Why should we deal with pornography from a feminist perspective? The answer to this question is straightforward. Pornography is the key mass media genre in which sexuality is made visible and performed. Sexuality, on the other hand, is one of the main areas where gender and gender relations are negotiated. In this article, I will examine different – and in particular conflicting – feminist positions with respect to pornography which have been developed from the 1970s until today. The focus will be on the issue of the construction of sexual and gender identities. I will analyze how these identities in regards to the pornographic body are negotiated or even shifted within these different feminist discourses and practices. Dildos and cyborgs will be discussed in the final part of this article, which deals with current queer-feminist debates in the field of so called post-porn.

At the beginning of the seventies, in a phase of almost complete legalization of pornography in most of the western countries, the pornographic movie left the underground and was allowed into new public spheres. Pornography as a film genre developed into a mass product and was increasingly available even in cinemas. It was during that period that the sexual revolution came to an end, or rather began to transform itself into something new.

{ Gender Forum | Continue reading }

image { James Victore }

A massive genetics study relying on fMRI brain scans and DNA samples from over 20,000 people has revealed what is claimed as the biggest effect yet of a single gene on intelligence – although the effect is small.

There is little dispute that genetics accounts for a large amount of the variation in people’s intelligence, but studies have consistently failed to find any single genes that have a substantial impact. Instead, researchers typically find that hundreds of genes contribute.

Following a brain study on an unprecedented scale, an international collaboration has now managed to tease out a single gene that does have a measurable effect on intelligence. But the effect – although measurable – is small: the gene alters IQ by just 1.29 points.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

related { Niceness is at least partly in the genes }

{ Mathilde Roussel }

Waking up from surgery can be disorienting. One minute you’re in an operating room counting backwards from 10, the next you’re in the recovery ward sans appendix, tonsils, or wisdom teeth. And unlike getting up from a good night’s sleep, where you know that you’ve been out for hours, waking from anesthesia feels like hardly any time has passed. Now, thanks to the humble honeybee, scientists are starting to understand this sense of time loss. New research shows that general anesthetics disrupt the social insect’s circadian rhythm, or internal clock, delaying the onset of timed behaviors such as foraging and mucking up their sense of direction. (…)

Warman says his team is currently looking at whether shining bright light at someone under anesthesia—a well known way to alter the circadian clock—could also reduce the procedure’s disorienting effects.

{ Science | Continue reading }

photo { Steve Shapiro, Truman Capote, Kansas, 1967 }

Federal authorities have arrested eight men accused of distributing more than $1 million worth of LSD, ecstasy, and other narcotics with an online storefront that used the TOR anonymity service to mask their Internet addresses.

“The Farmer’s Market,” as the online store was called, was like an Amazon for consumers of controlled substances, according to a 66-page indictment unsealed on Monday. It offered online forums, Web-based order forms, customer service, and at least four methods of payment, including PayPal and Western Union. From January 2007 to October 2009, it processed some 5,256 orders valued at $1.04 million. The site catered to about 3,000 customers in 35 countries, including the United States.

To elude law enforcement officers, the operators used software provided by the TOR Project that makes it virtually impossible to track the activities of users’ IP addresses.

{ Ars Technica | Continue reading }

photos { Claes Källarsson | 1 | 2 }

{ Cat Trapping, Neutering and Release, photographed by Sandy Carson }

In psychology, this phenomenon is called “gaslighting,” a term that has its origins in a 1938 play (and a 1940 film) called Gas Light, where a man leads his wife to believe that she is insane in order to steal from her. (…)

A classic example of psychological gaslighting is the following: Spouse A has an extramarital affair and tries to cover it up. Spouse B finds a suspicious text message in A’s phone and expresses concern to A. A then accuses B of being paranoid, and this pattern repeats every time B raises concerns. Eventually B begins to question his or her own perceptions.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

image { Steven Pippin }

{ Guido Castagnoli }

It’s famously tough getting through the Google interview process. But now we can reveal just how strenuous are the mental acrobatics demanded from prospective employees. Job-seekers can expect to face open-ended riddles, seemingly impossible mathematical challenges and mind-boggling estimation puzzles. (…)

1. You are shrunk to the height of a 2p coin and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do? (…)

3. Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco. (…)

5. Imagine a country where all the parents want to have a boy. Every family keeps having children until they have a boy; then they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in this country? (…)

6. Use a programming language to describe a chicken. (…)

7. What is the most beautiful equation you have ever seen? (…) Most would agree this is a lame answer:
E = MC2
It’s like a politician saying his favorite movie is Titanic.
You want Einstein? A better reply is:
G = 8πT (…)

8. You want to make sure that Bob has your phone number. You can’t ask him directly. Instead you have to write a message to him on a card and hand it to Eve, who will act as a go-between. Eve will give the card to Bob and he will hand his message to Eve, who will hand it to you. You don’t want Eve to learn your phone number. What do you ask Bob? (…)

11. How much would you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle? (…)

14. Can you swim faster through water or syrup?

{ Wired | Continue reading }

images, clockwise from top left { 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 }

quote { thanks Tim }

Psychology research shows most people wrongly assume their thoughts can become reality — even people who say they don’t believe in telekinesis or ESP. “If you think about something and then it happens, you feel a little bit responsible for it,” Hutson said. It’s an irrational feeling. Why do we feel it?

“It’s a byproduct of how we understand causality,” he said. “If there are two events, A and B, if A happens before B, if there are no other obvious causes of B, and if A and B are conceptually related, then we assume A caused B.”

The faulty logic gets reinforced every time you think a positive thought, such as visualizing a successful basketball free throw, and then the thought boosts your confidence, which affects your behavior, and — voila! — the ball swooshes through the net. (…)

Few Americans openly practice voodoo — e.g., inserting pins into figurines of their enemies in order to inflict bad luck or pain — but studies show we’re all secret practitioners. “When you do some symbolic action or perform some symbolic ritual, you tend to think it will bring about what it symbolizes,” Hutson said.

In a recent experiment, psychologists monitored people’s perspiration levels as they cut up a photograph of a cherished childhood possession. Unsurprisingly, destroying a representation of their childhood made the participants sweat.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

photo { Danielle Levitt }

When the sun goes down in the subtropical forests of Puerto Rico, hundreds of thousands of bats emerge from the caves that stud the island’s northern end. After a day of sleeping, the animals are ready for a hard day’s night of hunting insects. For some of them, though, there will be no feast of beetles and mosquitos, and they’ll instead wind up a meal themselves for the snakes that have set up an ambush at the cave’s entrance. (…)

The nightly ritual is played out on its largest scale at La Cueva de Los Culebrones, or the Cave of the Long Snakes. The cave’s estimated 300,000 bats can empty out in as little as three hours, providing the boas with an all-you-can-eat bat buffet. Biologists observers have seen as many as 20 boas hanging around the cave entrance. (…)

Sometimes, a snake that’s not having any luck with its own hunting will attempt to steal a bat from another snake. On one occasion, a biologist watched three snakes fight over a large bat carcass for over an hour and a half.

{ Matt Soniak | Continue reading | video }

The extraordinary success of Instagram is a tale about the culture of the Bay Area tech scene, driven by a tightly woven web of entrepreneurs and investors who nurture one another’s projects with money, advice and introductions to the right people. By and large, it is a network of young men, many who attended Stanford and had the attention of the world’s biggest venture capitalists before they even left campus.

Among this set, risk-taking is regarded as a badge of honor. Ideas are disposable: if one doesn’t work, you quickly move on to another. Timing matters. You make your own luck.

“There is some serendipity for entrepreneurs, but the people who are the rainmakers are the ones who entrepreneurs need to meet in order to make those connections that lead to success,” said Ted Zoller, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation who studies economic development around entrepreneurship. “The social ties that you make are directly correlated to success.”

For Mr. Systrom [co-founder of Instagram], the connections forged at Stanford were crucial.

Mr. D’Angelo, a 2006 graduate of the California Institute of Technology, helped him find engineers, set up databases and flesh out features. Soon after Instagram came out of the box, he put his money into it. So did Jack Dorsey, 35, a founder of Twitter; Mr. Systrom had been an intern at the company that became Twitter.

A colleague at Google, where Mr. Systrom worked straight out of college, introduced him to Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist who had already invested millions in Facebook. In the spring of 2010, even before Instagram was born, Mr. Andreessen wrote him a check for $250,000.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

From the mouth and nose, through the pharynx into the trachea, separating into the left and right main bronchi at the larynx. This is the start of your airway. This is to be the site of inflammation, or rather, the site of battle. Across the landscape that is the airways, two sides are about to go to war. Invading pathogens versus human inflammatory cells, in a war that will eventually lead to pneumonia.

{ science left untitled | Continue reading }

In Bailey’s Democracy, David Bailey photographed a raft of people in the nude, including Damien Hirst, pulling his prepuce and mugging at the camera. A telling image of Hirst’s skills – not that much, stretched not very far.
 
{ Craig Raine/New Statesman | Continue reading }

For several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the “carry trade,” has been enormously profitable for them. (…)

Under my plan, each American household could borrow $10 million from the Fed at zero interest. The more conservative among us can take that money and buy 10-year Treasury bonds. At the current 2 percent annual interest rate, we can pocket a nice $200,000 a year to live on. The more adventuresome can buy 10-year Greek debt at 21 percent, for an annual income of $2.1 million. Or if Greece is a little too risky for you, go with Portugal, at about 12 percent, or $1.2 million dollars a year. (No sense in getting greedy.) (…)

Because we will be making money in basically the same way as hedge fund managers, we should have to pay only 15 percent in taxes, just like they do.

{ Sheila Bair/Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { Felix Odell }

Victorian-era doctors disliked dealing with female patients. This highly masculinized profession saw women as overly emotional and barely capable of rational discussion of their bodies. (…)

One of women’s most common medical conditions was broadly called “hysteria.” By this, doctors meant any number of symptoms that described “irrational” female complaints. (…)

Male doctors found their hysterical and neurasthenic patients especially frustrating. Many doctors suggested that women would feel better if they engaged in sexual intercourse until its natural conclusion with a male orgasm. But given the ineffectiveness of vaginal penetration in satisfying many women, doctors resorted to other solutions. Doctors manually massaged the women’s clitoris until she achieved relief, i.e. experienced an orgasm, although it was not recognized as such. Annoyed doctors complained that it took women forever to achieve this relief; moreover, they thought this condition beneath their respectable professional demeanor to treat. On the other hand, the repeat business of these women was good for their pocketbooks.

Beginning in 1869, inventors developed steam-powered massage machines for medical offices. By 1900, doctors had a wide variety of devices to choose from, helping relieve the tedium of digitally massaging female patients. Even better from medical professionals’ perspective was the invention of a hand-held vibrator in 1905, allowing women to treat their own hysteria without visiting a physician. Soon, companies began advertising for the home vibrators.

{ AlterNet | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kern }

Tessa Price, a 22-year-old college senior, is gazing into a mirror in a virtual-reality laboratory at Stanford University. Looking back at her is Tessa Price—at the age of 68.

Staring into a mirror today and seeing yourself as you will look in the year 2057 is unnerving. But that may be just what it takes to shock Americans into saving more. At Stanford and other universities, computer scientists, economists, neuroscientists and psychologists are teaming up to find innovative ways of turning impulsive spenders into patient savers. (…)

It isn’t surprising that the young typically don’t want to save for their retirement, since that stage of life feels as if it will be lived by someone else. (…)

These researchers are tapping into what is called the Proteus effect, behavioral alterations in the real world that are triggered by changes in how our bodies appear to us in a virtual world.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates. The research is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals. (…)

“In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward,” adds co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who helped direct the research.

{ University of Rochester | Continue reading }

photo { Jessica Eaton }

“Whatever you post online, expect it to be used by companies to sell advertising,” says Rick Dakin.

{ 5 Ways Google Earns Money Off You | SmartMoney | full story }

images { 1. Marija Mandic | 2. Dan Christofferson }

Reliable and unbiased random numbers are needed for a range of applications spanning from numerical modeling to cryptographic communications. While there are algorithms that can generate pseudo random numbers, they can never be perfectly random nor indeterministic.

Researchers at the ANU are generating true random numbers from a physical quantum source. We do this by splitting a beam of light into two beams and then measuring the power in each beam.  Because light is quantised, the light intensity in each beam fluctuates about the mean.  Those fluctuations, due ultimately to the quantum vacuum, can be converted into a source of random numbers. Every number is randomly generated in real time and cannot be predicted beforehand.

{ Australian National University | Continue reading }

photo { Hiroshi Sugimoto, Orange Drive-in, 1993 }