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Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Links - 24th October 2017 (1)

Man ordered to pay $65K in child support for kid who isn’t his - "Texas’ family code, chapter 161, states that even if one is not the biological father, they still owe support payments that accrued before the paternity test proved otherwise. In Cornejo’s case, that amounts to some $65,000."

Game of Thrones: greyscale, diagnosed and explained - "Jules Lipoff, MD, is an assistant professor of clinical dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include telemedicine and global health, and he serves as a volunteer telemedicine consultant for Doctors Without Borders. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, McSweeney's, and the Village Voice, in addition to numerous academic journals. He is the author of the only report of greyscale in the medical literature."

Competition over collective victimhood recognition: When perceived lack of recognition for past victimization is associated with negative attitudes towards another victimized group - "Groups that perceive themselves as victims can engage in “competitive victimhood.” We propose that, in some societal circumstances, this competition bears on the recognition of past sufferings—rather than on their relative severity—fostering negative intergroup attitudes. Three studies are presented. Study 1, a survey among Sub-Saharan African immigrants in Belgium (N = 127), showed that a sense of collective victimhood was associated with more secondary anti-Semitism. This effect was mediated by a sense of lack of victimhood recognition, then by the belief that this lack of recognition was due to that of Jews' victimhood, but not by competition over the severity of the sufferings. Study 2 replicated this mediation model among Muslim immigrants (N = 125). Study 3 experimentally demonstrated the negative effect of the unequal recognition of groups' victimhood on intergroup attitudes in a fictional situation involving psychology students (N = 183). Overall, these studies provide evidence that struggle for victimhood recognition can foster intergroup conflict."
Or: Why the Oppression Olympics, Victim Culture, Identity Politics and Intersectionality are poison

Star Wars animator took LSD during production: 'I got to the green screen and it was like 'Aaagh, I took way too much'' - "He is far from the first creative to have had very positive experiences with LSD, Steve Jobs having frequently said his hallucinogenic trips were among the most important experiences of his life, and Francis Crick having discovered DNA while taking psychedelic drugs."
No wonder creativity is low in Singapore

Why Do Remakes Have To Be “Darker” and “Grittier”? - "It’s a mix of desire and shame that older fans have to grapple with: if Power Rangers and superheroes are for kids, the way to make them seem appropriate is to remove the childish aspects and go the “darker-and-grittier” route, which results in popcorn movies attacking real-world issues with varying degrees of success... Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice earned plenty of money but scathing reviews, while the more earnest Wonder Woman has succeeded both among critics and moviegoers. It’s not even clear whether the assumption that Millennials wanted “darker and grittier” was ever solid to begin with. Maybe we needed to grow up alongside Harry Potter, but we didn’t necessarily want to stay in that muddled, murky place where his story ended."

Laura 🇬🇧 on Twitter: "Look at the difference in Owen Jones's articles when a Muslim terrorist murders 22 and when a "far right" terrorist murders 1. https://t.co/61ZY06Utt2" - "Manchester is suffering now – but its spirit will overcome this atrocity "
vs
"Far-right extremists are cornered and dangerous. They must be challenged"

Children's Animated Films Have More Death Than Adult Movies, Study Says - "two-thirds of children’s movies depicted the death of an important character while only half of films for adults did. They also found that the main cartoon characters in children’s films were two-and-a-half times more likely to die, and three times as likely to be murdered, when compared with their counterparts in films for adults.

Roomba's Next Big Step Is Selling Maps of Your Home to the Highest Bidder - " If a company isn’t using simultaneous localization and mapping (or SLAM, as the mapping technology used by Roomba and its competitors is known), their robovac is probably inferior. If a company is making a robovac that uses the advanced tech, big data is the business model it should be thinking about. People will likely click “agree” to whatever terms are put in front of them. Hell, I never considered buying a Roomba until I started writing this article and thought about how much neater my apartment would be if I had one. Convenience trumps privacy every time."

India will ban driverless cars in order to protect jobs - "The haphazard roads and chaotic traffic in parts of the country make it difficult to safely introduce driverless technology onto the roadways. But Indian company Tata Elxsi has been trying to get around those issues by testing self-driving vehicles on a track designed to resemble the roads and traffic of India. Complete with pedestrians, livestock, unsignaled lane merges and lack of signage, the testing track is meant to give driverless cars as real of an experience as possible while still respecting India's ban of self-driving cars from its roads. How today's statement from Gadkari will impact Tata Elxsi's business plans isn't yet clear."

Majority of Palestinians Support Knife Attacks, Unless The Attacker Is a Young Girl - "Two-thirds of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip support the current spate of knife attacks against Israelis on the streets of Israel and the Palestinian territories—but almost three-quarters disapprove of young girls doing the stabbing"
So much for the stereotype that most people want peace

Pro-LGBT Muslim Group Kicked Out of Muslim Conference Where Linda Sarsour Spoke - "A pro-LGBT and feminist Muslim organization says it was expelled from tabling at the annual Islamic Society of North America convention earlier this month where self-proclaimed LGBT ally Linda Sarsour headlined as a keynote speaker... Sarsour has courted controversy for calling for jihad against the “fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House”"

Woman Tries 'Happy Ending' Massage In Bangkok, This is What She Has To Say About It

The Blonde Vegan Backlash - Jordan Younger Profile on Orthorexia Nervosa - "she uploaded a post titled "Why I'm transitioning away from veganism" and, as she describes in her new book, Breaking Vegan, her blog crashed under the ensuing traffic, much of it angry broadsides: "I heard about your excusatarian change to a diet with animal products," one reader griped. "Fine. If we can all 'do what we want,' I'll be over to barbecue your family later," threatened another. Younger had revealed she was suffering from orthorexia nervosa—an obsession not with thinness but with purity and health—and was thus dropping all dietary labels. "I kept saying to my therapist, 'Can't I just be a gluten-free pescatarian?'" she says. "But she said there's no such thing, and besides, the label is what's so unhealthy for my mind.""

Are we becoming more STUPID? IQ scores are decreasing - "Jan te Nijenhuis, a psychology professor at the University of Amsterdam, says Westerners have lost an average of 14 IQ points since the Victoria Era. He believes this is due to more intelligent women have fewer children than those who are less clever"

A negative Flynn Effect in France, 1999 to 2008–9 - "it might be that the increase in the numbers of immigrants with lower IQs in the French population may explain the decline. This increase has occurred throughout western Europe and a number of studies have shown that immigrants from North Africa and south- west Asia typically have an average IQ of around 85 to 90 (Lynn, 2006, 2008; Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012; Rindermann & Thompson, 2014; for a large meta-analysis see te Nijenhuis, de Jong, Evers, & van der Flier, 2004). This conclusion has been confirmed by Kirkegaard (2013) who has shown that in Denmark the number of non-European immigrants increased from approximately 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 in 2012 and the IQ of non-European immigrants in 18–19 year old military conscripts was 86.3, relative to 100 for indig- enous Danes. These immigrants are likely to have had some impact on reducing the average IQ of the populations, but it is doubtful whether the increase in the number of immigrants with lower IQs has been sufficiently great to have had a major effect. For instance, in Norway it was shown by Sundet, Barlaug, and Torjussen (2004) that immigrants comprised approximately 2–3% of their conscript samples and that these would have reduced the IQ by only around 0.1–0.2 IQ points (correspondence with Sundet, quoted in Dutton, 2014). In addition, Dutton and Lynn (2013) have observed a decline in IQ scores among Finnish military conscripts from 1997, despite a negligible number of non-Europeans in Finland of the appropriate age at that time. Furthermore, increasing numbers of immigrants with lower IQs than the host population has apparently had no effect in reversing the Flynn Effect in the United States"

A neuroscientist just tricked 4 dodgy journals into accepting a fake paper on 'Midi-Chlorians' - "an admission in the study that the "majority of the text in the current paper" was in fact stolen from Wikipedia surely should have let them know something was up? But again, nothing – at least not on the part of the journals that accepted the paper."
This doesn't help arguments for open access journals

No Voice at VOX: Sense and Nonsense about Discussing IQ and Race - "Sam Harris is not an expert in intelligence research but I am. After hearing the podcast, I emailed congratulations to him and Murray for conducting an informative discussion of complex and controversial issues. Every point they enumerated as having broad support among intelligence researchers is correct. There is an overwhelming weight of evidence to support the ideas that intelligence is something real, it can be reliably and validly measured without bias, and the measures predict many real world variables that are important to most human beings. There also is broad agreement that one component of intelligence is a general ability (the g-factor) to reason and problem-solve across a wide range of situations. There also is overwhelming evidence that genes play a significant role in explaining differences in intelligence among individuals"

Review. Puzzling monogamy - "In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide"

WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived - "In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor’s note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: The first note was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article; the other was buried the following day at the bottom... what was the Post’s motive in publishing two false stories about Russia that, very predictably, generated massive attention, traffic, and political impact? Was it ideological and political — namely, devotion to the D.C. agenda of elevating Russia into a grave threat to U.S. security? Was it to please its audience — knowing that its readers, in the wake of Trump’s victory, want to be fed stories about Russian treachery? Was it access and source servitude — proving it will serve as a loyal and uncritical repository for any propaganda intelligence officials want disseminated? Was it profit — to generate revenue through sensationalistic click-bait headlines with a reckless disregard to whether its stories are true? In an institution as large as the Post, with numerous reporters and editors participating in these stories, it’s impossible to identify any one motive as definitive. Whatever the motives, the effects of these false stories are exactly the same as those of whatever one regards as Fake News... The most ironic aspect of all this is that it is mainstream journalists — the very people who have become obsessed with the crusade against Fake News — who play the key role in enabling and fueling this dissemination of false stories. They do so not only by uncritically spreading them, but also by taking little or no steps to notify the public of their falsity... in my 10-plus years of writing about politics on an endless number of polarizing issues — including the Snowden reporting — nothing remotely compares to the smear campaign that has been launched as a result of the work I’ve done questioning and challenging claims about Russian hacking and the threat posed by that country generally. This is being engineered not by random, fringe accounts, but by the most prominent Democratic pundits with the largest media followings."

Children are sometimes so innocent that they do embarrassing things… These 15 photos made me blush!

Low IQ & Liberal Beliefs Linked To Poor Research? – William M. Briggs - "Watch out Sam Harris, Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri of Brock University are giving you competition for the worst use of statistics in an original paper. Their “Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact” published in Psychological Science1—headlined in the press as Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice—is a textbook example of confused data, unrecognized bias, and ignorance of statistics"

Phone Sex - Introduction - Phillip Toledano - "A contract of mutual self-delusion exists betwen the caller and phone sex operator"

Republican Grief Over Scalise's Shooting Called 'So Funny' by NE Democratic Party Official

CBS: GOP Baseball Shooting is Trump's Fault - "If a Republican shoots a Democrat, it's due to Republican hatred.
If an apolitical psycho shoots a Democrat, it's the fault of Republican incitement to violence.
If a Democrat shoots a Republican, it's the fault of... Republicans."

Why we are eating the wrong kind of apples - "An "addiction" to sugar is leading us to eat the wrong kind of apples, according to Raymond Blanc. The chef said a reliance on sugar was behind the growth in popularity of apples such as Gala, Jazz and Pink Lady, which many people choose over the more traditional Cox"

The War On the Cider Apple - "the seedling orchard came to be seen as having just one purpose, the production of hard cider and cider brandy. Per capita alcohol consumption rates in the United States were among the highest in the world in the 1820s, and a temperance movement emerged to combat the evil of drink."

Before You Applaud Termination Of Officer, Here's The One Thing You Missed - "The masses have begun to applaud the termination of the officer who “assaulted” a black teen and became the face of “police brutality” this week on social media while everyone seemed to weigh in on his actions. However, before the celebrations begin, there’s something to consider. Since it’s not in widely circulated videos, it seems to be the one thing that everyone has missed. By now, you’ve heard of Richland County Senior Deputy Ben Fields and the incident that occurred between him and a black female student at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina. News of his termination hit social media, and many are applauding this outcome"
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