Links - 15th June 2014

Most Neotenous in the World: Japan - "Through documented cross-cultural studies, where races rated the level of attractiveness of women, it has been proven that men are more attracted to women who have a higher degree of neoteny than those whom do not. However, in the study, it was noticed that Asians tended not be as concerned with sexual maturity as Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics. This probably has to do with Asians overall being more neotenized than other human races. Asians are stereotypically known to have less body hair, fewer sweat glands, be shorter , have stockier legs, and a flatter face. By chance, these are all traditionally neotenous characteristics in humans. Or is it by chance? There has been some conjecture to as of how this came about with Asian people. One such explanation was of the cultivation of rice, which allowed for greater population density, and thus people could live much closer together. Usually among mammals, when a species reaches maturity, they tend to live in not-so-close quarters. Juvenile mammals, however, can live together without any problems. Eureka! So there's the solution! Living close together required a great necessity of harmony and cooperation, and so it is speculated that perhaps Asians inadvertently bred themselves, in a sense, to acquire more juvenile features, ergo less aggressive features, for the good of society... The culprit who started the"girls should behave cutely" craze has been identified. Her name is Seiko Matsuda. This pop singer and songwriter idol set a new precedence for kawaii in the 80's and popularized a cute way of acting, known as burikko (ぶりっ子). This pretend cute-playing is often accompanied with an air of innocence and stupidity as well."

Single-Sex Education Unlikely to Offer Advantage Over Coed Schools, Research Finds - "Single-sex education does not educate girls and boys any better than coed schools, according to research published by the American Psychological Association analyzing 184 studies of more than 1.6 million students from around the world."

3-D porn: It was supposed to be the future of the industry. What happened? - "According to the eww-theory of its recent failure, no one wants to see negative parallax in a sex scene. At a porn industry event in 2012, one executive worried that “the things that can come at you are the things that a male viewer does not want coming at them.” Indeed, the major 3-D porn releases of recent years have been somewhat conservative in their use of the technology. There’s very little pop-out in This Ain’t Ghostbusters or This Ain’t Avatar, in fact. “They’re mainly using 3-D to increase the depth of field, kind of like the real Avatar,” says Gram Ponante. “It’s being done in a non-exploitative way, which is strange for porn.” Or maybe it’s just an extension of the problem that has afflicted all kinds of 3-D from the very start"

Brazil: Police warn visitors, 'Don't scream if robbed' - "The idea is apparently to warn visitors not to provoke robbers into further violence, and avoid the increasingly common crime of "latrocinios" - or robbery that ends in murder. "Tourists come mainly from Europe and the United States, where they do not see this crime very often," says Mario Leite, who is in charge of World Cup security in Sao Paulo. Tourists are also advised not to flaunt valuable objects that might attract robbers, to be careful at night, make sure they are with other people and to check nobody is following them. The guidelines might sound extreme, but police officer Mario Leite says they are there to deal with realities on the ground. "There is no use crying over spilt milk," he says."
Robbery culture! Victim blaming!

Favourite NDP songs composed by a Canadian ad-man - "Many Singaporeans don’t seem to like their new National Day songs, but they hold fond memories of old favourites like Stand Up For Singapore, Count On Me Singapore and We Are Singapore. The irony is that these all-time favourites were not written by a Singaporean, but by Canadian ad-man Hugh Harrison, now 62."
Wondering what TRS/Gilbert Goh think of the Classic National Day songs being written by Foreign Talent

Pornography's Impact on Sexual Satisfaction - "Male and female students and nonstudents were exposed to videotapes featuring common, nonviolent pornography or innocuous content. Exposure was in hourly sessions in six consecutive weeks. In the seventh week, subjects participated in an ostensibly unrelated study on societal institutions and personal gratifications. On an especially constructed questionnaire, subjects rated their personal happiness regarding various domains of experience; additionally, they indicated the relative importance of gratifying experiences. Exposure to pornography was without influence on the self-assessment of happiness and satisfaction outside the sexual realm (e.g., satisfaction deriving from professional accomplishments). In contrast, it strongly impacted self-assessment of sexual experience. After consumption of pornography, subjects reported less satisfaction with their intimate partners—specifically, with these partners' affection, physical appearance, sexual curiosity, and sexual performance proper. In addition, subjects assigned increased importance to sex without emotional involvement. These effects were uniform across gender and populations."

10 Things Every Woman Should Know About a Man's Brain - "While often linked to aggression and hostility, testosterone is also the hormone of the libido. And guys have six times the amount surging through their veins as women, said Pranjal Mehta, a social psychologist at Columbia University in New York. Mehta and colleagues found that testosterone impairs the impulse-control region of the brain. While it has yet to be studied, this may explain why, as Brizendine says, men ogle women as if on "auto-pilot." They often forget about the woman once she is out of their visual field, Brizendine said... An unstable hierarchy can cause men considerable anxiety, Brizendine said. But an established chain of command, such as that practiced by the military and many work places, reduces testosterone and curbs male aggression, she said... Daddy-specific ways of playing with their kids -- more rough-housing, more spontaneity, more teasing -- can help kids learn better, be more confidant, and prepare them for the real world, studies have shown. Also, involved dads lessen risky kids' sexual behavior... Infidelities are most likely to occur before men hit 30, found a study of Bolivian men published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 2007. After that, men primarily focus on providing for their families, the study found"

Love: How do you know if you've found "the one"? - Quora - "The One looks like a perfectly plain and featureless gold band. Heat it in your microwave, and if it is the One a Tengwar inscription in the Black Speech of Mordor will appear."
"I would define "the one" as person with whom your joint utility functions are maximized when you are together. A sort of global maximum of the set of all of your potential romantic relationships. In my experience, allowing the idea of finding "the one" to govern your decision making requires either a strong belief in fate/predestination/magic or a great amount of comfort with self-deception."

‘Warning’ for non-Muslims caught eating in public during Ramadan - "Non-Muslims caught eating in public during the Holy Month of Ramadan will be given one warning before criminal action will be taken, but the same leniency will not be given to Muslim violators who are caught breaking the norms during fasting period, Dubai police have said... "The law does not allow anybody to eat during the day in public in Ramadan. We should obey this to respect the culture and the Islamic people""

Why Many Singapore Women Of Marriageable Age Don't Know How To Cook? - "When young, SG girls are slim, pretty, sophisticated and intelligent so kena tempted to marry. Then find out after unwrapping that got no neh neh, low sex drive and dead fish in bed. Somemore don't know how to cook and do housework.
Five years into the marriage, not so slim and pretty anymore, sophisticated and intelligent become nagging and grouchy. This is when the men are about 32-38, and realise tio pian, BIG TIME."

A Plague of Strong Female Characters - NYTimes.com - "Every time I hear someone use the term “strong female character,” I want to punch them. The problem is, I hit like a girl... “Strong female character” is one of those shorthand memes that has leached into the cultural groundwater and spawned all kinds of cinematic clichés: alpha professionals whose laserlike focus on career advancement has turned them into grim, celibate automatons; robotic, lone-wolf, ascetic action heroines whose monomaniacal devotion to their crime-fighting makes them lean and cranky and very impatient; murderous 20-something comic-book salesgirls who dream of one day sidekicking for a superhero; avenging brides; poker-faced assassins; and gloomy ninjas with commitment issues... [they] reinforce the unspoken idea that in order for a female character to be worth identifying with, she should really try to rein in the gross girly stuff. This implies that unless a female character is “strong,” she is not interesting or worth identifying with. “Strong women characters” are a canard. They refer to the old-fashioned “strong, silent type,” a type that tolerates very little blubbering, dithering, neuroticism, anxiety, melancholy or any other character flaw or weakness that makes a character unpredictable and human... traditional “strong male characters” have been almost entirely abandoned in favor of male characters who are blubbery, dithering, neurotic, anxious, melancholic or otherwise “weak,” because this weakness is precisely what makes characters interesting, relatable and funny... Something similar happens when we talk about strong female characters. Certain traits become codified into a bad-faith embodiment of a type rarely found in nature: the stunning blond 23-year-old astrophysicist whose precocious brilliance and professional-grade beauty are no match for her otherworldly self-confidence, say, or the workaholic mercenary encumbered by emotions. It’s as if the naturalism of male characters has grown in inverse proportion to the realism in female characters. The insistence on “strong female character” is not bad because it aspires to engender respect, it’s bad because it tries to compensate for an existing imbalance by stacking the deck in favor of the female character, by making her better, more deserving, higher-toned, more virtuous and deserving of respect, somehow. “Strength,” in the parlance, is the 21st-century equivalent of “virtue.” And what we think of as “virtuous,” or culturally sanctioned, socially acceptable behavior now, in women as in men, is the ability to play down qualities that have been traditionally considered feminine and play up the qualities that have traditionally been considered masculine. “Strong female characters,” in other words, are often just female characters with the gendered behavior taken out. This makes me think that the problem is not that there aren’t enough “strong” female characters in the movies — it’s that there aren’t enough realistically weak ones. You know what’s better than a prostitute with a machine gun for a leg or a propulsion engineer with a sideline in avionics whose maternal instincts and belief in herself allow her to take apart an airborne plane and discover a terrorist plot despite being gaslighted by the flight crew? A girl who reminds you of you"

I hate Strong Female Characters - "Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to be Strong... [Strong male characters] are usually the most boring. He-Man, Superman (sorry). The Lone Ranger. Jack Ryan, perhaps. Forgotten square-jawed heroes of forgotten pulp novels and the Boy’s Own Paper. If Strong-Male-Character compatibility was the primary criterion of writing heroes, our fiction would be a lot poorer. But it’s within this claustrophobic little box that we expect our heroines to live out their lives."