Links - 1st February 2018 (1)

Desktop Icons change the order after restart - Microsoft Community - "This issue may happen if there are some themes which are installed on the computer, that interferes with the working of Desktop icons.
Perform the steps mentioned below and see if it helps.
a: Right Click on an empty space on the desktop, and then click Personalize.
b: Then Click Change Desktop Icons option present at the Top left corner.
c: Uncheck the option Allow Themes to change desktop icons.
d: Click Apply and then Ok."

How Circumcision Affects the Sensitivity of Your Penis - "According to a new study, men are freaking out about this way too much."
Unsurprisingly, Gabby Bess is a feminist who has complained about "mansplaining creeps" in the past

Gluttons for Self-Punishment - "We make people feel bad about something they did or not and then actually we give them the opportunity to hurt themselves and we expected and found in fact that when people wrote about a time that they had done something unethical that they were then more willing to give themselves painful electric shocks... when we asked our research subjects whether they thought that there was any connection between the two or whether they had acted specifically in response to anything else that they had done in the study they all denied it. They thought the idea was a little ridiculous actually, that they would give themselves stronger shocks because they had just written about a time that they did something unethical"

Fighting Feelings of Guilt - "'A symbolic act of handwashing somehow alleviates some of the guilt connected to this misbehavior'...
'There's a long history in social psychology that another way that people do this is to balance the scales by doing social good. I've done something bad or I'm reminded of something bad that i've done and along comes an opportunity to give to charity. Boy do I jump on that because now I don't have to feel so badly about myself'...
The historical idea behind this were the medieval flagellants who would go from town to town whipping themselves, beating themselves to sort of balance the moral scales... It's quite a sad result right? It would be nice if punishing ourselves was not going to help. That in order to restore karma to the world and balance the scale it would only help if we did something good for the world rather than something, something bad but of course lots of religions have these elements on self suffering... What about gyms?... we go to the gym. We torture ourselves. It's awful, it's unpleasant"

Why Willpower Doesn’t Work - "'You try to do one task and your ability to do another task that needs self control is basically'
'They all draw on the same resource. As is making decisions which is why after making decisions people will yield to temptation or show poor self control. May contribute to some of these political scandals that keep happening... People making decisions all day. Powerful, influential people have choices to make and decisions to make. They don't realize that this consumes their will power and leaves them less for resisting, for exerting self control in the evening afterwards when there's a sexual temptation or corruption or bribery or something like that as well'...
'All of us are more tempted to follow on our temptation, more likely to follow that temptation late in the evening when we depleted, after we've made lots of, lots of decisions... Politicians are particularly susceptible to this because their decisions are somehow bigger and more difficult in their need for self control throughout the day's larger and therefore they are more likely to fall to temptation'"

License to Cheat - "'Some people get a chance to buy green environmental products and some people don't and then they all get a chance to cheat and the question is do the people who got the chance to buy green products and presumably did, feel extra good about themselves and therefore able to cheat more afterwards?'...
'We actually did find what we expected. So those people who purchased green products in comparison to another group that only had a chance to purchase the regular conventional things were much more likely to cheat... We had another experiment where students did not have a chance to purchase a product. They were only seeing those products and there we actually found the opposite. So when you were just exposed to these green products you are actually behaving much much better than those who are just exposed to the convention products'...
'Maybe you felt oh I should, I should be doing this and I'm not doing enough and all of sudden people were more congruent and became better but if they purchased, if they acted on it that bought them karma and they could spend the karma by being worse'"
Moral licensing could explain why activists are often contemptible

Handwashing And Healthcare - Arming The Donkeys (podcast) - "The Institute of Medicine in nineteen ninety eight talked about more people die in health care, hospital cord infections than car accidents so it's pretty significant"

Hospital Workers Wash Hands Less Frequently Toward End of Shift, Study Finds - "Hospital workers who deal directly with patients wash their hands less frequently as their workday progresses, probably because the demands of the job deplete the mental reserves they need to follow rules... Hand-washing in hospitals has been demonstrated to reduce infections and save money. In a 2000 study of Swiss hospitals, researchers found that a 1 percentage point increase in hand-washing compliance reduced the number of infections by 3.9 per 1,000 patients. Another study, in 2009, estimated that the cost per patient with a health care-acquired infection is $20,549. Using these data, Dai and her colleagues extrapolated their findings to all 5,723 registered hospitals in the United States and estimated that there would be an additional 600,000 infections per year at a cost of approximately $12.5 billion annually."

Arming the Donkeys: Can you be too good? - "It does seem like people being more moral should be better and it seems strange to say that it would be problematic to be too moral... if I find a wallet in the street and it takes me months of trying to track down the person that's going to be real inconvenience for me... He's going to be more focused on things that will soothe his anxiety not necessarily the things that are the most moral... An example of someone who has scrupulosity is in the literature, her name is Bridget and she is very concerned with, she's a waitress and she is very concerned with inadvertently poisoning her customers where she works... the way that she expresses this is that she is constantly checking the level of solvents in a room that she otherwise has no reason to go into, precisely to make sure that she's not somehow getting some solvents onto the food. But of course by going into that room she is actually making it more likely that she'll poison her customers"

Arming the Donkeys: "Sharing" Online and Offline - 'If you had to guess what percent of all word of mouth would you guess is online?'
'I would guess twenty eight'...
'So it's actually seven, a very small... We think that word of mouth is all online. We think about facebook and twitter and social media but most of it's actually offline. Face to face communication.'"

Arming the Donkeys: Playing by the Rules - "We accept outcomes that seem, even if the rules may be a broken a little bit, we're just, we're a group of rule following cooperators... People were much more willing to accept the outcomes if we scrupulously followed the rules even when it was clearly irrational to do so so. You have just one or two people who protest, you give them a chance - even though it's clear it's going to lose because then they feel like they had a voice"
This explains the unhappiness over Singapore's Presidential sElection

Weird Putti — The Art History Babes - "[On Monkey Brand Soap] The idea of a monkey kind of acts as this hybrid between like, human, like ape and human. It always kind of has like human life features, it's not full monkey. And it really stood in the place of showing women doing domestic housework. So there was some taboo at the time about showing women in advertising cleaning, so the monkey was supposed to stand in as like - the soap just magically makes everything clean and you don't have to do anything"

Bring on the Bacchanal — The Art History Babes - "Everyone saw this this really goofy funny ridiculous dude that liked to have a good time in Will Ferrell's George Bush. They were like, they looked at him and they were like - I think this is an exact quote from the documentary: They were like that's a guy I'd like to have a drink with and in the end it ended up being our President"

Color Theory Part 1 — The Art History Babes - "'In reference to the guerrilla girls episode you mentioned how there is a history around hysteria and women thinking with emotion that are connected to their genitalia. Do you think it is acceptable in turn for women to accuse men of thinking with their penis and to all of you lovely feminists in the podcast have you ever personally accused a man of thinking with his genitalia?'
'Great questions.'
'Very interesting'"
They say no, and say it's kinda okay to say people think with their genitalia when they want to have sex (which is supposedly different from hysteria - even with the Victorian version they cast doubt on the diagnosis of sexual deprivation because it was male doctors diagnosing it), and say there's a history of women being put in mental institutions because of hysteria so it's different - but they still slam men they don't like as dicks

Medicine | Tell Me Something I Don't Know - "Normally your kidneys are in the back just kind of behind your intestines and they just kind of sit there. And it's easier for a surgeon to just add a new kidney in rather than take the old ones out. It's safer for the patient and it's easier for the surgeon... So they'll add the new kidneys into the pelvic cavity. The first one will kind of go on the right or the left... if they need another transplant they'll do it on the other side and after that they'll do it in the front but once they run out of room they kind of have to take them out... Originally the first transplants that were ,done the kidney was hooked up inside your forearm. Like the kidney was just kind of stuck there and put into the system and they covered it with a plastic bag and they let the urine drain into a jar and this was done on a patient who was in acute renal failure so she needed dialysis but they hadn't invented dialysis yet and they did that with the kidney then took it off and she was released four days later completely fine...
That's actually a good design because if something ever happens inside your body where an organ swells or you know something god forbid you have internal bleeding there's room for the stuff to go and you won't like explode...
It fits in with one of the many proofs that life is not fair which is that in general the recovery from kidney transplant is harder for the donor who gives the kidney than for the recipient...
[On a medicine that treats rheumatoid arthritis] The second most common form of hair loss after male pattern baldness is an autoimmune disease called alopecia areata.. the hair follicles secrete a protein that activates the body's immune cells which in turn attack the hair follicle which in turn secretes more protein and it turns out that the medication zelgens blocks activation of the immune cells which halts the disease and restores hair growth"

Behavior Change: Ultra Egghead Edition | Tell Me Something I Don't Know - "Immediate rewards are actually also critical to achieve our long term goals. That success at exercising or healthy eating is the immediate rewards that you are getting from pursuing these goals... The student that likes studying will study more than the student that doesn't like studying. Where is the student that finds studying more important will not necessarily study much more than the student that find it less important...
There is a certain type of news article, a certain section of the newspaper that's more likely to go viral... about twenty percent of the articles that appear on the New York Times make the most emailed list and thirty percent from the Science Times make the most emailed list... good news about science, right. We discover something exciting that feels like it could make our lives better...
We worked with this charity in the United States... their normal charitable fundraising appeal sent out a letter to their prior donors and would make a fairly emotional appeal it would talk about Maria and a pig farm and how they're helping her make more money and feed her children etc. They agreed to add a treatment... we actually conducted a randomized trial to measure the impact of our program and we found positive impacts on a bunch of stuff... on average it didn't matter at all... the interesting thing was looking within the sample at two different types of people. People who had been giving a lot in the past and people who had been giving a very little amount. By little amount, ten, fifteen, twenty dollars. Turns out the people who had given very little when you got wonky they actually gave less... they're giving for an emotional appeal and you get wonky. And that's like not why they're giving... you're actually reminding them this might not work...
Happy or sad images, you're unfortunately wrong. Sad images work way better... people give because they want to feel good not because they want to do good"

The History Hot 100 | Podcast | History Extra - "We're British, we're going to be interested in our own stories - that's just to be taken for granted, and if you did this poll in France - I'm half French, I know this, I grew up in a house where my mom was always banging on about how Agincourt is a minor skirmish. She is always going on about you know that they lose the Hundred Years War in the end, the English so it doesn't matter"

Friends or enemies? Anglo-French relations | Podcast | History Extra - "Doing comparative history in general, basically looking at a country, not just your own country but also at a foreign country allows you to distance yourself from inherited national myths. For instance what we could call exceptionalism, the idea that your country's history is unique, different, singular. To give you an example in Britain that would be the so called Our Island story or the Weak History. In France it's the idea that the notion of the Hexagon, the perfect shape of of the French territory which is a myth obviously but it was very powerful in the nineteenth century and beyond this the idea that France is a uniquely diverse and really has no equivalent in the world so I think it's very healthy...
My current work is on prisoners of war. So I am looking at these people as cultural mediators... Edward Gibbon, the very famous eighteenth century historian and philosopher. His first book was actually written in, copied, it was written in French because the guy was actually educated in French rather than English which is not very well known. And secondly the person who wrote he dictated basically the book to a person was a French prisoner of war on parole in Petersfield in Kent... There are plenty of other examples of prisoners of war and marrying English women... the same happening in France in Dinan, Brittany with English prisoners marrying French women et cetera...
What do we mean by the nation in that period is something which is very interesting and we have to be careful not to project back into the eighteenth century something which was really invented in the late eighteen, early nineteen even later century. So for many people what mattered was not necessarily the nation but the locality. For instance what foreigner might have meant, a very common use of the term foreigner was someone who lived outside your parish...
Defining one oneself as French or English depended on the context. Sometimes it wasn't really crucial and I'm thinking also about cross national alliances. For instance fishermen from Normandy, from Dieppe in Normandy, they really couldn't stand those from from Dunkirk which was also in the French national territory. But they were their competitors. So they preferred to ally themselves with those from Harwich or Dover
Once again, this shows the poverty of romanticising and prioritising the view from the inside

Queen Victoria behind closed doors | Podcast | History Extra - "For Albert marriage to Victoria is not really about all these romantic things like sex and love. Marriage to Victoria is about a job and fortunately - he doesn't really approve of Victoria as a young woman. He thought she was far too flighty, went to far too many parties, very frivolous and he really wanted to break off the relationship if he could. But unfortunately he comes to England and Victoria falls madly in love with him on first sight, proposes to him. She proposes to him - note - within five days of meeting him, she doesn't by the way even you know tell her mother... Once he's married to Victoria, Albert begins to take over power and the easiest way to do this is basically by making Victoria repeatedly pregnant... it's perhaps for that reason that she's so bitterly resentful of her babies and her children...
She spent a great deal of time on the Isle of Wight. Wonderfully inaccessible if you want to go and see her and you're Prime Minister. In those days getting to the Isle of White was not easy. And even more time in Scotland at Balmoral which was even worse to get to. It was a sort of sixteen hour train journey and you know once they were there most politicians who had to stay with the Queen, there was always a minister in attendance felt extremely uncomfortable because it was so cold. Queen Victoria insisted always on having the temperatures on every - sorry this isn't relevant - on every room of her house on the mantelpiece there would be a thermometer to see what the temperature was and it must always be below sixty. Every window was open in all her sitting rooms. She always felt terribly hot, much hotter than most people. So people staying at Balmoral were frozen... Never in London. She is invisible...
She needed companionship because she was a queen and so isolated she couldn't have friends like ordinary people did. She liked men and John Brown, whatever else he did, he had access to her. He came to her room frequently. He called her woman which she loved and so she felt kind of safe with him, a kind of companionship. But he has a terrible effect on her relations with her children. He bullies her children and also all her household hated him because he was not a very pleasant man and a drunkard"