Despite growing numbers of singles, the idealization of marriage and child rearing remains strong, pervasive, and largely unquestioned. Guided by life course perspective, the purpose of this article was to examine familial and societal messages women receive when not married by their late 20s to mid-30s. (…)

Women, when compared with men, experience more pronounced pressure to confirm to the “Standard North American Family” ideology and this may be especially true after 9/11, when mainstream messages strongly promoted tra- ditional ideologies of gender and families. Accepted notions of femininity remain based on women having a connection with a man to protect and care for her. Such constructions reflect Rich’s argument that “compulsory heterosexuality” is a controlling force in women’s lives. Compulsory heterosexuality positions the heterosexual romantic relationship within a patriarchal context as natural, normative, and the most desirable of all relationships. Furthermore, the dic- tate of motherhood and the coupling of marriage and motherhood further encourage women to enter into marriage.

Despite such ideologies, increasing proportions of women are single, with 41% of women aged 25 to 29 years and 24% of women aged 30 to 34 years having never married (U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007).

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

related { Psychologists find link between ovulation and women’s ability to identify heterosexual men }

photo { Alonzo Jordan }

Scientists have traced chronic pain to a defect in one enzyme in a single region of the brain. Could this be a decisive turn in the battle against pain? (…)

As neuroscientists learn more about the biological basis of pain, the situation is finally beginning to change. Most remarkably, unfolding research shows that chronic pain can cause concrete, physiological changes in the brain. After several months of chronic pain, a person’s brain begins to shrink. The longer people suffer, the more gray matter they lose. (…)

Normally, pain is triggered by a set of danger-sensing neurons, called nociceptors, that extend into the organs, muscles, and skin. Different types of nociceptors respond to different stimuli, including heat, cold, pressure, inflammation, and exposure to chemicals like cigarette smoke and teargas. Nociceptors can notify us of danger with fine-tuned precision. Heat nociceptors, for example, send out an alarm only when they’re heated to between 45 and 50 degrees Celsius (about 115 to 125 degrees Fahrenheit), the temperature at which some proteins start to coagulate and cause damage to cells and tissues.

For all that precision, we don’t automatically feel the signals as pain; often the information from nociceptors is parsed by the nervous system along the way. For instance, nociceptors starting in the skin extend through the body to swellings along the spinal cord. They relay their signals to other neurons in those swellings, called dorsal horns, which then deliver signals up to the brain stem. But dorsal horns also contain neurons coming down from the brain that can boost or squelch the signals. As a result, pain in one part of the body can block pain signals from another. If you stick your foot in cold water, touching a hot surface with your hand will hurt less.

{ Discovery | Continue reading }

The Rule of 72 deserves to be better known among technical people. It’s a widely-known financial rule of thumb used for understanding and calculating interest rates. But others, including computer scientist and start-up founders, are often concerned with growth rates. Knowing and applying the rule of 72 can help in developing numerical literacy numeracy around growth.

For example, consider Moore’s Law, which describes how “the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.” If something doubles every two years, at what rate does it increase per month, on average? If you know the rule of 72, you’ll instantly know that the monthly growth rate is about 3%. You get the answer by dividing 72 by 24 (the number of months).

{ Terry Jones | Continue reading }

Designers and engineers labour to create artificial noises that make life easier whether by generating atmosphere or making you feel more secure. (…)

To produce the ideal clunk, car doors are designed to minimise the amount of high frequencies produced (we associate them with fragility and weakness) and emphasise low, bass-heavy frequencies that suggest solidity. The effect is achieved in a range of different ways – car companies have piled up hundreds of patents on the subject – but usually involves some form of dampener fitted in the door cavity. Locking mechanisms are also tailored to produce the right sort of click and the way seals make contact is precisely controlled. (…)

The EU is still in the process of drafting a law which will require electric vehicle makers to have a signature sound with a minimum volume to make sure other road users can hear the otherwise silent machines whizzing towards them. (…)

While some US sports teams use artificial crowd noise to unsettle the opposition, lots of venues use it as a handy way to help amp up the atmosphere and encourage the real spectators to join in. (…)

Lots of modern telephone systems as well as software like Skype employ noise reduction techniques. Unfortunately, that can result in total silence at quiet points in a conversation and leave you wondering if the call has stopped entirely. To fill those lulls, the software adds artificial noise at a barely audible volume.

{ Humans Invent | Continue reading }

{ Many species of Pacific predators stick to familiar routes each season, according to new findings of a decade-long study that tracked 23 types of marine animals. The two most heavily trafficked corridors are the California Current along the West Coast of the U.S. and the North Pacific Transition Zone, where cold and warm water meet halfway between Alaska and Hawaii. | Washington Post | full story | photos }

Each of your senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell) has an individual, specialized hub (cortex) in the brain that collects and filters information from your sensory organs. For example, visual information from your eyes is transmitted directly to the visual cortex,housed in hind portions of the brain. Here, this information is converted into terms (patterns of electrical pulses) that the brain can understand. This filtered visual information is then sent to other regions of the brain, where it is integrated with the other forms of sensory information to create our perception. This process is called ‘multimodal integration’.

 Early theories stated that the senses don’t merge until after sensory information is processed. In other words, it was believed that the sensory cortices always operated in isolation. However, about thirty years ago, psychologists began to realize that one sensory system can heavily influence the processing abilities of another. For example, your sight can affect how you brain recognizes sounds.

{ Basic Science | Continue reading }

photo { J. Kursel }

Turntable.fm is a little miracle that does something simple and essential: It lets you play your favorite songs for your friends and strangers on the Web, in real time, for free.

I’d say it’s astonishing no one has done it before, but it’s not: The music business has a long tradition of resisting good ideas. So how did the Turntable.fm guys finally get the industry on board?

They haven’t. The start-up doesn’t have deals in place with any labels or publishers.

{ All Things D | Continue reading }

I am fascinated with zombies. Always have been, but even more so since I took an interest in microbiology. The zombie apocalypse is the best known and best chronicled viral infection which hasn’t happened. But it could happen any day. (…)

One problem that has to do with zombification is the loss free will. Do zombies have free will? More to the point, do humans have free will?

In two papers entitled A Wasp Manipulates Neuronal Activity in the Sub-Esophageal Ganglion to Decrease the Drive for Walking in Its Cockroach Prey and On predatory wasps and zombie cockroaches — Investigations of “free will” and spontaneous behavior in insects, Ram Gal and Frederic Libersat from Ben Gurion University explore free will in cockroaches. Do cockroaches have free will, or are they just sophisticated automatons? And where do we draw the line between the two?

Gal and Libersat  use the following definition for free will: the expression of patterns of “endogenously-generated spontaneous behavior”. That is, a behavior which has a pattern (i.e. not just random fluctuations) and must come from within (i.e. not entirely in response to external stimuli). They cite studies where such behavior — which they define as a “precursor of free will in insects” — is observed. They then show how this behavior is removed from cockroaches when the roaches are attacked by a wasp. (…)

So how about molecular zombies?

{ Byte Size Biology | Continue reading }

What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women.

There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises. (…)

The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. But so far, the data show, the more women, the better. (…)

Many studies have shown that women tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do. So what is really important is to have people who are high in social sensitivity, whether they are men or women.

{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

{ Death penalty costs California $184 million a year, study says. That’s more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since it was reinstated in 1978, or about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since then. | LA Times }

Tradition relates that, upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of men.

{ J. L. Borges, Parables, Inferno, 1, 32 | Selected Stories & Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges | PDF }

painting { Henry Fuseli, The Shepherds Dream, 1793 }

Are Fast Talkers More Persuasive?

When psychologists first began examining the effect of speech rate on persuasion, they thought the answer was cut-and-dried. In 1976 Norman Miller and colleagues tried to convince participants that caffeine was bad for them (Miller et al., 1976). The results suggested people were most persuaded when the message was delivered at a fully-caffeinated 195 words per minute rather than at a decaffeinated 102 words per minute.

At 195 words per minute, about the fastest that people speak in normal conversation, the message became more credible to those listening, and therefore more persuasive. Talking fast seemed to signal confidence, intelligence, objectivity and superior knowledge. Going at about 100 words per minute, the usual lower limit of normal conversation, was associated with all the reverse attributes. (…)

By the 1980s, though, other researchers had begun to wonder if these results could really be correct. They pointed to studies suggesting that while talking faster seemed to boost credibility, it didn’t always boost persuasion.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

{ Novelist Edward Docx had to know what it feels like to be lost—truly lost—in the Amazon. So he went to Brazil and hired some men to leave him in the jungle. | Prospect | full story }

photo { Sally Mann }

While it is recognized that Barbie dolls are perceived as feminine and Action figures as masculine, less is considered about the gender associations related to everyday items like the food we choose to eat. A series of studies reveal for instance that sour dairy products tend to be perceived as relatively feminine, whereas meat tends to be perceived as relatively masculine. Men are inclined to forgo their intrinsic preferences to conform to a masculine gender identity. Women, on the other hand, appear to be less concerned with making gender-congruent choices.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

Despite the first ‘Cars’ movie’s somewhat unimpressive reviews and ticket sales, Pixar is rolling out a sequel. Why? Because the animated film sparked a long-lived licensing bonanza.

In the five years since its 2006 release, “Cars” has generated global retail sales approaching $10 billion, according to Disney. That ranks the Pixar film alongside such cinematic merchandising standouts as “Star Wars,” “Spider-Man” and “Harry Potter.”

No fewer than 300 toys — and countless other items, including bedding, backpacks and SpaghettiOs — are rolling out in stores, in anticipation of the “Cars 2″ opening.

“We anticipate the consumer products program to be the largest in industry history, eclipsing the high water mark set by ‘Toy Story 3,’” Disney Consumer Products Chairman Andy Mooney said in a webcast last week before the annual toy licensing show in Las Vegas. Last year, the third installment of “Toy Story” generated $2.8 billion in merchandise sales.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

photo { Alex Tehrani }

Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it’s not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation. (…)

The choice not to do something is almost always more interesting than the choice to do something. (…)

If you’re by nature an optimistic person, which I am, that puts you in a lot better position to be lucky.

{ Chuck Close | Continue reading }

Husband’s employment status threatens marriage, but wife’s does not, study finds.

A new study of employment and divorce suggests that while social pressure discouraging women from working outside the home has weakened, pressure on husbands to be breadwinners largely remains.

The research, led by Liana Sayer of Ohio State University and forthcoming in the American Journal of Sociology, was designed to show how employment status influences both men’s and women’s decisions to end a marriage.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Satanism typically conjures thoughts of dark-cloaked figures in deeply wooded areas, where they sacrifice livestock over a makeshift altar and whisper mysterious incantations in hopes of appeasing their dark lord. Maybe every once in a while they get creative and throw a baby doll off an overpass or vandalize a Catholic church with swastika graffiti to garner a bit of attention. Chances are, however, that anyone who participates in these types of activities is also a regular at IHOP, works at a mall, and thinks Marilyn Manson is a real person.

Truly terrifying entities don’t advertise their presence, which is the main reason traditional satanic cults have eluded the public and thrived in every sector of our society. For hundreds of years, these secret organizations have relied on the simplest method to recruit and convert: fear. In fact, the only reason we are certain satanism still poses a danger is because it continues to produce victims of severe ritualistic abuse.

{ Vice | Continue reading }

photo { Harry Callahan }

UPS managed to save 3 million gallons of gas in 2006 by altering the routes of delivery trucks to avoid left turns. According to them, the company uses software called “package flow” to map out daily routes for drivers.

The problem the UPS driver faces, generally speaking, is that of the “traveling salesman,” in which our hero seeks the shortest possible round trip route given a list of required stops. Arising in road trip planning, school bus pickups, parking meter coin collection, power cable layout, and microchip design, it is not a new problem.

The famous 19th century Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton, who at age 12 once defeated the notorious American “calculating boy” Zerah Colburn in an arithmetic-off, invented the “Icosian game,” in which players attempt to find round-trip routes through a twelve-sided figure such that each vertex is visited exactly once and no edge is visited twice.

Inspired by Hamilton’s early work and puzzle-making prowess, mathematicians in Vienna and Cambridge began studying the general form of the traveling salesman problem (TSP for short) in the 1930s.

In 1972, UC Berkeley Professor Richard Karp published perhaps the most famous paper written to date in computer science, called “Reducibility Among Combinatorial Problems.” The point, broadly speaking, is that most problems that appear difficult to solve exactly most likely are. Rather than proving that all kinds of problems have no easy solution, Karp gave a clever method for showing that many different sorts of problems are equivalent in a certain sense: if you provide a magic fast solver for hard problem A, Karp uses it to build a fast solver for hard problem B.

As a result, researchers are amassing an impressive set of hard problems, all reducible to each other, so that if anyone ever found a magic solver for just one of them, well, things would get pretty crazy. A variant of the TSP, that of undirected Hamiltonian Circuits (same Hamilton), was in Karp’s original list of 21 problems. (…)

Computer scientists spend much time devising heuristics — approximate methods for dealing with intractable situations. Here’s a simple heuristic for the traveling salesman: when trying to decide which stop to visit next on the tour, pick the closest remaining one. While in many cases, this rule yields a route much less efficient than the optimal one, it works reasonably well on average.

{ LiveScience, 2008 | Continue reading }

image { Peter Crnokrak }

Betty Jo Patton spent her childhood on a 240-acre farm in Mason County, West Virginia, in the 1930s. Her family raised what it ate, from tomatoes to turkeys, pears to pigs. They picked, plucked, slaughtered, butchered, cured, canned, preserved, and rendered. They drew water from a well, cooked on a wood stove, and the bathroom was an outhouse. (…)

Evidence of the nostalgia abounds. (…) The surest sign that this nostalgia has reached a critical mass, though, is that food companies have begun to board the retro bus. (…) Mountain Dew (featuring a cartoon hillbilly from the 1960s) in which they’ve replaced “bad” high-fructose corn syrup with “good” cane sugar. (…)

It’s unlikely that most serious food reformers think America can or should dismantle our industrial food system and return to an agrarian way of life. But the idea that “Food used to be better” so pervades the rhetoric about what ails our modern food system that it is hard not to conclude that rolling back the clock would provide at least some of the answers. The trouble is, it wouldn’t. And even if it would, the prospect of a return to Green Acres just isn’t very appealing to a lot of people who know what life there is really like.

{ Lapham’s Quaterly | Continue reading }

artwork { Eric Thor Sandberg }