Nepal, on the other hand, reported only slightly higher tear rates for women (Cross-Cultural Research, 2011). Lead study author Dianne Van Hemert, PhD, a senior researcher at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, says that people in wealthier countries may cry more because they live in a culture that permits it, while people in poorer countries — who presumably might have more to cry about — don't do so because of cultural norms that frown on emotional expression... crying was more likely to make people feel better when they had emotional support (such as a close friend nearby), if they were crying due to a positive event, or if their crying led to a resolution or new understanding of the situation that led them to cry in the first place. Criers felt worse if they felt embarrassed or ashamed of crying, if they were with unsupportive people or if they cried because they saw suffering. Overall, participants were more likely to feel better if they cried alone or around one other person, but felt worse or didn't experience a mood change if they were with two or more people. Another line of crying research suggests that female tears can be a sexual turnoff for men"
"Patriarchy" means women cry less compared to men
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