Links - 15th August 2018 (1)

Ivy League Admissions Are a Sham: Confessions of a Harvard Gatekeeper - "Ivy League admissions are a complete racket, rigged in favor of the privileged and completely impervious to change... each candidate launched into their prepared speech to show that they personally bucked the popular image of the Millennial as a smartphone-obsessed, Ritalin-addicted egomaniac with no work ethic. In fact, they mostly went on to question whether such people even existed outside the minds of East Coast media commentators. Sure, each of them liked their iPhones and maybe they did struggle a bit to understand other people's worldviews, but that's also why they needed to take that trip to Tanzania or volunteer for Habitat for Humanity or take a field trip to an inner city school or… You get the idea. The only thing that told me was that either everyone under 18 reads New York Times Op-Eds and The Atlantic cover stories religiously, or—much more likely—that they were coached by someone who actually did. There were other red flags to look out for, too. How they sat straight up when it was time for the open-ended questions. How their eyes glazed over and they looked right past you once they started to recite their canned answers. How their outrage, their compassion, their conspiratorial asides seemed just a bit too…performative... At my day job, I've interviewed mid-career professionals who struggle with interview questions more than these high schoolers generally do"

This Singapore woman shares what she does as a debt collector - "“We are trained not to use scare tactics like threats or violence to intimidate debtors. Instead, we try to understand where they’re coming from,” explains Yvonne. “If they can’t pay up because they’ve lost their jobs, we help them find one – without taking any commission.”"

The 'sex selfie stick' lets you FaceTime the inside of a vagina - "Further proof that the sole goal of mankind is now to take selfies absolutely everywhere possible, a vibrator that can video capture an orgasm from its epicentre has been invented"

Have sex with your iPad thanks to the new sex toy no-one asked for - "The company this week launches Fleshlight Launchpad, which allows users of their flashlight-shaped, vagina-like toy to plug it into the back of an iPad in order to 'fully immerse themselves' in whatever they're watching."

Scientific peer reviews are a 'sacred cow' ready to be slaughtered, says former editor of BMJ - "Richard Smith, who edited the British Medical Journal for more than a decade, said there was no evidence that peer review was a good method of detecting errors and claimed that “most of what is published in journals is just plain wrong or nonsense”... an experiment conducted during his time at the BMJ, in which eight deliberate errors were included in a short paper sent to 300 reviewers, had exposed how easily the peer review process could fail... the process of peer review before publication could also work against innovative papers, was open to abuse, and should be done away with in favour of “the real peer review” of the wider scientific community post-publication... The editor of the second of the country’s two leading medical journals, Dr Richard Horton of The Lancet, wrote in an editorial earlier this month that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue”, blaming, among other things, studies with small sample sizes, researchers’ conflicts of interest and “an obsession” among scientists for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance”. “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming,” he wrote. “In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt their data to fit their preferred theory of the world.”"

Porn actors working with VR cameras strapped on 'having trouble keeping it up'

How Canadian Customs Decides Which Porn is Too Hardcore - "some of the decisions reported by CBSA don’t make much sense at first glance. The film Taboo Handjobs 2: admissible. Taboo Handjobs 3: denied. Or, why was Daddy I’m a Big Girl Now! barred, while Daddy Made me a Mommy was OK? Other allowable titles included Don’t Let Grandpa Babysit Your Daughter 3, My Niece is my Bae, and Brothers Fucking Their Stepsister 10. At the same time, Exercise in Domination, Bitches of Cruel Intent, and Pain Train (along with a dozen or so others) were turned away."

The Fallacy of 'Giving Up' - ""When you ask most people where they want to die," Volandes said—referring, of course, to people who have some context for the nature of the question—"most people say, I want to die outside of the hospital, in my home, in comfort." Nearly 80 percent of Americans, in fact, say that. And yet, close to 55 percent of older adults die in a hospital or nursing home. Fewer than one in four manage to die at home... people died fighting. They died fighting even when the fight was futile. They died on sterile wards with electrodes taped to their chests and tubes in orifices both natural and manmade. They died deprived of sleep and good food and all things familiar. They died in uniform gowns, whose singular purpose is accommodation of gastrointestinal processes. And worst, they died the way they most likely wouldn't have wanted to die. Most of those cases could have been, and could now be avoided, Volandes argues, if doctors and patients would just have The Conversation... in one large study Gawande cites, patients even ended up living just as long when they went into hospice care as did their aggressively medicalized counterparts. Of 4,493 people studied, the researchers concluded, mean survival after three years was actually 29 days longer for hospice patients than for non-hospice patients... "[Doctors] think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really, it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.""

The Rubble of Palmyra and Its Lessons - "When one reads this catalog of coexisting divinities, one is reminded of the old Enlightenment argument, made against the exclusivist and bellicose tendencies of the monotheistic faiths, about the innate tolerance of a polytheistic universe. Where there is one God, there is one way. Where there are many gods, there are many ways"

Why Teenagers Hit Puberty and Take Dumb Risks - "fighting with parents actually accelerated the onset of puberty... the effect of peers on adolescent risk taking may be hard-wired in the adolescent brain because of the impact of peers on the brain’s reward centers. Just being around your friends is so rewarding that it makes you do crazy things. Now that was pretty exciting."

Populist talkshows fuel rise of far right, German TV bosses told - "The head of Germany’s most powerful cultural body has called for the plug to be pulled on the nation’s multitude of political talkshows for a year, arguing that their populist agenda has helped fuel the rise of the far right. Olaf Zimmermann, who heads the German cultural council, an umbrella group for organisations from art galleries to television companies, said public broadcasters needed to step back and rethink a format that has helped cement gloom-ridden public attitudes towards refugees and Islam, and propelled the Alternative für Deutschland party into parliament at last September’s election. “I’d suggest for them, take a break for a year ... though the length of the intermission isn’t the decisive factor. What is crucial is that they return with new talkshow concepts and try to come up with more suitable contents with regards to social cohesion in our society,” Zimmermann said, arguing that the public broadcasters ARD and ZDF were obsessed with refugee-related issues, often framing them negatively... The production team of Hart Aber Fair said it rejected the accusation that they had unfairly labelled all refugees as dangerous. “As journalists we find the concept of framing alien to us. We are simply trying to represent the issues which are occupying people, for what they are,” they said... the AfD – whose representatives are relative newcomers on the talkshow circuit, the party only having been founded in 2014 – have been deeply critical of the extent to which they are excluded from TV debates"
Voting fuels the rise of the far right. Ban voting

Why closing legal brothels is a bad idea: Weitzer - "although long forgotten, the National Organization for Women voted in 1973 to support decriminalization in the United States. The resolution declared that NOW “opposes continued prohibitive laws regarding prostitution, believing them to be punitive” and “therefore favors removal of all laws relating to the act of prostitution.” These are just a few examples showing that legal prostitution is not a crazy fringe idea. In fact, the American public is much more sympathetic to the idea of than is commonly believed. Recent national polls show growing tolerance: Support for legalizing prostitution increased from 38 percent in 2012 to 44 percent in 2015 and 49 percent in 2016. And legalization bills have been recently introduced in Hawaii, New Hampshire and Washington, D.C... In the Netherlands, where prostitution has been legal since 2000, a report by the Ministry of Justice in 2007 stated that “it is likely trafficking in human beings has become more difficult, because the enforcement of the regulations has increased.” Evidence from Germany seems to confirm this argument. Government figures show a consistent decline since 2002 (when legalization took effect)... Unlike illegal street prostitution in many other places, Nevada’s legal brothels do not disturb public order, create nuisances, or negatively impact local communities in other ways. Instead, they provide needed tax revenue for cash-strapped rural towns"

Why a DNA data breach is much worse than a credit card leak - "while it’s possible for someone to receive a credit report and easily dispute it, almost no one has the genetic literacy to find their information, understand it, and correct it. There aren’t enough genetic counselors as it is and a recent study showed that some primary care providers didn’t feel comfortable interpreting the results... ultimately, a breach of genetic data is much more serious than most credit breaches. Genetic information is immutable"

Honey bees can understand the surprisingly complex concept of zero - "Andreas Nieder, a German neurobiologist, explains why it’s so astonishing that humans and bees demonstrate similar cognitive abilities. “Their last common ancestor, a humble creature that barely had a brain at all, lived more than 600 million years ago, an eternity in evolutionary terms,” Nieder writes. But somehow, separately, both vertebrates and insects developed these similar skills."

Two surgeons based in China say a head transplant is “imminent.” We need to grapple with the ethics now. - "We do not know how far the microbiome’s influence on our behavior goes. In one study, however, scientists took two sets of mice — one set timid, the other adventurous. They then took the gut microbes from each set and transplanted them into another set of mice (whose microbiomes had been removed). Astonishingly, the recipient mice took on the personality traits of the mice whose microbiomes they received. The prominence of the gut microbiome and the ENS gives scientific backing to the notion of having a “gut feeling.”"

The Myth of the Racist Cop - WSJ - "Last year’s 12% increase in homicides reported to the FBI is the largest one-year homicide increase in nearly half a century. The primary victims have been black... More police are being killed this year too... Officers are second-guessing their own justified use of force for fear of being labeled racist and losing their jobs, if not their freedom. On Oct. 5 a female officer in Chicago was beaten unconscious by a suspect in a car crash, who repeatedly bashed her face into the concrete and tore out chunks of her hair. She refrained from using her gun, she said, because she didn’t want to become the next viral video in the Black Lives Matter narrative. The Chicago Police Department now wants to institutionalize such dangerous second-guessing. Its proposed guidelines for using force would require cops to consider the “impact that even a reasonable use of force may have on those who observe” it... The Black Lives Matter narrative about an epidemic of racially biased police shootings is false: Four studies published this year showed that if there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites"

Ray Kelly: The NYPD: Guilty of Saving 7,383 Lives - WSJ - "in each of the city's 76 police precincts, the race of those stopped highly correlates to descriptions provided by victims or witnesses to crimes... The NYPD has too urgent a mission and too few officers for us to waste time and resources on broad, unfocused surveillance. We have a responsibility to protect New Yorkers from violent crime or another terrorist attack—and we uphold the law in doing so. As a city, we have to face the reality that New York's minority communities experience a disproportionate share of violent crime. To ignore that fact, as our critics would have us do, would be a form of discrimination in itself."

Four Nations Are Winning the Global War for Talent - Real Time Economics - WSJ - "The world’s highly skilled immigrants are increasingly living in just four nations: the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, according to new World Bank research highlighting the challenges of brain drain for non-English-speaking and developing countries... While the share of the world’s population living outside their birth country has hovered around 3% since the 1960s, the highly-skilled component—defined as workers with at least one year of tertiary education—has risen more than three times as fast as the number of low-skilled immigrant workers. And China, India and Philippines have edged out the U.K. as the biggest supplier. Despite efforts of non-English-speaking nations to attract high quality workers, almost 75% of the total OECD highly skilled workforce in 2010 lived in the four main Anglo-Saxon countries—almost 40% in the U.S. alone. Around 70% of engineers in Silicon Valley and 60% of doctors in Perth, Australia, were foreign-born in 2010."

So Busy at Work, No Time to Do the Job - WSJ - "As companies flatten hierarchy and preach collaboration among their ranks, a growing share of bosses’ time is spent coordinating, directing traffic and overseeing employees who may or may not report directly to them. Managers and executives complain that the push for teamwork, innovation and speed has left them little time to do real work."

Wozniak: Apple Couldn’t Emerge in Singapore - Indonesia Real Time - WSJ - "Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, said a company like Apple could not emerge in societies like Singapore where “bad behavior is not tolerated” and people are not taught to think for themselves. “Look at structured societies like Singapore where bad behavior is not tolerated [and] you are extremely punished” Mr. Wozniak said in a recent interview with the BBC. “Where are the creative people? Where are the great artists? Where are the great musicians? Where are the great writers?”"

American Job Openings Now Outnumber the Jobless - WSJ - "The labor market is forcing employers to rethink their approach to hiring, said Terri Greeno, owner of an Express Employment Professionals office in Crystal Lake, Ill. She is asking clients if they are being realistic in their demands for workers with clean criminal histories and higher levels of education... To attract workers, the Saladworks restaurant chain has raised its starting wages about 5%. It also has relaxed standards on tattoos and piercings, allowed employees to wear jeans and bandannas, and gotten more flexible about schedules."

Affirmative Action Lands in the Air Traffic Control Tower - WSJ - "When a plane starts its final descent, are the passengers more concerned about the competence or about the skin color of the air-traffic controllers on the ground who will help the pilot land safely? The answer may be obvious to readers, if not to the Obama administration. A recently completed six-month investigation by Fox Business Network found that the Federal Aviation Administration has quietly moved away from merit-based hiring criteria in order to increase the number of women and minorities who staff airport control towers. The changes come despite the fact that the FAA’s own internal reports describe the evidence for changing the hiring process as “weak.” Until 2013, the FAA gave hiring preference to controller applicants who earned a degree from one of its Collegiate Training Initiative schools and scored high enough on an eight-hour screening test called the Air Traffic Selection and Training exam, or AT-SAT, which measures cognitive skills. The Obama administration, however, determined that the process excluded too many from minority groups... Given that training an air-traffic controller can cost more than $400,000 on average, selecting candidates based on who is likely to complete the process makes economic sense. Hans Bader, a legal scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes that the FAA’s focus on diversity is not only inefficient but may be a violation of the Civil Rights Act. “The FAA’s jettisoning of merit-based hiring criteria violated the Supreme Court’s Ricci decision, [Ricci v. DeStefano, 2009] which limits agencies’ ability to discard hiring criteria in order to increase minority representation, especially when there is no strong evidence that the criteria are not job-related,” said Mr. Bader... Advocates of “diversity” insist that discounting objective measures of ability and competence is harmless, but history shows that it can be deadly. In 1973 Patrick Chavis was one of five black students admitted to a medical school in California through an affirmative-action program designed to increase minority enrollment. Allan Bakke, a white applicant who was rejected despite having much higher test scores than the black applicants, sued. In 1978 the Supreme Court struck down the program, but Chavis would go on to earn his medical degree and become a poster child for advocates of racial preferences. In 1995 he made the cover of the New York Times magazine. Sen. Ted Kennedy called him “the perfect example” of how affirmative action worked. In 1998 the California medical board revoked Chavis’s medical license, noting his “inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician” after several patients in his care died or were severely injured."
Besides "Dear Colleague"'s ruining of due process for campus sexual assault cases, we have another thing we can definitely say "Thanks Obama" for

McDonald's World Cup 2014 Advert - YouTube