"Most transmen will laugh, some quite loudly, at the notion that we transition in order to achieve male privilege. I’ve been transitioned for many years and still don’t know what that is. I’ve looked around, but the concept is as elusive as the winning lottery ticket that I’m sure I purchased but now can’t find anywhere. Transmen transition because of a gender incongruity, and if male privilege comes with it, it’s only a side effect. But most of us will attest to the fact that there isn’t much male privilege out there to be had."
--- Just Add Hormones: An Insider's Guide to the Transsexual Experience / Matt Kailey
L'origine de Bert
Friday, September 14, 2012
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Traditional Islamic Religious Tolerance
"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours." - Hunter S. Thompson
***
"The traditional political and social order which flourished in the Ottoman Empire and, with some modifications, in the realms of the shahs of Iran, had its roots in classical Islamic law and custom, and beyond that in the remoter civilizations of the ancient Middle East. As in other religious cultures, it was based frankly on inequality, since it would be inappropriate and indeed absurd to accord equal treatment to those who accept God’s final revelation and those who wilfully reject it. Sorne modem apologists, in justly praising the religious tolerance of traditional Islamic regimes, have described it as a system of equal rights. It was not, and such equality would indeed have been seen at the time not as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. In refusing equality to the unbeliever, the Islamic state was following the common practice of religions in power. Where it differed from most others was in according to these unbelievers a recognized status in society, defined and maintained by Holy Law, and accepted by the mass of the Muslim populations. This was not equal status, but it did provide a level of toleration which in states guided by other dispensations was not achieved until religion was disestablished or, at the very least, deprived of much of its influence in public affairs. Muslim religious tolerance was of course limited to monotheists who accepted what Islam recognized as earlier revelations. In practice, in the Middle East this meant Christians of various denominations, and Jews. In Iran there was also a small surviving community of Zoroastrians. In the Ottoman Empire, these minorities were constituted into what were known by the name of millet."
--- The Middle East / Bernard Lewis
***
"The traditional political and social order which flourished in the Ottoman Empire and, with some modifications, in the realms of the shahs of Iran, had its roots in classical Islamic law and custom, and beyond that in the remoter civilizations of the ancient Middle East. As in other religious cultures, it was based frankly on inequality, since it would be inappropriate and indeed absurd to accord equal treatment to those who accept God’s final revelation and those who wilfully reject it. Sorne modem apologists, in justly praising the religious tolerance of traditional Islamic regimes, have described it as a system of equal rights. It was not, and such equality would indeed have been seen at the time not as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. In refusing equality to the unbeliever, the Islamic state was following the common practice of religions in power. Where it differed from most others was in according to these unbelievers a recognized status in society, defined and maintained by Holy Law, and accepted by the mass of the Muslim populations. This was not equal status, but it did provide a level of toleration which in states guided by other dispensations was not achieved until religion was disestablished or, at the very least, deprived of much of its influence in public affairs. Muslim religious tolerance was of course limited to monotheists who accepted what Islam recognized as earlier revelations. In practice, in the Middle East this meant Christians of various denominations, and Jews. In Iran there was also a small surviving community of Zoroastrians. In the Ottoman Empire, these minorities were constituted into what were known by the name of millet."
--- The Middle East / Bernard Lewis
Post ID: 5352871654295531290
Thursday, September 06, 2012
Links - 7th September 2012
"He who lives without folly isn't so wise as he thinks." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
***
We failed in Bosnia - "the case for interventionism does not rest on the ease with which constitutional democracy can be transplanted in emerging states. Because western-style democracies are rare, and some states (such as Afghanistan) have proved resistant to them, it is fashionable for critics of intervention to claim to be realists. In reality, they are more usually sophists. Liberal-democratic internationalism, for all its limitations, holds out some hope of avoiding a Hobbesian world in which aggression is rewarded... Western failure in Bosnia was almost total. The reputations of its authors have barely been scathed by it."
Biker fined for speed camera gestures - "A teenage motorcyclist who deliberately set off 26 different speed cameras giving German police the finger in each one has been fined £4,000. Dimitri Salovic, 17, covered up in biking leathers and a full-face helmet, hid his registration number before roaring around Munich at speeds of up to 70mph, a court heard. Police finally nabbed him when they worked out a pattern to his route and set up an undercover traffic team where they thought he'd strike next."
Till Death Do Us Part - "Garvey had a stroke in January of 1940, and he becomes incapacitated. George Padmore, who was a columnist for The Chicago Defender, had heard a rumor that Garvey had died and instead of confirming this, he published a premature obituary.
The obituary described Garvey as a man whose followers had deserted him; a man who died “broke, alone and unpopular.”
When Garvey reads it, he lets out a loud moan and he collapses. He suffers a second stroke and next morning he dies."
The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Genius - "Margie Profet was always a study in sharp contradictions... the most salient fact about Profet is her absence. Neither friends, former advisers, publishers, nor ex-lovers has any idea what happened to her or where she is today. Sometime between 2002 and 2005, Profet, who was then in her mid-40s, vanished without a trace. Best known for three landmark papers in the prestigious Quarterly Review of Biology (QRB) and Evolutionary Theory, Profet recast a trio of everyday curses into a trinity of evolutionary blessings. Allergies, menstruation, and morning sickness, she argued, eliminate germs, carcinogens, and mutation-causing toxins from the body"
I'm an Asian Woman and I Refuse to Ever Date an Asian Man - "I'm an Asian girl. I don't date Asian guys. Yep, I'm one of those that date lots and lots of (mostly, but not always) white guys. Why? It's simple: I'm a racist... Asians are marrying non-Asians at a rate much higher than any other racial group. This summer Pew reported that 37 percent of all recent Asian-American brides wedded a non-Asian groom. In an earlier study of the couples who married in 2008, 9 percent of whites, 16 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Hispanics did so with someone of a different race or ethnicity. Thirty-one percent of Asians did. This trend has nothing to do with skin color. It has everything to do with patriarchy and cultural sexism and a lifestyle I grew up with and want nothing to do with anymore... Dating white men means acceptance into American culture. White culture"
What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress? - NYTimes.com - "2 percent to 7 percent of boys under age 12 regularly display “cross-gender” behaviors, though very few wish to actually be a girl... 60 to 80 percent of pink boys do eventually become gay men. The rest grow up to either become heterosexual men or become women by taking hormones and maybe having surgery. Gender-nonconforming behavior of girls, however, is rarely studied, in part because departures from traditional femininity are so pervasive and accepted. The studies that do exist indicate that tomboys are somewhat more likely than gender-typical girls to become bisexual, lesbian or male-identified, but most become heterosexual women... genes account for 70 percent of gender-atypical behavior in both sexes... A 1998 study in the academic journal Sex Roles suggests just how ordinary it has become for girls to exist in the middle space: it found that 46 percent of senior citizens, 69 percent of baby boomers and 77 percent of Gen-X women reported having been tomboys... “People rely on gender to help understand the world, to make order out of chaos”... When J. Crew ran an ad of its president painting her son’s toenails neon pink, with copy that read, “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink,” one commentator said she was exploiting her son “behind the facade of liberal, transgendered identity politics... Boys and men do have more latitude these days to dress and act in less conventionally masculine ways. Among straight men, long hair and (certain) necklaces and (certain) pairs of earrings are almost normative, at least in some communities. Plenty of men wax their eyebrows, get manicures and wear pink”
‘Missing’ woman unknowingly joins search for herself
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Who's Hungry? - "Before I knew it, tall, healthy-looking Western women became the trigger for my cannibalistic fantasies. I guess my infatuation with such women stemmed from the fact that I was short, ugly, and had an inferiority complex and therefore sought people who were the exact opposite of myself. Eventually, I began feeling a strong desire to bite into them—not to kill them or eat them per se, but merely to gnaw on their flesh. It was purely a form of sexual desire. It wasn’t like I felt like eating someone every time I was hungry. But you know how you tend to feel a stronger sexual desire when you’ve eaten a full meal? That’s when I would start feeling the urge to eat a girl. It’s absurd, right? In essence, it’s different from the type of hunger that people experience for food. This cannibalistic urge, where I’m going, “I want to eat human meat,” is a sort of sexual appetite, so if I don’t make sure that I ejaculate frequently enough, the desire only gets stronger and stronger"
Why Most Singaporeans Are in Debt - "Most Singaporeans will be in debt if they do the following:
1) Earn less than what they spend
2) Have no savings
3) Lose their jobs
4) Stay in a company for too long without promotion and their company pay them pathetic bonuses
5) Spend on liabilities
6) Do not delay gratification
7) Marries somebody that likes Cartier or Larry’s
8 ) Do not invest"
Visualising UI, UX etc
TOC News » Are Singaporeans too easily offended? - "Singaporeans have begun a crusade. Not against tyranny, or oppression, or privilege. In fact, this crusade, as far as anyone can tell, is against ever having to feel offended. And this crusade is leading more and more Singaporeans to seek out offensive content, so that they may destroy it... Offense is a self-inflicted injury. It makes no sense to hold other people accountable for your own self-inflicted injury... if I see a fat man in a dark alleyway and his obese frame offends me, who is responsible for my feelings of offense? Is it the fat man's fault that I find him offensive?... Worst of all, now, it seems, many Singaporeans are chomping at the bit, searching for more and more foreigners to hold responsible for their own hurt feelings. They are seeking out the alleyways where they know that fat people will congregate, and then launching an attack. News sites have been scraping the very bottom of the barrel to supply similar stories (one recent Temasek Review article alleged that a foreigner had called Singaporeans "low quality"). The appetite for these stories has become insatiable."
This Is Not a Joke: Government Issues Study of a Study About Studies
Population clock shows Japanese face extinction in 1000 years
Stand Up, Walk Around, Even Just For '20 Minutes' - "Use chocolate milk to replenish sugars after an intense workout. Reynolds calls it an "ideal recovery beverage" because it has the right ratio of carbs and proteins to aid your body's recovery process."
Low fertility increases descendant socioeconomic position but reduces long-term fitness in a modern post-industrial society - "modern fertility limitation represents a strategic response to the local costs of rearing socioeconomically competitive offspring, but contradict adaptive models suggesting that it maximizes long-term fitness. This indicates a conflict in modern societies between behaviours promoting socioeconomic versus biological success"
Robin Amos Kahn: A Husband, A House, A Mortgage, A Baby, A Light Bulb Moment - "I acted like I really enjoyed cooking though I hated cooking. And he acted like he really enjoyed spending weekends with me, when he really wanted to work seven days a week. But we made a commitment and we worked at it and we became a family... Here is my suggestion: Be you. Don't try to be anyone else. Also, live your life with pleasure and do what you love and what is important to you. Work hard, play hard, don't be waiting for someone to complete you. Complete yourself. A great marriage is really a dream for most. It takes honesty -- knowing and presenting who you really are. It isn't for everyone; it takes effort and a great deal of compromise and patience. It is not the Nobel Prize of life"
YouTube Flags Democrats' Convention Video on Copyright Grounds - "The most likely culprit is YouTube’s pre-emptive content filters, which allow large media companies to upload content they claim to own and automatically block videos that an algorithm decides matches their own. That would make the glitch the second livestream copyright-policing snafu in the span of a few days: On Sunday, a similar algorithm at uStream interrupted the livestream of the Hugo science fiction awards. The award show included clips of copyrighted videos, though the algorithm didn’t know that the clips had been authorized. In early August, an official NASA recording of the Mars landing was blocked hours after the successful landing, due to a rogue DMCA complaint by a news network."
Man nearly dies shipping himself to girlfriend
S'pore women attribute infertility to non-physiological reasons - "Majority of women in Singapore attribute their infertility to non-physiological reasons and say their condition is "god's will" or "bad luck"... Called "Starting Families Asia", the study also found two in five women here are unaware that a man can be infertile even if he does not have any problems having sex. Two in five Singaporean women also do not realise that a man may be infertile even if he produces sperm"
Jia Jia, the Chinese panda coming to Singapore receives its S Pass!
GooPhone I5 manufacturers want to sue Apple when iPhone launch - "According to reports, the Chinese manufacturers have filed for a patent on the design and are ready to take Apple to court when the next iPhone debuts"
Naomi Wolf's "Vagina" is full of bad science about the brain - ""dopamine is the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain"... If that were true, women with Parkinson’s could never be feminists, because that disease is caused by degeneration of the dopamine neurons. If that were true, feminists would be campaigning for the legalization of cocaine and crystal meth – at least for women – because those drugs boost dopamine levels. In fact, if that were true, it would mean that the most complimentary thing you could say to a woman would be “You sound like you’re on crack!” Naomi Wolf, you sound like you’re on crack."
Chocolate giants disown deep-fried Mars bar
***
We failed in Bosnia - "the case for interventionism does not rest on the ease with which constitutional democracy can be transplanted in emerging states. Because western-style democracies are rare, and some states (such as Afghanistan) have proved resistant to them, it is fashionable for critics of intervention to claim to be realists. In reality, they are more usually sophists. Liberal-democratic internationalism, for all its limitations, holds out some hope of avoiding a Hobbesian world in which aggression is rewarded... Western failure in Bosnia was almost total. The reputations of its authors have barely been scathed by it."
Biker fined for speed camera gestures - "A teenage motorcyclist who deliberately set off 26 different speed cameras giving German police the finger in each one has been fined £4,000. Dimitri Salovic, 17, covered up in biking leathers and a full-face helmet, hid his registration number before roaring around Munich at speeds of up to 70mph, a court heard. Police finally nabbed him when they worked out a pattern to his route and set up an undercover traffic team where they thought he'd strike next."
Till Death Do Us Part - "Garvey had a stroke in January of 1940, and he becomes incapacitated. George Padmore, who was a columnist for The Chicago Defender, had heard a rumor that Garvey had died and instead of confirming this, he published a premature obituary.
The obituary described Garvey as a man whose followers had deserted him; a man who died “broke, alone and unpopular.”
When Garvey reads it, he lets out a loud moan and he collapses. He suffers a second stroke and next morning he dies."
The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Genius - "Margie Profet was always a study in sharp contradictions... the most salient fact about Profet is her absence. Neither friends, former advisers, publishers, nor ex-lovers has any idea what happened to her or where she is today. Sometime between 2002 and 2005, Profet, who was then in her mid-40s, vanished without a trace. Best known for three landmark papers in the prestigious Quarterly Review of Biology (QRB) and Evolutionary Theory, Profet recast a trio of everyday curses into a trinity of evolutionary blessings. Allergies, menstruation, and morning sickness, she argued, eliminate germs, carcinogens, and mutation-causing toxins from the body"
I'm an Asian Woman and I Refuse to Ever Date an Asian Man - "I'm an Asian girl. I don't date Asian guys. Yep, I'm one of those that date lots and lots of (mostly, but not always) white guys. Why? It's simple: I'm a racist... Asians are marrying non-Asians at a rate much higher than any other racial group. This summer Pew reported that 37 percent of all recent Asian-American brides wedded a non-Asian groom. In an earlier study of the couples who married in 2008, 9 percent of whites, 16 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Hispanics did so with someone of a different race or ethnicity. Thirty-one percent of Asians did. This trend has nothing to do with skin color. It has everything to do with patriarchy and cultural sexism and a lifestyle I grew up with and want nothing to do with anymore... Dating white men means acceptance into American culture. White culture"
What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress? - NYTimes.com - "2 percent to 7 percent of boys under age 12 regularly display “cross-gender” behaviors, though very few wish to actually be a girl... 60 to 80 percent of pink boys do eventually become gay men. The rest grow up to either become heterosexual men or become women by taking hormones and maybe having surgery. Gender-nonconforming behavior of girls, however, is rarely studied, in part because departures from traditional femininity are so pervasive and accepted. The studies that do exist indicate that tomboys are somewhat more likely than gender-typical girls to become bisexual, lesbian or male-identified, but most become heterosexual women... genes account for 70 percent of gender-atypical behavior in both sexes... A 1998 study in the academic journal Sex Roles suggests just how ordinary it has become for girls to exist in the middle space: it found that 46 percent of senior citizens, 69 percent of baby boomers and 77 percent of Gen-X women reported having been tomboys... “People rely on gender to help understand the world, to make order out of chaos”... When J. Crew ran an ad of its president painting her son’s toenails neon pink, with copy that read, “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink,” one commentator said she was exploiting her son “behind the facade of liberal, transgendered identity politics... Boys and men do have more latitude these days to dress and act in less conventionally masculine ways. Among straight men, long hair and (certain) necklaces and (certain) pairs of earrings are almost normative, at least in some communities. Plenty of men wax their eyebrows, get manicures and wear pink”
‘Missing’ woman unknowingly joins search for herself
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Who's Hungry? - "Before I knew it, tall, healthy-looking Western women became the trigger for my cannibalistic fantasies. I guess my infatuation with such women stemmed from the fact that I was short, ugly, and had an inferiority complex and therefore sought people who were the exact opposite of myself. Eventually, I began feeling a strong desire to bite into them—not to kill them or eat them per se, but merely to gnaw on their flesh. It was purely a form of sexual desire. It wasn’t like I felt like eating someone every time I was hungry. But you know how you tend to feel a stronger sexual desire when you’ve eaten a full meal? That’s when I would start feeling the urge to eat a girl. It’s absurd, right? In essence, it’s different from the type of hunger that people experience for food. This cannibalistic urge, where I’m going, “I want to eat human meat,” is a sort of sexual appetite, so if I don’t make sure that I ejaculate frequently enough, the desire only gets stronger and stronger"
Why Most Singaporeans Are in Debt - "Most Singaporeans will be in debt if they do the following:
1) Earn less than what they spend
2) Have no savings
3) Lose their jobs
4) Stay in a company for too long without promotion and their company pay them pathetic bonuses
5) Spend on liabilities
6) Do not delay gratification
7) Marries somebody that likes Cartier or Larry’s
8 ) Do not invest"
Visualising UI, UX etc
TOC News » Are Singaporeans too easily offended? - "Singaporeans have begun a crusade. Not against tyranny, or oppression, or privilege. In fact, this crusade, as far as anyone can tell, is against ever having to feel offended. And this crusade is leading more and more Singaporeans to seek out offensive content, so that they may destroy it... Offense is a self-inflicted injury. It makes no sense to hold other people accountable for your own self-inflicted injury... if I see a fat man in a dark alleyway and his obese frame offends me, who is responsible for my feelings of offense? Is it the fat man's fault that I find him offensive?... Worst of all, now, it seems, many Singaporeans are chomping at the bit, searching for more and more foreigners to hold responsible for their own hurt feelings. They are seeking out the alleyways where they know that fat people will congregate, and then launching an attack. News sites have been scraping the very bottom of the barrel to supply similar stories (one recent Temasek Review article alleged that a foreigner had called Singaporeans "low quality"). The appetite for these stories has become insatiable."
This Is Not a Joke: Government Issues Study of a Study About Studies
Population clock shows Japanese face extinction in 1000 years
Stand Up, Walk Around, Even Just For '20 Minutes' - "Use chocolate milk to replenish sugars after an intense workout. Reynolds calls it an "ideal recovery beverage" because it has the right ratio of carbs and proteins to aid your body's recovery process."
Low fertility increases descendant socioeconomic position but reduces long-term fitness in a modern post-industrial society - "modern fertility limitation represents a strategic response to the local costs of rearing socioeconomically competitive offspring, but contradict adaptive models suggesting that it maximizes long-term fitness. This indicates a conflict in modern societies between behaviours promoting socioeconomic versus biological success"
Robin Amos Kahn: A Husband, A House, A Mortgage, A Baby, A Light Bulb Moment - "I acted like I really enjoyed cooking though I hated cooking. And he acted like he really enjoyed spending weekends with me, when he really wanted to work seven days a week. But we made a commitment and we worked at it and we became a family... Here is my suggestion: Be you. Don't try to be anyone else. Also, live your life with pleasure and do what you love and what is important to you. Work hard, play hard, don't be waiting for someone to complete you. Complete yourself. A great marriage is really a dream for most. It takes honesty -- knowing and presenting who you really are. It isn't for everyone; it takes effort and a great deal of compromise and patience. It is not the Nobel Prize of life"
YouTube Flags Democrats' Convention Video on Copyright Grounds - "The most likely culprit is YouTube’s pre-emptive content filters, which allow large media companies to upload content they claim to own and automatically block videos that an algorithm decides matches their own. That would make the glitch the second livestream copyright-policing snafu in the span of a few days: On Sunday, a similar algorithm at uStream interrupted the livestream of the Hugo science fiction awards. The award show included clips of copyrighted videos, though the algorithm didn’t know that the clips had been authorized. In early August, an official NASA recording of the Mars landing was blocked hours after the successful landing, due to a rogue DMCA complaint by a news network."
Man nearly dies shipping himself to girlfriend
S'pore women attribute infertility to non-physiological reasons - "Majority of women in Singapore attribute their infertility to non-physiological reasons and say their condition is "god's will" or "bad luck"... Called "Starting Families Asia", the study also found two in five women here are unaware that a man can be infertile even if he does not have any problems having sex. Two in five Singaporean women also do not realise that a man may be infertile even if he produces sperm"
Jia Jia, the Chinese panda coming to Singapore receives its S Pass!
GooPhone I5 manufacturers want to sue Apple when iPhone launch - "According to reports, the Chinese manufacturers have filed for a patent on the design and are ready to take Apple to court when the next iPhone debuts"
Naomi Wolf's "Vagina" is full of bad science about the brain - ""dopamine is the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain"... If that were true, women with Parkinson’s could never be feminists, because that disease is caused by degeneration of the dopamine neurons. If that were true, feminists would be campaigning for the legalization of cocaine and crystal meth – at least for women – because those drugs boost dopamine levels. In fact, if that were true, it would mean that the most complimentary thing you could say to a woman would be “You sound like you’re on crack!” Naomi Wolf, you sound like you’re on crack."
Chocolate giants disown deep-fried Mars bar
Post ID: 3566837119082733985
What happens when you risk going too far
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” - T.S. Eliot
National Geographic Adventure Magazine: Story--Lost at Sea
"In 1982, at 24 and with a Whitbread Round the World regatta under her belt, sailor Debbie Kiley boarded a 58-foot (18-meter) sailing yacht in Maine for a routine delivery to Florida.
After a stopover in Annapolis, Maryland, the weather quickly worsened—60-knot winds whipping up 40-foot (12-meter) waves. In the course of the next three days the crew lost their boat, survived 18 hours of treading water, lost two crew members to sharks and another to injuries sustained in the sinking, and suffered hallucinations from severe dehydration and hypothermia"
National Geographic Adventure Magazine: Story--Lost at Sea
"In 1982, at 24 and with a Whitbread Round the World regatta under her belt, sailor Debbie Kiley boarded a 58-foot (18-meter) sailing yacht in Maine for a routine delivery to Florida.
After a stopover in Annapolis, Maryland, the weather quickly worsened—60-knot winds whipping up 40-foot (12-meter) waves. In the course of the next three days the crew lost their boat, survived 18 hours of treading water, lost two crew members to sharks and another to injuries sustained in the sinking, and suffered hallucinations from severe dehydration and hypothermia"
Post ID: 7716723929352682828
Wednesday, September 05, 2012
Conversations About Singaporeans' Career Aspirations
"School is learning things you don't want to know, surrounded by people you wish you didn't know, while working toward a future you don't know will ever come." - Dave Kellett
***
CONVERSATIONS ABOUT SINGAPOREANS' CAREER ASPIRATIONS
"INTRODUCTIONS
Hi! We're a multi-disciplinary research unit within the Public Service Division <www.psd.gov.sg>. We're embarking on a project to learn more about Singaporeans' career aspirations, and we would love to hear your stories and experiences behind your career journey and life aspirations. Hence we are inviting you for participation and input to our learning journey.
WHAT OUR CONVERSATIONS ARE LIKE
We typically like to spend around 1.5 hours to chat with individuals or couples who fit the profiles listed below. These sessions are face-to-face, there will be about 3-4 people from our team, and preferably at the comfort of your home or office (or anywhere that you prefer and is conducive). Based on past experience, we found that the session would be more comfortable and enjoyable for participants when done in a manner more like casual friendly chat, hence no worries about having to go through a stiff/boring survey interview! Participants will also be compensated with shopping vouchers worth S$80 in appreciation of their time.
ABOUT YOUR CONFIDENTIALITY
Rest assured that all your personal information will guarded with the utmost confidentiality. We will also be recording our conversation and taking a few pictures only for the purposes of note-taking and internal reference, if you're okay with it and with your permission of course. And if you prefer to remain anonymous for the project, we will respect your wishes too. All information will be kept confidential for the purpose of this research, and there will be a confidential agreement to be signed by both you and us before we start the session.
HOW TO SIGN UP
Please take a moment to have a look at the profiles below, and fill the form further below if you fit the bill and would like to participate. Alternatively, pass this on to your friends/family who you think might be interested (and you can badger him/her for 'commission' after that!). CONTACT Upon completion of this short questionaire, we will contact you via phone or email for a quick chat and to coordinate an interview venue and timing. We aim to hold these sessions over the period between 10 to 22 Sept (Mon-Fri). If you have any questions, please contact Jason Leow at or 9229 4308, or Leon Voon at or 9229 4105.
Thank you so much in advance for your interest in participating in this project! We're really looking forward to hearing your stories. :)
Profiles
Please select which profile fits you best. If you feel none of the profiles fit, please fill in the text box under "Other". The examples stated are meant for illustration purposes only, so variations in degree can be accepted. :)
1. Someone who dropped out of university to pursue their own alternative career path
2. Success story of someone who only went through primary / secondary school.
3. Career hopper (e.g. changed jobs every year for past 10 years)
4. Global careerist (who held jobs in different companies in different continents)
5. Self-employed entrepreneur with successful business
6. Career part-timers / career free-lancers
7. Radical mid-career switcher (e.g. corporate bank CEO to non-profit NGO director)
8. Highly educated but chose not to have no career (e.g. long-term volunteer doctor)
9. Radically alternative career (e.g. professional psychic)
10. PhD holder
11. Stayed in 1 job for almost whole lifetime
12. Singaporean now working in Singapore but was schooled overseas all of his/her childhood
13. Someone who can go university but stop at polytechnic
14. JC student who went to polytechnic instead of university
15. People who pursued careers outside of what they were trained in while in university (e.g. engineers who became teacher)
16. Scholarship holder
17. Working adult who was home-schooled all his childhood
18. Current polytechnic student who owns a business
19. Low-income university student
20. Mid-/Retiring adult who is life-long learner, e.g. had 2 bachelor degrees, a MA and PhD, and still going for certifiable courses
21. Someone who intentionally denied promotion for personal / life / aspirational reasons
22. Someone who is happily (or unhappily) settled for second-best career option (e.g. couldn't to be doctor so went on to be nurse)
23. Career Counsellors / Life coach
24. Recruitment Firm / Head-hunter
Other:
(I don't actually know - or know that I know, at any rate - anyone involved in this)
***
CONVERSATIONS ABOUT SINGAPOREANS' CAREER ASPIRATIONS
"INTRODUCTIONS
Hi! We're a multi-disciplinary research unit within the Public Service Division <www.psd.gov.sg>. We're embarking on a project to learn more about Singaporeans' career aspirations, and we would love to hear your stories and experiences behind your career journey and life aspirations. Hence we are inviting you for participation and input to our learning journey.
WHAT OUR CONVERSATIONS ARE LIKE
We typically like to spend around 1.5 hours to chat with individuals or couples who fit the profiles listed below. These sessions are face-to-face, there will be about 3-4 people from our team, and preferably at the comfort of your home or office (or anywhere that you prefer and is conducive). Based on past experience, we found that the session would be more comfortable and enjoyable for participants when done in a manner more like casual friendly chat, hence no worries about having to go through a stiff/boring survey interview! Participants will also be compensated with shopping vouchers worth S$80 in appreciation of their time.
ABOUT YOUR CONFIDENTIALITY
Rest assured that all your personal information will guarded with the utmost confidentiality. We will also be recording our conversation and taking a few pictures only for the purposes of note-taking and internal reference, if you're okay with it and with your permission of course. And if you prefer to remain anonymous for the project, we will respect your wishes too. All information will be kept confidential for the purpose of this research, and there will be a confidential agreement to be signed by both you and us before we start the session.
HOW TO SIGN UP
Please take a moment to have a look at the profiles below, and fill the form further below if you fit the bill and would like to participate. Alternatively, pass this on to your friends/family who you think might be interested (and you can badger him/her for 'commission' after that!). CONTACT Upon completion of this short questionaire, we will contact you via phone or email for a quick chat and to coordinate an interview venue and timing. We aim to hold these sessions over the period between 10 to 22 Sept (Mon-Fri). If you have any questions, please contact Jason Leow at
Thank you so much in advance for your interest in participating in this project! We're really looking forward to hearing your stories. :)
Profiles
Please select which profile fits you best. If you feel none of the profiles fit, please fill in the text box under "Other". The examples stated are meant for illustration purposes only, so variations in degree can be accepted. :)
1. Someone who dropped out of university to pursue their own alternative career path
2. Success story of someone who only went through primary / secondary school.
3. Career hopper (e.g. changed jobs every year for past 10 years)
4. Global careerist (who held jobs in different companies in different continents)
5. Self-employed entrepreneur with successful business
6. Career part-timers / career free-lancers
7. Radical mid-career switcher (e.g. corporate bank CEO to non-profit NGO director)
8. Highly educated but chose not to have no career (e.g. long-term volunteer doctor)
9. Radically alternative career (e.g. professional psychic)
10. PhD holder
11. Stayed in 1 job for almost whole lifetime
12. Singaporean now working in Singapore but was schooled overseas all of his/her childhood
13. Someone who can go university but stop at polytechnic
14. JC student who went to polytechnic instead of university
15. People who pursued careers outside of what they were trained in while in university (e.g. engineers who became teacher)
16. Scholarship holder
17. Working adult who was home-schooled all his childhood
18. Current polytechnic student who owns a business
19. Low-income university student
20. Mid-/Retiring adult who is life-long learner, e.g. had 2 bachelor degrees, a MA and PhD, and still going for certifiable courses
21. Someone who intentionally denied promotion for personal / life / aspirational reasons
22. Someone who is happily (or unhappily) settled for second-best career option (e.g. couldn't to be doctor so went on to be nurse)
23. Career Counsellors / Life coach
24. Recruitment Firm / Head-hunter
Other:
(I don't actually know - or know that I know, at any rate - anyone involved in this)
Post ID: 7691213833180746434
On China's Dysfunction
"Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in." - Leonardo da Vinci
***
You’ll never be Chinese
"I wanted to be Chinese, once... I wanted China to be the place where I made a career and lived my life. For the past 16 years it has been precisely that. But now I will be leaving...
If I had to choose one word to describe China in the mid-1980s it would be optimistic. A free market of sorts was in its early stages. With it came the first inflation China had experienced in 35 years. People were actually excited by that. It was a sign of progress, and a promise of more to come...
Deng had promised the Chinese people material wealth they hadn’t known for centuries on the condition that they never again asked for political change. The Party said: “Trust us and everything will be all right.”
Twenty years later, everything is not all right...
Modern day mainland Chinese society is focused on one object: money and the acquisition thereof...
To rise to the top you must be grey, with no strong views or ideas. Leadership contenders might think, and here I hypothesise, that once they are in position they can show their “true colours.” Too late they realise that will never be possible...
Leadership requires empathy, an ability to put yourself in your subordinate’s shoes. It also requires decisiveness and a willingness to accept responsibility. Believing themselves to be unique, the Chinese find it almost impossible to empathise... the system is designed to make avoidance of responsibility a prerequisite before any major decision is taken...
A leader must also offer something more than supremacy. The current “world leader” offers the world the chance to be American and democratic, usually if they want to be, sometimes by force. The British empire offered freedom from slavery and a legal system, amongst other things. The Romans took grain from Egypt and redistributed it across Europe...
The Party wouldn’t know a legal system if you swung the scales of justice under its metaphorical nose. (I was once a plaintiff in the Beijing High Court. I was told, off the record, that I had won my case. While my lawyer was on his way to collect the decision the judge received a telephone call. The decision was reversed)...
There is one final reason why the world does not want to be led by China in the 21st century. The Communist Party of China has, from its very inception, encouraged strong anti-foreign sentiment... To speak ill of China in public, to award a Nobel prize to a Chinese intellectual, or for a public figure to have tea with the Dalai Lama, is to “interfere in China’s internal affairs” and “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” The Chinese are told on a regular basis to feel aggrieved at what foreigners have done to them, and the Party vows to exact vengeance on their behalf...
Everything the Party does to fix things in the short term only makes matters worse in the long term by setting off property prices again... I hope the upheaval, when it comes, is peaceful, that the Party does not try to distract people by launching an attack on Taiwan or the Philippines...
China does not nurture and educate its youth in a way that will allow them to become the leaders, inventors and innovators of tomorrow, but that is the intention. The Party does not want free thinkers who can solve its problems. It still believes it can solve them itself, if it ever admits it has a problem in the first place. The only one it openly acknowledges, ironically, is its corruption. To deny that would be impossible"
***
China: at war with its history
"The party archives still hold many documents that remain “sensitive,” in the official euphemism. The extent of cannibalism in the Cultural Revolution is something he had discovered during his research...
Most striking this year, perhaps, is that the centenary of 1911, which marked the end of over 2,000 years of China’s imperial system, has gone largely uncelebrated. The party preferred to remember its own 90th birthday in July, perhaps unwilling to remind people that what the 1911 revolutionaries embraced were not the ideas of Karl Marx but democracy...
The result is an ostensibly modern nation in which historians can still be fired or worse for deviating from the party line and in which, in the name of social stability and national security, a fifth of humanity must pretend to believe a national story invented to keep the Communist party in perpetual control...
The mission of public history became to demonstrate that foreigners had been behind the country’s major setbacks since the early 19th century...
5,000 years ago, China did not exist in a shape recognisable today. The true political father of the Chinese state is Qin Shihuangdi, the brutal first emperor of the Qin dynasty, who, some 2,000 years ago, conquered neighbouring princely states... But the territory ruled by Qin Shihuangdi was still only a fraction of the size of today’s People’s Republic. The political entity that he created was to fragment and change repeatedly in the following centuries. China’s current borders date only to the 17th century...
[They claim] that the term Chinese applies equally to the majority Han and to the ethnic minorities now within its borders. The Qing emperors knew different: they spent much of the 19th century suppressing rebellions both by disaffected Muslims and those native Chinese who saw them as foreign oppressors...
In 1974, war crimes committed by the Japanese invading Manchuria in 1931, then China proper in 1937, had been so forgotten that when a Japanese delegation visited Fudan University in Shanghai where I was studying at the time, the campus was festooned with banners that proclaimed “Friendship between the Japanese and the Chinese People, from Generation to Generation.” The 1937-38 Nanjing massacre which left 150,000-300,000 Chinese civilians dead, and the Japanese occupation of China (1937-45), might never have happened. Nor were the mid-19th century Opium Wars with Britain prominent in the public memory...
The National Museum of China, one of the cornerstones of Beijng’s monumental centre, has spent almost as much time closed as open since it was inaugurated in 1959"
***
You’ll never be Chinese
"I wanted to be Chinese, once... I wanted China to be the place where I made a career and lived my life. For the past 16 years it has been precisely that. But now I will be leaving...
If I had to choose one word to describe China in the mid-1980s it would be optimistic. A free market of sorts was in its early stages. With it came the first inflation China had experienced in 35 years. People were actually excited by that. It was a sign of progress, and a promise of more to come...
Deng had promised the Chinese people material wealth they hadn’t known for centuries on the condition that they never again asked for political change. The Party said: “Trust us and everything will be all right.”
Twenty years later, everything is not all right...
Modern day mainland Chinese society is focused on one object: money and the acquisition thereof...
To rise to the top you must be grey, with no strong views or ideas. Leadership contenders might think, and here I hypothesise, that once they are in position they can show their “true colours.” Too late they realise that will never be possible...
Leadership requires empathy, an ability to put yourself in your subordinate’s shoes. It also requires decisiveness and a willingness to accept responsibility. Believing themselves to be unique, the Chinese find it almost impossible to empathise... the system is designed to make avoidance of responsibility a prerequisite before any major decision is taken...
A leader must also offer something more than supremacy. The current “world leader” offers the world the chance to be American and democratic, usually if they want to be, sometimes by force. The British empire offered freedom from slavery and a legal system, amongst other things. The Romans took grain from Egypt and redistributed it across Europe...
The Party wouldn’t know a legal system if you swung the scales of justice under its metaphorical nose. (I was once a plaintiff in the Beijing High Court. I was told, off the record, that I had won my case. While my lawyer was on his way to collect the decision the judge received a telephone call. The decision was reversed)...
There is one final reason why the world does not want to be led by China in the 21st century. The Communist Party of China has, from its very inception, encouraged strong anti-foreign sentiment... To speak ill of China in public, to award a Nobel prize to a Chinese intellectual, or for a public figure to have tea with the Dalai Lama, is to “interfere in China’s internal affairs” and “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” The Chinese are told on a regular basis to feel aggrieved at what foreigners have done to them, and the Party vows to exact vengeance on their behalf...
Everything the Party does to fix things in the short term only makes matters worse in the long term by setting off property prices again... I hope the upheaval, when it comes, is peaceful, that the Party does not try to distract people by launching an attack on Taiwan or the Philippines...
China does not nurture and educate its youth in a way that will allow them to become the leaders, inventors and innovators of tomorrow, but that is the intention. The Party does not want free thinkers who can solve its problems. It still believes it can solve them itself, if it ever admits it has a problem in the first place. The only one it openly acknowledges, ironically, is its corruption. To deny that would be impossible"
***
China: at war with its history
"The party archives still hold many documents that remain “sensitive,” in the official euphemism. The extent of cannibalism in the Cultural Revolution is something he had discovered during his research...
Most striking this year, perhaps, is that the centenary of 1911, which marked the end of over 2,000 years of China’s imperial system, has gone largely uncelebrated. The party preferred to remember its own 90th birthday in July, perhaps unwilling to remind people that what the 1911 revolutionaries embraced were not the ideas of Karl Marx but democracy...
The result is an ostensibly modern nation in which historians can still be fired or worse for deviating from the party line and in which, in the name of social stability and national security, a fifth of humanity must pretend to believe a national story invented to keep the Communist party in perpetual control...
The mission of public history became to demonstrate that foreigners had been behind the country’s major setbacks since the early 19th century...
5,000 years ago, China did not exist in a shape recognisable today. The true political father of the Chinese state is Qin Shihuangdi, the brutal first emperor of the Qin dynasty, who, some 2,000 years ago, conquered neighbouring princely states... But the territory ruled by Qin Shihuangdi was still only a fraction of the size of today’s People’s Republic. The political entity that he created was to fragment and change repeatedly in the following centuries. China’s current borders date only to the 17th century...
[They claim] that the term Chinese applies equally to the majority Han and to the ethnic minorities now within its borders. The Qing emperors knew different: they spent much of the 19th century suppressing rebellions both by disaffected Muslims and those native Chinese who saw them as foreign oppressors...
In 1974, war crimes committed by the Japanese invading Manchuria in 1931, then China proper in 1937, had been so forgotten that when a Japanese delegation visited Fudan University in Shanghai where I was studying at the time, the campus was festooned with banners that proclaimed “Friendship between the Japanese and the Chinese People, from Generation to Generation.” The 1937-38 Nanjing massacre which left 150,000-300,000 Chinese civilians dead, and the Japanese occupation of China (1937-45), might never have happened. Nor were the mid-19th century Opium Wars with Britain prominent in the public memory...
The National Museum of China, one of the cornerstones of Beijng’s monumental centre, has spent almost as much time closed as open since it was inaugurated in 1959"
Post ID: 2629700436082066376
GK Chesterton on False Demons (and Smoking)
"He who lives without folly isn't so wise as he thinks." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
***
"A fairly large majority consume it so that one may roughly form the opinion that they would be better in health if they smoked less, just as one forms the opinion that they would be better if they took a shade more exercise or ate a shade less meat. A mere dot on the map of this minority is a very small minority of people who are so constituted that they should not smoke at all; and a smaller dot marking a yet tinier minority who actually induce illness by smoking. Those are about the proportions of peril in the thing. It is about as dangerous as sitting in a draught. It is about as questionable as eating pork. If a policeman can take away my cigarette, there cannot be the slightest rational objection, on a warm day, to his taking away my overcoat. In wet weather he might change my boots for me violently in the street, or suddenly garrott me with a muffler. The thing is a typical mild human indulgence, enjoyed by most people and over-enjoyed by a few people, a thing like scent or sweetmeats. Realize that the reality which we all know it to be, and then measure that mad abyss of disproportion, on the other side of which are the eight States holding up their streets with policemen and treating every man who is carrying a cigarette as if he were carrying a bomb. Thus all our cranks of culture are leading us back (or onward) into barbarism. For the essence of barbarism is idolatry; that is the worship of something other than the best reason and justice of the Universe. Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice. The Moslems say, 'There is no God but God.' The English Moslems, the abstainers, have to learn to remember also that there is no Satan but Satan"
--- GK Chesterton
***
"A fairly large majority consume it so that one may roughly form the opinion that they would be better in health if they smoked less, just as one forms the opinion that they would be better if they took a shade more exercise or ate a shade less meat. A mere dot on the map of this minority is a very small minority of people who are so constituted that they should not smoke at all; and a smaller dot marking a yet tinier minority who actually induce illness by smoking. Those are about the proportions of peril in the thing. It is about as dangerous as sitting in a draught. It is about as questionable as eating pork. If a policeman can take away my cigarette, there cannot be the slightest rational objection, on a warm day, to his taking away my overcoat. In wet weather he might change my boots for me violently in the street, or suddenly garrott me with a muffler. The thing is a typical mild human indulgence, enjoyed by most people and over-enjoyed by a few people, a thing like scent or sweetmeats. Realize that the reality which we all know it to be, and then measure that mad abyss of disproportion, on the other side of which are the eight States holding up their streets with policemen and treating every man who is carrying a cigarette as if he were carrying a bomb. Thus all our cranks of culture are leading us back (or onward) into barbarism. For the essence of barbarism is idolatry; that is the worship of something other than the best reason and justice of the Universe. Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice. The Moslems say, 'There is no God but God.' The English Moslems, the abstainers, have to learn to remember also that there is no Satan but Satan"
--- GK Chesterton
Post ID: 2154853579951538846
Links - 5th September 2012
"Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control." - Don Marquis
***
Heteronormative Biases And Hermeneutic Phenomenology In Mass Effect 3 - "Basically I want to address the video game Mass Effect 3 and its scripting of heteronormativity, including heteronormative biases and hermeneutic phenomenology and I will use Butler's performativity and Foucault's concept of power/discourse to show how hegemonically masculine stereotypes could be creating a generation of 'virtual skinheads' and the critical role pedagogy can play. Okay, this isn't about that at all. I mean, it could be, someone in the humanities somewhere followed along with those opening paragraphs and felt like something real was in there, but mostly this article got written because I was bored and wanted to play a video game, so I started one over and decided this time I would play a girl"
Write Your Own Academic Sentence - "The emergence of praxis clarifies the position of the invention of print culture."
Humanities and social sciences != academic
Can A Man Really Get Pregnant? Sure, But It Might Kill Him
Want To Get Pregnant? Eat Ice Cream - "Researchers in the United States have found a link between a low-fat dairy diet and increased risk of infertility due to lack of ovulation (anovulatory infertility)"
Different HIV Rates Among Homosexuals And Heterosexuals Ignores Risky Behavior Data - "to end the HIV epidemic, gay men would need to have rates of unprotected sex several times lower than those currently evident among the straight population. This is because transmission rates are higher for anal sex than they are for vaginal sex, say the authors. But "role versatility," whereby people adopt both “insertive” and “receptive roles,” also plays a part, they add. A gay man can be easily infected through unprotected receptive sex, and then infect someone else through insertive sex. Gay men are therefore far more susceptible to the spread of the virus through the population, even with the same numbers of unprotected sexual partners"
Video Games And Violence: Are Studies Biased? - "Writing today in the International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry, Patrick Kierkegaard of the University of Essex, England, suggests that there is scant scientific evidence that video games are anything but harmless and do not lead to real world aggression. Moreover, his research shows that previous work is biased towards the opposite conclusion... "With millions of sales of violent games, the world should be seeing an epidemic of violence," he says, "Instead, violence has declined." Research is inconclusive, emphasises Kierkegaard. It is possible that certain types of video game could affect emotions, views, behaviour, and attitudes, however, so can books, which can lead to violent behaviour on those already predisposed to violence"
Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes? - "the average client of a $300/hour hooker (which was exactly what I charged) wants a good, quality "girlfriend experience" (GFE), which will be much more likely if he treats his "date" like a lady. Most escorts who are treated as though they're "bought and paid for" will try to complete the act as quickly as possible and get such a client out the door. Furthermore, in my experience, the typical client enjoys the illusion that a beautiful woman wants to spend time with him, even if he intellectually knows she is there for the money. I guarantee you that the majority of my clients tried their utmost to impress me, even to the point of bringing me gifts, flowers, and the like... Intelligent men are less likely to believe in silly propaganda against us, and less likely to have the kind of fragile masculine ego which would be wounded by "having to pay for it." The intelligent man knows that "free tail is the most expensive kind," and can make the reasonable and pragmatic decision to spend his money on a "sure thing" rather than chasing women whose price and quality are uncertain"
Female mate choice is influenced by male sport participation - "We predicted that females would favor males that participated in team sports over individual sports and non-athletes because team sport athletes may be more likely to display qualities such as the ability to work well with others and role acceptance. We used a questionnaire, a photograph, and manipulated descriptions to gauge the effects of sport involvement, attractiveness, and status on 282 females’ willingness to participate in various types of relationships. Team sport athletes were perceived as being more desirable as potential mates than individual sport athletes and non-athletes. It is suggested that team sport athletes may have traits associated with good parenting such as cooperation, likeability, and role acceptance, and/or these athletes may be better able to assert dominance in a team setting"
DesignPorn | Toast messenger by Sasha Tseng - "Eat your words! This toaster by Sasha Tseng incorporates a little message board where one can write quick notes. The message also gets “toasted” into the toast itself."
Nightclubs' foreign entertainer quota cut - "The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) said in a circular sent to nightclub operators a week ago that the new limit is in line with the Government's efforts "to regulate the increasing dependency on foreign manpower""
Comment: "If this is MOM trying to show us that they are doing something about FT and FW in Singapore, then I think our MOM is hitting the wrong tree.
Foreign Entertainers do add real variety and value to this industry and do not compete with locals. Each entertainment gig has their own appeal and value and do not compete on cheap pay, unlike in the other industries.
And Singaporean entertainers in general are really quite BORING!"
Bizarre HR: Candidates without Facebook “suspicious” - "Human resources professionals are becoming increasingly wary of candidates who aren’t on Facebook, because it makes them look 'abnormal'... The biggest concern from employers is that a lack of a Facebook page – or other social networking sites – could mean the applicant’s online account contains so much inappropriate content that it had to be deleted. While there could be many reasons a person does not have or want a Facebook page – whether it’s too addictive or they crave privacy – owning one is a sign of having a healthy social network
True & Co: This Startup Has The Secret To Finding The Perfect Bra - "When you sign up, you take a quiz to answer questions like what shape your breast is"
Why Narcissists Ace Job Interviews - "Employers should keep this study in mind: although narcissists dazzled in the interviews, there is no evidence they were more or less effective workers."
Lexington: The scarcer sex | The Economist - " Even now, fewer than two out of ten members of Congress are female. For this, women have only themselves to blame. Plenty of research shows that women who stand for election do just as well as their male counterparts: they raise as much money, scoop up as many votes and are no less likely to win. The problem, according to a recent study and survey by Jennifer Lawless of American University and Richard Fox of Loyola Marymount University, is that so few choose to run. Even though a record number are running for the Senate, women are competing in fewer than a third of congressional races this year. In short, what women mainly lack is political ambition. Perversely, a decade of high-profile role models has done nothing to make a political career more alluring. If anything, the experiences of the likes of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and the former House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, appear to have produced the opposite effect"
Consensual sex can lead injuries, rape: study - "The study, in which the researchers compared rape victims with nursing students to come to their conclusion, casts doubt on commonly held view that vaginal injuries are evidence that intercourse has been forced. "The findings are extremely interesting. The nursing students experience just as frequent vaginal injuries as rape victims, and so these injuries cannot be used for much more than to establish that intercourse has taken place"... n cases of convictions based on evidence of vaginal injuries, there could now be discussions as to whether there have been miscarriages of justice... The nursing students' results were not affected by whether they had engaged in rough or gentle sex, or whether they had used condoms or sex toys"
‘Theft’ Law in the 21st Century - NYTimes.com - "From its earliest days, the crime of theft has been understood to involve the misappropriation of things real and tangible... The problem is that most people simply don’t buy the claim that illegally downloading a song or video from the Internet really is like stealing a car. According to a range of empirical studies, including one conducted by me and my social psychologist collaborator, Matthew Kugler, lay observers draw a sharp moral distinction between file sharing and genuine theft, even when the value of the property is the same... criminal law is least effective — and least legitimate — when it is at odds with widely held moral intuitions... We would do better to consider a range of legal concepts that fit the problem more appropriately: concepts like unauthorized use, trespass, conversion and misappropriation"
Indonesian Syariah stronghold 'rehabilitates' punks - ""Why did they arrest us? They haven't given us any reason," said Fauzal, 20. "We didn't steal anything, we weren't bothering anyone. It's our right to go to a concert." A 22-year-old man from Medan city, who did not want to be named, said he feared he would lose his job for staying at the camp for 10 days. "I've just started with a bank in Medan. I don't even know what to tell them because I don't know why I've been arrested." Police said the objective was to deter the youths from "deviant" behaviour. " "They never showered, they lived on the street, never performed religious prayers," Aceh police chief Iskandar Hasan told AFP. "We need to fix them so that they will behave properly and morally. They need harsh treatment to change their mental behaviour"... Aceh, on the northernmost tip of Sumatra island, adopted partial syariah law in 2001 as part of a special autonomy package aimed at quelling separatist sentiment. Only Muslims can be charged under Syariah law, although the non-Muslim community is expected to follow some laws out of respect."
U.S. scholar inspires president to end conscription - "Zue told him that Taiwan's compulsory military service makes college graduates forget what they learned in school and keeps them out of touch with the latest technological advances in their disciplines"
Teachers Don’t Like Creative Students - "'creative people tend to have traits that some have referred to as obnoxious (Torrance, 1963). Torrance (1963) described creative people as not having the time to be courteous, as refusing to take no for an answer, and as being negativistic and critical of others'... although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are “sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable.” In other words, the teachers don’t know what creative students are actually like"
***
Heteronormative Biases And Hermeneutic Phenomenology In Mass Effect 3 - "Basically I want to address the video game Mass Effect 3 and its scripting of heteronormativity, including heteronormative biases and hermeneutic phenomenology and I will use Butler's performativity and Foucault's concept of power/discourse to show how hegemonically masculine stereotypes could be creating a generation of 'virtual skinheads' and the critical role pedagogy can play. Okay, this isn't about that at all. I mean, it could be, someone in the humanities somewhere followed along with those opening paragraphs and felt like something real was in there, but mostly this article got written because I was bored and wanted to play a video game, so I started one over and decided this time I would play a girl"
Write Your Own Academic Sentence - "The emergence of praxis clarifies the position of the invention of print culture."
Humanities and social sciences != academic
Can A Man Really Get Pregnant? Sure, But It Might Kill Him
Want To Get Pregnant? Eat Ice Cream - "Researchers in the United States have found a link between a low-fat dairy diet and increased risk of infertility due to lack of ovulation (anovulatory infertility)"
Different HIV Rates Among Homosexuals And Heterosexuals Ignores Risky Behavior Data - "to end the HIV epidemic, gay men would need to have rates of unprotected sex several times lower than those currently evident among the straight population. This is because transmission rates are higher for anal sex than they are for vaginal sex, say the authors. But "role versatility," whereby people adopt both “insertive” and “receptive roles,” also plays a part, they add. A gay man can be easily infected through unprotected receptive sex, and then infect someone else through insertive sex. Gay men are therefore far more susceptible to the spread of the virus through the population, even with the same numbers of unprotected sexual partners"
Video Games And Violence: Are Studies Biased? - "Writing today in the International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry, Patrick Kierkegaard of the University of Essex, England, suggests that there is scant scientific evidence that video games are anything but harmless and do not lead to real world aggression. Moreover, his research shows that previous work is biased towards the opposite conclusion... "With millions of sales of violent games, the world should be seeing an epidemic of violence," he says, "Instead, violence has declined." Research is inconclusive, emphasises Kierkegaard. It is possible that certain types of video game could affect emotions, views, behaviour, and attitudes, however, so can books, which can lead to violent behaviour on those already predisposed to violence"
Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes? - "the average client of a $300/hour hooker (which was exactly what I charged) wants a good, quality "girlfriend experience" (GFE), which will be much more likely if he treats his "date" like a lady. Most escorts who are treated as though they're "bought and paid for" will try to complete the act as quickly as possible and get such a client out the door. Furthermore, in my experience, the typical client enjoys the illusion that a beautiful woman wants to spend time with him, even if he intellectually knows she is there for the money. I guarantee you that the majority of my clients tried their utmost to impress me, even to the point of bringing me gifts, flowers, and the like... Intelligent men are less likely to believe in silly propaganda against us, and less likely to have the kind of fragile masculine ego which would be wounded by "having to pay for it." The intelligent man knows that "free tail is the most expensive kind," and can make the reasonable and pragmatic decision to spend his money on a "sure thing" rather than chasing women whose price and quality are uncertain"
Female mate choice is influenced by male sport participation - "We predicted that females would favor males that participated in team sports over individual sports and non-athletes because team sport athletes may be more likely to display qualities such as the ability to work well with others and role acceptance. We used a questionnaire, a photograph, and manipulated descriptions to gauge the effects of sport involvement, attractiveness, and status on 282 females’ willingness to participate in various types of relationships. Team sport athletes were perceived as being more desirable as potential mates than individual sport athletes and non-athletes. It is suggested that team sport athletes may have traits associated with good parenting such as cooperation, likeability, and role acceptance, and/or these athletes may be better able to assert dominance in a team setting"
DesignPorn | Toast messenger by Sasha Tseng - "Eat your words! This toaster by Sasha Tseng incorporates a little message board where one can write quick notes. The message also gets “toasted” into the toast itself."
Nightclubs' foreign entertainer quota cut - "The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) said in a circular sent to nightclub operators a week ago that the new limit is in line with the Government's efforts "to regulate the increasing dependency on foreign manpower""
Comment: "If this is MOM trying to show us that they are doing something about FT and FW in Singapore, then I think our MOM is hitting the wrong tree.
Foreign Entertainers do add real variety and value to this industry and do not compete with locals. Each entertainment gig has their own appeal and value and do not compete on cheap pay, unlike in the other industries.
And Singaporean entertainers in general are really quite BORING!"
Bizarre HR: Candidates without Facebook “suspicious” - "Human resources professionals are becoming increasingly wary of candidates who aren’t on Facebook, because it makes them look 'abnormal'... The biggest concern from employers is that a lack of a Facebook page – or other social networking sites – could mean the applicant’s online account contains so much inappropriate content that it had to be deleted. While there could be many reasons a person does not have or want a Facebook page – whether it’s too addictive or they crave privacy – owning one is a sign of having a healthy social network
True & Co: This Startup Has The Secret To Finding The Perfect Bra - "When you sign up, you take a quiz to answer questions like what shape your breast is"
Why Narcissists Ace Job Interviews - "Employers should keep this study in mind: although narcissists dazzled in the interviews, there is no evidence they were more or less effective workers."
Lexington: The scarcer sex | The Economist - " Even now, fewer than two out of ten members of Congress are female. For this, women have only themselves to blame. Plenty of research shows that women who stand for election do just as well as their male counterparts: they raise as much money, scoop up as many votes and are no less likely to win. The problem, according to a recent study and survey by Jennifer Lawless of American University and Richard Fox of Loyola Marymount University, is that so few choose to run. Even though a record number are running for the Senate, women are competing in fewer than a third of congressional races this year. In short, what women mainly lack is political ambition. Perversely, a decade of high-profile role models has done nothing to make a political career more alluring. If anything, the experiences of the likes of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and the former House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, appear to have produced the opposite effect"
Consensual sex can lead injuries, rape: study - "The study, in which the researchers compared rape victims with nursing students to come to their conclusion, casts doubt on commonly held view that vaginal injuries are evidence that intercourse has been forced. "The findings are extremely interesting. The nursing students experience just as frequent vaginal injuries as rape victims, and so these injuries cannot be used for much more than to establish that intercourse has taken place"... n cases of convictions based on evidence of vaginal injuries, there could now be discussions as to whether there have been miscarriages of justice... The nursing students' results were not affected by whether they had engaged in rough or gentle sex, or whether they had used condoms or sex toys"
‘Theft’ Law in the 21st Century - NYTimes.com - "From its earliest days, the crime of theft has been understood to involve the misappropriation of things real and tangible... The problem is that most people simply don’t buy the claim that illegally downloading a song or video from the Internet really is like stealing a car. According to a range of empirical studies, including one conducted by me and my social psychologist collaborator, Matthew Kugler, lay observers draw a sharp moral distinction between file sharing and genuine theft, even when the value of the property is the same... criminal law is least effective — and least legitimate — when it is at odds with widely held moral intuitions... We would do better to consider a range of legal concepts that fit the problem more appropriately: concepts like unauthorized use, trespass, conversion and misappropriation"
Indonesian Syariah stronghold 'rehabilitates' punks - ""Why did they arrest us? They haven't given us any reason," said Fauzal, 20. "We didn't steal anything, we weren't bothering anyone. It's our right to go to a concert." A 22-year-old man from Medan city, who did not want to be named, said he feared he would lose his job for staying at the camp for 10 days. "I've just started with a bank in Medan. I don't even know what to tell them because I don't know why I've been arrested." Police said the objective was to deter the youths from "deviant" behaviour. " "They never showered, they lived on the street, never performed religious prayers," Aceh police chief Iskandar Hasan told AFP. "We need to fix them so that they will behave properly and morally. They need harsh treatment to change their mental behaviour"... Aceh, on the northernmost tip of Sumatra island, adopted partial syariah law in 2001 as part of a special autonomy package aimed at quelling separatist sentiment. Only Muslims can be charged under Syariah law, although the non-Muslim community is expected to follow some laws out of respect."
U.S. scholar inspires president to end conscription - "Zue told him that Taiwan's compulsory military service makes college graduates forget what they learned in school and keeps them out of touch with the latest technological advances in their disciplines"
Teachers Don’t Like Creative Students - "'creative people tend to have traits that some have referred to as obnoxious (Torrance, 1963). Torrance (1963) described creative people as not having the time to be courteous, as refusing to take no for an answer, and as being negativistic and critical of others'... although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are “sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable.” In other words, the teachers don’t know what creative students are actually like"
Post ID: 7720239001740922185
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
One reason gay guys are bitchy
"School is learning things you don't want to know, surrounded by people you wish you didn't know, while working toward a future you don't know will ever come." - Dave Kellett
***
"Many gay men rejected manly activities for such womanly pursuits as fashion, gossip, and culture, especially opera and theater (Karlen 1971; Hooker 1956; Altman 1982, 154). Other feminine practices entailed bitchy humor (Read 1980, 105—8), “drag” balls and shows (Newton 1972; Cory 1951: 129—34), old movies (Dyer 1977), and celebrity worship (Tipmore 1975)...
In our culture, the conversational style known as "dishing" was regarded as appropriate for women (Richardson 1981). This style included bitchy retorts, vicious putdowns, and malicious gossip. Far earlier in the century, closet homosexuals adopted this style as a means of articulating their feminine identification; it was especially characteristic of homosexuals in the theatre of entertainment industry... They dubbed it "fag talk" or "chit chat"... Again, clones transformed and modified dish, just as they embraced and appropriated it"
--- Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone / Martin Levine, Michael Kimmel
Book description: "Before gay liberation, gay men were usually perceived as failed men--"inverts," men trapped in women's bodies. The 1970s saw a radical shift in gay male culture, as a male homosexuality emerged that embraced a more traditional masculine ethos. The gay clone, a muscle-bound, sexually free, hard-living Marlboro man, appeared in the gay enclaves of major cities, changing forever the face of gay male culture.
Gay Macho presents the ethnography of this homosexual clone. Martin P. Levine, a pioneer of the sociological study of homosexuality, was among the first social scientists to map the emergence of a gay community and this new style of gay masculinity. Levine was a participant in as well as an observer of gay culture in the 1970s, and this perspective allowed him to capture the true flavor of what it was like to be a gay man before AIDS. Levine's clone was a gender conformist, whose masculinity was demonstrated in patterns of social interaction and especially in his sexuality. According to Levine, his life centered around the "four D's: disco, drugs, dish, and dick.""
Related link:
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"
***
"Many gay men rejected manly activities for such womanly pursuits as fashion, gossip, and culture, especially opera and theater (Karlen 1971; Hooker 1956; Altman 1982, 154). Other feminine practices entailed bitchy humor (Read 1980, 105—8), “drag” balls and shows (Newton 1972; Cory 1951: 129—34), old movies (Dyer 1977), and celebrity worship (Tipmore 1975)...
In our culture, the conversational style known as "dishing" was regarded as appropriate for women (Richardson 1981). This style included bitchy retorts, vicious putdowns, and malicious gossip. Far earlier in the century, closet homosexuals adopted this style as a means of articulating their feminine identification; it was especially characteristic of homosexuals in the theatre of entertainment industry... They dubbed it "fag talk" or "chit chat"... Again, clones transformed and modified dish, just as they embraced and appropriated it"
--- Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone / Martin Levine, Michael Kimmel
Book description: "Before gay liberation, gay men were usually perceived as failed men--"inverts," men trapped in women's bodies. The 1970s saw a radical shift in gay male culture, as a male homosexuality emerged that embraced a more traditional masculine ethos. The gay clone, a muscle-bound, sexually free, hard-living Marlboro man, appeared in the gay enclaves of major cities, changing forever the face of gay male culture.
Gay Macho presents the ethnography of this homosexual clone. Martin P. Levine, a pioneer of the sociological study of homosexuality, was among the first social scientists to map the emergence of a gay community and this new style of gay masculinity. Levine was a participant in as well as an observer of gay culture in the 1970s, and this perspective allowed him to capture the true flavor of what it was like to be a gay man before AIDS. Levine's clone was a gender conformist, whose masculinity was demonstrated in patterns of social interaction and especially in his sexuality. According to Levine, his life centered around the "four D's: disco, drugs, dish, and dick.""
Related link:
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"
Post ID: 6360919549619738429
Sunday, September 02, 2012
National Education lesson: Fifth Columns
"A lie told often enough becomes the truth." - Lenin
***
According to the COMBINED HUMANITIES O LEVEL SOCIAL STUDIES SYLLABUS (2012) (Paper 2192), we must "learn from the experiences of other countries to build and sustain a politically viable, socially cohesive and economically vibrant Singapore".
We learn this as we "study the past through varied socio-cultural perspectives over time and space, and understand its relevance to the present through lessons learnt"
Unfortunately, I (and others of my generation) were unable to benefit from Social Studies in our time in school. To remedy this, I have been studying National Education on my own and have shared the lessons I have learnt on my blog for the edification of all.
Previously, we have learnt many National Education lessons:
- One always has to be critical about what one learns in school, as it might be designed to impart political ideologies
- Venice declined because it abused its position
- Singapore should ban football
- Ultra-nationalism and indoctrination in school leads to an aggressive foreign policy and ruinous wars
We also learnt many other lessons from the NKF scandal.
Recently I came across another historical tidbit, dating back to 1211 and the Mongol Invasion of China:
"While the main force of the Chin army was concentrated around the capital facing north, 120 miles further west Genghis and the main body of the Mongol army had crossed the Great Wall without firing a shot. This section of the wall was guarded not by Chinese troops, but by Onguts, ethnic relatives to the Mongols whom the Mongol intelligence service had cultivated for years as possible allies. Faced with the choice of remaining loyal to the Chin and having to do battle with a huge Mongol army or going over to the Mongols, the Onguts changed sides and allowed the Mongols to pass through the western battlements unhindered. Farther to the east, Subotai broke contact, pull back from the wall, and disappeared.
The Chinese generals had been caught badly out of position... Attacked from four directions, the huge Chin army was annihilated at the battle of Shansi. The entire province lay open before the Mongols"
--- Genghis Khan's Greatest General: Subotai the Valiant / Richard A. Gabriel
So the lesson we learn from this historical episode is to be careful who we trust: ethnic minorities could betray us at a critical moment.
(If you don't get that, read the first National Education lesson in the list above again)
***
According to the COMBINED HUMANITIES O LEVEL SOCIAL STUDIES SYLLABUS (2012) (Paper 2192), we must "learn from the experiences of other countries to build and sustain a politically viable, socially cohesive and economically vibrant Singapore".
We learn this as we "study the past through varied socio-cultural perspectives over time and space, and understand its relevance to the present through lessons learnt"
Unfortunately, I (and others of my generation) were unable to benefit from Social Studies in our time in school. To remedy this, I have been studying National Education on my own and have shared the lessons I have learnt on my blog for the edification of all.
Previously, we have learnt many National Education lessons:
- One always has to be critical about what one learns in school, as it might be designed to impart political ideologies
- Venice declined because it abused its position
- Singapore should ban football
- Ultra-nationalism and indoctrination in school leads to an aggressive foreign policy and ruinous wars
We also learnt many other lessons from the NKF scandal.
Recently I came across another historical tidbit, dating back to 1211 and the Mongol Invasion of China:
"While the main force of the Chin army was concentrated around the capital facing north, 120 miles further west Genghis and the main body of the Mongol army had crossed the Great Wall without firing a shot. This section of the wall was guarded not by Chinese troops, but by Onguts, ethnic relatives to the Mongols whom the Mongol intelligence service had cultivated for years as possible allies. Faced with the choice of remaining loyal to the Chin and having to do battle with a huge Mongol army or going over to the Mongols, the Onguts changed sides and allowed the Mongols to pass through the western battlements unhindered. Farther to the east, Subotai broke contact, pull back from the wall, and disappeared.
The Chinese generals had been caught badly out of position... Attacked from four directions, the huge Chin army was annihilated at the battle of Shansi. The entire province lay open before the Mongols"
--- Genghis Khan's Greatest General: Subotai the Valiant / Richard A. Gabriel
So the lesson we learn from this historical episode is to be careful who we trust: ethnic minorities could betray us at a critical moment.
(If you don't get that, read the first National Education lesson in the list above again)
Post ID: 400087401182727939
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Links - 28th August 2012
"Before I was a Discordian, I wasted a lot of time arguing with evangelists about God and Jesus. Now they waste a lot of time arguing about Eris Discordia with me." - Kerry Thornley
***
The Study of Man (or Males) - NYTimes.com - "According to Professor Tiger, the trouble with men’s studies is that it’s “a wholly owned branch of women’s studies”... The people in men’s studies, like those in women’s studies, take a mostly sociological perspective and believe that masculinity is essentially a cultural construct and that gender differences in general are fluid and variable... The male studies people, on the other had, are what their critics call “essentialists” and believe that male behavior is in large part biologically determined... the male studies movement is less an expansion of that debate than a response to a specific crisis, the nature of which both sides agree on: academically at least, young men are in trouble... A popular theory, set forth in books like “The Trouble With Boys,” by Peg Tyre, and “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Hurting Our Young Men,” by Christina Hoff Sommers, is that grammar school classrooms have become excessively feminized, impatient with boys’ naturally boisterous behavior and short attention spans and inattentive to the way in which boys learn differently from girls... On their very first day at college, awkward young men are gathered into a room with their female counterparts and, the argument goes, made to feel like sexual predators. Miles Groth, who teaches psychology at Wagner College and was host of the conference there last spring, says that what he hears all the time from male undergraduates on his campus is “I just don’t feel welcome here”... “Why the silence?” he said between classes one day. “Why hasn’t our generation been more vocal about what’s happening to our young men?” And then he partly answered his own question: “It’s the continuing myth of male power. If I as a man raise these issues I’m just raising that old specter of male power because I want to keep women under control”... Last semester, Professor Groth taught a course on the psychology of men; of 30 students, all but five were women. “I asked everyone, ‘Why are you taking this course?’ ” he recalled. “The boys didn’t say anything. The girls all said, ‘We want to understand the guys better’”"
'Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection' - WSJ.com - "Social isolation has an impact on health comparable to the effect of high blood pressure, lack of exercise, obesity, or smoking. Our research in the past decade or so demonstrates that the culprit behind these dire statistics is not usually being literally alone, but the subjective experience known as loneliness. Whether you are at home with your family, working in an office crowded with bright and attractive young people, touring Disneyland, or sitting alone in a fleabag hotel on the wrong side of town, chronic feelings of isolation can drive a cascade of physiological events that actually accelerates the aging process. Loneliness not only alters behavior but shows up in measurements of stress hormones, immune function, and cardiovascular function. Over time, these changes in physiology are compounded in ways that may be hastening millions of people to an early grave"
Why Feminists Should Be Wary of the Obsession With the GlassCeiling - "my life has been a near caricature of women’s empowerment... I flexed my feminist humor last May by sending a Happy-We’re-Not-Mothers Day email to my childless female friends congratulating them on another year of successful birth control use. (“And if anyone became pregnant, congratulations on taking advantage of our totally legal and awesome abortion rights!” I cheered)... [In breaking the glass ceiling] there is also the problem of orientation and perspective, the idea that women will succeed only when they achieve male-defined success... many suggested that the industry would never have spiraled into such a pit of immorality had more women been in finance. These arguments conveniently omitted the fact that the developer of credit default swaps, a type of derivative that allowed companies to bet against their own products and turned into a symbol for the system’s deception, was a woman, Blythe Masters. Or that women’s bylines at the New Yorker decreased from 40 percent to a mere 20 percent under Tina Brown’s reign. Or that California gubernatorial candidate and Silicon Valley success-story Meg Whitman espoused such anti-woman politics that even the Feminist Majority, a women’s equality group whose mission is to “win equality for women at the decision-making tables of the state,” publicly denounced her... a growing number of feminists view these career tracks as so steeped in and dependent on patriarchy, as well as racism, that they are nearly impossible to change from the inside out"
Corollary: whatever happens, feminists will be able to complain about sexism and misogyny
Kangaroo attack: How to protect yourself from a hopping, kicking, clawing beast. - "You don’t stand much of a chance in a toe-to-toe standoff with a rampaging kangaroo, which can swipe at you with clawed hands or deliver powerful kicks to your abdomen while supporting itself on its tail. A kangaroo’s foot claws are sharp enough to slice open a human abdomen"
Most Offensive Blog Ever. - "We all make mistakes. There’s a choice we make in life. Either you get offended, or you have a sense of humor. One is a lot healthier than the other. I’m not gonna say which one. But I will say that the following is something you will never see in the eulogy of an old and contented soul:
“Katherine passed away yesterday at the age of 102. She lived a long, happy life. She ate lots of chocolate, exercised daily, and was easily offended.”"
Shanmugam urges S'poreans to rethink their driving habits - " Law and Foreign Affairs Minister, K Shanmugam, said it is time for Singaporeans to seriously reconsider their driving habits. On his latest Facebook post, he said he received over 360 comments to his post on driving habits, a subject which had obviously touched some raw nerves."
Journalism in Singapore has gone from rephrasing Ministry press releases to rephrasing Ministers' Facebook posts
Pinay in hot water after peeing in men's washroom in Singapore - "Security officers were alerted and they brought her out of the washroom. The report however did not say if the Pinay will face penalties"
Bank of Canada apologises for removing 'Asian' from bill - "The Bank of Canada says it intended for the scientist looking into the microscope to appear to be of a neutral ethnicity... "Some believe that it presents a stereotype of Asians excelling in technology and/or the sciences. Others feel that an Asian should not be the only ethnicity represented on the banknotes"... Last week, May Lui, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Canadian National Council, accused the Bank of "caving in to the racist feedback""
Either you are racist for perpetuating stereotypes about Asians, or you are racist for removing representations of Asians. It's safest just to proclaim that you are racist
delanceyplace.com 8/14/12 - american prostitution - "My oldest girl says she will go into that business when she grows up; she says it's a good business, easy, and you can dress and eat well"
More evidence that robots will someday rule the world: statistical models are more accurate at judging things than trained professionals. - "The range of predicted outcomes has expanded to cover medical variables such as the longevity of cancer patients, the length of hospital stays... economic measures such as the prospects of success for new businesses... questions of interest to government agencies, including assessments of the suitability of foster parents, the odds of recidivism among juvenile offenders... Each of these domains entails a significant degree of uncertainty and unpredictability. We describe them as ‘low-validity environments.’ In every case, the accuracy of experts was matched or exceeded by a simple algorithm... Why are experts inferior to algorithms? One reason, which Meehl suspected, is that experts try to be clever, think outside the box, and consider complex combinations of features in making their predictions. Complexity may work in the odd case, but more often than not it reduces validity. Simple combinations of features are better... Another reason for the inferiority of expert judgment is that humans are incorrigibly inconsistent in making summary judgments of complex information"
Everyone thinks they're special
Illusory superiority - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "One of the first studies that found the effect of illusory superiority was carried out in 1976 by the College Board in the USA. A survey was attached to the SAT exams (taken by approximately one million students per year), asking the students to rate themselves relative to the median of the sample (rather than the average peer) on a number of vague positive characteristics. In ratings of leadership ability, 70% of the students put themselves above the median. In ability to get on well with others, 85% put themselves above the median, and 25% rated themselves in the top 1%."
Singapore as a Global City - "In the EIU’s index, Singapore falls down on internal indicators such as cultural vibrancy and openness and diversity. Indeed, the report indicated that, “Singapore the global city is increasingly different from Singapore of the heartlands”... approximately 1,200 Singaporeans have renounced their citizenship annually over the last five years. Although the renunciation rates are only around a low 0.1 percent, it’s still disconcerting for a country that sees itself on par with other major Asian cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo. A recent online comment made by an anonymous Vietnamese student highlighted the view of many. The student referred to Singapore as “a middle checkpoint” in many overseas students’ journey"
Vital Signs: The Woman Who Needed to Be Upside-Down - "A doctor is baffled: Why did a giant man walk into the ER holding a tiny woman by her feet?"
Jasmine - Indonesian Escorts - "Chinese Customers:
$100 / 60 mins / 1 shots with room and condoms included.
$160 / 90 mins / 2 shots with room and condoms included.
For Caucasian Customers:
$120 / 60 mins / 1 shots with room and condoms included. "
Price discrimination!
What The Left Won't Tell You About The Boom In U.S. Gun Sales - "As gun sales surged in early 2009 the going joke among employees of gun manufacturers was that President Barack Obama was the “greatest gun salesman of all time.” The trouble with this backhanded complement, however, is Left-leaning news outlets have since used it to avoid something that really scares them... the surge is gun sales didn’t begin in 2008. Over the last 10 years (from 2002 to 2011) there has been a 54.1 percent rise in the number of NICS checks and the increase hasn’t all taken place since 2008... attributing this entire trend to President Obama’s anti-gun reputation is disingenuous, yet many in the media like this explanation because by saying the increase in gun sales is only about President Obama they can then write the whole thing off as a simple-minded fear from those who “cling to guns and religion.”"
How To Tell If Your Boss Is Spying On You
An Estimated 83 Million Facebook Profiles are Fake
Funnyjunk Lawyer Charles Carreon Isn't Afraid of The Oatmeal - "It’s a bold notion, saying that you’ve got as much time and energy as the internet"
***
The Study of Man (or Males) - NYTimes.com - "According to Professor Tiger, the trouble with men’s studies is that it’s “a wholly owned branch of women’s studies”... The people in men’s studies, like those in women’s studies, take a mostly sociological perspective and believe that masculinity is essentially a cultural construct and that gender differences in general are fluid and variable... The male studies people, on the other had, are what their critics call “essentialists” and believe that male behavior is in large part biologically determined... the male studies movement is less an expansion of that debate than a response to a specific crisis, the nature of which both sides agree on: academically at least, young men are in trouble... A popular theory, set forth in books like “The Trouble With Boys,” by Peg Tyre, and “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Hurting Our Young Men,” by Christina Hoff Sommers, is that grammar school classrooms have become excessively feminized, impatient with boys’ naturally boisterous behavior and short attention spans and inattentive to the way in which boys learn differently from girls... On their very first day at college, awkward young men are gathered into a room with their female counterparts and, the argument goes, made to feel like sexual predators. Miles Groth, who teaches psychology at Wagner College and was host of the conference there last spring, says that what he hears all the time from male undergraduates on his campus is “I just don’t feel welcome here”... “Why the silence?” he said between classes one day. “Why hasn’t our generation been more vocal about what’s happening to our young men?” And then he partly answered his own question: “It’s the continuing myth of male power. If I as a man raise these issues I’m just raising that old specter of male power because I want to keep women under control”... Last semester, Professor Groth taught a course on the psychology of men; of 30 students, all but five were women. “I asked everyone, ‘Why are you taking this course?’ ” he recalled. “The boys didn’t say anything. The girls all said, ‘We want to understand the guys better’”"
'Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection' - WSJ.com - "Social isolation has an impact on health comparable to the effect of high blood pressure, lack of exercise, obesity, or smoking. Our research in the past decade or so demonstrates that the culprit behind these dire statistics is not usually being literally alone, but the subjective experience known as loneliness. Whether you are at home with your family, working in an office crowded with bright and attractive young people, touring Disneyland, or sitting alone in a fleabag hotel on the wrong side of town, chronic feelings of isolation can drive a cascade of physiological events that actually accelerates the aging process. Loneliness not only alters behavior but shows up in measurements of stress hormones, immune function, and cardiovascular function. Over time, these changes in physiology are compounded in ways that may be hastening millions of people to an early grave"
Why Feminists Should Be Wary of the Obsession With the GlassCeiling - "my life has been a near caricature of women’s empowerment... I flexed my feminist humor last May by sending a Happy-We’re-Not-Mothers Day email to my childless female friends congratulating them on another year of successful birth control use. (“And if anyone became pregnant, congratulations on taking advantage of our totally legal and awesome abortion rights!” I cheered)... [In breaking the glass ceiling] there is also the problem of orientation and perspective, the idea that women will succeed only when they achieve male-defined success... many suggested that the industry would never have spiraled into such a pit of immorality had more women been in finance. These arguments conveniently omitted the fact that the developer of credit default swaps, a type of derivative that allowed companies to bet against their own products and turned into a symbol for the system’s deception, was a woman, Blythe Masters. Or that women’s bylines at the New Yorker decreased from 40 percent to a mere 20 percent under Tina Brown’s reign. Or that California gubernatorial candidate and Silicon Valley success-story Meg Whitman espoused such anti-woman politics that even the Feminist Majority, a women’s equality group whose mission is to “win equality for women at the decision-making tables of the state,” publicly denounced her... a growing number of feminists view these career tracks as so steeped in and dependent on patriarchy, as well as racism, that they are nearly impossible to change from the inside out"
Corollary: whatever happens, feminists will be able to complain about sexism and misogyny
Kangaroo attack: How to protect yourself from a hopping, kicking, clawing beast. - "You don’t stand much of a chance in a toe-to-toe standoff with a rampaging kangaroo, which can swipe at you with clawed hands or deliver powerful kicks to your abdomen while supporting itself on its tail. A kangaroo’s foot claws are sharp enough to slice open a human abdomen"
Most Offensive Blog Ever. - "We all make mistakes. There’s a choice we make in life. Either you get offended, or you have a sense of humor. One is a lot healthier than the other. I’m not gonna say which one. But I will say that the following is something you will never see in the eulogy of an old and contented soul:
“Katherine passed away yesterday at the age of 102. She lived a long, happy life. She ate lots of chocolate, exercised daily, and was easily offended.”"
Shanmugam urges S'poreans to rethink their driving habits - " Law and Foreign Affairs Minister, K Shanmugam, said it is time for Singaporeans to seriously reconsider their driving habits. On his latest Facebook post, he said he received over 360 comments to his post on driving habits, a subject which had obviously touched some raw nerves."
Journalism in Singapore has gone from rephrasing Ministry press releases to rephrasing Ministers' Facebook posts
Pinay in hot water after peeing in men's washroom in Singapore - "Security officers were alerted and they brought her out of the washroom. The report however did not say if the Pinay will face penalties"
Bank of Canada apologises for removing 'Asian' from bill - "The Bank of Canada says it intended for the scientist looking into the microscope to appear to be of a neutral ethnicity... "Some believe that it presents a stereotype of Asians excelling in technology and/or the sciences. Others feel that an Asian should not be the only ethnicity represented on the banknotes"... Last week, May Lui, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Canadian National Council, accused the Bank of "caving in to the racist feedback""
Either you are racist for perpetuating stereotypes about Asians, or you are racist for removing representations of Asians. It's safest just to proclaim that you are racist
delanceyplace.com 8/14/12 - american prostitution - "My oldest girl says she will go into that business when she grows up; she says it's a good business, easy, and you can dress and eat well"
More evidence that robots will someday rule the world: statistical models are more accurate at judging things than trained professionals. - "The range of predicted outcomes has expanded to cover medical variables such as the longevity of cancer patients, the length of hospital stays... economic measures such as the prospects of success for new businesses... questions of interest to government agencies, including assessments of the suitability of foster parents, the odds of recidivism among juvenile offenders... Each of these domains entails a significant degree of uncertainty and unpredictability. We describe them as ‘low-validity environments.’ In every case, the accuracy of experts was matched or exceeded by a simple algorithm... Why are experts inferior to algorithms? One reason, which Meehl suspected, is that experts try to be clever, think outside the box, and consider complex combinations of features in making their predictions. Complexity may work in the odd case, but more often than not it reduces validity. Simple combinations of features are better... Another reason for the inferiority of expert judgment is that humans are incorrigibly inconsistent in making summary judgments of complex information"
Everyone thinks they're special
Illusory superiority - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "One of the first studies that found the effect of illusory superiority was carried out in 1976 by the College Board in the USA. A survey was attached to the SAT exams (taken by approximately one million students per year), asking the students to rate themselves relative to the median of the sample (rather than the average peer) on a number of vague positive characteristics. In ratings of leadership ability, 70% of the students put themselves above the median. In ability to get on well with others, 85% put themselves above the median, and 25% rated themselves in the top 1%."
Singapore as a Global City - "In the EIU’s index, Singapore falls down on internal indicators such as cultural vibrancy and openness and diversity. Indeed, the report indicated that, “Singapore the global city is increasingly different from Singapore of the heartlands”... approximately 1,200 Singaporeans have renounced their citizenship annually over the last five years. Although the renunciation rates are only around a low 0.1 percent, it’s still disconcerting for a country that sees itself on par with other major Asian cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo. A recent online comment made by an anonymous Vietnamese student highlighted the view of many. The student referred to Singapore as “a middle checkpoint” in many overseas students’ journey"
Vital Signs: The Woman Who Needed to Be Upside-Down - "A doctor is baffled: Why did a giant man walk into the ER holding a tiny woman by her feet?"
Jasmine - Indonesian Escorts - "Chinese Customers:
$100 / 60 mins / 1 shots with room and condoms included.
$160 / 90 mins / 2 shots with room and condoms included.
For Caucasian Customers:
$120 / 60 mins / 1 shots with room and condoms included. "
Price discrimination!
What The Left Won't Tell You About The Boom In U.S. Gun Sales - "As gun sales surged in early 2009 the going joke among employees of gun manufacturers was that President Barack Obama was the “greatest gun salesman of all time.” The trouble with this backhanded complement, however, is Left-leaning news outlets have since used it to avoid something that really scares them... the surge is gun sales didn’t begin in 2008. Over the last 10 years (from 2002 to 2011) there has been a 54.1 percent rise in the number of NICS checks and the increase hasn’t all taken place since 2008... attributing this entire trend to President Obama’s anti-gun reputation is disingenuous, yet many in the media like this explanation because by saying the increase in gun sales is only about President Obama they can then write the whole thing off as a simple-minded fear from those who “cling to guns and religion.”"
How To Tell If Your Boss Is Spying On You
An Estimated 83 Million Facebook Profiles are Fake
Funnyjunk Lawyer Charles Carreon Isn't Afraid of The Oatmeal - "It’s a bold notion, saying that you’ve got as much time and energy as the internet"
Post ID: 1514171916851089354
Sunday, August 26, 2012
An apology for Structural Violence
"I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it." - Garrison Keillor
***
Please Stop Apologizing - NYTimes.com
"The first lady’s press secretary declared the joke “inappropriate,” and Mr. De Niro said his remarks were “not meant to offend.” So, as these things go, even if the terrible damage can never be undone, at least the healing can begin. And we can move on to the next time we choose sides and pretend to be outraged about nothing.
When did we get it in our heads that we have the right to never hear anything we don’t like? In the last year, we’ve been shocked and appalled by the unbelievable insensitivity of Nike shoes, the Fighting Sioux, Hank Williams Jr., Cee Lo Green, Ashton Kutcher, Tracy Morgan, Don Imus, Kirk Cameron, Gilbert Gottfried, the Super Bowl halftime show and the ESPN guys who used the wrong cliché for Jeremy Lin after everyone else used all the others. Who can keep up?...
If you see or hear something you don’t like in the media, just go on with your life... The answer to whenever another human being annoys you is not “make them go away forever.” We need to learn to coexist, and it’s actually pretty easy to do. For example, I find Rush Limbaugh obnoxious, but I’ve been able to coexist comfortably with him for 20 years by using this simple method: I never listen to his program. The only time I hear him is when I’m at a stoplight next to a pickup truck.
When the lady at Costco gives you a free sample of its new ham pudding and you don’t like it, you spit it into a napkin and keep shopping. You don’t declare a holy war on ham.
I don’t want to live in a country where no one ever says anything that offends anyone. That’s why we have Canada. That’s not us. If we sand down our rough edges and drain all the color, emotion and spontaneity out of our discourse, we’ll end up with political candidates who never say anything but the safest, blandest, emptiest, most unctuous focus-grouped platitudes and cant. In other words, we’ll get Mitt Romney."
"If You Don't Like Gay Marriage, Don't Have One"
"If you don't like sexist jokes, don't make them"
***
Please Stop Apologizing - NYTimes.com
"The first lady’s press secretary declared the joke “inappropriate,” and Mr. De Niro said his remarks were “not meant to offend.” So, as these things go, even if the terrible damage can never be undone, at least the healing can begin. And we can move on to the next time we choose sides and pretend to be outraged about nothing.
When did we get it in our heads that we have the right to never hear anything we don’t like? In the last year, we’ve been shocked and appalled by the unbelievable insensitivity of Nike shoes, the Fighting Sioux, Hank Williams Jr., Cee Lo Green, Ashton Kutcher, Tracy Morgan, Don Imus, Kirk Cameron, Gilbert Gottfried, the Super Bowl halftime show and the ESPN guys who used the wrong cliché for Jeremy Lin after everyone else used all the others. Who can keep up?...
If you see or hear something you don’t like in the media, just go on with your life... The answer to whenever another human being annoys you is not “make them go away forever.” We need to learn to coexist, and it’s actually pretty easy to do. For example, I find Rush Limbaugh obnoxious, but I’ve been able to coexist comfortably with him for 20 years by using this simple method: I never listen to his program. The only time I hear him is when I’m at a stoplight next to a pickup truck.
When the lady at Costco gives you a free sample of its new ham pudding and you don’t like it, you spit it into a napkin and keep shopping. You don’t declare a holy war on ham.
I don’t want to live in a country where no one ever says anything that offends anyone. That’s why we have Canada. That’s not us. If we sand down our rough edges and drain all the color, emotion and spontaneity out of our discourse, we’ll end up with political candidates who never say anything but the safest, blandest, emptiest, most unctuous focus-grouped platitudes and cant. In other words, we’ll get Mitt Romney."
"If You Don't Like Gay Marriage, Don't Have One"
"If you don't like sexist jokes, don't make them"
Post ID: 7474270685979639269
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Links - 19th August 2012
Advice for Young Girls From The Little Mermaid - YouTube
The whole series is good!; the fact that real girls don't actually believe these things (e.g. you should get animals to lick your plates) is ironically evidence against the monkey-see monkey-do theory of human behavior
Four Sisters Recreate Childhood Photos Taken Decades Ago
"Join Us Surely" by PwC Singapore - YouTube
あらま They Didn't ! Japanese Entertainment News - Detroit's Chou Anime Cafe Offers Japanese Treats, Companionship & Waitresses In Frilly Dresses - "I feel bad that people are giving them so much flack based on their race and body type. Like if anything judge them on how they present themselves and their service, not their appearance."
A maid cafe with a difference
The psychology of doping accusations: Which athletes raise the most suspicion? - "According to covariation theory, we form internal or external attributions for people’s actions based on the degrees of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency in the behavior. Consensus is the extent to which other people would act similarly in the same situation, distinctiveness is the extent to which the target person behaves the same way in other situations, and consistency is the extent to which the target actor’s behavior is the same way every time the situation occurs."
In Israel, new modesty glasses for Orthodox Jewish men blur women out of their line of sight - "It’s the latest prescription for extreme ultra-Orthodox Jewish men who shun contact with the opposite sex: Glasses that blur their vision, so they don’t have to see women they consider to be immodestly dressed"
They should sell this in the Muslim world
Charles McCain: The "Greatest Generation" Is A Myth (Part 1 of 3) - "I have known, talked to, and interviewed dozens and dozens of World War Two vets and not one of them took the expression the “Greatest Generation" seriously. To a man they thought it was specious. A good friend of mine who fought on Okinawa said, "it's a bunch of bullshit. No one wanted to go. No one. We didn't feel called upon by history. We just got stuck with it and there was no choice. We had to do it.""
Charles McCain: The "Greatest Generation" Is A Myth (Part 2 of 3) - "Most veterans of World War Two never heard a shot fired in anger because they were in support units. It took at least 25 to 30 men to support each soldier in combat. And believe me, from deep reading into the subject, the majority of those men took care of themselves before they passed anything onto the combat soldiers. The memoirs of the combat troops are filled with invective against the rear echelon troops"
Charles McCain: The "Greatest Generation" Is A Myth (Part 3 of 3) - "US infantry typically scorned American tank units because they were often hesitant to advance. They had good reason: the standard American M4 Sherman tank could not stand up to German tanks or to the deadly German panzerfaust. Although the US Army learned this within a few days of the landings in Normandy, the nation with the ability to manufacture unlimited quantities of almost anything, failed to produce a battle worthy tank which could stand up to the Germans until the very end of the war. And that was simply a Sherman tank which was upgunned and had thicker armor added in the front."
The Myth called “the Greatest Generation” More like The Greatest Book Title. - "What I remember most about the GG was their hatred of Jews and Blacks, their tendency to believe that hitting their children was their “right.” The husband’s belief that wives were good if they could just stay in kitchen and perform in the bedroom. That’s what women were for in the GG. If a husband beat his wife, normally the police were not notified. And when they were, it was extremely unusual for a husband to be charged with assault. In their mind that wife was his property. To me, the Greatest Generation was angry, cowardly and socially inept"
Ikkousha is Ultimate Ramen Champion 2011 - "Ramen judge and writer of Japanese-language Ramen Freak magazine, Ishiyama Hayato, said via translator, "I am very impressed with the quality of ramen available here, I have interviews several ramen outlets in Japan and there is no difference in the quality and authenticity of the ramen available here in Singapore". Hayato, who has sampled ramen from more than 5,000 places and visits two ramen outlets a day, hopes that these characteristic bowls of noodles will be soon recognized as a world food"
Some people claim that it's impossible to find authentic food outside of its home/native/origin country
Researchers Create Picture Dictionary for Cities - Technology - "What gives your city its unique visual character? This may sound like a pretty subjective question, but researchers from Carnegie Mellon and a Parisian university are making it less so. They’ve developed visual data mining software to detect which features define a city’s look. For Paris, the team concluded that cast-iron balconies, windows with railings, special Parisian lampposts, and certain styles of doors make up the city's unique identity. For New York it's the fire escapes, and bay windows defined San Francisco, though the software had trouble picking up on elements in U.S. cities because of a relative lack of stylistic coherence compared to European cities"
A little wartime anecdote - "The granddad of @kixes told her what happened when news broke in Singapore of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945... the Japanese officers were very fair to them, they knew they were all listening to 'illegal' broadcasts but never turned them in. They just said 'not during my office hours'. So they listened in after office hours"
Samantha Brick: Scientists say honesty really IS the best policy - "It was two years ago that I first adopted an ‘honesty policy’ that has reduced many of my friends to tears, left some open-mouthed with shock, and others full of admiration... with my 40th birthday looming, I decided that enough was enough: all this niceness and tip-toeing around people was exhausting. From that point on, if I was asked for an honest opinion, then I would give it... According to researchers at the University of Notre Dame, an honesty policy can improve your physical and mental health. They found that those who told little white lies to spare the feelings of others found the experience stressful. Meanwhile, those who spoke the truth not only felt more relaxed, they also formed better relationships with those they were being straight with"
Meet Japan's Lady of Eternal Youth - "Ms Masako Mizutani, who turns 44 in September, says: "I joined the contest just for fun. I didn't think I'd make an impression because there were so many beautiful Japanese women"... "I didn't think it was really a big deal. It's a woman's duty to take care of herself"... "Everyone knows that I spend at least five hours on my beauty regime a day." Ms Mizutani feels that women, particularly those who marry and have children, tend to neglect their beauty regime after they hit their 30s. She says: "That should not be the case. If you don't love yourself, how do you expect to be loved?""
The Positive Power of Negative Thinking - NYTimes.com - "21 people were treated for burns after walking barefoot over hot coals as part of an event called Unleash the Power Within, starring the motivational speaker Tony Robbins... Mr. Robbins and his acolytes have little time for physics. To them, it’s all a matter of mind-set: cultivate the belief that success is guaranteed, and anything is possible... Consider the technique of positive visualization, a staple not only of Robbins-style seminars but also of corporate team-building retreats and business best sellers... visualizing a successful outcome, under certain conditions, can make people less likely to achieve it... Or take affirmations, those cheery slogans intended to lift the user’s mood by repeating them: “I am a lovable person!” “My life is filled with joy!” Psychologists at the University of Waterloo concluded that such statements make people with low self-esteem feel worse... Even goal setting, the ubiquitous motivational technique of managers everywhere, isn’t an undisputed boon. Fixating too vigorously on goals can distort an organization’s overall mission in a desperate effort to meet some overly narrow target, and research by several business-school professors suggests that employees consumed with goals are likelier to cut ethical corners... The Stoics recommended “the premeditation of evils,” or deliberately visualizing the worst-case scenario. This tends to reduce anxiety about the future: when you soberly picture how badly things could go in reality, you usually conclude that you could cope... Buddhist meditation, too, is arguably all about learning to resist the urge to think positively — to let emotions and sensations arise and pass, regardless of their content... the relentless cheer of positive thinking begins to seem less like an expression of joy and more like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity. Mr. Robbins’s trademark smile starts to resemble a rictus. A positive thinker can never relax, lest an awareness of sadness or failure creep in. And telling yourself that everything must work out is poor preparation for those times when they don’t. You can try, if you insist, to follow the famous self-help advice to eliminate the word “failure” from your vocabulary — but then you’ll just have an inadequate vocabulary when failure strikes"
. . .s h h h. - Interesting Fact About 千と千尋の神隠し - "I’ve noticed that several of my followers are Miyazaki fans, so I thought I share this little tidbit of information with you about Spirited Away... basically, they were brothels. Guess what the woman who ran this bath house would be called? ゆばば。Yubaba. (translates directly to “hot water old woman”) Yubaba is the name of the woman who runs the bath house in Spirited Away. If you watch Spirited Away in Japanese, the female workers are referred to as yuna... THEN I read interviews with Miyazaki. This was all put in intentionally. As we all know. Miyazaki’s stories are weaved with different themes and metaphors. He said he was tackling the issue of the sex industry rapidly growing in Japan, and that children being exposed to it at such early ages is a problem"
LBJ: The President Who Marked His Territory - "Once, he even relieved himself on a Secret Serviceman who was shielding him from public view. When the man looked horrified, Johnson simply said, “That’s all right, son. It’s my prerogative.” His favorite power ploy, however, seemed to be dragging people into the bathroom with him―forcing them to continue their conversations with the president as he used the toilet."
Stop Blaming “Stop At Two” - "Some of these comments essentially laid the entire blame of our modern problems on the “Stop At Two” policies of the 70s... From the hypothetical set of data, our last year where fertility rate is at or above replacement level would be 1984, and in 2010, our fertility rate would be at about 1.4, just slightly above Korea and Hong Kong - still a serious problem... In our parallel universe, Singapore’s fertility trend line would have matched Korea"
The whole series is good!; the fact that real girls don't actually believe these things (e.g. you should get animals to lick your plates) is ironically evidence against the monkey-see monkey-do theory of human behavior
Four Sisters Recreate Childhood Photos Taken Decades Ago
"Join Us Surely" by PwC Singapore - YouTube
あらま They Didn't ! Japanese Entertainment News - Detroit's Chou Anime Cafe Offers Japanese Treats, Companionship & Waitresses In Frilly Dresses - "I feel bad that people are giving them so much flack based on their race and body type. Like if anything judge them on how they present themselves and their service, not their appearance."
A maid cafe with a difference
The psychology of doping accusations: Which athletes raise the most suspicion? - "According to covariation theory, we form internal or external attributions for people’s actions based on the degrees of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency in the behavior. Consensus is the extent to which other people would act similarly in the same situation, distinctiveness is the extent to which the target person behaves the same way in other situations, and consistency is the extent to which the target actor’s behavior is the same way every time the situation occurs."
In Israel, new modesty glasses for Orthodox Jewish men blur women out of their line of sight - "It’s the latest prescription for extreme ultra-Orthodox Jewish men who shun contact with the opposite sex: Glasses that blur their vision, so they don’t have to see women they consider to be immodestly dressed"
They should sell this in the Muslim world
Charles McCain: The "Greatest Generation" Is A Myth (Part 1 of 3) - "I have known, talked to, and interviewed dozens and dozens of World War Two vets and not one of them took the expression the “Greatest Generation" seriously. To a man they thought it was specious. A good friend of mine who fought on Okinawa said, "it's a bunch of bullshit. No one wanted to go. No one. We didn't feel called upon by history. We just got stuck with it and there was no choice. We had to do it.""
Charles McCain: The "Greatest Generation" Is A Myth (Part 2 of 3) - "Most veterans of World War Two never heard a shot fired in anger because they were in support units. It took at least 25 to 30 men to support each soldier in combat. And believe me, from deep reading into the subject, the majority of those men took care of themselves before they passed anything onto the combat soldiers. The memoirs of the combat troops are filled with invective against the rear echelon troops"
Charles McCain: The "Greatest Generation" Is A Myth (Part 3 of 3) - "US infantry typically scorned American tank units because they were often hesitant to advance. They had good reason: the standard American M4 Sherman tank could not stand up to German tanks or to the deadly German panzerfaust. Although the US Army learned this within a few days of the landings in Normandy, the nation with the ability to manufacture unlimited quantities of almost anything, failed to produce a battle worthy tank which could stand up to the Germans until the very end of the war. And that was simply a Sherman tank which was upgunned and had thicker armor added in the front."
The Myth called “the Greatest Generation” More like The Greatest Book Title. - "What I remember most about the GG was their hatred of Jews and Blacks, their tendency to believe that hitting their children was their “right.” The husband’s belief that wives were good if they could just stay in kitchen and perform in the bedroom. That’s what women were for in the GG. If a husband beat his wife, normally the police were not notified. And when they were, it was extremely unusual for a husband to be charged with assault. In their mind that wife was his property. To me, the Greatest Generation was angry, cowardly and socially inept"
Ikkousha is Ultimate Ramen Champion 2011 - "Ramen judge and writer of Japanese-language Ramen Freak magazine, Ishiyama Hayato, said via translator, "I am very impressed with the quality of ramen available here, I have interviews several ramen outlets in Japan and there is no difference in the quality and authenticity of the ramen available here in Singapore". Hayato, who has sampled ramen from more than 5,000 places and visits two ramen outlets a day, hopes that these characteristic bowls of noodles will be soon recognized as a world food"
Some people claim that it's impossible to find authentic food outside of its home/native/origin country
Researchers Create Picture Dictionary for Cities - Technology - "What gives your city its unique visual character? This may sound like a pretty subjective question, but researchers from Carnegie Mellon and a Parisian university are making it less so. They’ve developed visual data mining software to detect which features define a city’s look. For Paris, the team concluded that cast-iron balconies, windows with railings, special Parisian lampposts, and certain styles of doors make up the city's unique identity. For New York it's the fire escapes, and bay windows defined San Francisco, though the software had trouble picking up on elements in U.S. cities because of a relative lack of stylistic coherence compared to European cities"
A little wartime anecdote - "The granddad of @kixes told her what happened when news broke in Singapore of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945... the Japanese officers were very fair to them, they knew they were all listening to 'illegal' broadcasts but never turned them in. They just said 'not during my office hours'. So they listened in after office hours"
Samantha Brick: Scientists say honesty really IS the best policy - "It was two years ago that I first adopted an ‘honesty policy’ that has reduced many of my friends to tears, left some open-mouthed with shock, and others full of admiration... with my 40th birthday looming, I decided that enough was enough: all this niceness and tip-toeing around people was exhausting. From that point on, if I was asked for an honest opinion, then I would give it... According to researchers at the University of Notre Dame, an honesty policy can improve your physical and mental health. They found that those who told little white lies to spare the feelings of others found the experience stressful. Meanwhile, those who spoke the truth not only felt more relaxed, they also formed better relationships with those they were being straight with"
Meet Japan's Lady of Eternal Youth - "Ms Masako Mizutani, who turns 44 in September, says: "I joined the contest just for fun. I didn't think I'd make an impression because there were so many beautiful Japanese women"... "I didn't think it was really a big deal. It's a woman's duty to take care of herself"... "Everyone knows that I spend at least five hours on my beauty regime a day." Ms Mizutani feels that women, particularly those who marry and have children, tend to neglect their beauty regime after they hit their 30s. She says: "That should not be the case. If you don't love yourself, how do you expect to be loved?""
The Positive Power of Negative Thinking - NYTimes.com - "21 people were treated for burns after walking barefoot over hot coals as part of an event called Unleash the Power Within, starring the motivational speaker Tony Robbins... Mr. Robbins and his acolytes have little time for physics. To them, it’s all a matter of mind-set: cultivate the belief that success is guaranteed, and anything is possible... Consider the technique of positive visualization, a staple not only of Robbins-style seminars but also of corporate team-building retreats and business best sellers... visualizing a successful outcome, under certain conditions, can make people less likely to achieve it... Or take affirmations, those cheery slogans intended to lift the user’s mood by repeating them: “I am a lovable person!” “My life is filled with joy!” Psychologists at the University of Waterloo concluded that such statements make people with low self-esteem feel worse... Even goal setting, the ubiquitous motivational technique of managers everywhere, isn’t an undisputed boon. Fixating too vigorously on goals can distort an organization’s overall mission in a desperate effort to meet some overly narrow target, and research by several business-school professors suggests that employees consumed with goals are likelier to cut ethical corners... The Stoics recommended “the premeditation of evils,” or deliberately visualizing the worst-case scenario. This tends to reduce anxiety about the future: when you soberly picture how badly things could go in reality, you usually conclude that you could cope... Buddhist meditation, too, is arguably all about learning to resist the urge to think positively — to let emotions and sensations arise and pass, regardless of their content... the relentless cheer of positive thinking begins to seem less like an expression of joy and more like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity. Mr. Robbins’s trademark smile starts to resemble a rictus. A positive thinker can never relax, lest an awareness of sadness or failure creep in. And telling yourself that everything must work out is poor preparation for those times when they don’t. You can try, if you insist, to follow the famous self-help advice to eliminate the word “failure” from your vocabulary — but then you’ll just have an inadequate vocabulary when failure strikes"
. . .s h h h. - Interesting Fact About 千と千尋の神隠し - "I’ve noticed that several of my followers are Miyazaki fans, so I thought I share this little tidbit of information with you about Spirited Away... basically, they were brothels. Guess what the woman who ran this bath house would be called? ゆばば。Yubaba. (translates directly to “hot water old woman”) Yubaba is the name of the woman who runs the bath house in Spirited Away. If you watch Spirited Away in Japanese, the female workers are referred to as yuna... THEN I read interviews with Miyazaki. This was all put in intentionally. As we all know. Miyazaki’s stories are weaved with different themes and metaphors. He said he was tackling the issue of the sex industry rapidly growing in Japan, and that children being exposed to it at such early ages is a problem"
LBJ: The President Who Marked His Territory - "Once, he even relieved himself on a Secret Serviceman who was shielding him from public view. When the man looked horrified, Johnson simply said, “That’s all right, son. It’s my prerogative.” His favorite power ploy, however, seemed to be dragging people into the bathroom with him―forcing them to continue their conversations with the president as he used the toilet."
Stop Blaming “Stop At Two” - "Some of these comments essentially laid the entire blame of our modern problems on the “Stop At Two” policies of the 70s... From the hypothetical set of data, our last year where fertility rate is at or above replacement level would be 1984, and in 2010, our fertility rate would be at about 1.4, just slightly above Korea and Hong Kong - still a serious problem... In our parallel universe, Singapore’s fertility trend line would have matched Korea"
Post ID: 3981183137212294973
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Reasons to get Facebook
Bizarre HR: Candidates without Facebook “suspicious” | Human Resources Online
Global – Human resources professionals are becoming increasingly wary of candidates who aren’t on Facebook, because it makes them look 'abnormal'.
With the social networking site becoming such in integral part of modern society, HR departments are doing double takes at job candidates who don’t appear to have a Facebook profile, Forbes reported.
The biggest concern from employers is that a lack of a Facebook page – or other social networking sites – could mean the applicant’s online account contains so much inappropriate content that it had to be deleted.
While there could be many reasons a person does not have or want a Facebook page – whether it’s too addictive or they crave privacy – owning one is a sign of having a healthy social network, psychologist Christopher Moeller told Forbes.
Other psychologists, and German magazine Der Taggspiegel, go as far to point out accused theater shooter James Holmes and Norwegian mass murder Anders Behring Breivik, both do not have Facebook profiles, implying keeping yourself away from online social interaction could be a sign of dysfunctional, or even dangerous, ways.
Advice columnist for Slate.com, Emily Yoffee, wrote young people also shouldn’t date anyone who isn’t on Facebook for the same reasons.
“If you’re of a certain age… and that person doesn’t have a Facebook page, you may be getting a false name. It could be some kind of red flag,” she said.
Global – Human resources professionals are becoming increasingly wary of candidates who aren’t on Facebook, because it makes them look 'abnormal'.
With the social networking site becoming such in integral part of modern society, HR departments are doing double takes at job candidates who don’t appear to have a Facebook profile, Forbes reported.
The biggest concern from employers is that a lack of a Facebook page – or other social networking sites – could mean the applicant’s online account contains so much inappropriate content that it had to be deleted.
While there could be many reasons a person does not have or want a Facebook page – whether it’s too addictive or they crave privacy – owning one is a sign of having a healthy social network, psychologist Christopher Moeller told Forbes.
Other psychologists, and German magazine Der Taggspiegel, go as far to point out accused theater shooter James Holmes and Norwegian mass murder Anders Behring Breivik, both do not have Facebook profiles, implying keeping yourself away from online social interaction could be a sign of dysfunctional, or even dangerous, ways.
Advice columnist for Slate.com, Emily Yoffee, wrote young people also shouldn’t date anyone who isn’t on Facebook for the same reasons.
“If you’re of a certain age… and that person doesn’t have a Facebook page, you may be getting a false name. It could be some kind of red flag,” she said.
Post ID: 2417869229004954406
Straits Times Forum Letter of the Day
Do Malay husbands know something the Chinese don't?
THE total fertility rate of Malay Singaporeans last year was 1.64, followed by Indian Singaporeans at 1.09 and Chinese Singaporeans at 1.08 ("Get married, have babies"; Sunday).
Most incentives - maternity leave, maid levies and discounted taxes - are aimed at women, and may be working better for the Malays than for the Chinese.
Perhaps the Government should find out why Malay women are more willing to have babies.
Are Malay men more romantic, persuasive and less stressed out by life's perceived demands than Chinese men?
Do Malay couples have a more viable network of caregivers?
I would like to believe that a man with confidence is attractive to women. He can better influence his wife to have more babies, especially if he believes he can adequately provide for the family.
How can Chinese Singaporean men attain more confidence? In this modern age, the ability to provide translates into how much a man earns and his job security.
Greater confidence may well encourage Singaporean men to take the plunge earlier, and increase the potential for having babies sooner.
Ivan Goh
Another good one:
Not as sports-crazy as China? Imagine these...
"MR CHRISTOPHER Ong is sceptical that Singaporean medal achievements in the Olympic Games will create a surge of national pride or unite the people ("What's the worth of an Olympic medal?"; last Saturday).
He concluded that the notion of national sporting accomplishments uniting the nation is overblown.
Allow me to show, with examples, how wrong he is.
If Singapore were playing against Brazil for an Olympic football gold medal, my bet is that almost every Singaporean would be watching the match on TV. The roads would be empty; every pub with a TV set would be packed; life, as we know it, would stand still while Singaporeans cheer on the Lions. And if Singapore beat Brazil... need I say more?"
(the joy of social thought experiments is no one can prove you wrong)
And finally:
Govt must lead with changes
"The ministry should revamp the leave system with regard to maternity and paternity leave.
It should designate a fixed number of weeks in which both parents can take such leave interchangeably.
Such a flexible parental leave policy sends a strong signal that child-rearing is a task that involves both parents, and will gradually move us away from the traditionally male chauvinist tilt."
POOR SINGLE PARENTS
THE total fertility rate of Malay Singaporeans last year was 1.64, followed by Indian Singaporeans at 1.09 and Chinese Singaporeans at 1.08 ("Get married, have babies"; Sunday).
Most incentives - maternity leave, maid levies and discounted taxes - are aimed at women, and may be working better for the Malays than for the Chinese.
Perhaps the Government should find out why Malay women are more willing to have babies.
Are Malay men more romantic, persuasive and less stressed out by life's perceived demands than Chinese men?
Do Malay couples have a more viable network of caregivers?
I would like to believe that a man with confidence is attractive to women. He can better influence his wife to have more babies, especially if he believes he can adequately provide for the family.
How can Chinese Singaporean men attain more confidence? In this modern age, the ability to provide translates into how much a man earns and his job security.
Greater confidence may well encourage Singaporean men to take the plunge earlier, and increase the potential for having babies sooner.
Ivan Goh
Another good one:
Not as sports-crazy as China? Imagine these...
"MR CHRISTOPHER Ong is sceptical that Singaporean medal achievements in the Olympic Games will create a surge of national pride or unite the people ("What's the worth of an Olympic medal?"; last Saturday).
He concluded that the notion of national sporting accomplishments uniting the nation is overblown.
Allow me to show, with examples, how wrong he is.
If Singapore were playing against Brazil for an Olympic football gold medal, my bet is that almost every Singaporean would be watching the match on TV. The roads would be empty; every pub with a TV set would be packed; life, as we know it, would stand still while Singaporeans cheer on the Lions. And if Singapore beat Brazil... need I say more?"
(the joy of social thought experiments is no one can prove you wrong)
And finally:
Govt must lead with changes
"The ministry should revamp the leave system with regard to maternity and paternity leave.
It should designate a fixed number of weeks in which both parents can take such leave interchangeably.
Such a flexible parental leave policy sends a strong signal that child-rearing is a task that involves both parents, and will gradually move us away from the traditionally male chauvinist tilt."
POOR SINGLE PARENTS
Post ID: 4445783338110070534
Monday, August 13, 2012
Launch of VOICES CLEAR AND TRUE: NEW SINGAPORE PLAYS VOLUME 1
Update: All tickets to the event have been given out!
Launch of VOICES CLEAR AND TRUE: NEW SINGAPORE PLAYS VOLUME 1
+ REGISTRATION REQUIRED. TO REGISTER:
• Send an email titled “Voices Clear and True launch – I want to go!” and include full name and mobile number in the email body to contact@checkpoint-theatre.org.
• Alternatively, send a text message to 9040 4675 in this format: “VOICES LAUNCH! Name: [Full Name] Email: [Email Address] No. of pax: [Number of people attending]”.
• Registration Deadline: by 11.59pm on Thu, 16 Aug 2012.
• Admission is free and by prior registration only.
• Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis.
--
As part of Checkpoint Theatre's 10th anniversary celebrations, we're launching our inaugural book publication, “Voices Clear and True: New Singapore Plays Volume 1”!
This is the first volume in a series of play collections published by Checkpoint Theatre that showcase the exciting work of a new generation of the following Singapore playwrights: Christine Chong, Kenneth Chong, Lucas Ho, Dan Koh, Cheryl Lee, Laremy Lee, Faith Ng and Shiv Tandan.
Their plays were written under the mentorship of acclaimed dramatist Huzir Sulaiman, Checkpoint Theatre’s Joint Artistic Director, and produced by Singapore theatre companies.
The plays are by turns lyrical and hilarious, and are marked by their intellectual rigour, emotional honesty, and refined technique. These plays are evidence of the burgeoning renaissance in Singapore playwriting.
The collection of critically-acclaimed plays includes wo(men) and The Good, the Bad, and the Sholay, which were both nominated for Best Original Script in the Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards.
“Voices Clear and True: New Singapore Plays Volume 1” is edited by Huzir Sulaiman, Lucas Ho and Laremy Lee, and includes an introduction by Huzir Sulaiman.
--
“Voices Clear and True contest – Let me win!”
Join our contest as part of the lead-up to the launch!
Answer these two questions correctly in order to win attractive prizes:
1. Out of the eight plays in Voices Clear and True: New Singapore Plays Volume 1, how many plays were nominated for Best Original Script at the ST Life! Theatre Awards?
2. Based on your answer in (1), what are the full names of the plays and the playwrights nominated for Best Original Script at the ST Life! Theatre Awards?
Send an email titled “Voices Clear and True contest – Let me win!” that includes your answers, their full name and mobile number in the email body to contact@checkpoint-theatre.org by 11.59pm on Mon, 13 Aug 2012.
Two lucky winners will each walk away with the following prizes:
• Two invites to the book launch; and
• One copy of the book signed by all the playwrights.
(Terms and conditions at http://fb.me/1eax8t3y8)
Launch of VOICES CLEAR AND TRUE: NEW SINGAPORE PLAYS VOLUME 1
+ REGISTRATION REQUIRED. TO REGISTER:
• Send an email titled “Voices Clear and True launch – I want to go!” and include full name and mobile number in the email body to contact@checkpoint-theatre.org.
• Alternatively, send a text message to 9040 4675 in this format: “VOICES LAUNCH! Name: [Full Name] Email: [Email Address] No. of pax: [Number of people attending]”.
• Registration Deadline: by 11.59pm on Thu, 16 Aug 2012.
• Admission is free and by prior registration only.
• Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis.
--
As part of Checkpoint Theatre's 10th anniversary celebrations, we're launching our inaugural book publication, “Voices Clear and True: New Singapore Plays Volume 1”!
This is the first volume in a series of play collections published by Checkpoint Theatre that showcase the exciting work of a new generation of the following Singapore playwrights: Christine Chong, Kenneth Chong, Lucas Ho, Dan Koh, Cheryl Lee, Laremy Lee, Faith Ng and Shiv Tandan.
Their plays were written under the mentorship of acclaimed dramatist Huzir Sulaiman, Checkpoint Theatre’s Joint Artistic Director, and produced by Singapore theatre companies.
The plays are by turns lyrical and hilarious, and are marked by their intellectual rigour, emotional honesty, and refined technique. These plays are evidence of the burgeoning renaissance in Singapore playwriting.
The collection of critically-acclaimed plays includes wo(men) and The Good, the Bad, and the Sholay, which were both nominated for Best Original Script in the Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards.
“Voices Clear and True: New Singapore Plays Volume 1” is edited by Huzir Sulaiman, Lucas Ho and Laremy Lee, and includes an introduction by Huzir Sulaiman.
--
“Voices Clear and True contest – Let me win!”
Join our contest as part of the lead-up to the launch!
Answer these two questions correctly in order to win attractive prizes:
1. Out of the eight plays in Voices Clear and True: New Singapore Plays Volume 1, how many plays were nominated for Best Original Script at the ST Life! Theatre Awards?
2. Based on your answer in (1), what are the full names of the plays and the playwrights nominated for Best Original Script at the ST Life! Theatre Awards?
Send an email titled “Voices Clear and True contest – Let me win!” that includes your answers, their full name and mobile number in the email body to contact@checkpoint-theatre.org by 11.59pm on Mon, 13 Aug 2012.
Two lucky winners will each walk away with the following prizes:
• Two invites to the book launch; and
• One copy of the book signed by all the playwrights.
(Terms and conditions at http://fb.me/1eax8t3y8)
Post ID: 8959946161516341776
Links - 13th August 2012
Woman slammed for giving free meals to poor - "A woman, who has been cooking food for the needy, has been criticised online, with one netizen even calling for her arrest. Rachel Lim Yan Xuan, a 34 year-old dance instructor, has been preparing meals and distributing them for free to people begging or selling tissues on the streets of Geylang and outside a temple at Waterloo Street... “Someone threatened me, saying that as I do not have an AVA licence to cook from home for public distribution, and that as giving the food to the poor is [supposedly] illegal, I may end up in jail”... Ms Lim said that her overseas friends were startled when they saw the comments. “They wondered why a developed country like Singapore would have such unreasonable people,” she said in her interview with Lianhe Wanbao. Some of the netizens who made scorching comments have since removed their posts from Ms Lim’s Facebook account"
I laugh with my friends about how bad Mediacorp shows are on Twitpic - "Mediacorp has been more than happy to be able to do our bit to help us bond"
HAHAHA Hippo gets explosive diarrhea! - YouTube
Italian laws: Court rules it is a criminal offence to tell a man he has 'no balls' because it hurts male pride - "The ruling, which comes after years of legal dispute, did not specify whether any insults against women should now also be considered crimes"
The Freakish Faces Of Synchronized Swimming
If Video Games Were Real | SMOSH
Hypocrisy of the rich liberals who buy their way out of the schools calamity their dogma created - "Sir Jonathan’s profound aversion to private education is well known. In accordance with his principles, in the Seventies he sent his own children to Pimlico comprehensive school in Central London... Now William says that he and his wife have decided to educate their primary school-age children privately to ensure that they, too, do not become — as he has characterised himself and his siblings — the ‘victims of the most cavalier of social experiments’. And his father is helping foot the bill... They were the victims of their parents’ ideological fixation with abolishing privilege — a fixation expressed by refusing to give their children the educational advantages that all too often they themselves had enjoyed... through an utterly misplaced idealism, they resolved that if everyone could not benefit from such schools, then no one should. Accordingly, the principle of equality of opportunity that lay behind selective education — including that provided in the state system by the grammar schools — was replaced by the doctrine of equality of outcomes. The result was a disastrous confluence of comprehensive schooling with child-centred educational theories, which in the interests of eradicating both ‘illegitimate’ adult authority over children and equally ‘illegitimate’ differences in achievement, simply undid the very concept of education altogether. The result was countless numbers of children abandoned to ignorance and under-achievement... The damage done by this experiment has been incalculable. The further irony is that it actually increased the numbers going to independent schools"
Looted Afghan artefacts returned to Kabul - "More than two thirds of the exhibits at the National Museum in Kabul were stolen or destroyed during the civil war... there will be concerns about the fate of the artefacts, given the unpredictability surrounding Afghanistan's future"
Sesame street- MANAMANA - Original 1969 version.flv - YouTube
best running gag ever 2816 - YouTube - "on the muppet show there were strange funny phone calls"
Man writes to Cathay CEO to ask them to stop pilot from having sex with his wife - AsiaOne Forum
The Imbibing Idiot Bias: Consuming Alcohol Can Be Hazardous to Your (Perceived) Intelligence by Scott Rick, Maurice Schweitzer - "Alcohol consumption and cognitive impairment frequently co-occur. We propose that the relationship is so familiar that exposure to alcohol cues primes expectations of cognitive impairment. Across five studies, we find that in the absence of any evidence of reduced cognitive performance, people who hold an alcoholic beverage are perceived to be less intelligent than those who do not, a mistake we term the imbibing idiot bias. In fact, merely priming observers with alcohol cues causes them to judge targets who hold no beverage at all as less intelligent. The bias is not driven by a belief that less intelligent people are more likely to consume alcohol. We find that the bias may be costly in professional settings. Job candidates who ordered wine during an interview held over dinner were viewed as less intelligent and less hireable than candidates who ordered soda. However, prospective candidates believe that ordering wine rather than soda will help them appear more intelligent."
Ahh Americans!
Beyond initial attraction: physical attractiveness in newlywed marriage. - "In contrast to the robust and almost universally positive effects of levels of attractiveness on new relationships, the only association between levels of attractiveness and the outcomes of these marriages was that attractive husbands were less satisfied. Further, in contrast to the importance of matched attractiveness to new relationships, similarity in attractiveness was unrelated to spouses' satisfaction and behavior. Instead, the relative difference between partners' levels of attractiveness appeared to be most important in predicting marital behavior, such that both spouses behaved more positively in relationships in which wives were more attractive than their husbands, but they behaved more negatively in relationships in which husbands were more attractive than their wives"
South Korean gold gymnast vaults from rags to riches - "Nongshim, the manufacturer of Yang's favorite instant noodles, has also said it will provide his family with "limitless amount of instant noodles""
Wrestling the Troll : Sam Harris - "You might think that it’s the triumphant ill will expressed here that gets under my skin—but you would be mistaken. What bothers me is the persistence of misunderstanding. I can’t shake the feeling that if I just wrote or spoke more clearly, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen... people like PZ Myers continue to malign me as an advocate of “racial profiling.” I have written to Myers personally about this and answered his charges publicly. His only response has been to attack me further and to endorse the false charges of others... Simply raising these issues—even to clarify misunderstandings—does little more than inspire trolls... generally speaking, I’m at the limits of my bandwidth and have to draw the line somewhere"
Addendum: "If my daughter one day reads in my obituary that her father “was persistently dogged by charges of racism and bigotry,” unscrupulous people like PZ Myers will be to blame."
Why I don't have comments - "First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters"
The Macrobiotic Diet: Eat Tiny Portions of Foods You Don’t Like - "Lack of energy (and/or self-righteous bitchiness) may result from following the macrobiotic diet too closely. One look at Gwyneth Paltrow’s self-satisfied blog “Goop” is all the evidence you really need to see…."
delanceyplace.com 5/6/11 - theater acting vs movie acting - "The modern film actor knows that real people in real life struggle not to show their feelings. It is more truthful, and more potent, to fight against the tears, only yielding after all those defense mechanisms are exhausted. If today's actor emulates film, he'd be better off watching a documentary. The same is true of drunkenness. In real life, a drunk makes a huge effort to appear sober"
delanceyplace.com 5/8/12 - the stallion sacrifice - "The stallion was then smothered to death, presumably to avoid damaging its body, whereupon the king's first wife, his queen, symbolically coupled with the sacrificed horse under covers, while the royal court gave her encouragement with obscene remarks"
delanceyplace.com 6/12/12 - bible sales vs. bible knowledge - "So biblical literacy is low to zip, even while biblical reverence remains high and Bible sales rise. What's going on? Could it be that biblical literacy is being replaced by biblical consumerism? In today's consumer culture, we are what we buy, wear, and carry. We identify ourselves by our patterns of consumer choices, by the market niches we buy into. It's gone beyond that post-Cartesian proof of existence, 'I shop, therefore I am.' Today, it's closer to 'I shop for what I am.'"
FLIGHT RISK! Vietnamese airline fined for staging in-air beauty-queen bikini show
Send Anything to the Edge of Space, for Free
Is there an 'obesity paradox' in diabetes? - "overweight and obese people who get diagnosed with the blood sugar disorder tend to live longer than their leaner peers... it's probably not that excessive pounds are protective, said Carnethon, but rather that lean people who get diabetes are somehow predisposed to worse health"
Cough Medicine: Should You or Shouldn’t You? - "We've never had good evidence that cough suppressants and expectorants help with cough"
Sushi Bullies - WSJ.com - "Geri-Ayn Gaul had her first encounter with a raw-fish autocrat in August at Ino, in San Francisco. First, she tried to add some soy sauce to her seaweed salad. Big mistake. Chef Noboru Inoue scolded her, she says, telling her, "No, no, no. No soy sauce!" Then, she had the temerity to scrape some wasabi off a piece of sushi, because she doesn't like spicy food. The chef's response, she says: "'No. It needs the wasabi.'" She obeyed, and choked down the fish. "I was so nervous, I spilled my miso soup," says Ms. Gaul, whose meal for two, with no alcohol, cost $75 -- before tip. While unaccommodating service may sound like a recipe for a failing restaurant, these domineering sushi chefs can have lines of supplicants out the door... They reserve special enmity for spicy tuna rolls -- typically made with scraps of raw tuna, mayonnaise and chili powder -- which they say were only invented so that restaurants could mask the taste of substandard fish... Some patrons are so chagrined over being banned that they try to come back disguised in baseball caps, sunglasses, and, in one case, a wig"
Texas Gov. Rick Perry: 'political correctness has to stop' - El Paso Times - ""When conservatives are offended by a corporate policy, we simply choose not to give them our business." He added that offended liberals "try to keep everyone else from giving them business""
LOCAL - Columnist blasted online after piece on 'chestless, man-like' female Olympians - "Aytuğ said the Olympics forced women to "look more like men" in order to be successful and wrote about an ongoing "sporting violence against women," while criticizing what he called an understanding of "the manlier you look the more successful you are.""
This portion of his criticism actually sounds like feminist analysis
I laugh with my friends about how bad Mediacorp shows are on Twitpic - "Mediacorp has been more than happy to be able to do our bit to help us bond"
HAHAHA Hippo gets explosive diarrhea! - YouTube
Italian laws: Court rules it is a criminal offence to tell a man he has 'no balls' because it hurts male pride - "The ruling, which comes after years of legal dispute, did not specify whether any insults against women should now also be considered crimes"
The Freakish Faces Of Synchronized Swimming
If Video Games Were Real | SMOSH
Hypocrisy of the rich liberals who buy their way out of the schools calamity their dogma created - "Sir Jonathan’s profound aversion to private education is well known. In accordance with his principles, in the Seventies he sent his own children to Pimlico comprehensive school in Central London... Now William says that he and his wife have decided to educate their primary school-age children privately to ensure that they, too, do not become — as he has characterised himself and his siblings — the ‘victims of the most cavalier of social experiments’. And his father is helping foot the bill... They were the victims of their parents’ ideological fixation with abolishing privilege — a fixation expressed by refusing to give their children the educational advantages that all too often they themselves had enjoyed... through an utterly misplaced idealism, they resolved that if everyone could not benefit from such schools, then no one should. Accordingly, the principle of equality of opportunity that lay behind selective education — including that provided in the state system by the grammar schools — was replaced by the doctrine of equality of outcomes. The result was a disastrous confluence of comprehensive schooling with child-centred educational theories, which in the interests of eradicating both ‘illegitimate’ adult authority over children and equally ‘illegitimate’ differences in achievement, simply undid the very concept of education altogether. The result was countless numbers of children abandoned to ignorance and under-achievement... The damage done by this experiment has been incalculable. The further irony is that it actually increased the numbers going to independent schools"
Looted Afghan artefacts returned to Kabul - "More than two thirds of the exhibits at the National Museum in Kabul were stolen or destroyed during the civil war... there will be concerns about the fate of the artefacts, given the unpredictability surrounding Afghanistan's future"
Sesame street- MANAMANA - Original 1969 version.flv - YouTube
best running gag ever 2816 - YouTube - "on the muppet show there were strange funny phone calls"
Man writes to Cathay CEO to ask them to stop pilot from having sex with his wife - AsiaOne Forum
The Imbibing Idiot Bias: Consuming Alcohol Can Be Hazardous to Your (Perceived) Intelligence by Scott Rick, Maurice Schweitzer - "Alcohol consumption and cognitive impairment frequently co-occur. We propose that the relationship is so familiar that exposure to alcohol cues primes expectations of cognitive impairment. Across five studies, we find that in the absence of any evidence of reduced cognitive performance, people who hold an alcoholic beverage are perceived to be less intelligent than those who do not, a mistake we term the imbibing idiot bias. In fact, merely priming observers with alcohol cues causes them to judge targets who hold no beverage at all as less intelligent. The bias is not driven by a belief that less intelligent people are more likely to consume alcohol. We find that the bias may be costly in professional settings. Job candidates who ordered wine during an interview held over dinner were viewed as less intelligent and less hireable than candidates who ordered soda. However, prospective candidates believe that ordering wine rather than soda will help them appear more intelligent."
Ahh Americans!
Beyond initial attraction: physical attractiveness in newlywed marriage. - "In contrast to the robust and almost universally positive effects of levels of attractiveness on new relationships, the only association between levels of attractiveness and the outcomes of these marriages was that attractive husbands were less satisfied. Further, in contrast to the importance of matched attractiveness to new relationships, similarity in attractiveness was unrelated to spouses' satisfaction and behavior. Instead, the relative difference between partners' levels of attractiveness appeared to be most important in predicting marital behavior, such that both spouses behaved more positively in relationships in which wives were more attractive than their husbands, but they behaved more negatively in relationships in which husbands were more attractive than their wives"
South Korean gold gymnast vaults from rags to riches - "Nongshim, the manufacturer of Yang's favorite instant noodles, has also said it will provide his family with "limitless amount of instant noodles""
Wrestling the Troll : Sam Harris - "You might think that it’s the triumphant ill will expressed here that gets under my skin—but you would be mistaken. What bothers me is the persistence of misunderstanding. I can’t shake the feeling that if I just wrote or spoke more clearly, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen... people like PZ Myers continue to malign me as an advocate of “racial profiling.” I have written to Myers personally about this and answered his charges publicly. His only response has been to attack me further and to endorse the false charges of others... Simply raising these issues—even to clarify misunderstandings—does little more than inspire trolls... generally speaking, I’m at the limits of my bandwidth and have to draw the line somewhere"
Addendum: "If my daughter one day reads in my obituary that her father “was persistently dogged by charges of racism and bigotry,” unscrupulous people like PZ Myers will be to blame."
Why I don't have comments - "First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters"
The Macrobiotic Diet: Eat Tiny Portions of Foods You Don’t Like - "Lack of energy (and/or self-righteous bitchiness) may result from following the macrobiotic diet too closely. One look at Gwyneth Paltrow’s self-satisfied blog “Goop” is all the evidence you really need to see…."
delanceyplace.com 5/6/11 - theater acting vs movie acting - "The modern film actor knows that real people in real life struggle not to show their feelings. It is more truthful, and more potent, to fight against the tears, only yielding after all those defense mechanisms are exhausted. If today's actor emulates film, he'd be better off watching a documentary. The same is true of drunkenness. In real life, a drunk makes a huge effort to appear sober"
delanceyplace.com 5/8/12 - the stallion sacrifice - "The stallion was then smothered to death, presumably to avoid damaging its body, whereupon the king's first wife, his queen, symbolically coupled with the sacrificed horse under covers, while the royal court gave her encouragement with obscene remarks"
delanceyplace.com 6/12/12 - bible sales vs. bible knowledge - "So biblical literacy is low to zip, even while biblical reverence remains high and Bible sales rise. What's going on? Could it be that biblical literacy is being replaced by biblical consumerism? In today's consumer culture, we are what we buy, wear, and carry. We identify ourselves by our patterns of consumer choices, by the market niches we buy into. It's gone beyond that post-Cartesian proof of existence, 'I shop, therefore I am.' Today, it's closer to 'I shop for what I am.'"
FLIGHT RISK! Vietnamese airline fined for staging in-air beauty-queen bikini show
Send Anything to the Edge of Space, for Free
Is there an 'obesity paradox' in diabetes? - "overweight and obese people who get diagnosed with the blood sugar disorder tend to live longer than their leaner peers... it's probably not that excessive pounds are protective, said Carnethon, but rather that lean people who get diabetes are somehow predisposed to worse health"
Cough Medicine: Should You or Shouldn’t You? - "We've never had good evidence that cough suppressants and expectorants help with cough"
Sushi Bullies - WSJ.com - "Geri-Ayn Gaul had her first encounter with a raw-fish autocrat in August at Ino, in San Francisco. First, she tried to add some soy sauce to her seaweed salad. Big mistake. Chef Noboru Inoue scolded her, she says, telling her, "No, no, no. No soy sauce!" Then, she had the temerity to scrape some wasabi off a piece of sushi, because she doesn't like spicy food. The chef's response, she says: "'No. It needs the wasabi.'" She obeyed, and choked down the fish. "I was so nervous, I spilled my miso soup," says Ms. Gaul, whose meal for two, with no alcohol, cost $75 -- before tip. While unaccommodating service may sound like a recipe for a failing restaurant, these domineering sushi chefs can have lines of supplicants out the door... They reserve special enmity for spicy tuna rolls -- typically made with scraps of raw tuna, mayonnaise and chili powder -- which they say were only invented so that restaurants could mask the taste of substandard fish... Some patrons are so chagrined over being banned that they try to come back disguised in baseball caps, sunglasses, and, in one case, a wig"
Texas Gov. Rick Perry: 'political correctness has to stop' - El Paso Times - ""When conservatives are offended by a corporate policy, we simply choose not to give them our business." He added that offended liberals "try to keep everyone else from giving them business""
LOCAL - Columnist blasted online after piece on 'chestless, man-like' female Olympians - "Aytuğ said the Olympics forced women to "look more like men" in order to be successful and wrote about an ongoing "sporting violence against women," while criticizing what he called an understanding of "the manlier you look the more successful you are.""
This portion of his criticism actually sounds like feminist analysis
Post ID: 4152950504466973961
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