Why so many of America’s sushi restaurants are Chinese-owned

The influx of low-wage Chinese immigrants — China recently eclipsed Mexico as the largest source of immigrants to the United States — has created fierce competition to provide cheap food. At the same time, Japan’s wealth and economic success helped its cuisine gain a reputation as trendy and refined. So for many entrepreneurial Chinese immigrants looking to get ahead, Japanese food has often become the better opportunity.

“Chinese entrepreneurs have figured out that this is a way to make a slightly better living and get out of the . . . world of $10, $5 food at the bottom end of the market,” says Krishnendu Ray, who leads New York University’s food studies program. […]

“Japanese food has more prestige and seems to, if you just look at a menu, have greater economic opportunity attached to it, because people are conditioned to pay more for rice and protein when it’s presented as sushi than rice and protein when it’s presented as a stir fry,” said Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Sushi Economy.” […]

“I can tell you it is easier to do than a Chinese restaurant,” says Kin Lee, the owner of Love Sushi in Gaithersburg, Md., “and the profit margins are better.”

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

Canadian Mint employee accused of smuggling $180K of gold in his rectum

Sperm delivery by mail? There’s an app for that

Riding Roller Coasters Can Help Dislodge Kidney Stones

MIT Researchers developed a device that uses radio waves to detect whether someone is happy, sad, angry or excited.

Why do more men than women commit suicide? The answer could lie in four traits.

Can we form memories when we are very young?

‘Five Second Rule’ for Food on Floor Is Untrue, Study Finds [NYT]

many mathematicians (and quants, economists who analyze market fluctuations using algorithms) have been using “random” models for their predictions

Rats spread disease, decimate crops and very occasionally eat people alive. For centuries, we have struggled to find an effective way of controlling their numbers. Until now …

Uber is researching a new vertical-takeoff ride offering that flies you around

It took a couple decades, but the music business looks like it’s okay again

Before we continue, please note that Japanese cooking does not really use what we Westerners would call sauces.

Mushroom Suit Absorbs Your Body After You Die

Pen Pineapple Apple Pen

Recently, experimental psychologists at Oxford University explored the function of kissing in romantic relationships.

Surprise! It’s complicated.

After conducting an online survey with 308 men and 594 women, mostly from North America and Europe, who ranged in age from 18 to 63, the researchers have concluded that kissing may help people assess potential mates and then maintain those relationships.

“The repurposing of the behavior is very efficient,” said Rafael Wlodarski, a doctoral candidate and lead author of the study, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior.

But another hypothesis about kissing — that its function is to elevate sexual arousal and ready a couple for coitus — didn’t hold up. While that might be an outcome, researchers did not find sexual arousal to be the primary driver for kissing. […]

The participants generally rated kissing in casual relationships as most important before sex, less important during sex, even less important after sex and least important “at other times.” (To clarify: researchers defined kissing as “on the lips or open-mouth (French).”)

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

When used in speech, hesitancies can indicate a pause for thought, when read in a transcript they indicate uncertainty. In a series of experiments the perceived uncertainty of the transcript was shown to be higher than the perceived uncertainty of the spoken version with almost no overlap for any respondent.

{ arXiv | Continue reading }

art { Paul Klee, After the drawing 19/75, 1919 }

In early 2015, near the end of my MFA in Fine Arts at Parsons, I set out on a project to create a celebrity by 2020—entirely via the internet—as an art practice. The celebrity I began to create was a hyper sexy, cyber savvy, female rock star named Ona.

Without a large budget or industry connections, I knew that major social media growth would be an important factor. I started by employing some of the usual tactics I’d used in the past for other projects—a press release, an article in Thought Catalog, soliciting articles from journalists. Nothing much came of it.

So I tried a different tack, working with what I already had: two Instagram accounts, each with a couple hundred followers—one for my art practice as a whole (@leahschrager) and one specifically for selfies and modeling (@onaartist). It was immediately clear that the selfies I posted on @onaartist got more likes and the account grew more quickly. I sought out modeling accounts with big follower numbers and I started DMing them, asking the models if I could pay them to talk to me about how they grew. None of them got back to me. I then did some open submissions to @playboy, @arsenicmagazine, and a few others, but I didn’t get picked.

Finally, I DMed a collection page—a page with a large follower count that features photos of various models—and it got back to me. The page was @the.buttblog, and I was told it would cost $200 for a permanent post. I paid its admin to post a photo of me and in 24 hours I gained around 5,000 real followers.

{ Leah Schrager/Rhizome | Continue reading }

marker on inkjet print { Leah Schrager }

In 2012, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist Albert Hu was convicted of a financial fraud that stretched from Silicon Valley to Hong Kong. Today, he is locked up in the minimum security wing of Lompoc federal prison—inmate #131600-111—without access to the Internet. But, somehow, his bogus investment firm has come back to life.

On the surface, Asenqua Ventures appears to be legitimate. It has a website. It has a working voicemail system and lists a Northern California office address. It has distributed multiple press releases via PRNewswire, which were then picked up by reputable media organizations. It is included in financial industry databases like Crunchbase, PitchBook, and S&P Capital IQ. Its senior managers have LinkedIn profiles.

One of those profiles belonged to Stephen Adler, who earlier this week sent out hundreds of new Linkedin “connect” invitations (many of which were accepted). Among the recipients was Marty McMahon, a veteran executive recruiter who just felt that something was a bit off about Adler’s profile. So he did a Google reverse image search on Adler’s profile pic, and quickly learned that the headshot actually belonged to a San Diego real estate agent named Dan Becker.

McMahon called Dan Becker, who he says was stunned to learn that his photo was being used by someone who he didn’t know. Then McMahon did another image search for the LinkedIn profile pic of Adler’s colleague, Michael Reed. This time it led him to Will Fagan, another San Diego realtor who often works with Dan Becker.

{ Fortune | Continue reading }

For hundreds of years, Koreans have used a different method to count age than most of the world. […] A person’s Korean age goes up a year on new year’s day, not on his or her birthday. So when a baby is born on Dec. 31, he or she actually turns two the very next day.

{ Quartz | Continue reading }

{ via A.V. Flox }

{ Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments | PDF }

Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them. Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they’re used to seeing. They last longer. They’re more sophisticated. And they look like probing. One week, the attack would start at a particular level of attack and slowly ramp up before stopping. The next week, it would start at that higher point and continue. And so on, along those lines, as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure. […]

We don’t know where the attacks come from. The data I see suggests China, an assessment shared by the people I spoke with. On the other hand, it’s possible to disguise the country of origin for these sorts of attacks. The NSA, which has more surveillance in the Internet backbone than everyone else combined, probably has a better idea, but unless the US decides to make an international incident over this, we won’t see any attribution.

{ Bruce Schneier | Continue reading }

polaroid photograph { Andy Warhol, Grapes, 1981 }

‘Smart’ Dildo Company Sued For Tracking Users’ Habits

Is Sex Good for Your Health? A National Study on Partnered Sexuality and Cardiovascular Risk among Older Men and Women

Fetal masturbation

Overall, most U.S. men were satisfied with their genitals

Neither intelligence nor education can stop you from forming prejudiced opinions – but curiosity may help you make wiser judgements

Implicit memory for words heard during sleep

How new experiences boost memory formation

Sugar industry bought off scientists, skewed dietary guidelines for decades [[NYT]] Related: Breakfasts

Which body part hurts the most when stung by a bee? A scientist put himself through a torturous experiment to find out

I have no idea if we’re going to have a quantum computer in every smart phone, or if we’re going to have quantum apps or quapps, that would allow us to communicate securely and find funky stuff using our quantum computers; that’s a tall order. It’s very likely that we’re going to have quantum microprocessors in our computers and smart phones that are performing specific tasks.

Hijacking Banksy: using a contemporary art mystery to increase academic readership

Someone Set Up A Sweet Co-Working Space On A Bridge Over The 5 Freeway

Nihilistic Password Security Questions

The Evolution of Bacteria on a “Mega-Plate” Petri Dish

Brooklyn Bar Menu Generator [Thanks Tim]

Why Scientific Studies Are So Often Wrong: The Streetlight Effect

Researchers tend to look for answers where the looking is good, rather than where the answers are likely to be hiding.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

Revisiting Depression Contagion […] A Speed-Dating Study.

After four minutes of interaction with partners with high levels of depressive symptoms, participants did not experience increased negative affect; instead, they experienced reduced positive affect, which led to the rejection of these partners.

{ Clinical Psychological Science | Continue reading }

Seafood fraud comes in different forms, including species substitution — often a low-value or less desirable seafood item swapped for a more expensive or desirable choice — improper labeling, including hiding the true origin of seafood products, or adding extra breading, water or glazing to seafood products to increase their apparent weight. […]

One in five of the more than 25,000 samples of seafood tested worldwide was mislabeled.

{ Oceana | PDF }

polaroid photograph { Andy Warhol, Lobsters, 1982 }

Half Of People Click Anything Sent To Them

Smartphone Apps Are Now 50% of All U.S. Digital Media Time Spent

Mangan speculates that the brain’s internal clock runs more slowly in elderly people. As a result, the pace of life appears to speed up. [More: Time really does seem to fly by faster as we age]

For older adults, having more or closer family members in one’s social network decreases his or her likelihood of death, but having a larger or closer group of friends does not, finds a new study.

There aren’t many articles I’ve read that have really changed the way I see the world, but “Gender Identity and Relative Income Within Households,” is one of them

The method of serial reproduction has revealed that the social transmission of information is characterized by the gradual transformation of the original message. Evidence of a negativity bias in the social transmission of information

The Effect of Redactions on Conspiracy Theory Beliefs

Who Is the Most Famous Person in the World, Statistically?

Physicists are confronting their “nightmare scenario.” What does the absence of new particles suggest about how nature works?

Inside the Real-Life Database of America’s Firearms

The story of the Boeing 747 [ Joe Sutter, Boeing engineer who led development of the 747 jumbo jet, dies at 95]

Evangel’s Tanner Coleman (62) loses his helmet

{ Apple consumption is related to better sexual quality of life in young women | PDF }

photo { Carla van de Puttelaar }

Many laboratory experiments show that people are often altruistic or care for fairness. We present data that reveal a darker side of human nature. We introduce the joy-of-destruction game. Two players each receive an endowment and simultaneously decide on how much of the other player’s endowment to destroy. Subjects play this game repeatedly. In one treatment, subjects can hide their destruction behind random destruction. In this treatment, money is destroyed in almost 40% of all decisions. We attribute this behavior to a visceral pleasure of being nasty. Under full information destruction is also observed, but rare. In this treatment, acts of destruction are followed by immediate retaliation.

{ Faculty of Economics and Management Magdeburg | PDF }

{ Not using smartphones can improve productivity by 26%, says study }

Some philosophers and physicians have argued that alcoholic patients, who are responsible for their liver failure by virtue of alcoholism, ought to be given lower priority for a transplant when donated livers are being allocated to patients in need of a liver transplant.

The primary argument for this proposal, known as the Responsibility Argument, is based on the more general idea that patients who require scarce medical resources should be given lower priority for those resources when they are responsible for needing them and when they are competing with patients who need the same resources through no fault of their own.

Since alcoholic patients are responsible for needing a new liver and are in direct competition with other patients who need a new liver through no fault of their own, it follows that alcoholic patients ought to be given lower priority for a transplant.

In this article, I argue against the Responsibility Argument by suggesting that in order for it to avoid the force of plausible counter examples, it must be revised to say that patients who are responsible for needing a scarce medical resource due to engaging in behavior that is not socially valuable ought to be given lower priority. I’ll then argue that allocating organs according to social value is inconsistent or in tension with liberal neutrality on the good life. Thus, if one is committed to liberal neutrality, one ought to reject the Responsibility Argument.

{ Bioethics }