Links - 12th February 2013

Trying to ground hooligans - "If people fitted the profile - men, aged 15 to 45, casual clothes, England flags poking out of bags - their journey was halted by football intelligence officers at Heathrow's Terminal 2... Also sought are the peripherals who would likely step in to a fight to support the hardcore of violent offenders. They might not have an order over their heads, but police say their history suggests they are a threat, past convictions or not... "The types we are looking for are casually dressed, not in football clothes, but in certain types of clothing, Stone Island jackets, Burberry""
"People seem happy to accept racial profiling when they're stopping Young White Males suspected of being football hooligans"

Airline crash data group ranks world's safest airlines - "The world’s safest airlines
1. Finnair
2. Air New Zealand
3. Cathay Pacific
4. Emirates
5. Etihad
6. EVA Air
7. TAP Portugal
8. Hainan Airlines
9. Virgin Australia
10. British Airways
The bottom 10
51. SkyWest Airlines
52. South African Airways
53. Thai Airways
54. Turkish Airlines
55. Saudia
56. Korean Air
57. GOL Transportes Aéreos
58. Air India
59. TAM Airlines
60. China Airlines"

Better Book Titles - "The Pros and Cons of Prisoner Rehabilitation Programs
Now a motion picture starring Wolverine
Victor Hugo: Les Misérables...
Even in your wildest dreams the only men interested in you will have weird teeth and be made of wood
E.T.A Hoffman and Maurice Sendak: The Nutcracker"

Tony Awards 2011 Opening number NPH sings It's Not Just For Gays Anymore - YouTube

Penis Size Does Matter To Some Women, Study Claims - "A new study finds that women who have frequent vaginal orgasms are more likely than other women to say they climax more easily with men with larger penises. Women who tend to prefer penile-vaginal intercourse over other types of sex also say the same"

Top painter saves cat first during blaze - "Tan Swie Hian... the 1987 Cultural Medallion winner then returned to retrieve six paintings, which he estimates to be worth about $9 million in all, from his personal collection... “If my house is on fire, I would save the cat. Between life and art, I choose life.”"
This is probably speciesism

Groupon - Why You Should Sell The 100% Rally - "We don't think that Groupon offers a decent risk reward profile at the current stock price and valuation. The company is trying to enter highly competitive internet businesses, such as online retail and payments, at the same time. The company has realized its core discount deal business model is at a dead end and it is desperately trying to enter new ones. The company's CEO is not sure how long he will retain his position and the company's acquisitions don't make a whole lot of sense. We don't think management knows what it wants to do and where it wants to go. The only upside risk is if Groupon gets bought by a bigger technology company."

Feminism, the Patriarchy, PZ Myers, and other trigger words - "I used to really like PZ Myers, but between belittling people who didn't agree with his definition of atheism, the "Elevatorgate" nonsense, and the colossally stupid dramas over sexual harassment policies at conferences and the embarrassment that was "Atheism+", I just stopped caring... he has a post ranting again about feminism, mocking Michael Shermer and erecting massive straw men in order to belittle anyone who disagrees with him... the vast majority of rational people, particularly those in the nontheist community, fully support legal equality between men and women. And we acknowledge that there are cultural expectations – gender roles, if you will – that women and men may or may not choose to embrace, and we should be tolerant of and celebrate those differences... The thing is, we don't all agree on the severity or relevance of this sort of thing. We don't all agree that there actually is a "patriarchy" in modern America. We don't all agree whether ads featuring scantily-clad men or women, in an attempt to appeal to our biology to drive the free market, are indicative of any kind of broad social problem. We don't all agree that, at least in modern America, the areas where women still experience inequality deserve more attention than the areas where men experience inequality... The problem is, though, that in the mind of PZ Myers, Watson, and the those of that ilk, there is no room for measures of disagreement. If you're not totally on board their train, then you are the enemy. You are, as PZ describes it, an "anti-feminist". No – you are not allowed to broadly support women's legal equality and support their right to accept or reject certain normative gender roles while disagreeing about the extent and/or severity of these issues in modern Western civilization. You either swallow the whole doctrine, or you are part of the problem. And, that's why I stopped reading Pharyngula. If I wanted dogmatism, I would have stuck with religion. At least they give out free crackers."
"I barely go to Pharyngula anymore because of this "if you are not 100% with us you're against us" rabble and his mindless minions on the comment section are even worse"
"I find it disappointingly typical that, since I don't agree with your stance, you make the assumption that the problem is one of ignorance on my part, as though I'm not familiar with women's studies."

All hail the supreme poo-bah PZ, and his minions! - "Where are all these so-called bars where men cannot seem to control themselves for 5 minutes and are supposedly groping women en masse? After years of having done the whole bar scene I was never harassed, or groped. And none of my friends, or their friends, were either. And we are talking years of going out to different places every weekend. Places packed with men who were drinking mostly to excess. Men who were probably looking to get laid, but hell so were many women. Look ladies, we can be just as ‘bad’ in regards to harassment. Stop pretending like we are all the innocent little wallflowers you femenazis would like to make us all seem to be. If you are that concerned about it then stay home. The rest of us women would like to go out and not keep worrying about stupid things that really are not as bad as you’d like to pretend it were. Most women, such as me, don’t care to live in fear and are perfectly capable of handling a drunken idiot. And we are not so uber sensitive or narcissistic to think that ANY attention from a guy means it is somehow sexually motivated and should be flagged as harassment... One thing you'll notice, if you have the intestinal fortitude, or well calloused forehead to keep reading the comments on PZ's blog, is that there is quite a low tolerance for rational, intellectual, and independent thought over there. The minions get all uppity when their supreme poo-bah is questioned, or asked to provide anything to back-up his statements. It's so sad, and quite embarrassing for the community as a whole. Which is the only reason why I even bother with this whole rigamarole. I don't want women to buy into this crap and think that the atheist/skeptic community is somehow rife with over-sexed men who will harass, touch, or rape you at the drop of a hat. This is not the case. By believing in, and perpetuating this myth we do so much more harm than sexual harassment could ever do. It rips our community apart, instills irrational fear in women, and misinforms the public at large. Is this what we want? I personally do not"

Women Need to Realize Work Isn't School - "the CEO statistics will continue to improve, but only incrementally, until women recognize that the boardroom is not the schoolroom. To be successful, we must now do the very thing we were always taught not to: be disruptive. In school, being disruptive might get you sent to the principal's office, but in business, disruption is a proven path to success, describing innovations that take root at the low end of the market, or create a new market, and then eventually upend an industry. If you play disruptively as you go into the workplace, you'll be doing the upending."

89% of Internet Traffic now x10 pop-under adverts - "An informal study by DSLreports.com staff has concluded that x10 camera "pop-under" adverts now account for 89% of bandwidth used by all broadband users."
From the bad old days of 2001

A Guy Thing? Secularism, Feminism, and a Response to Ophelia Benson - "I shall close with a warning about the propensity for social movements to turn on themselves in purges that distract from the original goals and destroy the movement from within... (Ayn Rand’s Objectivist movement, in which members were judged—and subsequently purged—for such trivial matters as liking the wrong music; in the end the movement was reduced to Rand and a handful of sycophants alone in her New York apartment.) As the aforementioned Harriet Hall e-mailed me, she “was vilified on Ophelia’s blog for not following a certain kind of feminist party line of how a feminist should act and think. And I was attacked there in a disturbingly irrational, nonskeptical way.” I asked her why she didn’t defend herself: “I did not dare try to explain my thinking on Ophelia’s blog, because it was apparent from the tone of the comments that anything I might say would be misinterpreted and twisted to use against me. I have always been a feminist but I have my own style of feminism. And I have felt more oppressed by these sort of feminists than by men, and far less welcome in that strain of feminism than in the atheist or skeptical communities”... if the worst offense against women in secularism today is a ten-second quip taken out of context and redacted to the two-second line “it’s a guy thing” (which in any case was not meant to be sexist) then I would count that as evidence of significant moral progress deserving of celebration, not vilification"

Security audit finds dev OUTSOURCED his JOB to China to goof off at work

Good Manners - "RD sent reporters to major cities in 35 countries where the magazine is published — from Auckland, New Zealand, to Zagreb, Croatia. In the United States, that meant targeting New York, where looking out for No. 1 — the heck with the other guy — has always been a basic survival skill... four out of every five people they encountered passed RD’s courtesy test — making New York the most courteous city in the world. Imagine that."
Singapore was near the bottom of the list, but even lower were Seoul and then... KL. India was the very worst

The Truth About the Financial Transactions Tax or the Robin Hood Tax - "The basic idea is that every financial transaction should have a tiny tax added to it: there are so many transactions that there will be bucket loads of money to spend, even if not enough to stopper every piggie’s squeal. No one will notice each individual amount except the banks and as we don’t like them that’s fine. This is both charming and naïve: it really isn’t possible to abstract a few hundred billion from the economy without people noticing. The only good thing to say about the tax is that it obeys Colbert’s dictum, about the art being getting the maximum feathers with the least hissing from the goose. Everyone thinks it will be the banks paying and as we really don’t like them at present then that’s just fine. Sadly, given that taxes always mean that some live human’s wallet gets lightened, it won’t be the banks paying the tax for banks are corporations which do not, ever, pay taxes. They can collect them, hand them over, but some human somewhere carries the economic burden. In the case of an FTT it will be consumers everywhere plus workers everywhere... A stated aim, over and above that the banks should pay, is that the tax will reduce market volatility by reducing some of the speculative froth. That speculative froth is what reduces market volatility seems to be lost on those ideologically opposed to finance. You know, it’s done largely by men, in offices, with money: must be bad and should be a law against it. But what is really important to know about the tax is that it won’t raise any money. Not a single penny"