Leak site back online

Wired reports:

SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge on Friday allowed whistle-blower site WikiLeaks to resume operation in the United States, a week after ordering its U.S. hosting company and domain registrar to shut down and lock the renegade's site from the internet.

The judge conceded the futility of attempts to censor information, in this instance private banking records, after it has been posted to the internet. ...

The judge held a hearing here Friday to reconsider his initial decision because federal law required it, and because he was having second thoughts. "There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment," he said from the bench. (Hours later, he issued this ruling.)

New bogus claim of spanking harm

USA Today reports:

Children whose parents spank them or otherwise inflict physical punishment may be more likely to have sexual problems later, according to research to be presented Thursday to the American Psychological Association.

The analysis of four studies by Murray Straus, co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire-Durham, suggests that children whose parents spanked, slapped, hit or threw objects at them may have a greater chance of physically or verbally coercing a sexual partner, engaging in risky sexual behavior or engaging in masochistic sex, including sexual arousal by spanking.

"It increases the chances of sexual problems," though "it's not a one-to-one causation," Straus says.

No, it is not. According to the article, 85% of USA kids have been spanked. In an unpublished survey on dating violence, 12.5% of students "likely to insist that their partner have unprotected sex" said that they have never been hit.

That 12.5% is not significantly different from the 15% of the general population who have not been spanked. This is bogus research from an 81-year-old sociology professor who has made a career out of ideological opposition to spanking. This latest research has not even been published. The new media should ignore it.

For some research that is favorable to spanking, see this.

USA Today quotes another anti-spanking zealot:

Elizabeth Gershoff, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, who reviewed 80 years of spanking research in 2002 in the APA's Psychological Bulletin, says Straus' work appears to be the first to link spanking with sexual problems.

Gershoff says that though many children have been spanked (85% in one 2007 survey), problems may depend on how they process the spanking.

"They may internalize that to mean that in loving relationships sometimes there's pain or physical aggression," she says. Another possible lesson is that "whoever is stronger and has more power can overpower the other person and use physical aggression to control the other person's behavior."

Yes, it is true that the strong can overpower the weak. That is a lesson that all kids need to learn.

Look at spending, not income

A NY Times op-ed says:

The top fifth of American households earned an average of $149,963 a year in 2006. As shown in the first accompanying chart, they spent $69,863 on food, clothing, shelter, utilities, transportation, health care and other categories of consumption. The rest of their income went largely to taxes and savings.

The bottom fifth earned just $9,974, but spent nearly twice that — an average of $18,153 a year. ...

So, bearing this in mind, if we compare the incomes of the top and bottom fifths, we see a ratio of 15 to 1. If we turn to consumption, the gap declines to around 4 to 1.

Why men do not teach

Here is why we have so few men teaching elementary school:

When Dan Brown began teaching fourth grade at Public School 85 in the Bronx as an NYC Teaching Fellow, he quickly realized he was one of the few male teachers at the school. ...

But his role came with an added responsibility not many female teachers face. "Only two kids out of the 26 had parents who were married," he said. "Most of these kids had no father figure at home. To come to school and have that male authority figure who was treating them respectfully made a huge difference." ...

According to statistics recently released by the National Education Association (NEA), men made up just 24.4 percent of the total number of teachers in 2006. In fact, the number of male public school teachers in the U.S. has hit a record 40-year low. ...

Many men once in the profession say they quit because of worries that innocuous contact with students could be misconstrued, reports the NEA. ...

"There's a lack of support for male teachers, a lack of respect, and a lack of being able to be involved in decision-making," said Reg Weaver, president of the NEA. "And I can't say it's getting better." ...

"People will ask you inappropriate questions," he said, recalling a recent e-mail he received from an aspiring male teacher who was asked during a job interview, "Why would any healthy male want to work with kids?"

Trivial action gets sex crime conviction

Portland Oregon news:

A Washington County jury found Rodriguez guilty in 2005 of first-degree sexual assault after police accused her of running her hands through a 13-year-old boy’s hair and pulling the back of his head against her covered chest in the middle of a crowded game room at the Boys and Girls Club in Hillsboro.

Under Measure 11, a 1994 voter-approved ballot initiative setting mandatory minimum sentences, Rodriguez faced six years and three months in prison.

This is more evidence overcriminalized sex offenses.

The college rape myth

Heather Mac Donald writes in an LA Times op-ed:

It is a central claim of these organizations that between a fifth and a quarter of all college women will be raped or will be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years. ...

If the one-in-four statistic is correct, campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. ...

Such a crime wave -- in which millions of young women would graduate having suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience -- would require nothing less than a state of emergency. ...

None of this crisis response occurs, of course -- because the crisis doesn't exist.

That's right, it is all a big hoax.

Lesbian domestic violence

Glenn Sacks reports:

Dutton cited one study of 1,100 lesbian or bisexual women who are in abusive lesbian relationships. The study, which was conducted in Phoenix, found that the women were more likely to have experienced violence in their previous relationships with women than in their previous relationships with men.

Dutton explained that in general research shows that domestic violence is more common in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual relationships.

Some people just don't believe that women can be responsible for domestic violence, even tho all the studies say they are to blame as much as men.

California school expenses

The California schools are complaining loudly about school budget cuts. Here is a chart of the actual K-12 school expenses over the last 25 years.

I got the data from here. I combined Department of Education and "General Obligation Bonds - K-12". It does not include college expenses or Contributions to Teacher's Retirement Fund. It also does not include federal money, which has been increasing under No Child Left Behind.

As you can see, even with the cuts, K-12 spending is still much more than it was just three years ago.

Stuff white people like

There is a blog called Stuff white people like that brilliantly lampoons white people. I recommend it.

California deficit

California politicians are complaining about a budget deficit, but here are the actual state government revenues in recent years.

My source is the California Legislative Analyst's Office. As you can see, revenues have increased from $72 billion to a projected $103 billion.

Obesity does not cause cancer

The Junk Food Science blog explains that current research shows that fat people don't get cancer any more than anyone else, contrary to what you might have read.

Bernie Ward sex chat released

The police report on left-wing San Francisco talk show host Bernie Ward has been released. (See also the copy on TMG.) In Dec. 2007 it was announced:

The indictment, which was returned on Sept. 20, 2007, and unsealed today, alleges that between December 2004 and January 2005, Ward received images of child pornography on his computer. Ward is also charged with two counts of knowingly distributing images of child pornography that had been mailed, shipped, and transported in interstate commerce by means of a computer.

Ward faces a maximum of 20 years in prison on each count, a $250,000 fine, and a lifetime term of supervised release.

The pictures don't sound that bad, and prosecuting him for distributing child porn seems excessive. But the sex chat transcript makes him sound like a real pervert, and his story about having the child porn to research a book on hypocrisy is obviously a lie. Particularly disturbing are the references to his underage kids.

Ward is a failed Catholic priest, a Bush-hater, and a tool of the angry Left. He had his own "God Talk" radio show with his own peculiar theology. He would sanctimoniously attack the Catholic Church, conservatives, and Republicans at every opportunity. He would subscribe to every wacky leftist conspiracy theory, if it suited his ideology. I don't know if he was really writing a book on hypocrisy, but he was always accusing right-wingers of hypocrisy.

At least no one will have to listen to his stupid hypocrisy rants anymore.

Poll on singles not dating

A new Pew poll concludes:

Whatever the reasons, few of today's seeking singles describe themselves as active on the dating scene.

Here is a possible reason:

More than one in three single women confessed to having someone they can call for no-strings-attached sex.

This is a little-known secret of today's dating scene. Many women maintain these NSA relationships without even their closest friends knowing.

Fast food improves blood cholesterol

Here is some new diet research:

PARIS (AFP) - A month-long diet of fast food and no exercise led to dangerously high levels of enzymes linked to liver damage, in an unusual experiment inspired by the docu-movie "Supersize Me."

But investigators, reporting their findings on Thursday, were also stunned to find that a relentless regimen of burgers, fries and soda also boosted so-called good cholesterol, seen as a key measure of cardiovascular health.

Researchers in Sweden asked 12 men and six women in their twenties, all slim and in good health, to eat two meals per day at McDonalds, Burger King or other fast-food restaurants over four weeks.

The volunteers were also told to refrain from exercising. The goal was to increase body weight by 10 to 15 percent to measure the impact of an abrupt surge in calorie intake.

Roger Clemens testifies

The case against Roger Clemens seems very weak to me. The statistical evidence proves nothing.

A couple of congressmen seemed to think that it was incriminating that Clemens' buddy Andy Pettitte accused him of using HGH, and Clemens was unwilling to call him a liar. Clemens merely said that Pettitte was mistaken.

I disagree. Even if Pettitte was not mistaken, it is telling that his accusation was very weak. He had no knowledge of Clemens using steroids. If Clemens had confided with his buddy about HGH, wouldn't he also be likely to confide in steroid use?

Even if Clemens did use HGH briefly in 1999, I don't think it is any big deal. HGH doesn't even help a pitcher much, as far as I know. I don't see any smoking gun. Clemens should be innocent until proven guilty.

Winning the nomination without a plurality

Whoever wins the Democrat nomination, I just hope that the winning candidate gets a majority of the delegates, but fails to get a plurality of the popular vote. Then we'll have a bunch of Democrats arguing with Democrats about what a fair election is.

Since 2000, Democrats have complained about the USA President not being decided by a plurality of the popular vote. But the Democrats do not even use the popular vote to determine their own nominee.

Diet soda makes you fat

The LA Times reports:

Casting doubt on the benefit of low-calorie sweeteners, research released Sunday reported that rats on diets containing saccharin gained more weight than rats given sugary food.

The study in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience found that the calorie-free artificial sweetener appeared to break the physiological connection between sweet tastes and calories, driving the rats to overeat.

Lyn M. Steffen, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the latest report, said the study offered a possible explanation for the unexpected association between obesity and diet soda found in recent human studies.

If confirmed, this would be another example of conventional diet wisdom being wrong.

Amsterdam’s War on Sex

Newsweek reports:

Amsterdam plans to close down its most famous district, citing sleaze, criminal activity and human trafficking. ... Amsterdam’s mayor, Job Cohen, and his aldermen have demonstrated little nostalgia for the district, which has been the world’s most famous home of sexual permissiveness since the 15th century. They first unveiled the plan to close it in December; last month they revoked the licenses of two widely known sex venues, the Casa Rosso and the Banana Bar.

You can still buy dope there, as far as I know.

Gaydar research

AAAS Science Mag reports:

Talk about "gaydar." In just a fraction of a second, people can accurately judge the sexual orientation of other individuals by glancing at their faces, according to new research. The finding builds on the growing theory that the subconscious mind detects and probably guides much more of human behavior than is realized. ...

Ambady and colleague Nicholas Rule, both at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, wondered about sexual orientation. They showed men and women photos of 90 faces belonging to homosexual men and heterosexual men for intervals ranging from 33 milliseconds to 10 seconds. When given 100 milliseconds or more to view a face, participants correctly identified sexual orientation nearly 70% of the time.

I am not sure this study proves anything. Maybe 20 out of the 90 had haircuts that match stereotypes.

Scottish government drafts Cat Welfare Code

The UK Register reports:

The Scottish government has tackled the thorny issue of cat welfare by issuing a Draft Cat Welfare Code of Practice aimed at providing "basic information and guidance to those responsible for cats on how to care for them".

This exhaustive document contains essential info for those Scots who aren't feline-savvy, such as the revelations that "different cats will have different needs", inquisitive moggies may end up in tumble dryers and that nine lives won't save your pet from if it falls from your sixth-floor balcony.

There's more. Apparently, to keep your cat healthy, it is "essential to provide it with a nutritionally balanced diet from early in its life" (ie, meat, and plenty of it, with the occasional fish and a half-a-dozen songbirds a year).

The govt do-gooders have way too much time on their hands.

Chiral osculators

SciAm reports:

Psychologist Onur Güntürkün of the Ruhr-University of Bochum in Germany recently surveyed 124 couples kissing in public places in the U.S., Germany and Turkey and found that they tilted their heads to the right twice as often as to the left before their lips touched. Right-handedness cannot explain this tendency, because being right handed is four times more common than is the act of kissing on the right. Instead Güntürkün suspects that right-tilted kissing results from a general preference that develops at the end of gestation and in infancy. This “behavioral asymmetry” is related to the lateralization of brain functions such as speech and spatial awareness.

I think that his logic is flawed. If a right-hand kisser were a little more likely to tilt to the right, then that would explain the data.

It's almost impossible

CBS News reports:

Another sign of just how close the Democratic race is: Both Clinton and Obama received 6,001 votes in the city of Syracuse, according to preliminary results. According to Syracuse University mathematics professor Hyune-Ju Kim, the odds of that happening are less than one in one million. "It's almost impossible," Kim said.

His math is wrong. There is at least one chance in a thousand of such a tie in Syracuse, depending on your assumptions. With a lot of cities voting, ties like this are not so surprising.

Update: This statistician also explains it.

Crack found where?

A news site had an inadvertantly funny headline 6 days ago, and already it is on 15,000 web pages.

Why men run from commitment

A forensic psychologist writes:

Why do today’s men run from commitment — indefinitely delaying settling down in a marriage they take seriously, and having kids? Dr. Helen Smith asks whether they are indeed pampered eternal adolescents more interested in exploding toilets and video games than real life. ...

Nowadays, for many men, the negatives of marriage for men often outweigh the positives. Therefore, they engage in it less often. Not because they are bad, not because they are perpetual adolescents, but because they have weighed the pros and cons of marriage in a rational manner and found the institution to be lacking for them. It’s a sensible choice for some and the video games, magazines, and humor websites that Hymowitz disses are a way to fill one’s time with fun activities that don’t tell you that you suck, are an “unfinished person,” emotionally detached or on your way to jail for fake domestic violence charges. People used to treat men better than this.

Read this the next time you hear some female shrink complain about the Peter Pan Syndrome.

Update: Here is an inflammatory comment on it:

I gagged at the first paragraph of that woman's nonsense. She's a single woman with a child. Traditionally, most men would not want to form a life with her.

I have a 29-year-old son. He has known forever that I would NEVER, ABSOLUTELY NEVER under any circumstances, accept as a "pretend grandchild" the child of some other man.

A couple of years ago, it was clear that he had adopted my standard when he said that he would NEVER marry a woman who had a child by another man. I asked, "How about if she had been widowed?" ... His answer was simple: "I don't care what her story is."

The woman who wrote the Atlantic piece made her own selfish choices; let her deal with them without the pity that she seeks in her article. She created a child who would forever have no access to the financial, familial, or emotional support of a father. If that isn't selfish and intentionally abusive, what is?

Any man who would opt to form a life with that woman would be either (1) resigning himself to never having children, or (2) damning his own future children to reduced paternal support and assistance because he would be taking on the task of "pretend father" to the child whose father is an unknown.

The actions and attitudes of the woman author disgust me.

Heath Ledger dies of accidental overdose

Hollywood news:

NEW YORK -- The medical examiner has concluded that actor Heath Ledger's death was an accident, and the result of the abuse of prescription medications.

The medical examiner released results of the toxicology report Wednesday, saying Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of six drugs, including pain killers, sleeping pills, and anti-anxiety drugs.

The six drugs found in his system were oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine, the medical examiner's office said.

The drugs are the generic names for the OxyContin painkiller, the anti-anxiety drug Valium, Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, and the sleep aids Restoril and Unisom. Hydrocodone is another name for the better-known Vicodin. ...

The actor, 28, was found face down and naked on his bed at 3:26 p.m. by his housekeeper.

His housekeeper had entered Ledger's room to let him know that a masseuse had arrived for an appointment, police said.

Police sources said investigators found two bottles of sleeping and anti-anxiety pills at the apartment.

While not a marquee movie star, Ledger was a respected, award-winning actor who chose his roles carefully rather than cashing in on his heartthrob looks. He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as a gay cowboy in "Brokeback Mountain," where he met Michelle Williams, who played his wife in the 2005 film. The two had a daughter, now 2-year-old Matilda, and lived together until they split up last year.

The death was a shocking and unforeseen conclusion for one of Hollywood's bright young stars.

Unforeseen? Somebody had to know that his life was a mess. Who prescribed all those pills?

Fat People Cheaper to Treat

Here is a new study:

LONDON (AP) -- Preventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it doesn't save money, researchers reported Monday. It costs more to care for healthy people who live years longer, according to a Dutch study that counters the common perception that preventing obesity would save governments millions of dollars.

I think that the study just looks at medical savings. There would be additional saving if you consider Social Security payments.

Multiple wives will mean multiple benefits

The UK London Telegraph reports:

Husbands with multiple wives have been given the go-ahead to claim extra welfare benefits following a year-long Government review, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Even though bigamy is a crime in Britain, the decision by ministers means that polygamous marriages can now be recognised formally by the state, so long as the weddings took place in countries where the arrangement is legal.
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The outcome will chiefly benefit Muslim men with more than one wife, as is permitted under Islamic law. Ministers estimate that up to a thousand polygamous partnerships exist in Britain, although they admit there is no exact record.

The article says that the polygamous Mohammedans have been collecting welfare for a couple of years, even tho polygamy is illegal.

Women use lingerie to impress each other

Denmark news:

His findings: when selecting lingerie, the hierarchies of the dressing room play just as much a role as the intrigues of the bedroom when determining what lingerie women purchase.

Østergaard found that women use lingerie as a means for exploring other sides of their personality in addition to merely looking sexy for their mates. Lingerie essentially provides a means for exploring and defining a social identity.

According to Østergaard's findings, women continually size up each other's undergarments in public spaces to evaluate whether they fall within accepted norms. ...

'Men get their impression of undergarments through the media and have quite a stereotypical idea of what is sexy,' said Østergaard. 'But a lot of the lingerie that men see on fashion models doesn't necessarily look as good on their girlfriends at home. She knows that, but he doesn’t.'

This is more evidence that women are harder to understand than men.

Watching football causes heart attacks

The Junkfood science blog writes:

The Super Bowl, and all spectator competitive sports, may be a thing of the past, in accordance with current public health policies. A new study has found such sporting events are associated with a 326% increase in cardiac emergencies among men and nearly a doubled risk among women. These are actual myocardial infarctions and cardiac arrhythmias, not surrogate endpoints for heart problems. For those with heart disease, the risks are twice those of people without a history of heart problems.

He argues that banning the Super Bowl makes about as much sense as banning transfats.

Vegetarianism proves to be perversion of nature

Pravda reports:

Vegetarians can be referred to as true fanatics. On the other hand, they are seriously misled in their beliefs. Practically nobody argues with them, since it is really difficult to convince a vegetarian of his or her self-deception. May be that is the reason why the vegetarian movement develops so actively around the globe and continues to recruit many new members. ...

Vegetarians, especially those of advanced age, usually face numerous health problems that are mainly caused with the shortage of animal protein. ...

Furthermore, cosmetologists say that a typical vegetarian has dry and fragile hair, dull eyes and unhealthy complexion. They can hardly stand criticism and have a low boiling point. They raise their voice, swing their arms and splutter when arguing. They are weak even in their logic. They exemplify their righteousness with the cow, a herbivorous animal, and say that nature originally made a human being as a vegetarian creature.

Pravda used to be a commie propaganda paper. I don't know what it is now.

Teachers: don't say mom and dad

The London UK Daily Mail reports:

Teachers should not assume that their pupils have a "mum and dad" under guidance aimed at tackling anti-gay bullying in schools.

It says primary pupils as young as four should be familiarised with the idea of same-sex couples to help combat homophobic attitudes. ...

When discussing marriage with secondary pupils, teachers should also educate pupils about civil partnerships and gay adoption rights. ...

Teachers should avoid telling boys to "be a man" ...

At the same time, schools should encourage gay role models ...

Next month is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month, where pupils learn about apparently gay figures from history including Leonardo da Vinci, Oscar Wilde and James Dean.

This means that usage of the word "gay" will be tightly policed. Certain usages will be promoted, while others will be punished.

Unusual killer mug shot

Here is a Penn. story:

Torres was driving on Turner Street Friday afternoon when he was pulled over by police and arrested. He was wearing a hooded sweartshirt with a skull-head pattern on it, pajama bottoms and fuzzy lion-faced slippers at the time. He was still wearing the get-up when he was arraigned after midnight at Lehigh County prison. ...

Police have not said how they came to suspect Torres in the shooting deaths of Carlos Collazo, 32, and Jorge Camacho, 36, both of Allentown. But in an affidavit filed in court, police said Torres told them that he and another man had been looking for Collazo and Camacho, and that Torres admitted to killing both.

The cops probably decided that Torres's appearance matched the profile of a murderer. Lock him up!

Prominent psychiatrist ordered to seek help

Psychiatrists commonly prescribe drugs to treat various anti-social behaviors, and downplay the adverse consequences. So what happens when a shrink deviates from the party line on drug treatments? She gets orders to see a shrink herself, in order to coerce her into adopting conforming opinions! From a major Australian newspaper:

Prominent psychiatrist ordered to seek help
Louise Hall Health Reporter
January 27, 2008

A PSYCHIATRIST known as a "hired gun" in court cases has been ordered into treatment by medical authorities after being accused of a dubious diagnosis.

Yolande Lucire has been reprimanded by the NSW Medical Board after its professional standards committee disagreed with a diagnosis she made in a medico-legal case and questioned her professionalism.

The eastern suburbs forensic psychiatrist is well-known in legal circles and her testimony in a criminal trial last year sparked a NSW judge to slam doctors for creating a generation of "Ritalin kids", who were now committing violent crimes.

Dr Lucire said she could not defend herself because of a non-disclosure order, but said the matter "did not relate to patient care". She can continue to practise. ...

The medical board took issue with her diagnosis of residual organic hallucinosis in a patient and she was ordered to see a board-approved senior psychiatrist "for the purpose of seeking and taking advice with a view to improving some aspects of her practice of medicine".

If the shrinks could have their way, anyone with an unorthodox view would be ordered into psychotherapy to be reeducated. And being unorthodox is only measured by the wacky standards of the shrinks, not society at large.

Books that make you dumb

Someone has cleverly used Facebook data to chart books that make you dumb. The idea is to get correlations between average college SAT and popular book preferences. The smart students are reading Lolita while the dumb ones read the Bible.

No sex in marriage

The UK Daily Mail reports:

Carrie Jones hasn't had sex with her husband Hal, a City banker, for the past four years. Nor does she want to. Sex is something she can no longer summon the effort to endure - with the man she married, at least.

She admits she stays in her sexless relationship for the sake of her children, aged nine and 11, and will remain celibate until the day they are grown up and she feels able to leave. At which point, she confesses, she will probably abandon her husband and begin a sexual odyssey to find the satisfaction that eludes her. ...

So convinced is Carrie that her experience of sex in marriage - initially pleasant, dwindling to nothing at all after having children - is a universal one that she has just written a book, under an assumed name, highlighting the disappointment of her sex life. ...

So what of her sexual history? It seems that Carrie wasn't always this uninterested in sex. She admits to having 23 lovers before she married.

"Ten were proper boyfriends," she recalls. "I regretted having sex with six of them, loved three of them but only one of the 23 ever gave me an orgasm.

"As I entered my thirties, it was obvious my sex life had a recurring, rather depressing pattern: intense desire to begin with followed, if the relationship survived long enough, by a slow winding down into indifference.

There is a woman with a serious attitude problem. She needs treatment, not a book tour.

Recidivism rates

A WSJ columnist reports:

Meanwhile, the existing research raises tough questions about the relative danger child molesters pose to society. Their likelihood of being convicted for a crime after release is much lower than average for all criminals released from prison, and even for all sex offenders, at least in the short term, as measured by a Bureau of Justice Statistics study and others.

A lot of people assume that sex offenders can never be cured, and child molesters must be locked up for life because they have the highest recidivism rates of all crimes. I think that we have some public policies based on some bad data.

Male ego is larger than IQ

From an interview of a London psychology prof:

NEWSWEEK: Many studies show that men score slightly higher in IQ tests. Is this significant?
Adrian Furnham: Universally, men tend to score higher on certain specialized skills, such as spatial awareness. In the real world, that means they might be better at reading maps or navigating. Women score higher in terms of language development and emotional intelligence. But most experts agree there is no real, important overall difference when it comes to gender and intelligence.

But women think they aren't as smart as men?
That's the conundrum. What I study is "perceived intelligence," essentially how smart people think they are. I analyzed 30 international studies, and what I found was that women, across the world, tend to underplay their intelligence, while men overstate it.

So do most men think they're Albert Einstein?
There certainly is a greater male ego. It's what we call the male hubris and female humility effect. Men are more confident about their IQ. These studies show that on average, women underestimate their IQ scores by about five points while men overestimate their own IQs. Since these studies were international in scope, the results were essentially the same whether women were from Argentina, America, Britain, Japan or Zimbabwe. Another factor affecting perception may be distribution of IQ ... Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ bell curve are more likely to be men. That is a pattern that we see in the university setting, with men either being at the very top of the class or at the bottom.

Do women tend to think that men are smarter than they are?
Surprisingly, [both] men and women perceive men being smarter across generations. Both sexes believe that their fathers are smarter than their mothers and grandfathers are more intelligent than their grandmothers.

It would indeed be surprising if people all over the world are so wrong about
their own parents.

Mexican guppies sexually harass other fish

NewScientist reports:

Male guppies may sexually harass females of another fish species to prevent them from reproducing, researchers suggest. They believe the guppies -- which have invaded Mexican rivers and lakes -- are using sex as a way of suppressing one native fish population. ...

Guppies, originally from Trinidad, invaded Mexican waters in the 1950s. ...

They put male and female guppies in aquariums with female skiffia and found that no matter how many female guppies were around, male guppies would try to copulate with females of both species.

Their advances were unsuccessful, but Valero and her colleagues believe that the attempts at sex might be harming the female skiffia. ...

The two species have very different ways of reproducing. Skiffia sex is consensual -- males have no extending reproductive organ so the only way for their sperm to reach the females' eggs is for the two animals to line up their genital openings.

Sexual harassment

Guppy sex is more violent. Males have a hooked genital organ known as a gonopodium, which they insert into the females.

The article goes on to say that American minks have been sexually harassing European minks.

Juno

I just watched the new movie Juno. Critics raved about it as a feel-good comedy that is blazingly truthful. Warning: spoilers below.

The movie is about a 16-year-old pregnant girl who struggles with her options. It was okay, but I am a little disturbed about the raves. The title character Juno seduces a classmate and dumps him. She likes him but doesn't give him any say about what to do about the pregnancy. She only considers dating him after she has a jealous fit. She finds adoptive parents based on the most superficial factors, and rejects helpful advice. An ultrasound technician makes a minor comment praising Juno for finding adoptive parents, and we are expected to cheer as the technician gets verbally abused for it. Juno helps to bust up the marriage of the adoptive parents. The adoptive mother turns out to be a nut-case, but she gets the baby anyway.

The writer, Diablo Cody, is a woman who seems to be promoting some sort of feminist message that men should have no say in anything connected to babies. Juno refuses to listen to her father and to the father of her baby. The adoptive mother refuses to listen to what her husband has to say about the adoption, the baby's name, or the house preparations. Both Juno and the adoptive mother are portrayed as women who only need a man to help make the baby, and who can then casually discard the man.

The actress that played Juno, Ellen Page, was also the protagonist in Hard Candy. She also got wide praise for that movie, but I thought that she was creepier than the pedophiles. These are sick movies, and I am disturbed by the raves that they have gotten.

Response to Jonathan: I don't think that the movie Juno is anti-man. The men in the movie are more likable and sympathetic than the women. But the movie is strongly against men having any say about kids. That message is in almost every scene.

Yes, Juno consulted her boyfriend and parents. And then she proceeded to ignore them and insist on making all the decisions by herself. The boy should have met the adoptive parents and signed off on the adoption. The baby is his child also, and he has rights. The parents should have made their own determination regarding whether the adoptive parents were suitable.

I don't blame the 16-year-old Juno for breaking up the marriage of Mark and Vanessa. Juno is just a dumb kid. My objection is to the movie's potrayal of Juno as having done the good and responsible thing. It is clear from the start that Vanessa wants a kid much more than she wants to keep her husband, and that the kid will ruin their marriage. Vanessa was marginalizing Mark by ignoring him, confining his music to one room of the house, and refusing his input on baby names and house preparations. When the kid arrives, Mark will be completely extraneous. If she were really such a good mother, then she would have been figuring out how to get her husband more invested in the baby, instead of figuring out ways to shut him out. Maybe Juno isn't smart enough to see what is happening, but the adoption did destroy the marriage. Also, Juno insists on flirting with Mark even after her parents warn her of the dangers. And finally, Juno condemns her own baby to a fatherless life.

Update: Juno just got Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Actress, Director, and Original Screenplay.

College smokes out student with an opinion

The NY Times reports this about an unnamed university that requires its students to write anonymous evaluations of their professors:

On one evaluation, a student made derogatory comments about a professor’s sexual orientation. The university hired a handwriting expert to confirm the identity of the culprit so punishment could be administered. The university claims the student broke the code of conduct, ...

The handwriting expert confirmed the identity of the student, who was given a formal reprimand and was required to write an essay on how his remarks can affect the gay community, to write a letter of apology to the professor and to meet with a dean of students to discuss enrolling in a program meant to teach tolerance.

I think that the university has a problem tolerating anonymous comments. I have received inappropriate anonymous comments, but it never occurred to me that a university might track down the student and punish him for expressing his opinion.

Law of unintended consequences

The Freakonomics guys write (with comments on their blog):

So does this mean that every law designed to help endangered animals, poor people and the disabled is bound to fail? Of course not. But with a government that is regularly begged for relief — these days, from mortgage woes, health-care costs and tax burdens — and with every presidential hopeful making daily promises to address these woes, it might be worth encouraging the winning candidate to think twice (or even 8 or 10 times) before rushing off to do good. Because if there is any law more powerful than the ones constructed in a place like Washington, it is the law of unintended consequences.

That is true, but there ought to be a better name for this law. The first example was how the Americans With Disabilities Act [ADA] sometimes causes discrimination against disabled folks. I'd be willing to bet that when Congress debated the ADA, there were people who openly and loudly explained that it would cause exactly the sort of problems that are described in the article. There were probably even amendments offered to mitigate these consequences. It appears to me that Congress really did intend those bad consequences.

Back seat sex research

Sex research seems to have very low standards. USA Today reports:

Bisexuality among women isn't just a phase, according to new research that followed 79 non-heterosexual women for a decade and found that bisexual women continue to be attracted to both sexes over time.

Being bisexual is a distinct orientation, not a temporary stage, says the study by Lisa Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah. It is being published next week in the January issue of Developmental Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association. ...

Diamond suggests that most women "possess the capacity to experience sexual desires for both sexes, under the right circumstances."

So she talked to 79 non-hetersexual women, and then jumped to conclusions about most women. There was not even a control group.

The study also debunks the stereotype that bisexual women aren't able to commit to monogamous relationships because they're always thinking about desire for the other gender.

So how did she determine that these women were still bisexual, if they were committed to monogamous relationships?

"Women's sexuality in general has taken a back seat in terms of research overall."

This academic research sounds about as valid as my personal back-seat sex research on women.

Impersonating the police

M. Carolina news:

The man asked for assistance in locating an item in the store, and, as the cashier helped him, he told her he was an officer with the Marion Police Department, said the document. ...

Melton was taken into custody in Rutherford County last week and charged with impersonating an officer. He was released on a written promise to appear in court.

"Melton admitted that he had told employees that he was an officer," the release stated. "When asked why, Melton said that he did it to impress the ladies. Melton said that he did not know it was a crime and that he thought it sounded better than telling the ladies that he was a plumber. Melton said that he thought it would help him get the ladies to date him."

Is there some list of lies that are approved for impressing the ladies?

I realize that it has to be illegal to make an arrest under false pretenses, or to somehow falsely coerce people under color of police authority, but this guy sounds harmless to me. Does he really have to tell the ladies that he is a plumber?

Mohammedan terrorist convicted

British Muslim computer geek, son of diplomat, revealed as al Qaeda's top cyber terrorist

A computer nerd from Shepherd's Bush, West London, became al Qaeda's top internet agent, it can be revealed today.

Younes Tsouli, 23, an IT student at a London college, used his top-floor flat in W12 to help Islamist extremists wage a propaganda war against the West.

Under the name Irhabi 007 — combining the James Bond reference with the Arabic for terrorist — he worked with al Qaeda leaders in Iraq and came up with a way to convert often gruesome videos into a form that could be put onto the Web.

Lawmaker wants to castrate trucks

Virginia news:

State lawmaker Lionel Spruill introduced a bill Tuesday to ban displaying rubber replicas of male genitalia on vehicles, calling it a safety issue because it could distract other drivers.

Our precious American freedoms are disappearing, one by one.

Higher wine prices boost drinking pleasure

Reuters reports:

STANFORD, California (Reuters) - The more wine costs, the more people enjoy it, regardless of how it tastes, a study by California researchers has found.

Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology found that because people expect wines that cost more to be of higher quality, they trick themselves into believing the wines provide a more pleasurable experience than less expensive ones.

Their study, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says that expectations of quality trigger activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. This happens even though the part of our brain that interprets taste is not affected.

While many studies have looked at how marketing affects behavior, this is the first to show that it has a direct effect on the brain.

I am not surprised. People like fancy wines for reasons other than taste.

Wacky Frisco intruder story

A Texan is apt to draw a gun if there is a strange intruder in the house in the middle of the night. Here is what can happen in San Francisco:

The new year kicked off memorably for Donald Burnette and his wife, Deborah Martin, when they were awakened by the sound of someone kicking in the back door of their third-story apartment in San Francisco's Upper Haight about 1 a.m. Jan. 1.

Standing in the kitchen of the Stanyan Street flat was a vision out of a sci-fi comic book: a guy in his early 20s whose body, boots and gloves were studded with spikes, some more than an inch long.

The story gets weirder after that. Calling 911 was no help, and the couple had find some cops changing a flat tire down the street to kick the weirdo out of their apartment.

Roger Clemens should get more respect

The NY Times writes this about MLB pitcher Roger Clemens:

Accused by his former personal trainer of taking steroids for several years, Clemens has found his reputation as one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history splintering by the day. He has embarked on a furious and, some say, debatable public relations effort with the spin of his tightest slider. ...

If Clemens is telling the truth about never having taken steroids, Langberg and other experts said, he is failing to leave that impression — and instead leaving himself open to public and legal consequences. His contentions that injections he received were merely of the painkiller lidocaine and the vitamin B12 have not rung plausibly with the public, they said, despite his emotion. ...

Langberg and Marina Ein, a crisis-management consultant based in Washington, said they would have strongly advised against Clemens’s appearing on “60 Minutes” last Sunday and holding a long news conference the next day. They tell their clients to assert their innocence, outrage and commitment to fight the charges under oath only in a brief written statement, rather than in the more uncontrollable forums in which Clemens lost his cool.

In other words, Clemens is being found guilty in the court of public opinion because he did not hire the right PR firm.

Three of the greatest baseball players that I have ever seen are Pete Rose, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens. All had long and illustrious careers that should have made them heroes. They share the most impressive records.

And yet they have all been disgraced by innuendo from colleages and associates who have double-crossed them. I am not convinced that any of them are guilty of anything. Considering their many years of outstanding service to baseball, I think that they should be given the benefit of the doubt. They haven't been. Too many people regard them as guilty until proven innocent. MLB is a disgrace for how they have treated their very best and most loyal stars.

In Clemens's case, the accusation just comes from one guy who used it to get more favorable treatment from federal prosecutors. The case looks weak to me. I think that it is unamerican to treat him like a guilty man, even if his PR strategy is not the best.

Hollywood mathematicians

A WSJ blog says:

"I think you could make a movie about a mathematician who is not psychotic or schizophrenic," said Ken Keeler, a PhD in applied math who has written for "Futurama" and "The Simpsons." John Nash, the Nobel Prize winner who was played by Russell Crowe in "A Beautiful Mind," is the latter, and his mental illness served as the bulk of that film's drama, rather than his mathematical innovations.

"Numb3rs," the popular CBS show about a mathematician who helps federal investigators crack cases, would appear to be an exception. But Mr. Keeler notes that even Charlie Eppes, the hero of the show played by David Krumholtz, "is not normal."

Numb3rs portrays math about as well as it can for the audience. Yes, it is exaggerated and simplified, but so is everything else on TV.

Eppes is not normal, but he is not a lunatic like most of the Hollywood mathematicians. Good Will Hunting (1997) and Pi (1998) present particular negative images of mathematicians.

Almost all recorded music is digital

The NY Times reports:

Warner is the third of the four major music corporations to reconsider its use of so-called digital rights management software, known by its initials as D.R.M., and offer its catalog in the unrestricted MP3 format. ...

The move also comes as the industry faces increasing pressure to bolster digital music sales as its traditional business -- selling CDs -- suffers a sharp decline.

The reporter is not very clear on the concept. Music sales went digital about 25 years ago. CDs contain digital music, and they always have. The traditional music business is the digital music business.

The main promoter of DRM music is Apple with its iTunes store. If you buy music elsewhere, in CD or mp3 format, then you can nearly always just copy it to your computer or portable music player without any difficulty. Music from Apple comes with tight restrictions, and can only be played on an Apple computer or ipod.

Update: Here is a Jan. 14 NY Times article that makes the same mistake. It quotes someone saying:

How do I convince them that digital music is a good thing to begin with?

When does anyone ever listen to recorded music that is not digital?

ex Offenders Are Barred From Internet by New Jersey

The NY Times reports:

New Jersey enacted legislation on Thursday banning some convicted sex offenders from using the Internet.

In signing the restrictions into law, Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey, who is filling in while Gov. Jon S. Corzine is vacationing, noted that sexual predators were as likely to lurk at a computer keyboard as in a park or playground.

No federal law restricts sex offenders’ use of the Internet, and Florida and Nevada are the only other states to impose such restrictions.

There are some good comments here.

These laws are really extreme. A lot of sex offender are convicted of minor crimes based on flimsy evidence.

UK dumbs tests down

A UK paper reports:

Pupils should be given as much time as they need to complete crucial national tests, says the Government's exam watchdog.

This would ensure the children, aged 11 to 14 and sitting Key Stage tests, do not become stressed, says a report by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

The proposal will reignite accusations that examinations are being dumbed down and an "all must have prizes" system is being encouraged.

In the USA, a lot of kids get extra time by claiming to have a learning disability.

Safe sex public health posters

Here are some bizarre French anti-AIDS posters.

Idiots on The View

The TV show The View seems like just a parody of silly women saying silly things. Here is Sherri Shepherd's best in 2007. She says that nothing predated Jesus and Christians, and that she tries not to beat her kid in a rich white kids store.

County lets women out of jail

Wisconsin news:

Sometime next year, La Crosse County might let all its female prisoners out of jail. Instead of sitting behind bars, the women will be in a new community-based program the La Crosse County Board unanimously approved Thursday night. ...

Supervisor Keith Belzer, a criminal defense attorney, said in 15 years he's never represented a woman who was put in jail because she's dangerous.

"I'm not saying there won't ever be a woman in La Crosse County who's dangerous and needs to be locked up for the safety of the community," said Belzer. "I will say that would be the rare exception rather than the rule."

Belzer said women are almost always in the system "because of some kind of relationship with a man."

So if a woman gets convicted of a crime, she just gets treatment on having better relationships with men? Weird.

Humor comes from testosterone

UK BBC reports:

Men are naturally more comedic than women because of the male hormone testosterone, an expert claims.

Men make more gags than women and their jokes tend to be more aggressive, Professor Sam Shuster, of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, says.

The unicycling doctor observed how the genders reacted to his "amusing" hobby.

Women tended to make encouraging, praising comments, while men jeered. The most aggressive were young men, he told the British Medical Journal. ...

Dr Nick Neave is a psychologist at the University of Northumbria who has been studying the physical, behavioural, and psychological effects of testosterone.

He suggested men might respond aggressively because they see the other unicycling man as a threat, attracting female attention away from themselves.

"This would be particularly challenging for young males entering the breeding market and thus it does not surprise me that their responses were the more threatening."

Somehow I don't think that this clown was really a threat to young men.

Low IQ kids do not get adopted

Steve Sailer analyzes a NY Times story about how Romanian orphanage kids have low IQ. He quotes:

On I.Q. tests taken at 54 months, the foster children scored an average of 81, compared to 73 among the children who continued in an institution. The children who moved into foster care at the youngest ages tended to show the most improvement, the researchers found.

The comparison group of youngsters who grew up in their biological families had an average I.Q. of 109 at the same age, found the researchers, who announced their preliminary findings as soon in Romania as they were known.

It appears that the low IQ kids are gypsies that no one wants to adopt.

Those named K strike out

The WSJ Numbers Guy writes:

For example, major league baseball players with first or last initial K were more likely than average to strike out; and business graduate students with initials C or D had lower grades, on average, perhaps reflecting an unconscious affinity to the grades corresponding to their initials.

There have been a lot of other studies that have found correlations with names and birth dates. This sounds like astrology to me. If these studies are correct, then it seems possible that astrological signs could have some significant correlations.

Mindreading Games

Soon, you will be able to buy mindreading toys.

Women spend much more than men

A Business school publication says:

Women spend $4 trillion annually and account for 83% of U.S. consumer spending, which makes up two-thirds of the nation's gross national product, according to WomenCertified, a women's consumer advocacy and retail training organization headquartered in Hollywood, Fla., which also worked on the study.

The "Men Buy, Women Shop" study is based on a random, national sample of 1,250 shoppers who were asked about a recent shopping experience in telephone interviews conducted from October 20 to November 4, 2007. The sample was dominated, two to one, by females.

Swedes castrate army symbol

News from Sweden:

Protests from female soldiers have led to the Swedish military removing the penis of a heraldic lion depicted on the Nordic Battlegroup's coat of arms.

The armed forces agreed to emasculate the lion after a group of women from the rapid reaction force lodged a complaint to the European Court of Justice, Göteborgs-Posten reports. ...

But the castrated lion has already won the day and is now worn on the arms of all soldiers in the battle group's Swedish battalions.

"We were given the task of making sure the willy disappeared," Christian Braunstein from the army's 'tradition commission' told Göteborgs-Posten.

"We were forced to cut the lion's willy off with the aid of a computer," he added.

I guess nobody cares if the male soldiers don't like having to wear the image of a castrated lion.

Huckabee urges wives to submit

AP reports:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Republican Mike Huckabee's record on women's rights is coming under increased scrutiny, including his endorsement of the Southern Baptist Convention's stance that women should "submit graciously" to their husbands and his opposition to sending women into combat. ...

The former Arkansas governor and his wife Janet signed a full-page ad in USA Today in support of the statement with 129 other evangelical leaders in 1998.

"A wife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ," the convention says in its statement of faith.

Homeschooled kid wins biggest college sports award

Homeschooled kids have been winning spelling bees and other contests for years, but now a homeschooler has won the Heisman Trophy for college football. Florida QB Tim Tebow was homeschooled until college.

Double bubble in calendar

This is from a math calendar.

Bernie Ward indicted

When a right-wing radio talk-show host gets caught in some minor scandal, the news media grossly exaggerates the story. But now left-wing radio talk-show host Bernie Ward just got indicted for distributing child pornography, and everyone is strangely silent.

Bernie Ward sounds like a puppet of MoveOn.org, and is a typical lying Bush-hater. He is a failed Catholic priest, and has the most annoying holier-than-thou attitude when he lectures the public on his own peculiar theology. He claims that he needed the child porn for a book on Hypocrisy that he was writing. I doubt that he deserves the draconian penalties that he faces. I think that he is mainly guilty of being an idiot. But Ward appears to have done something worse than Rush Limbaugh, and Ward is the real hypocrite.

Women want casual but ethical sex

Here is some wacky sex research from down under:

Women 'want no-strings sex'
5:00AM Saturday December 08, 2007
By Simon Collins

Two young women researchers are calling for a new form of sexual ethics that would allow women to have casual sex without feeling that they're "sluts".

They say the popular view of women as either promiscuous or passive victims has failed to reduce incidents of rape and sexual assault.

Instead, they want both women and men to think about what each of them really wants out of a sexual encounter, and negotiate how to get it.

Canadian sociologist Melanie Beres, a post-doctoral researcher at Auckland University, and Auckland doctoral student Pantea Farvid told a sociology conference yesterday that rape prevention efforts should stop just giving women tips to avoid harm and promote an ethic of "self-care and care for the other".

Dr Beres interviewed young Canadians aged 19 to 25 about their casual sex experiences, while Ms Farvid interviewed New Zealanders in the same age bracket. The New Zealand women were more likely to have actively initiated casual sex, whereas the Canadians were more likely to say it "just happened". Drink was used by some as an excuse for their choices.

Studies have shown New Zealanders start sex younger than in many countries and have high rates of teen pregnancies and STDs. By the age of 25, 13 per cent of women have had more than 10 sexual partners.

Dr Beres said some women deliberately challenged society's "double standard" that said casual sex was okay for men. One woman in her study took the initiative in sexual encounters and another had decided that a serious relationship would hinder her career, so she sought casual sex to meet her physical needs.

Ms Farvid said a more open approach to sex would move away from the legal idea that the only issue in sexual morality was consent.

In some highly publicised group sex cases, men had escaped conviction because of doubts over consent. But on the basis of care for oneself and others, it would be unethical to have "four men in a room with a woman".

I guess that the women are still sluts if they have sex with four men at one time.

Free speech on YouTube

A JAMA article complains that the freely available info on YouTube.com does not always match the official govt mandates. The article is not freely available on the web.

Republicans are more sane

A Gallup poll finds:

Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans report having excellent mental health, compared to 43% of independents and 38% of Democrats. This relationship between party identification and reports of excellent mental health persists even within categories of income, age, gender, church attendance, and education.

Female voting consequences

John R. Lott Jr., author of the book Freedomnomics, writes in the Wash Times:

Studies show that women are generally more risk averse than men. Possibly, this is why they are more supportive of government programs to ensure against certain risks in life. ...

Even after accounting for a range of other factors — such as industrialization, urbanization, education and income — the impact of granting of women's suffrage on per-capita state government expenditures and revenue was startling. Per capita state government spending after accounting for inflation had been flat or falling during the 10 years before women began voting. But state governments started expanding the first year after women voted and continued growing until within 11 years real per capita spending had more than doubled. The increase in government spending and revenue started immediately after women started voting.

Everyone agrees that women should be allowed to vote, but Lott shows that women's suffrage has had a number of undesirable consequences.

Deep-voiced men father more kids

The NY Science Times reports:

Researchers have found that men with deeper voices have more children -- at least among the Hadza, a group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania.

According to background information in an article published online for the Dec. 22 edition of Biology Letters, most women in Western societies find lower-pitched male voices more attractive, judging them healthier and more masculine. Meanwhile, men find higher-pitched voices more appealing.

The evolutionary reasons for reproductive success are difficult to discover in a society that uses modern birth control methods. The Hadza use no birth control and choose their own spouses; this makes them what the researchers call a “natural fertility population” where hypotheses about human reproductive success can be tested.

Researchers collected voice recordings (the Hadza speak Swahili) and reproductive histories from 49 men and 52 women to determine if voice pitch might affect the number of children.

After controlling for age, voice pitch was a highly accurate predictor of the number of children a man fathered, and those with deeper voices fathered significantly more. The researchers estimated that voice quality alone could account for 42 percent of the variance in men’s reproductive success. The quality of women’s voices was unrelated to how many children they had.

Maybe the women think that the men with the high-pitched voices are gay.

Update: Evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup says the handgrip is more important:

Gallup’s new research suggests that handgrip strength in men is directly connected with reproductive fitness.

People with high grip-strength scores are usually healthier than those with weak grips. "They live longer and recover faster from injury," Gallup says. "They have reduced disability, higher bone density and greater fat-free body mass." And in a study published this year, Gallup and his son Andrew -- at the time an undergraduate psychology major -- found that males with high grip-strength scores reported being more aggressive and dominant and had more masculine body types (broader shoulders, narrower hips). They also had "increased sexual opportunities," which resulted in an increased number of sexual partners, and younger ages of first sexual encounter.

UK rape trial changes not working

The UK has to keep changing the rules in order to increase the rape conviction rate:

Legislation to stop rape complainants from being unfairly questioned about their sexual history in court is not working, a report has concluded. ...

It said there had been "no discernible effect" on reducing the number of failed prosecutions.

Data for 2004 shows the proportion of rape allegations that result in a conviction continues to fall, standing at 5.6% out of 14,000 reported offences.

That is an odd way to report the conviction rate. Many of those reported offenses were withdrawn or not prosecuted for various reasons. The UK govt just wants to boost conviction rates.

The Earth's Moon is unusual

From a JPL news release:

New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that moons like Earth's - that formed out of tremendous collisions - are uncommon in the universe, arising at most in only 5 to 10 percent of planetary systems. ...

Scientists believe the Moon arose about 30 to 50 million years after our Sun was born, and after our rocky planets had begun to take shape. A body as big as Mars is thought to have smacked into our infant Earth, breaking off a piece of its mantle. Some of the resulting debris fell into orbit around Earth, eventually coalescing into the moon we see today. The other moons in our solar system either formed simultaneously with their planet or were captured by their planet's gravity.

A lot of things about the Earth-Moon system are very unusual, and they may even be essential for life on Earth. I think that scientists overestimate the possibility of intelligent life on other planets.

Deadbeat dad avoids felony conviction

Michigan news:

A jury found a 36-year-old Eastpointe man not guilty of felony child support for late payments following a 2-day-trial in Macomb County Circuit Court.

Corey Flener wiped away tears after the jury delivered the verdict Thursday afternoon and said he felt relieved to have the burden of a potential felony conviction lifted. If convicted, he would have faced a sentence of up to four years in prison and a fine levied by Judge Tracey Yokich. ...

Flener still owes $60,000 but claims he was behind $45,000 in 2000 before he realized he owed any money because he was unaware his now ex-wife, Tammy, filed for divorce. The amount has climbed also because of accumulating interest.

These prosecutions are outrageous. It does no good to throw a man in jail, just because he cannot pay the interest on some dubious old debt to his ex-wife.

Child custody evaluations

NPR All Things Considered (afternoon radio news) had a segment (audio here) on how child custody evaluations are bogus, and ought to be abolished.

The host finished with

In other words, perhaps the best thing that parents can do is: Skip the child custody evaluation, sit down, and figure it out themselves.

No, that is not really the lesson here. The child custody evaluations are ordered by the court; parents almost never submit to them voluntarily. What we need is for the courts to stop ordering them.

Cops overreact to toddler's story

The Las Vegas Sun reports:

Authorities: Girl, 4, Invents Abduction

Santa Ana, Calif. (AP) - Deputies began a search and even questioned a man after a 4-year-old girl reported an attempted abduction before she admitted she made the whole thing up, a sheriff's spokesman said.

The girl said a man with spiked hair and a dragon tattoo approached her on a playground Tuesday and showed her a gun tucked in his waistband, sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino said. Authorities dispatched eight police cars, a helicopter and a dozen armed officers to find the suspect and even interviewed a man with spiked hair during a four-hour hunt, he said.

But the child's story changed repeatedly during the day and she finally admitted to inventing the attempted kidnapping to get back at her mother, Amormino said. The mother had briefly left her daughter unsupervised in a gated playground in mobile home park where the family lives and the child was scared, he said.

Amormino said authorities were stunned that a child so young could provide such vivid details about something that didn't happen.

"In 28 years in law enforcement, I have never had a 4-year-old make up a story like this," he said Wednesday. "It says something about what television is doing to our children."

Investigators cannot charge the child, but may suggest that her parents get her counseling, Amormino said.

It would be better to send the cops into counseling. Children commonly make up stories.

Using Caller ID

Why is it that so few businesses use Caller ID? It is very annoying to call a business, and then have to orally give my phone number. Caller ID technology has been available for 20 years. It only costs about $2 per month. It saves a lot of time, mistakes, and lost numbers.

Successful blacks

Black Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates Jr writes in the NY Times:

I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon). And I’ve seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 — a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property.

Someone observed:

There's nothing "astonishing" [his word] about Gates's statistic. If we go back to great-grandparents (as Gates does in his Winfrey example), then four relevant families exist (by hypothesis) in 1920. At that time, according to Gates, 25% of black families owned property. The probability that "at least one" of the four relevant antecedent families held property in 1920 is thus 1.0 - (0.75 x 0.75 x 0.75 x 0.75) which is about 68%. Gates's sample of 20 yielded 75%.

He is correct. Gates's argument is bogus.

Executions save lives

The NY Times admits:

According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.

The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly. ...

To economists, it is obvious that if the cost of an activity rises, the amount of the activity will drop. ... To many economists, then, it follows inexorably that there will be fewer murders as the likelihood of execution rises.

It is amazing how many otherwise intelligent people say that they are against the death penalty because it has been proved not to be a deterrent. In fact, nearly all the research for decades has shown that the death penalty is a deterrent.

There are other arguments against the death penalty, but people should realize that saving the life of a convicted murderer could result in some other innocent person getting murdered.

The NY Times reports:

Doctors cannot diagnose attention deficit or any other psychiatric disorder with imaging technology

I've met people who have told me that their kid has ADD or autism or dyslexia or something else, and that they are sure of it because of an MRI or some other brain scan. It is just not possible with current technology.

The main point of the article is to say that misbehaving kids are not doomed:

Kindergartners who interrupted the teacher, defied instructions and even picked fights were performing as well in reading and math as well-behaved children of the same abilities when they both reached fifth grade, the study found. ... The findings should also put to rest concerns that boys and girls who are restless, disruptive or withdrawn in kindergarten are bound to suffer academically. ...

About 80 percent of those with attention problems were taking or had taken stimulant drugs, and the researchers did not know the effect of the medications on brain development. Doctors consider stimulant drugs a reliable way to improve attention in the short term; the new study is not likely to change that attitude.

So your kid will do fine without the drugs, but your pediatrician will want to drug him anyway.

Shapely women have smart kids

NewScientist reports:

Curvier women may have smart children because hip fat contains polyunsaturated fatty acids critical for the development of the fetus's brain.

Using data from the US National Center for Health Statistics, William Lassek at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and Steven Gaulin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, found a child's performance in cognition tests was linked to their mother's waist-hip ratio, a proxy for how much fat she stores on her hips.

The study authors claimed that they accounted for other factors, but I don't believe it. Men prefer women with small waist-hip ratios. So do women. So all they really found was that female success in one area is correlated with success in another area. Maybe these women are smarter or healthier, or marry smarter husbands, or have more money, or less likely to be drug addicts, or a lot of other things.

Gay jokes could be banned

A gay lawyer brags:

Yesterday the House passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The vote was 235-184, with 35 Republicans in favor and 25 Democrats against. It's the first time either house of Congress has ever passed a gay civil-rights bill.

The gay lobby has mixed opinions. In the UK, a similar law could make gay jokes illegal.

Once again, Congress is telling us to do what it won't do itself. Congress passed a law allowing the armed forces to discriminate based on homosexual activities.

If they are not trying to ban gay jokes, why don't they just put a clause in the law explicitly saying that the right to tell gay jokes is not being restricted?

New book on Duke rape case

Someone recommended this PBS interview:

Legal journalist Stuart Taylor discusses his new book, "Until Proven Innocent," which takes a deeper look at the controversy surrounding the Duke University Lacrosse team rape case.

Their innocence is old news. I named the accuser back in April 2006 because I had concluded that they were innocent.

I am sure that Taylor and K.C. Johnson do a fine job of documenting the innocence of the Duke lacrosse players, but I doubt that the book goes far enough in exposing the evil behind the prosecution.

Taylor places most of the blame on the "rogue District Attorney Mike Nifong". The blame should really go primarily to the justice system that is fundamentally tilted against anyone accused of a sex crime.

What saved the Duke boys was not the justice system, but modern technology. Without digital cameras, cell phones, ATMs, video surveillance, DNA tests, and bloggers, they would be in jail today. Even when they presented overwhelming evidence of their innocence to the judge, the judge still refused to dismiss the charges. It still took overwhelming public pressure, and documentation of mistakes by the accuser, police, and DA.

There are many others in jail today for sex crimes based only on flimsy evidence. The rules of evidence for sex crimes is very one-sided, and the public has no patience with accused sex offenders.

Disbarring Nifong was really a fluke. I bet that prosecutors in every state have done worse things, and nothing happened to them even when they got caught.

No, this is not just a story of a rogue prosecutor. It is the story of how hard it is in our society for anyone to prove himself innocent of a sex crime.

The difference myth

Here is some science news from the Boston Globe paper:

Scientists have turned up some intriguing findings of anatomical differences between the sexes.

You would think that would be obvious. The article goes on to argue that brain differences are either insignificant, or should be ignored anyway.

From a UK Times column:

With increasing frequency, women in their twenties, thirties and forties take a pragmatic, postfeminist view that sex is something over which they have no need to negotiate. In the bedroom, there is no compromise. If a man has a higher sex drive than a woman, then he can sort himself out. If he wants to try something new and she can’t be bothered, tough luck to him. ...

Having researched my new book, as well as talked to thousands of men and women over the years, I now firmly believe that too many women see the sexual side of their lives as something to be claimed completely and utterly as their own. ...

Does she really want to take out the rubbish in the pouring rain? No, but partners in relationships do such things because they know that it makes the other happy. Sex should be seen in the same light.

More amusing is the feminist outrage to this. They don't believe that a woman should satisfy her husband, and they don't believe that men have greater sexual needs anyway.

More cell phone hype

The Google Android gPhone has become the move overhyped product since the Apple iPhone. Google brags that the big advantage will be its spyware capabilities:

Android does not differentiate between the phone's core applications and third-party applications. ...

With Android, a developer could build an application that enables users to view the location of their friends and be alerted when they are in the vicinity giving them a chance to connect.

This makes a lot of sense for Google. With the ability to spy on everything you are doing and everywhere you are going, it can sell more targeted ads. Soon your cell phone will light up with a Google ad that says, "You are a block from Macy's and your friend Jenny bought shoes there last week. Click here for a map and prices."

Meanwhile Time mag declared the Apple iPhone the Invention Of the Year. Time said that it was pretty, cool, and may someday be replaced with a product that is cheaper and more useful.

Krugman lies again

The lying Bush-hater Paul Krugman writes:

"My chance of surviving prostate cancer — and thank God I was cured of it — in the United States? Eighty-two percent," says Rudy Giuliani in a new radio ad attacking Democratic plans for universal health care. "My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 percent, under socialized medicine."

It would be a stunning comparison if it were true. But it isn’t. ...

Mr. Giuliani got his numbers from a recent article in City Journal, a publication of the conservative Manhattan Institute. The author gave no source for his numbers on five-year survival rates — the probability that someone diagnosed with prostate cancer would still be alive five years after the diagnosis. And they're just wrong.

You see, the actual survival rate in Britain is 74.4 percent. That still looks a bit lower than the U.S. rate, but the difference turns out to be mainly a statistical illusion. The details are technical, ...

So Krugman calls Guiliani a liar because he got a statistic from an article that does not cite its source. But Krugman does not cite a source for his 74.4% figure either.

On Krugman's blog, he cites this:

Five-year survival rates were 95 percent in the U.S. and 60 percent in the United Kingdom, which includes Britain, in 1993-1995, the most recent time period with data to compare, the group said.

Today, rates are higher -- 99 percent in the U.S. and an estimated 74 percent in the U.K.

Assuming that this is Krugman's source, he is falsely presenting the 74% figure for the UK as being comparable to Guiliani's 82% figure for the USA. It is not. Even by Krugman's own measures, USA prostate cancer survival rates are much higher than the UK's.

Study on risks of toddlers watching TV

USA Today reports:

Study: Educational TV for toddlers OK

CHICAGO (AP) — Arthur and Barney are OK for toddler TV-watching. But not Rugrats and certainly not Power Rangers, reports a new study of early TV-watching and future attention problems.

The research involved children younger than 3, so TV is mostly a no-no anyway, according to the experts. But if TV is allowed, it should be of the educational variety, the researchers said.

Every hour per day that kids under 3 watched violent child-oriented entertainment their risk doubled for attention problems five years later, the study found. Even non-violent kids' shows like Rugrats and The Flintstones carried a still substantial risk for attention problems, though slightly lower. ...

Previous research and news reports on TV's effects have tended to view television as a single entity, without regard to content. But "the reality is that it's not inherently good or bad. It really depends on what they watch," said Dr. Dimitri Christakis, who co-authored the study with researcher Frederick Zimmerman.

Also, WebMD reports:

Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, MPH, tells WebMD that a 3-year-old who watches TV for two hours a day "has a 20% increased risk for attention problems at age 7 compared with a child who doesn't watch any TV."

Christakis says that the risk increases as TV watching increases so that "for each additional hour of television watched, the risk is increased by almost 10%."

But that is not what the actual research article concluded:

RESULTS. Data were available for 184 boys and 146 girls at both time periods. Adjusting for baseline Behavioral Problem Index scores and age, parental education, maternal depression, and cognitive and emotional support, violent television programming was associated with an increased risk for antisocial behavior for boys but not for girls. Neither educational nor nonviolent programming was associated with increased risk for boys or girls.

CONCLUSIONS. Viewing of violent programming by preschool boys is associated with subsequent aggressive behavior. Modifying the content that is viewed by young children may be warranted.

So the news article says that nonviolent shows can be a problem, but the research says not. The news article says that TV leads to "attention problems such as difficulty concentrating, being easily distracted, impulsiveness, or restlessness." The research article says that TV leads to "aggressive behavior".

In my opinion, you should ignore all of this and just use common sense. This is an example of supposed experts giving opinions outside their expertise. Pediatricians are experts on child medicine, but have no expertise in TV watching.

If watching Rugrats is really correlated with later attention problems or aggressive behavior, then there are several possible explanations. Maybe kids who inherit an attention problem have parents who don't pay attention to what the kids watch on TV. Maybe kids who already have an attention problem are bored by Sesame Street and prefer the faster-paced shows like Rugrats. Maybe the kids with the aggressive behavior are the healthy ones, and it is the kids who did not watch Rugrats who are overly-docile and have the problem.

The Pediatricians officially recommend that no children under the age of two be allowed to watch TV. I don't agree, and I believe that some TV shows can be beneficial.

The Subjectivity of Wine

Jonah Lehrer reports on various experiments to prove that wine-tasting is subjective:

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the "red" wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its "jamminess," while another enjoyed its "crushed red fruit." Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The experts also cannot tell the difference between expensive and cheap wines, and can be fooled by just putting a fancy label on the bottle.

Nazi attempt to control tobacco

Devra Davis claims that there is some sort of conspiracy to suppress knowledge about cancer prevention, and writes:

During the Nazi era, the Germans tried and failed to enact stringent policies to control tobacco. Their conquerors, despite having full access to German research on tobacco, didn't even try.

Usually people cites the Nazis as an example govt overreaching. This is someone arguing that the Nazis did not go far enough to control the Germans.