Links - 29th May 2017 (2)

Commentary: In a world first, Singapore’s highest court rules that parents deserve kids with their genes - "Society and individuals place great value on such biological relationships. Genetic affinity – rather than appearance – grounds a parent’s obligation to pay child support, for instance. And men who suspect their spouses of cheating on them often care deeply about whether their children are really theirs."

Uganda is worried about the number of Chinese men marrying their women

Princeton’s Ad-Blocking Superweapon May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race - "The team used several computer vision techniques to detect ads the same way that a human would, which they call "perceptual ad blocking"... The rise of malvertising, invasive tracking and surveillance, and heavyweight scripts that can bog down browser performance mean that there is a strong case to be made for blocking ads (a recent study found that advertising and scripts slow down web pages by an average of 44 percent)... "The fundamental problem with online ads today is a misalignment of incentives—not just between users and advertisers, but between publishers and advertisers," Narayanan told me in an email. "We've consistently found that publishers are upset about rampant online tracking and the security problems with ads, but they don't have much control over ad tech. Changing this power imbalance is important if we want a long-term solution.""

Why mothers should expect less of themselves and more of their partner - "her life became easier: she was able to look at her time and her tasks, and work out what mattered to her and what could go by the wayside. Her lightbulb moment was the realisation that anything she couldn’t do could be dropped – and either Kojo or someone else in their extended family or community could pick up the balls that she had let go of, or the task could be neglected... One of the big lessons she learned was that when you drop a ball and your partner picks it up, you have to let him pick it up his way. So when Kojo took on collecting the dry cleaning, he got it delivered. (“Why had I never realised they delivered?” asks Tiffany.) When he took on the cooking, it was chicken casserole every night for a week... she was suffering from what she calls “home control disease”: while she scoffed at the idea that a woman’s place was in the home, she still focused obsessively on how it was run, how it was organised, and she still believed, deep down, that only her way of doing things would work... Among her strategies was transferring tactics learned in the office to home life: some women are good at transferring their home organisation skills to the workplace, but less good at doing it the other way round. She created a spreadsheet and put every family task she could think of into it: beside the tasks were three columns, headed “Tiffany”, “Kojo”, and “no one”. When Kojo saw the list he came up with some things Tiffany had forgotten to include, such as booking the family’s holidays, sorting out their tech needs and watering the garden – all tasks, he pointed out, that he did. It wasn’t that Kojo was doing nothing – although he could, and now does, do more – but he prioritised tasks that Tiffany hadn’t even realised needed doing, just as she had done with tasks she usually did herself."

Woman made PowerPoint to convince her crush to date her - "On slide four, she really delves into science, setting the page up with the subtitle, 'My boobs exhibit steady growth over time.' 'I performed two statistical analysis tests to prove my breasts will grown larger with time,' she writes beside before and after images as well as a graph that shows that she has grown from an A cup to a DD cup from 2013 to 2017."

'Snowflake' generation rely on teachers to bail them out - "Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham, said last night that some pupils know ‘if they’re not going to work, teacher are going to come in and boost them’. He said: ‘This is another sign of the snowflake generation, with young people becoming ever more dependent and sensitive and relying on others to look after them and do the work for them."

You Can Now Get StarCraft For Free

'Fat, Old, Ugly' Flight Attendants Lost the Discrimination Case Against Aeroflot Airlines - "A Moscow court has dismissed a lawsuit by Russian flight attendants who had sued Russia’s national airline, Aeroflot, for discrimination. The airline had imposed regulations governing stewardess’ weight, height and clothing sizes. Several Aeroflot flight attendants had stepped forward claiming that the company demoted them based on their body types and attractiveness... In response to the flight attendants’ lawsuit, Aeroflot referred to Russian labor law, which allows imposing strict work rules if they are necessitated by the line of work, or industry"

Obama thought Clinton's handling of email server was 'political malpractice': book

Muslims care more about halal food than halal income, deputy minister says - "On Monday, minister Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom had said that the authorities will not issue halal certification for non-alcoholic “beer” or any product that uses “haram”-related names like ham or bacon. According to state news agency Bernama, the minister in charge of Islamic affairs said the term “halal beer” went against the manual procedure for Malaysia’s halal certification."

How game theory improves dating apps - "American dating apps traditionally had a ratio of roughly 60% men to 40% women, “which doesn’t sound that extreme, but if you actually take into account activity level – guys are twice as active as women – the gender ratio becomes even more lopsided; in the active user base it’s more like 80:20.”... Bumble’s unique feature is that only women can make the first move (that is, send the first message). Of course, this greatly restricts activity for the men, but the restriction breaks the great coordination problem and solves the tragedy of the commons: since women are not being inundated with messages, the men they match have a real chance of a date. Even for the men, the benefits may well be worth the price. Bumble has several other features that strategically influence users’ behaviour in order to lead more users into real conversations. For example, after a match is made, women only have 24 hours to start chatting or else the match disappears. Any worries that responding too quickly will signal over-enthusiasm are allayed because it’s common knowledge that the app leaves no choice. Similarly, women don’t have to worry about how they’ll be perceived for initiating a conversation"

Christian governor loses Jakarta run-off: Pollsters - "Jakarta's Christian governor on Wednesday lost heavily to a Muslim former government minister in an election run-off, private polls indicated, after a divisive battle that has damaged Indonesia's reputation as a bastion of tolerant Islam.
Anies Baswedan, who was accused of pandering to hardliners to win votes, and his supporters cheered as news came through that surveys showed him winning by over 10 percentage points against Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, who was fighting for his job while standing trial for blasphemy."
Will Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia still be used of examples of moderate Islam that's compatible with democracy? Can Jakarta's election be dismissed like Aceh (one province) or the fault of rural ignoramuses?

Will Islam swing nail-biter election for Jakarta’s governor? | This Week In Asia | South China Morning Post - "If the outcome of the elections should prove that Islamist intervention into elections can drag down a governor with a 70 per cent approval rating, this would have significant repercussions for how Indonesian electoral politics work in the future... the president was forced to dial back comments he made suggesting religion and politics needed to be kept separate, after the top Muslim clerical council accused him of promoting “liberal values”."

Sask. ranchers stunned as beaver herds 150 cattle - Saskatoon - ""A Canadian beaver leading around a bunch of Canadian cattle just makes it even more funny"

The Real Beauty and the Beast - "It's a condition known as "hypertrichosis" or "Ambras Syndrome," but in the 1500s it would transform one man into a national sensation and iconic fairy-tale character. His name: Petrus Gonsalvus, more commonly known today as the hairy hero of Beauty and the Beast"

What if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Had Swapped Genders? - "Salvatore says he and Guadalupe began the project assuming that the gender inversion would confirm what they’d each suspected watching the real-life debates: that Trump’s aggression—his tendency to interrupt and attack—would never be tolerated in a woman, and that Clinton’s competence and preparedness would seem even more convincing coming from a man. But the lessons about gender that emerged in rehearsal turned out to be much less tidy. What was Jonathan Gordon smiling about all the time? And didn’t he seem a little stiff, tethered to rehearsed statements at the podium, while Brenda King, plainspoken and confident, freely roamed the stage? Which one would audiences find more likeable?... Many were shocked to find that they couldn’t seem to find in Jonathan Gordon what they had admired in Hillary Clinton—or that Brenda King’s clever tactics seemed to shine in moments where they’d remembered Donald Trump flailing or lashing out... The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman—that was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.” Another—a musical theater composer, actually—said that Trump created “hummable lyrics,” while Clinton talked a lot, and everything she was was true and factual, but there was no “hook” to it. Another theme was about not liking either candidate—you know, “I wouldn’t vote for either one.”"
People liked "Trump" even more as a female, and disliked "Clinton" even more as a male. Feminism meets reality

E-cigarettes around 95% less harmful than tobacco estimates landmark review - "An expert independent evidence review published today by Public Health England (PHE) concludes that e-cigarettes are significantly less harmful to health than tobacco and have the potential to help smokers quit smoking... e-cigarettes may be contributing to falling smoking rates among adults and young people"
Meanwhile, in Singapore...

How Uber Could End Up As Silicon Valley's Most Spectacular Crash - "The company is private, but some of its numbers have been leaked. Bloomberg reported that Uber lost $800 million in the third quarter of 2016. Some speculate Uber may have lost $3 billion last year"

Uber Is Doomed - "After a discombobulated 2016, in which Uber burned through more than $2 billion, amid findings that rider fares only cover roughly 40 percent of a ride, with the remainder subsidized by venture capitalists, it’s hard to imagine Kalanick could take the company public at its stunning current valuation of nearly $70 billion... Uber has maintained operating losses of $2 billion a year, surpassing any start-up in history, with a negative 143 percent profit margin... Horan found that Uber passengers fares only covered 41 percent of the actual trip cost, suggesting it charges far-too little for fares. Even public transit systems, long lambasted for being money-losing ventures, perform better: for instance, fare revenue for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which serves the nation’s capital, accounts for 47 percent of its operating costs... Amazon’s “worst losses were $1.4 billion in its fifth year of operations, but shrank rapidly thereafter, while Uber’s losses have been steadily growing and will be over $3 billion in its seventh year.” The problem with Uber, Horan argued, is that it doesn’t have a powerful economy of scale"

Deployed US Navy Has a Pregnancy Problem, and It’s Getting Worse - "A record 16 out of 100 Navy women are reassigned from ships to shore duty due to pregnancy, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act... That number is up 2 percent from 2015, representing hundreds more who have to cut their deployments short, taxing both their unit’s manpower, military budgets and combat readiness. Further, such increases cast a shadow over the lofty gender integration goals set by former President Barack Obama... The evacuation of pregnant women is costly for the Navy. Jude Eden, a nationally known author about women in the military who served in 2004 as a Marine deployed to Iraq, said a single transfer can cost the Navy up to $30,000 for each woman trained for a specific task, then evacuated from an active duty ship and sent to land. That figure translates into $115 million in expenses for 2016 alone... “A pregnancy takes you out of action for about two years. And there’s no replacement,” said Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a nonpartisan public policy organization. “So everybody else has to work all that harder,” adding that on small ships and on submarines, “you really have a potential crew disaster.”... The Obama administration understated the pregnancy problem throughout its eight years and even suppressed some data about the impact of its “gender-neutral” policies on the Navy... In May 2015, Admiral Michelle Howard announced a quota of 25 percent of women on all ships. “We’re going back and looking at the ships — all of them — and what percentage of women are on the ships. Over time, we’ll modernize them to make sure we get to about 25 percent on each ship,” she said."

Baby Aboard: The Navy Responds to High Rates of Unplanned Pregnancies Among Sailors - "Unintended pregnancies are even more common among women in the Navy than they are in the general population"

Everything changed in Hong Kong after 1997, actor Anthony Wong laments | South China Morning Post - "What do you think of the current state of the Hong Kong film industry?
At the moment, it is finished. When you say Hong Kong film industry, that means Hong Kong investment and Hong Kong people make it, Hong Kong actors, just like in the early 1990s. But now they have gone to the China market, so they have to censor the script, control the story, so more of the artists are from China... Before we had a lot of styles; kung fu, drama, comedy, we could say anything that we liked, mocking people. There was no limit. But now that’s gone... In Hong Kong movies, someone with very clear features and who is strong would be cast as the bad guy. But if you are short, fat and baby-faced, 40-something, then you will be a good guy."

This site is “taking the edge off rant mode” by making readers pass a quiz before commenting - "On some stories, potential commenters are now required to answer three basic multiple-choice questions about the article before they’re allowed to post a comment... The goal is to ensure that the commenters have actually read the story before they discuss it... Forcing users to take a little extra time to think about the comment they’re about to post also helps them think about tone"
What if this excludes minorities?

Why Were the 7,000 Antisemitic Incidents Under Obama Largely Ignored? - "The question is: Are we only offended by certain types of antisemitism and not others?"

Sexual orientation and personality. - "Self-ascribed masculinity-femininity (Self-M-F) and gender-related interests showed the largest heterosexual-homosexual differences (respective ds = .60 and 1.28 for men, and -1.28 and -1.46 for women) and the largest sex differences (respective ds = 2.83 and 2.65). Instrumentality and expressiveness showed much smaller heterosexual-homosexual and sex differences. Big Five traits showed a number of small-to-moderate heterosexual-homosexual and sex differences. Bisexual men were much more like gay men than like heterosexual men in their Self-M-F and gender-related interests, whereas bisexual women were intermediate between lesbian and heterosexual women. Homosexual participants were more variable on some gender-related traits than same-sex heterosexuals were. The gender inversion hypothesis-that gay men's traits tend to be somewhat feminized and that lesbians' traits tend to be somewhat masculinized-received considerable support"