Links - 14th October 2012

"The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling." - Paula Poundstone

***

WhatTheFont! « MyFonts - "Seen a font in use and want to know what it is? Submit an image to WhatTheFont to find the closest matches in our database"

Eunuchs reveal clues to why women live longer than men - "They lived up to 19 years longer than uncastrated men from the same social class and even outlived members of the royal family. The researchers believe the findings show male hormones shorten life expectancy... "Castrato versus non-castrato singers are probably a better comparison, and showed no difference in lifespan. Non-castrato lived an average 65 years and both groups lived fairly cosseted lives""

Teachers cheered by call to be firm with pushy parents - "My teachers spend a lot of extra time on pupils, even on Saturdays. But some parents don't want their child to spend time on a Saturday coming to school for extra classes. So they tell the teacher not to come back to teach the rest of the class. They do not want their child's classmates to benefit"

Has Google given us a brief understanding of Singaporean men and women? on Twitpic

Why Fathers Really Matter - NYTimes.com - "Twentieth-century Darwinian genetics dismissed Lamarckism as laughable, but because of epigenetics, Lamarckism is staging a comeback... when boys ate badly during the years right before puberty, between the ages of 9 and 12, their sons, as adults, had lower than normal rates of heart disease. When boys ate all too well during that period, their grandsons had higher rates of diabetes.

Modern Love – You May Call It Cheating, but We Don’t - NYTimes.com - "In an anthology edited by Susie Bright, who blogs about sex, one woman said: “It surprises me to no end that the sexual fetish of cuckoldry, once thought of as a disability, could be shared by so many people. The cuckolding fetish has an element of surprise, along with a bittersweet emotional masochism. Another key to the fetish, from the perspective of the cuckold, is that of eroticizing as a defense mechanism”... I slept my way around Europe as a teenager, and am sometimes wistful for the ability to leave situations the second they became complicated. To me, countries and boyfriends were similar. You visited, enjoyed the view until you didn’t anymore and then left... attraction to other people isn’t necessarily a sign your marriage is bankrupt. In the course of being together forever, especially if you’re out in the world meeting new people, it happens. One of the challenges in a marriage, in addition to deciding whose job it is to do the dishes and how to balance the budget, is to figure out how to deal with lust or love for other people... “Infidelity doesn’t kill a relationship,” a therapist told me. “Indifference does.” Of course, infidelity can lead to indifference, because it distracts you from your partner"

Lolsnaps.com - Whenever My Mom Tells Me "There's Plenty Of Fish In The Sea"

Comparing The Costs Of Human Vs. Animal Health Care - "I received fantastic care during my surgery and brief stay at the hospital. I guarantee that Rover got just as good a quality of care as I did. I think service and compassion were a wash in this comparison. I know for a fact that many pet owners think veterinarians charge too much. I hear that all the time. Take a look at this side-by-side fee comparison. The same surgery, one-tenth the cost."

Kid loses tooth placed under pillow for Tooth fairy. Parent leaves this under pillow. (image)

Blogging and identity: To name or not to name? - "I have a friend who told me that at two different jobs, his bosses requested him to leave after they found out he was a political activist, even though they were satisfied with his work and he had done nothing illegal"

Rosenhan experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "Rosenhan's study was done in two parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients" (three women and five men) who briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in five different states in various locations in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had not experienced any more hallucinations. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release. The average time that the clients spent in the hospital was 19 days. All but one were diagnosed with schizophrenia "in remission" before their release. The second part of his study involved an offended hospital challenging Rosenhan to send pseudopatients to its facility, whom its staff would then detect. Rosenhan agreed and in the following weeks out of 193 new patients the staff identified 41 as potential pseudopatients, with 19 of these receiving suspicion from at least 1 psychiatrist and 1 other staff member. In fact Rosenhan had sent no-one to the hospital. The study concluded, "It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals"... In 2008, the BBC's Horizon science program performed a somewhat related experiment over two episodes entitled "How Mad Are You?". The experiment involved ten subjects, five living with previously-diagnosed mental health conditions, and five with no such diagnosis. They were observed by three experts in mental health diagnoses and their challenge was to identify the five with mental health problems. The experts correctly diagnosed two of the ten patients, misdiagnosed one patient, and incorrectly identified two healthy patients as having mental health problems"

Is There Really an Epidemic of Depression? - "since 1980 psychiatry and the other mental health professions have used a definition of depression that conflates genuine depressive disorder with intense, but normal, states of sadness... Mental health advocates, for instance, liked the fact that it produced high estimates of the amount of depressive mental disorder so that it seemed as if depression was a “public health problem” of massive proportions. Clinicians could get reimbursed for conditions that might actually be non-medical problems. Perhaps most important, pharmaceutical companies found that they could portray people who suffered from widespread psychosocial problems in their advertisements while at the same time marketing their products as treatments for depressive mental disorders. And, of course, many individuals find it more acceptable to frame their problems as the result of a mental disorder and to take psychotropic drugs to attempt to relieve their distress than to see their suffering as the result of psychosocial problems... the medicalization of sadness has a number of costs. One is that calling a condition a “depressive disorder” prejudges the nature of that condition and suggests that medication is the most appropriate response to it... defining sadness as depression can tend to close off non-medical interventions including various sorts of social support, psychotherapies, changes in life circumstances or turning the sufferer’s attention to confronting their psychosocial situation—and can undermine resolve to address social problems that make people miserable by reframing that misery as a widespread individual medical disorder... it misleads our thinking in every area, from policy and research to clinical intervention and our own personal understandings"

Ask Me About Being A Birthday Party Princess - "I have a deep voice. Like, a deep voice for a woman. Some people tell me it's sexy or sophisticated, but these people are my friends so I'd hardly expect them to tell me I sound like a dude. But it's not a princess voice, that's for sure. Go back and watch Disney movies, especially Snow White, and take in the ear-splitting high notes they hit in song. Sleeping Beauty has one of the deepest singing voices of the princesses, and she's still super femmy sounding. My singing range is right there with Megara from Hercules. Middle of the scale, maybe a few high notes if I practice. So I practice, a LOT. At home, in the shower and with a special CD on my way to every party. My boss told me once that she was initially worried at our first interview when I started talking, because she thought I couldn't do the ear-splitting "princess voice". But I switched it on before the first party and she was very relieved. It's not hard for me to adopt a high-pitched falsetto talking voice, without sounding too fake or strained. It's just the singing that's hard for me, so I try to choose songs where I can exploit the lower tones, but still hit enough high notes for it to be "princessy". My boss has very strict guidelines for our behavior. We must smile ALWAYS, every minute of the party (hard to do until you get the hang of it), we must be always entertaining, we must act as if we know the birthday girl (we're told her name and age before we arrive) and are good friends, if they tell us they 'saw us at Disneyworld', we agree and pretend to remember them. We have to be graceful, walk with good posture, always polite, and apparently always talking. I have a set number of filler comments to use if I can't think of anything to say, including *girlish giggle*, "Oh my!" and the old stand-by, "how wonderful!" (This has become an embarrassment to me lately because it carries over to my regular life...I caught myself doing the "fill the silence with adorable laughter" thing with friends once. It's kind of awful.)"

Fructose and sugar substitutes alter gut microbiota - "The combination of these processes can undoubtedly contribute to development of many metabolic disorders associated with obesity"

Samsung to bloggers: Promote our products at IFA or walk home

Meet Mr Fifty Shades: EL James's husband speaks out - "Journalists ask if fans turn up on our doorstep asking silly questions. No, but journalists do. Do we have a dungeon? Or a Red Room of Pain? Maybe, and maybe there's a helicopter pad on the roof in case Christian Grey drops in for a spanking. Fifty Shades Of Grey is a fantasy – have they forgotten what that means? Do they chase JK Rowling down the street daring her to use her Avra Kedavra spell? Do they ask Hilary Mantel how many courtiers she's beheaded?... That cynical old hack Maguire would mutter that my novel is getting this coverage because I'm Mr EL James. Well, of course it is. But, like most novelists, I'm hardly going to refuse publicity. I'm not a masochist. And that's all I'm going to say about our sex life."
Seems journalists have something in common with feminists and TV violence activists: the inability to distinguish fantasy from reality