Links - 1st May 2014

'Frontline staff should be below 80kg' - "The Public Service Department (PSD) has been urged to hire frontliners who weigh below 80kg, fit and healthy to serve the public."

Man really didn’t get anything for his girlfriend for Valentine’s Day | New Nation - "Zhen Yuan Wang, the boyfriend, said: “I really had no idea what she said is not what she meant. She said to me a week before Valentine’s Day she didn’t want anything? So what was I supposed to believe?” “Some days she said she didn’t want to have sex and she really meant it during those times.” Other men who are familiar with this situation can only shake their heads and offer their condolences. Hong Kan Leow, a man who had the same thing happened to him last year, said: “I was very excited at first because I thought my girlfriend was different.” “But I guess that’s the price you pay for thinking like a normal man.”"

The evolution of fairness through spite - "Spite—social behaviour that inflicts harm with no direct benefit to the actor—can evolve when it is disproportionally directed at individuals playing different strategies. The introduction of negative assortment alters the dynamics in a way that increases the chance fairness evolves, but at a cost: spite also evolves. Fairness is usually linked to cooperation and prosocial behaviour, but this study shows that it may have evolutionary links to harmful antisocial behaviour."

▶ VH1 Revenge of the Nerds - YouTube

People’s Pornography – An interview with Katrien Jacobs | Danwei - "it seems that Chinese men really prefer Japanese porn over Western porn. I think it is primarily because the Japanese know how the play the Chinese markets for pop culture and sex entertainment. They simply supply an excessive kind of erotic imagination that Chinese entrepreneurs cannot handle. Even though there is a wealth of genres and mind-boggling fetish products available from Japan, the cultures actually share a quite narrow-minded patriarchal view on sexual pleasure. This is perhaps the reason why Chinese men like Japanese stars, because they embody a feminine ideal of innocence and purity that is harder to find in Western porn. Western females in porn are considered to be too active and too “coarse” for Chinese men. Also, it works well for Chinese people, and specifically youngsters, to project liberation and otherness onto the “foreign” Japanese porn culture... Pan Suiming is one of the leading Chinese scholars who has documented the deep-rooted effects of abstinence and sex/porn starvation in males during the Mao years"

Russians Are Miserable And Brazilians Love To Smile: What Selfies Reveal About Cultural Stereotypes - "only 3% to 5% of the 300,000-plus images that they examined were actually selfies.
• Women take more selfies than men. "In every city we analyzed, there are significantly more women selfies than men taking, from 1.3 times as many in Bangkok to 1.9 times more in Berlin," Stefaner says. In Moscow, the discrepancy is even more striking: 4.6 times more women take selfies in the Russian capitol then men. No matter where, if a man takes selfies, though, he's likely to be older: the median age of men who post selfies on Instagram is more than 30 years old.
• Women strike more extreme poses in selfies (especially in São Paulo). According to SelfieCity's research, women tend to take more expressive, sexy poses than men in their selfies. On average, the head tilt of a woman's selfie is 150% higher than for men (12.3° vs. 8.2°). Translated, this means an awful lot of women take selfies holding their cameras way above their heads. But in São Paulo, it's even crazier: there, the average head tilt for females is 16.9°! Guess they want to fit their bikinis in-frame...
People are happiest in Bangkok and São Paulo, and more miserable in Moscow. "Our mood analysis revealed that you can find lots of smiling faces in Bangkok (0.68 average smile score) and São Paulo (0.64)," Stefaner says. "People taking selfies in Moscow smile the least (only 0.53 on the smile score scale).""
Stereotypes persist and endure because they are often true

The Selfie Olympics - Photos

BishopBlog: Psychology: Where are all the men? - "The term ‘psychology’ covers a huge range of subject matter with different historical roots. Most areas of academic psychology make some use of statistics, but they vary considerably in how far they require strong quantitative or computational skills. For instance, it would be difficult to specialise in the study of perception or neuroscience without being something of a numbers nerd: that’s generally less true for developmental, clinical, interpersonal or social psychology, which require other skills sets... The APA is predominantly a professional organisation, and non-applied areas of psychology are not strongly represented in the membership. Nevertheless, one can see clear gender differences, which generally map on to the expectation that women are more focused on the caring professions, and men are more heavily represented in theoretical and quantitative areas... The big question is how far we should try to manipulate gender differences when we find them... [if] gender stereotyping is a major determinant of subject choices, shouldn’t we then adopt similar policies to other subjects that show a gender bias, whether this be in favour of girls or boys?... A-level psychology [is] dominated by girls, and perceived by boys as a ‘girly’ subject. So should we try to change that? As Smith notes, the female bias seems linked to a preference for schools to teach A-level psychology options that veer away from more quantitative cognitive topics. Here we find that psychology provides an interesting test case for arguments around gender, because within the subject there are consistent biases for males and females to prefer one kind of sub-area to another. This implies that to alter the gender balance you might need to change what is taught, rather than how it is taught, by giving more prominence to the biological and cognitive aspects of psychology. If true, it might be easier to alter gender ratios in psychology than in physics, but only by modifying the content of the syllabus. One of the IOP's recommendations is: "Co-ed schools should have a target to exceed the current national average of 20% of physics A-level students being girls." But surely this presumes an agenda whereby we aim for equality of genders in all subjects, with equivalent campaigns to recruit more boys into nursing, psychology and English?... The downside of an insistence on gender balance is a sense of coercion, whereby children are made to feel that their choice of subject isn't a real choice, but is only made because they have been brainwashed by gender stereotypes"

The Blood Harvest - "Each year, half a million horseshoe crabs are captured and bled alive to create an unparalleled biomedical technology. "

Oil, Ambergris and the Grand Ball of the Whales - "a more recent - and American - reminder can be found in the cartoon at the top of this post, taken from Vanity Fair in 1861, and which we hold at the Library. 'The Grand Ball given by the Whales' depicts a celebratory pod of whales, who are heartily cheered by the the striking of 'rock oil' at Drake's oil well in Pennsylvania. No longer, the sperm whales believed, would their precious spermaceti oil be hunted for use in candles and lubrication of the delicate machines of the industrialised north."

'I'm 60. . . and irresistible to men of 20 who want sex with no strings attached': Read MONICA PORTER'S unashamed account of how she took 15 lovers - most of them under 30 - and two in one day | Mail Online - "By and large he wasn't interested in girls of his own age. 'All they want to talk about is The X Factor and the latest celebrity gossip. After a couple of dates they start putting on the pressure. They want a proper relationship and commitment'... I felt that the big-bellied, baggage-laden oldsters on the dating site couldn't compete with these tempting young men. It was like looking into a cake shop and seeing all the scrumptious little cupcakes with their colourful swirly tops. Why on earth would you choose the boring old Victoria sponge?... I had finally twigged how the virtual dating system worked. New connections were constantly forming, leaving earlier ones to dissolve. The hapless were dropped while other options were explored. Everything was built on shifting sand, nothing was solid or reliable or entirely real. The more you wanted to believe in the emotional value of a particular connection, the more likely it was to be merely a mirage. Normal responses to other human beings - involving sentiments such as hope and trust - were de-activated. If you couldn't play this pitiless game, you were in the wrong place."