Jung Fun!

You make Pearson cry

Three examples of misinterpreting correlations.

The Little ARG That Failed

Between the giant banners advertising the D-9 alternate reality game (ARG) with anti-alien slogans, beyond the Dharma Initiative recruitment booth, there was a little stack of postcards at Comic-Con that read "You are being deceived — www.youarebeingdeceived.com." It was the calling card for an ARG that nobody saw. How do I know? Because io9 built the You Are Being Deceived ARG, complete with a phone number you can call and two mysterious linked URLs, as an experiment in marketing and mass deception. What happens when you try to deceive people but your lies are drowned out by better-funded lies? Allow me to recount our strange tale. Link

For the Brain, Remembering Is Like Reliving

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it.

Link

Magenta Ain't A Colour

A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence (click here to check). Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn’t there. But if pink isn’t in the light spectrum, how come we can see it?

Here’s an experiment you can try: stare at the pink circle below for about one minute, then look over at the blank white space next to the image. What do you see? You should see an afterimage. What colour is it? Link

Bill recommends, Rethinking Thin

Entry level I/O position

HUMAN RESOURCES ASSISTANT
Job #:	7907
Category:	HUMAN RESOURCES
Description:	This is an entry level Human Resources position under the HRIS division. The duties are as followed: New hire entry, edit/maintenance of all new hire entry and review of all new hire paperwork Terminations Manual Check Requests-new hires and terminations PCA's- location changes, grade & title changes, cost center changes, status changes, and salary changes, etc. Requests for Leave/Returns from Leave Document imaging: document preparation and scanning Location Report for Payroll (Attach copies of pca's and forward to Payroll) Ad hoc Business Objects reports Expense Reports Reception coverage & lunch relief Approval of employee data changes in ESS and Monitor HRIS Support folder in Outlook I-9 follow up and updates Other duties as assigned/Special projects as assigned
Requirements:	Proficient typing skills, data entry experience, Basic Excel and Word. Access a plus. Familiarity with Oracle and/or PeopleSoft a plus but not necessary
Location:	NEW YORK, NY USA
Travel Coverage:	Not specified
Minimum Experience (yrs):
Required Education:	Some College Classes
Relocation Offered:	No
Authorization required to work in this country:	Required

http://search0.smartsearchonline.com/pb/jobs/jobdetails.asp?current_page=1&city=&location=&job_type=&emp_status=&country=&k1=&k2=&k3=&k4=&k5=&k6=&k7=&k8=&salary_min=&co_num=&apply=yes&job_number=7907

Emergency Mobilization on the Budget at the Governor’s NYC Office

Emergency Mobilization on the Budget at the Governor’s NYC Office:

Tuesday, December 16, 4:00-5:00 P.M., Third Avenue and 41^st Street

Dear Colleagues,

This Tuesday, December 16, Governor Paterson will release his proposed State budget for the 2009-2010 fiscal year. All indications are that it will include deep cuts to CUNY and a plan to close part of the State’s budget gap through increased CUNY tuition. In response to the anticipated budget—which may be the most damaging for CUNY in many years—the PSC has called an Emergency Mobilization on Tuesday, December 16 from 4:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M. in front of the governor’s New York City office.

At 4:00 that day, representatives of faculty, staff and students from across the University will join me to deliver 55,000 signed postcards to the governor calling for public investment in CUNY. We will meet with the governor’s director of higher education. Our message will be amplified by the thousands of members of the CUNY community who have signed the postcards: In a time of economic distress New York should invest more—not less—in CUNY.

I am writing to ask you to make an exceptional effort to participate in the mobilization on Tuesday. There is an alternative to budget cuts and regressive taxes, and Albany needs to see how strong the support for it is. New York would have $17 billion more in income this year alone if it simply restored the tax cuts enacted between 1994 and 2005. Over the past 30 years, New York has cut the tax rate on the highest income bracket in half. The budget problem would be solved if the State restructured the personal income tax for greater fairness.

It’s not too late to call on Albany to reverse course. We need to be at the governor’s office in numbers to make our point. Please contact caikin@pscmail.org to let us know that we can count on you to be there: Emergency Mobilization on the Budget: Tuesday, December 16, 4:00-5:00 P.M., Third Avenue and 41^st Street.

In solidarity,

Barbara Bowen

President, Professional Staff Congress/CUNY

Jobs/Internships

Hi guys,

I'm helping my boss at a nonprofit org find an incredible intern for next semester, so I pasted a bit of info about it below. If this sounds like your cup of tea, or may know someone else who'd find it useful, please pass it on!

On a personal note, the Young People For office is young, everyone is super nice, freakishly intelligent and very committed to the progressive cause. I've learned ridiculous amounts here this semester and my boss was a good teacher--she is my favorite kind of web nerd; if you're into PHP and accessible and pretty pretty CSS web design, she will definitely love you. If you wanted an introduction to the nonprofit world, this is a great opportunity!

----

Young People For (YP4) is an NYC-based nonpartisan program of People For the American Way Foundation. YP4 empowers progressive college student leaders to create lasting change in their communities.

We have openings for web and communications interns for the Spring 2009 semester. We'd love to extend this opportunity to your students, particularly those who have web design, blogging, and/or copy editing experience. Read the full description: http://www.youngpeoplefor.org/about/jobs/web-and-communications-intern

We are seeking NYC-based interns who are able to work either full- or part-time. We're happy to arrange academic credit. Our interns don't fetch coffee or make photocopies; we put interns to work in areas that interest them, such as creating newsletters, coding, blogging, conducting research and developing new web projects.


----

Feel free to respond if you have any questions!

Lis
elisabeth@sent.com

The success of "crowdsourced" websites like YouTube and Wikipedia has puzzled psychologists, since a small number of people do most of the work for little obvious reward, while the rest benefit, seemingly without giving anything back. New Scientist.

York's art!

Although I've made fun with (not at) the art here at York, I really love it and I'm glad it's here.

Dr Cripps and his class created a webpage celebrating York's art.

Strange Experiments Create Body-Swapping Experiences

Scientists now have manipulated people’s perceptions to make them think they have swapped bodies with another human or even a "humanoid body," experiencing the sensations that the other would feel and giving the illusion of being inside the other's body.

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/081202-body-swapping.html

New Report Shows Unionization Advances Pay and Benefits for Women

The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) released a report this week that found unions generally have a positive impact on the salaries and benefits of women workers. The study, Unions and Upward Mobility for Women Workers (see PDF), found that all other factors controlled, women who joined a union were more likely to have health insurance through their employer, a pension plan, and higher earnings than their non-unionized equivalents. The study also established that unionization benefits lower earning female workers just as significantly as those with higher paying jobs.

John Schmitt, who authored the study and is a Senior Economist at CEPR said in a press release that "for women, joining a union makes as much sense as going to college…All else equal, joining a union raises a woman's wage as much as a full year of college, and a union raises the chances a woman has health insurance by more than earning a four-year college degree."

Media Resources: CEPR Press Release 12/2/08; CEPR Report 12/08

Feminist.org: Your daily source for the feminist perspective on national and global events.

CUNY student jobs

The CUNY employment opportunities initiative aims to help students obtain part-time and full-time work, and internships to help meet the costs of attending college. Explore these and other resources.

http://urdox1.cuny.edu/jobs/student-jobs.html

Tuition hikes and budget cuts

New York state is in a budget meltdown with the governor calling for massive budget cuts. Why? He says that tax revenue is down. But I got this letter from my union's president:

There is an alternative to the false choice between a contract reopener and layoffs: increasing revenue. New York State would have $16 billion in additional revenue this year alone if it had restored the 1994 tax cut for the highest earners. What New York is really facing is a revenue crisis. The richest one percent of New York families (those earning $1.6 million or more a year) pay only 6.5 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the poorest New Yorkers (with incomes under $15,000) pay 11.6 percent. Restructuring the unfair tax system would eliminate the need for budget cuts—and generate the funds for desperately needed new investment, starting with CUNY.

In the short term, the state could close this year’s budget gap by drawing on the more than $1 billion in the “rainy day fund” (Tax Stabilization Reserve Fund) and gaining support from a federal economic stimulus. The federal government is considering a stimulus package that would increase aid to state and local governments; announcement of devastating budget cuts before the decision on a stimulus bill is premature.

The PSC has joined economists, unions and community groups across the state in calling on the governor and the legislature to adopt a revenue proposal rather than resorting to cuts and layoffs that will deepen the effect of a recession. Brooklyn College, Queens College and Lehman College were all founded during the Depression. These times demand a similar, visionary investment. Public higher education is the key to reinvigorating the economy.

If you want to help out my students (especially if you are one of my students), this link will allow you to send a letter to the Governor against tuition hikes. Quote from my post if you like or just use the standard letter.


Here's the link to a further explanation of the tax policy.

Symbolic Racism in the 08 election

Sacramento GOP Web site encouraged people to 'waterboard Obama'

Sacramento County Republican leaders Tuesday took down offensive material on their official party Web site that sought to link Sen. Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden and encouraged people to "Waterboard Barack Obama" — material that even offended state GOP leaders.

By Ed Fletcher

Sacramento Bee

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Sacramento County Republican leaders Tuesday took down offensive material on their official party Web site that sought to link Sen. Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden and encouraged people to "Waterboard Barack Obama" — material that even offended state GOP leaders.

Link

Political elections usually bring out the worst in people, but I've never seen such extreme statements made by such high status organizations. Is this a sign of symbolic racism?

Extreme McCain-Palin supports - Examples of RWA?

Racism and mental contamination in the election

Mental contamination is when one concept becomes associated with another concept via association. It's just strengthening the linkages between nodes in a semantic network.

Here is a very subtle attempt at that during the election.














I've been told that's it's a Republican ad (tho I haven't been able to confirm that).

It's not just that Obama lacks experience. That's related to him being black.

Study Finds Blacks Reap Smaller Financial Gains From Certain Majors

From the Chronicle of Higher Education

November 7, 2008

Study Finds Blacks Reap Smaller Financial Gains From Certain Majors

Jacksonville, Fla. — Black students who major in high-paying fields appear to reap smaller financial gains when they enter the job market than do comparable Asian- and Hispanic-American students, according to a new study of minority scholarship applicants.

The study, scheduled to be discussed here tomorrow at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, tracked about 350 students who had applied for the Gates Millennium Scholars Program for low-income minority students and had gone through its selection process. The students, who graduated from high school in the spring of 2000 and entered college the following academic year, were surveyed by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago at various intervals until six years after their graduation from high school.

Because the Gates program looks well beyond the SAT scores of scholarship applicants, and examines a host of psychological traits related to college persistence and early earnings, focusing on that population helped the researchers ensure comparability among the students being studied.

Even when comparable students majored in the same fields, the economic benefits they reaped from college upon entering the job market varied substantially by race and ethnicity, according to a paper on the study’s findings by Tatiana Melguizo, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, and Gregory C. Wolniak, a research scientist at the National Opinion Research Center.

The salary premium that Asian- and Hispanic-American students received from majoring in science, technology, mathematics, or engineering was 50 percent higher than what black students who had majored in those fields were earning soon after college, the study found. Asian- and Hispanic-American students also reaped a higher salary premium than did black students for majoring in professional fields such as business or law.

The researchers say they did not look into whether discrimination explained the gaps they found because they did not have sufficient data matching students with their employers. They found some evidence that variations in occupational choices may play a role, but said more research was needed there as well.

Their paper concludes that, “in a scholarship program or campus-based policies aimed at promoting economic outcomes, attention needs to be placed on how and why students choose their field of study, as well as the manner in which their education influences their occupational attainment.” —Peter Schmidt

http://chronicle.com/news/article/5456/study-finds-blacks-reap-smaller-financial-gains-from-certain-majors

After yesterday's panel on gender and the election

I couldn't pass up posting this mailing from the Republicans.

Obama and compliance

The Obama campaign has very successfully used compliance principles set out by Robert Cialdini in the email I get (after donating):

1. Reciprocity
2. Commitment and Consistency
3. Social Proof
4. Liking
5. Authority
6. Scarcity

Liking

I get emails from "Michelle Obama" "Joe Biden" and "Barack Obama" himself. They are personal notes addressed to "Bill." These suggest that we are on a first name basis - friends.

Reciprocity

Did they give me something? Yes, I was able to sign up to be told of Obama's VP choice, before it was announced to the press. In the same email, they also asked me to reciprocate - in the form of a donation.

Also,








If I donate, I get a shirt!

Commitment and Consistency

The emails I get remind me of the past donations I made.

Scarcity

The t-shirt was a "limited edition."
Also, check out the subject line from this email:
"Midnight deadline: Double your impact"
My donation could be doubled, but I had to donate by midnight.

Social Proof

An email from Obama's campaign manager

Bill --A record 100,000 people rallied with Barack in St. Louis yesterday, and another 75,000 in Kansas City last night. Back in Chicago, we were tallying up our latest fundraising numbers.Supporters like you have completely transformed how political campaigns raise money, so I wanted you to be the first to know how we did in September.

175,000 people are doing this, so you should too. They are people "like you."

Racism in the 2008 Presidential Campaign?

Earlier this week, Palin told a group of donors in Colorado that "this is not a man who sees America like you and I see America."


A half-minute clip of the "that one" remark.

Wall Street Journal's article.

This article is from Canada.

CNN's editorial holds that it wasn't racist.

A civil rights leader: McCain is playing with fire.

Gender Discrimination Suit Against Bloomberg LP Grows

The number of plaintiffs in a gender discrimination suit filed against Bloomberg LP grew last week from 58 to 72. According to New York Magazine, one in seven female employees who became pregnant in the last six years are now plantiffs in the lawsuit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Bloomberg LP last fall.

According to the Associated Press , the EEOC claims Bloomberg LP discriminated against women after they disclosed their pregnancies by regularly demoting them, reducing their professional duties, and, according to Reuters, replacing them with "junior" male employees.

http://www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=11295

Racism - alive and well

Louisiana State Lawmaker Considering Legislation to Fund Sterilizations

Louisiana State Representative John LaBruzzo is considering proposing a plan that would pay poor women $1,000 to be sterilized. He has said the program would be voluntary, could involve sterilization of both women and men, could encourage other forms of birth control, and could include tax incentives that would encourage people in higher socio-economic classes to have more children.

Shana Griffin, interim director of the New Orleans Women's Health Clinic said that "if we really want to improve the lives of people in our communities we would think about raising the minimum wage, holistic health care, improving labor laws, employment opportunities for all people and the educational system….Instead he wants to use a form of medical experimentation and forces sterilization on poor women of color, using their economic status as a way to make them more vulnerable to the offer."

Link

Video games good for kids

Far from turning teenagers into anti-social loners, video games help them engage with friends and community, says a report.
The Pew Internet study of US teenagers found that few play alone and most join up with friends when gaming.
It found that many used educational games to learn about world issues and to begin to engage with politics.
The report also found that gaming had become an almost universal pastime among young Americans.



Read the rest of this BBC News article.

Read the Pew report.

Superstitions evolved to help us survive

New Scientist

And the same logic applies to heuristics, such as representativeness.

Stroop

A simple powerpoint slide demo of the Stroop Effect

America's most dangerous jobs

Link

The Tongue Maps Wrong!

Link

Punishment in schools and racism

DALLAS – More than 200,000 US public school students were punished by beatings during the 2006-2007 school year, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union said in a joint report released today. In the 13 states that corporally punished more than 1,000 students per year, African-American girls were twice as likely to be beaten as their white counterparts.

link

Sexism in Today's Media

American Apparel

Sexist antics and union-busting cast doubt on American Apparel’s progressive cred.

In These Times.

Monty Hall Problem

The Monty Hall Problem, named after the host of the long-running game show "Let’s Make a Deal," is a statistical puzzle that seems counterintuitive. A recurring deal on the show featured contestants choosing one of three closed doors, with a big prize behind one of them and something else, like a goat, behind each of the others.

NY Times Demo

No Fat-E's

The new Pixar movie goes out of its way to equate obesity with environmental collapse.

Slate

The F word

Feminist.

The sex industry is booming, the rape conviction rate is plummeting, women's bodies are picked over in the media, abortion rights are under serious threat and top business leaders say they don't want to employ women. It all adds up to one thing ... an all-out assault on feminism. But why? And what's to be done about it, asks Kira Cochrane

Guardian

Your living 1/10 of a second in the future!

Key to All Optical Illusions Discovered

Humans can see into the future, says a cognitive scientist. It's nothing like the alleged predictive powers of Nostradamus, but we do get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur.
And the mechanism behind that can also explain why we are tricked by optical illusions.
Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York says it starts with a neural lag that most everyone experiences while awake. When light hits your retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world.
Scientists already knew about the lag, yet they have debated over exactly how we compensate, with one school of thought proposing our motor system somehow modifies our movements to offset the delay.

Human brain appears 'hard-wired' for hierarchy

Human imaging studies have for the first time identified brain circuitry associated with social status, according to researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) of the National Institutes of Health. They found that different brain areas are activated when a person moves up or down in a pecking order – or simply views perceived social superiors or inferiors. Circuitry activated by important events responded to a potential change in hierarchical status as much as it did to winning money.

story

Being Fat: a stigma or reality?

Half of overweight adults may be heart-healthy
By LINDSEY TANNERAP MEDICAL WRITER


An overweight man is shown in Washington in this 2003 file photo. A new study suggests that a surprising number of overweight people, about half, have normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels, while an equally startling number of trim people suffer from some of the ills associated with obesity. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)
CHICAGO -- You can look great in a swimsuit and still be a heart attack waiting to happen. And you can also be overweight and otherwise healthy. A new study suggests that a surprising number of overweight people - about half - have normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels, while an equally startling number of trim people suffer from some of the ills associated with obesity.

story

Coke versus Pepsi: It's all in the head

The preference for Coke versus Pepsi is not only a matter for the tongue to decide, Samuel McClure and his colleagues have found. Brain scans of people tasting the soft drinks reveal that knowing which drink they're tasting affects their preference and activates memory-related brain regions that recall cultural influences. Thus, say the researchers, they have shown neurologically how a culturally based brand image influences a behavioral choice.

story.

Cognitive dissonance in monkeys

And Behind Door No. 1, a Fatal Flaw
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: April 8, 2008
Some experiments that purport to show cognitive-dissonance effects might be explainable by statistics alone.

Not Really.

NY Times story.

CEOs' pay

See how CEOs' pay has grown over the average workers'.

Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them

You may think you decided to read this story -- but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it.
In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.
The decision studied -- whether to hit a button with one's left or right hand -- may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion?
Wired Story

Fertile women 'have sexier voice'

A woman's voice becomes more alluring when she is at her most fertile, according to US research.
Recordings of women taken at different points in their menstrual cycle were played to people of both sexes.
New Scientist magazine reports that the voices rated as most attractive belonged to women at peak fertility.

BBC story

Plays well with others

Idea Lab
The Case for Fitting In
By DAVID BERREBY
Published: March 30, 2008

Why nonconformity is overrated

A new look at Asch's line judging experiment.

Data show extent of sexism in physics

from Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080423/full/452918a.html


Women are poorly represented in physics, making
up just 10% of faculty in the United States,
for example, but the reasons for this have proved
contentious. Now a particle physicist claims to
have hard data showing institutional sexism
at an experiment at one of America’s highestprofile
physics labs.
Sherry Towers claims that female postdocs
worked significantly harder than their male
peers but were awarded one-third as many conference
presentations proportionally. “There
was this shocking difference,” says Towers, who
now studies statistics at Purdue University in
West Lafayette, Indiana. “Particle physics really
hasn’t moved forward in 30 years.”
Towers used data from publicly available work
records to chart the careers of 57 postdoctoral
researchers, including nine women, who worked
on the ‘DZero’ particle detector at Fermilab in
Batavia, Illinois, between 1998 and 2006. Towers
herself worked as a postdoc on the project
between 2000 and 2005. The findings of her
survey were striking, she says. She claims that
women did 40% more maintenance work
than their male counterparts, and that female
postdocs produced significantly more ‘internal
papers’ per year. But based on that productivity
they were only one-third as likely to be allocated
conference talks as their male peers, she claims
(http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.2026).
Conference presentations are critical to a
young particle physicist’s career. Papers from
collaborations such as DZero have hundreds
of authors in alphabetical order. Being given
the chance to present results at a meeting is a
major way for young researchers to stand out.
“It’s important,” says Pauline Gagnon, a physicist
with the ATLAS detector at CERN near Geneva,
Switzerland. “Being able to give
talks is a way of rewarding individuals
for their work.”
Most particle detectors have
internal committees that allocate
conference presentations
to researchers. These committees
are frequently male-dominated,
and Towers believes this
lies behind the discrimination.
“I don’t think for a second that
there is a conscious bias going
on,” she says. But the committees
“are in danger of being
prone to patronage and cronyism”.
Male committee members are more likely
to nominate male protégés to receive presentation
time, she claims.
Some are sceptical of the findings. “I wasn’t
convinced that the effect she has found is real,”
says Kevin Pitts, a particle physicist at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Internal
papers are not necessarily a direct measure
of productivity, he argues, and the small number
of physicists surveyed is not enough to prove
systematic bias. But Pitts is quick to add that he
has little doubt that females do suffer gender discrimination:
“In fact,” he says, “I have personally
observed this on more than one occasion.”
Female physicists contacted by Nature said
Towers’s data matched their personal experiences
of institutional sexism in physics. “You often see a
young guy with an older guy gossiping and having
coffee, but never a woman,” says Freya Blekman, a
physicist on the CMS experiment at CERN. “I’m
convinced,” agrees Gagnon. “There is absolutely
no shadow of a doubt in my mind.” She says the
ATLAS collaboration is thinking about how to
address the problem in its own
speakers’ committee.
After Towers complained,
Fermilab launched an internal
review in autumn 2006,
says Bruce Chrisman, the
lab’s chief operating officer.
An edited copy of the review
obtained by Nature found that
the collaboration “followed
its policies correctly”. But the
investigator, a senior female
physicist, added that complaints
of gender discrimination
in the group “should not
be summarily dismissed”. There was a general
feeling that females were being “passed over”
for leadership roles, the report says.
DZero’s leaders counter that bias, if it ever
existed, is not plaguing the current collaboration.
A survey of data between August 2006 and
2007 showed that women gave 17% of all talks
despite making up just 12% of the collaboration,
says DZero spokesman Dmitri Denisov.
Powers says the investigation didn’t focus
on postdocs and hasn’t led to real changes at
DZero. She wants the conference allocation system
to be made more transparent and balanced.
“The changes that need to be made are simple,”
she says. “It wouldn’t cost them a dime.”
And Towers says gender discrimination ultimately
forced her out of particle physics. She
adds that in 2004 her former employer, a prominent
northeastern public university, tried to terminate
her contract after she complained that
she wasn’t given adequate maternity leave. She
has since filed a lawsuit against the university. ■
Geoff Brumfiel

Stress and Illness

As I always tell my students, stress is really, really bad. It exacerbates a lot of psychological and physical problems. Unfortunately, most students assume I mean that it causes these problems.

Stress Test
By PEGGY ORENSTEIN
Published: June 29, 2008
Why Americans want to believe that our mental states can control our physical maladies.
NY Times

UN Security Council to Discuss Sexual Violence

Today, Condoleezza Rice leads the United Nations Security Council in a discussion of sexual violence as a tactic of war. While the United Nations has previously recognized that sexual violence against women occurs in war, it has not created concrete steps for alleviating this atrocity or mechanisms for oversight and information gathering.

House Drops Affordable Birth Control Pricing Amendment

The US House passed a version of a supplemental war spending bill on Thursday which, unlike the Senate version passed last month, does not include an amendment to restore affordable access to birth control for college students and low-income women.

World's oldest companies!

World's oldest companies!

Mail I get from my union

CUNY faculty are in a teacher's union (PSC-CUNY), which is part of a larger teacher's union AFT. I received this email from AFT today.

http://www.freechoiceact.org/page/content/aft-aboutus/

I wasn't satisfied with this description so I went to the AFL-CIO's site and found this

http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion/voiceatwork/efca/upload/EFCA_Summary.pdf

Email I get from the ACLU

Support Working Families!

Dear William,


What happens when you need time off to care for an ailing parent?

What do you do if you're pregnant, but you don't get paid maternity leave?


These are dilemmas that New Yorkers confront each day. Juggling work responsibilities and family commitments is part of modern life. But health issues should not force New Yorkers to choose between their paycheck and caring for their families.

That's why we need a comprehensive paid family leave law. Email your Senator today!

Paid family leave would provide a weekly benefit to help an employee care for a new child or a seriously ill family member. This benefit would cost employers nothing, and would cost workers only pennies a week.

Paid family leave will help all working families in New York. But women, who often work full time and shoulder the responsibility of caring for children and ailing relatives, are disproportionately impacted by policies that do not provide paid leave. Paid family leave will help New York women better juggle work, family and financial responsibilities, and will further the goal of true equality in the workplace.

Paid family leave will help employees care for their families without risking the paycheck they rely on, and without creating new burdens on employers.

Time is running out in the legislative session. Please e-mail your Senator today.

Send a letter to the following decision maker(s):
Your State Senator (if you live in New York)

Below is the sample letter:

Subject: Senator, please support paid family leave

Dear [decision maker name automatically inserted here],

I am writing to urge you to support comprehensive paid family leave legislation that will prevent families from having to choose between family responsibilities and financial solvency. The Assembly Speaker has introduced legislation, A.9245, that provides the best coverage. Now the Senate should do the same, and make paid family leave a reality in New York State.

Paid family leave would cost worker just pennies a week, and will create no new administrative requirements or financial burdens on employers.

Paid family leave would make New York a national leader in supporting working families. It would also further the important goals of equality by easing financial burdens that constrain women's choices.

Please support a bill modeled after Speaker Silver's comprehensive paid family leave bill, so New Yorkers will no longer have to choose between their paycheck and caring for their families.


Sincerely,

William Ashton

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
What's At Stake:

Too many New Yorkers are forced to decide between their paycheck and caring for their families.

For families today, it is common for both parents to work outside the home, or for the household to be headed by a single parent. Older family members are also living longer, and need more care in the later part of their lives.

Yet there is still no requirement that employers offer paid leave to enable working families to care for new babies or sick family members. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) guarantees unpaid leave for family health care issues. But most people cannot afford to forego pay, even in medical emergencies. Studies of workers who did not take allowed time off show that 77 percent said it was because they could not afford to miss a paycheck.

All New Yorkers will benefit from this legislation. But it is especially critical for women, who are often the primary caregivers for their families. Paid family leave furthers the goals of gender equality by reducing the financial burdens associated with caring for a new baby or sick family member. In supporting women’s choices, it also furthers the cause of reproductive freedom.

How paid family leave would work:

It simply amends the existing Worker’s Compensation Program, by extending benefits already available for temporary disability.
It is covered by insurance and paid for by employees themselves through small payroll deductions – so it does not increase payroll costs.
Benefits of $170 per week for up to 12 weeks will cost workers just pennies a week, or just more than $23 a year for each worker.

Campaign Expiration Date:
June 23, 2008

Fight over the virtual office

This story about TV news writers' new contract directly addresses the virtual office.

What Women Want (Maybe)

What Women Want (Maybe)
By ANDY NEWMAN
Published: June 12, 2008
NY Times

A new documentary about bisexuality provides scientific evidence that places female sexuality along a continuum between heterosexuality and homosexuality, rather than as an either-or phenomenon.

This article cites JPSP research on images which arouse heterosexual women.

Diversity Training

INTEREST-FREE tuition installment option

Dear Faculty,



As you know, the advising period is upon us. It is to continuing students’ advantage to complete early registration for Fall now, while a large number of course seats are still open.



Some students may be postponing their course registration because they do not want to pay their full tuition bills until closer to Fall semester. Please share with them that there is an INTEREST-FREE tuition installment option available to them. Registering for courses now does NOT necessarily mean they have to come up with the full amount of their tuition by July. For a low enrollment fee, they can pay their semester bill in installment payments over the semester , rather than in one lump sum.



Information on the plan is available at www.TuitionPay.com/cuny
and at the Bursar’s Office.



Thanks for keeping students informed of the various options available for financing their education.





Cynthia R. Haller

Acting Associate Dean, Humanities and Social Sciences

Room 2H07C, Office of Academic Affairs

York College/CUNY

Jamaica, NY 11451

718-262-2468

haller@york.cuny.edu

3rd variable illustration

'Healthier hearts' for cat owners

However the authors warned against impulsive cat purchases.

They said while cats may indeed have a calming effect, it was unclear whether the kind of people who opted for a cat in the first place may have a lower risk of heart attack.

read the BBC story

The quote directly addresses the third variable problem: could something else (such as a personality trait) cause both a lower risk of heart disease and cat ownership? But also, there's the directionality problem: could people who are less likely to develop heart disease prefer cats? If you think about this for a second, you realize that this explanation is either silly or the 3rd variable problem in disguise.

Study Shows Comprehensive Sex Education Reduces Teen Pregnancy

A new study by researchers at the University of Washington found that students who receive comprehensive sex education are half as likely to become teen parents as those who receive abstinence-only sex education. According to the Seattle Times, this study marks the first time researchers have compared comprehensive sex education and abstinence-only education in a national sample of teenagers.

Read the Feminist DDaily News story.

Pregnancy Discrimination Reports at Record High

Reports of pregnancy discrimination to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) are at an all time high. The EEOC received 5,587 charges of pregnancy-based discrimination in 2007, up 14 percent from 2006 which represents the largest increase in a single year.

Read the Feminist Daily News story.

Have you been bullied at work?

A recent blog on the NY Time's Well page had over 300 responses describing people who have been bullied at work.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/have-you-been-bullied-at-work/#more-302

Zimbardo & Abu Ghraib

THE HORRIFYING PHOTOS of young Iraqis abused by American soldiers have shocked the world with their depictions of human degradation, forcing us to acknowledge that some of our beloved soldiers have committed barbarous acts of cruelty and sadism. Now there is a rush to analyze human behavior, blaming flawed or pathological individuals for evil and ignoring other important factors. Unless we learn the dynamics of "why," we will never be able to counteract the powerful forces that can transform ordinary people into evil perpetrators.

Read the Boston Globe op-ed by Zimbardo.

Pappas's mental state in Iraq was first publicly questioned in The Lucifer Effect, a best-selling book by Dr. Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford University psychologist and expert on detention who conducted the well-known "Stanford Prison Experiment" — a 1971 simulation in which students were asked to play the role of guards — and who also testified as an expert witness in one of the Abu Ghraib trials.

Read the Time article.

“War is all about old men wanting young men to kill other young men, but we only want them to kill them when they are there; when they come back, we don’t want them to become killers. That’s why we put men in uniforms,” Zimbardo said.

Zimbardo at Uuniversity of Delaware.

More racism - economic

I just saw this today:

Now, what kind of American is ‘sub-prime.’ Guess. No peeking. Here’s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid – they had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s called in the mortgage sharking business.

Greg Palast outlines what this sub-prime morgage crisis is (and how it relates to NY state).

Construction of Racial Identity

Are you black enough?


What is being black?

A nice review of social psychology

Why We do Dumb or Irrational Things: 10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies

Perceptions of Free Will

Whether or not people have free will, whether or not they believe that they do has significant influences on their behavior.

Behavior: An Absence of Free Will, a Tendency to Cheat
By ERIC NAGOURNEY
Published: February 19, 2008
If there is no such thing as free will, do you really have to put that money into the office coffee kitty when no one is looking?

Arguing the Upside of Being Down

Author Eric G. Wilson has come to realize he was born to the blues, and he has made peace with his melancholy state.
But it took some time, as he writes in his new book, a polemic titled Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.

All Things Considered, February 11, 2008

"ice-pick" lobotomy

On Jan. 17, 1946, a psychiatrist named Walter Freeman launched a radical new era in the treatment of mental illness in this country. On that day, he performed the first-ever transorbital or "ice-pick" lobotomy in his Washington, D.C., office. Freeman believed that mental illness was related to overactive emotions, and that by cutting the brain he cut away these feelings.

All Things Considered

Aromatherapy

Putting pseudoscience claims to the test of controlled research.

Nostrums: Aromatherapy Rarely Stands Up to Testing
By ERIC NAGOURNEY
Published: March 11, 2008
When researchers set out to see if they could prove any of the claims about aromatherapy in the lab, most did not pan out.

One problem tho, the co-author's name: William B. Malarkey

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE!

More Expensive Placebos Bring More Relief
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: March 5, 2008
In a recent study, researchers found that a $2.50 placebo works better than one that costs 10 cents.

The Scientific Method is self-correcting

Did they dry lab (make up the data) or is something else going on?

Nobel Winner Retracts Research Paper
By KENNETH CHANG
Published: March 7, 2008
A team of scientists including Linda B. Buck, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has retracted a scientific paper after the findings could not be reproduced.

Availability and the Iraq war

"On my wrist, there’s Arabic for “F you.” I got that put on my wrist just two weeks before we went to Iraq, because that was my choking hand, and any time I felt the need to take out aggression, I would go ahead and use it.
Please go to the next picture. Next, there’s an instance of detainees and how they were treated in a nice manner.
Next, that is the Fatima Mosque minaret. As you can see, it is ridden with bullet holes and holes in the top of it. Those were from mortars. And the next video that I’m going to show you is a tank round that went into that minaret, where we weren’t sure if we were taking fire or not. Actually, I’ll talk about this one. This is after one of the guys in a weapons company had gotten shot. This is a way that we would take out our aggression. For those of you who don’t know, it is illegal to shoot into a mosque, unless you were taking fire from it. There was no fire that was taken from that mosque. It was shot into because we were angry."

This is a statement Jon Michael Turner, former Marine with the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines, gave at Winter Soldier last week. (see story on Democracy Now)

What? You didn't hear about Winter Soldier? Not suprised, most of the news services didn't cover this event. (Headlined on 3/19/08:Corporate Media Ignored Winter Soldier. )

So, what's not in the news is not available.

Logo Can Make You 'Think Different'

An excellent example of priming and advertising.

Whether you are a Mac person or a PC person, even the briefest exposure to the Apple logo may make you behave more creatively, according to recent research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the University of Waterloo, Canada.

From, Physorg.com

attentional blindness commerical

For the "our culture of rape" files

'Torture Porn' Makers Shrug Off the Label


As "torture porn" movies deepen their imaginative excursions into terror and violence against women, some of their creators are not only defending themselves from attacks by women's activists, they're calling their work feminist.

(WOMENSENEWS)--When the movie "Hostel" raked in $19 million on its debut weekend and gripped the No. 1 spot for a week in 2005, some critics heralded the comeback of horror, which had been in a box office slump for a decade.

From, Women's News

United Nations Finds US Not Combating Racism Effectively

The United Nations (UN) Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination called attention to the wide racial disparities that continue to exist in the US. The Committee concluded March 7 after finding the US lacking in its pursuit of the end of racial discrimination. The Committee's report on the US criticized persistent racial profiling, the dismantling of affirmative action, inadequate access to health care, and the racial disparities in the US criminal justice system. The UN also condemned the racial inequities in reproductive and sexual health care in the US. The Center for Reproductive Rights reports that that the Committee urged the US to reduce its high rates of maternal and infant mortality, to decrease the rate of unplanned pregnancies, and to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. The Reproductive Health Reality Check pointed out that women of color have significantly worse sexual health than white women.

From, Feminist Daily News WireMarch 17, 2008

Mythbusters

From XKCD

Scientists "see" ghosts

An article about the how unreal our normal perceptual processes are.

Aggression: "College football games and crime"

http://econ.cudenver.edu/home/workingpapers/Rees_WP_08-01.pdf
"Our results suggest that the host community registers sharp increases in assaults, vandalism, arrests for disorderly conduct, and arrests for alcohol-related offenses on game days. Upsets are associated with the largest increases in the number of expected offenses. These estimates are discussed in the context of psychological theories of fan aggression."

The Power of Being Influenced

Sometimes an idea spreads through society like a newly-mutated cold virus zooming through a class of first-graders. Other times, a good idea never seems to take hold. What makes the difference? Scientists want to know, and marketers want to know even more, since they make their living spreading ideas about their products.

racism in the ER

Emergency department physicians are prescribing more narcotics to patients who say they have pain, but minority patients are less likely than whites to receive such drugs, according to a study published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Milgram in real life!

Get this, obedience to authority and the end results is people getting electrical shocks!

http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2007/12/18/prank_led_school_to_treat_two_with_shock/

Researchers Gain Understanding of How Poverty Alters the Brain

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Monday, February 18, 2008
Researchers Gain Understanding of How Poverty Alters the Brain
By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

Brain studies of poor children reveal that their neural systems develop differently from those of other children, a finding that potentially points the way toward creating methods for ameliorating the effects of poverty on academic achievement.
"Growing up poor is bad for your brain—we've known that for a long time," said Martha J. Farah, director of the center for cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. "What's new is that neuroscientists have begun to try to understand this problem," she said last week at the annual meeting here of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which ends today.
For generations, psychologists have noted that children raised in poverty perform poorer on cognitive tests, on average, than do students from wealthier families. Some researchers have taken those results to argue that intelligence is determined for the most part by genetics and that certain races are inherently smarter than others. In 1994, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray presented that case in their book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.
But the new results from neuroscience indicate that experience, especially being raised in poverty, has a strong effect on the way the brain works. "It's not a case of bad genes," said Ms. Farah.
She and her colleagues have investigated the issue by trying to tease out which aspects of poverty alter specific cognitive skills, such as memory, language, and the ability to delay gratification. The researchers studied a group of African-American children of low socioeconomic status, who had been tracked from birth through high-school graduation by Hallam Hurt, a pediatrician at Penn.
Over the years, Dr. Hurt's team had assessed the home environments of the children, monitoring how nurturing parents were, and how intellectually stimulating the homes were—for example, whether the children had access to books and visited museums.
When Ms. Farah's team tested 110 of those children, they found that particular cognitive skills were linked with certain aspects of the environment. Children with better language abilities were more likely to come from intellectually stimulating homes, no matter how nurturing their parents were. Memory skills, however, matched the nurturing levels in the home, reported Ms. Farah, who will publish her results in an upcoming issue of Developmental Science.
Effect of Nurturing on the Brain
To test why, the researchers did MRI scans of the children. They found that students raised in nurturing homes generally had bigger hippocampi, the portion of the brain associated with forming and retrieving memories. The discovery dovetails with previous research in rodents, which showed that rats raised in a stressful environment develop smaller hippocampi.
The results of the new work suggest that "it's worth making intervention and prevention programs because clearly a lot of the action here is experiential," said Ms. Farah. "This points out the fact that these phenomena are the result of adverse environments."
At the science association's meeting, Courtney Stevens, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oregon's brain-development laboratory, described other experiments on the cognitive effects of poverty. In one study, researchers put a net of electrodes on the heads of children and measured their brain waves. The children were seated between two speakers playing different stories and they were asked to pay attention to only one of the stories.
While the stories were being read, the children heard identical bursts of distracting noise coming from either of the speakers. The brains of the children responded differently to those same noises, depending on whether it came from the side they were listening to or ignoring. It's almost as if the brain has a volume control, turning up the sound on the side it is attending to, said Ms. Stevens.
The study revealed that students from lower-income families were less able to screen out the noises embedded in the stories they were supposed to ignore.
The students in the higher-income group, however, "had more gain on their volume control," she said. "Their brains were able to make a larger distinction between what they were trying to hear versus ignore."
With those results and others suggesting that cognitive skills are strongly influenced by environment, the Oregon team is developing intervention programs to try to counteract the effects of poverty. At the meeting, Ms. Courtney described one experimental program that has shown initial success.
Parental-Intervention Program
The program, developed by Jessica Fanning, a doctoral student at Oregon, trains parents to improve their communication skills and provides them with tools to improve their children's behavior, with the aim of reducing stress in the home. To test her program, Ms. Fanning recruited families from a Head Start program.
She found that after eight weekly sessions with parents, they reported less stress in the home, and their children performed significantly better on tests of language skills, nonverbal intelligence, memory, and attention.
The researchers have thus far tested only 14 low-income children and 14 controls. And they are tracking the children to see whether the effects persist. "At the end of the day, what we don't care about is a 5-point difference in I.Q.," said Ms. Stevens. "We care about this measure if it's going to translate into something persistent and useful."
While many of the researchers at the session supported the hypothesis that socioeconomic status plays a strong role in affecting brain development in children, Mabel L. Rice, director of the doctoral program in child language at the University of Kansas, described a new study that goes against the hypothesis, at least in the case of early verbal abilities. In tests of 1,766 children in Australia, Ms. Rice and her colleagues found no correlation between a child's verbal abilities at 24 months old and the parents' socioeconomic status or their education levels.
"The conclusion is that we don't want to assume too strongly that children of poverty are unable to acquire early vocabulary," she told The Chronicle.
Ms. Rice and three other researchers reported their results in December in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

The Women's Body Image Quiz

The skinny on Miss Cleo

Miss Cleo, the fake-Jamaican, psychic is back!

Now she's doing commercials for FUSE tv playing on her past notoriety. She also has a psychic website.

People just don't learn.

Here's a CourtTV article on the downfall of the 90's Miss Cleo.

And here's the script for a "live tarot reading."

Quarter of U.S. women suffer domestic violence

WASHINGTON - About a quarter of U.S. women suffer domestic violence, U.S. health officials reported on Thursday, with ongoing health problems that one activist likened to the effects of living in a war zone.

Some men also experience domestic violence, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found.

The CDC said 23.6 percent of women and 11.5 percent of men reported being a victim of what it called "intimate partner violence" at some time in their lives.

The CDC defined this as threatened, attempted or completed physical or sexual violence or emotional abuse by a spouse, former spouse, current or former boyfriend or girlfriend or a dating partner. The CDC estimates that 1,200 women are killed and 2 million injured in domestic violence annually.

Read the rest of this Reuters report.

Original CDC Report

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Whose myth? Ph.D.'s, of course!

The following article was sent around among the York faculty this week:

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/02/2008020101c/careers.html

This article makes three points about science and teaching:

1. Perspective

Us folks (professors, Ph.D.s, Psychologists) forget that we have a unique perspective about being human and being a college student: we were destined for Ph.D.s. That is, when we subjectively think about our experiences of being a plain old human or our experiences in college, they are being experienced by people who have the special traits which motivate and allow them to go on and excel intellectually.

We forget that we -- like everyone else -- are stuck in their own perspective.

The false consensus effect describes how everyone assumes a false consensus -- if I do x, most people do x. Saying, "teaching this say really had an effect on me in college, so therefore I should teach this way so my students will get the same benefit" is the false consensus effect!

2. Hypotheses

Ok 330 and 332 students: Is this (Clydesdale's work) empirical? Yes, he collects data systematically. Is it experimental? No. He creates no control conditions or other procedures to control for extraneous variables.

Students are often confused about sociology (Clydesdale's area) and social psychology. Both study normal people in social situations. The difference is in the level of study and methodology. Social Psychologists study individuals (i.e. psychology) while sociologists study groups. What attitudes do this social group hold? is a sociology question; how do people come to hold any attitude (the psychological process of attitude formation) is a social psychology question. Social Psychologists, as most psychologists, are experimental. We are more concerned about extraneous variables than realism. Sociologists are more concerned with realism (what is this real group thinking) than defending ourselves from extraneous variables.

3. Teaching

Clydesdale's conclusion is that classroom activities need to focus more on activities than lectures. Just wanted to mention that; my students are often uncomfortable with my teaching methods - for example, this week in Social Psych I won't lecture; I will do activities to teach basic psych skills.

Why we use primary sources

Bewildered, academics pore over sex-trade hysteria

Farley's book cites -- incorrectly -- Brents and Hausbeck's primary research, and arrives at a very different conclusion.

The Moral Instinct - STEVEN PINKER

harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — they are the primary colors of our moral sense

Gender Gap

The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report

The US's standing.

Inattentional Blindness video

Notice anything odd in this video?

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/23.html

try the next video (scroll down)













http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/12.html

In this video, 50% of the participants did not notice the change, even when questioned about it.

Asian voters in US 'got raw deal'

Many Asian American voters faced discrimination from voting officials during 2006 mid-term elections in the US, a civil rights group has alleged.

What's wrong with privatization?

Nobody likes a government run bureaucracy; they're wasteful, full of red tape and do-gooders.

The privatization of organizations which perform a public good may not be a great solution.

At Many Homes, More Profit and Less Nursing

Six prisoners had escaped in broad daylight from the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center and were still at large. The inmates had cut a four-foot hole in the prison's fence during outdoor recreation, then maneuvered through three rolls of razor ribbon without being detected. No alarm went off, and the officers patrolling the perimeter didn't notice anything amiss.

A meta-analysis of studies found little difference in cost to the public of private prisons:

Maahs, J. & Pratt, T. (1999). Are Private Prisons More Cost-Effective Than Public Prisons? A Meta-Analysis of Evaluation Research Studies. Crime & Delinquency, 45(3), 358-371.

Austrian Politician Calls Prophet Muhammad a 'Child Molester'

While in the US white/black racism has essentially gone underground (modern racism) in the US and Europe white/arab racism is the old fashioned variety -- proudly displayed.

A candidate campaigning for the Graz city council in Austria says it is time that Islam was "thrown back ... behind the Mediterranean," and alleges Muhammad wrote the Koran in "epileptic fits."

But are you happy?

I found this on a weird news site

Sarkozy wants happiness included in economic growth measures

Which reallys isn't that weird. There's been a lot of research lately on subjective well being and national averages.

The different types of love

Rubes by Leigh Rubin

Hillary's challenge

Tom Toles
Female leaders face a double standard. Typical leader behavior is seen as extreme (as compared to male leaders) because the behavior deviates from the feminine gender role expectations. Any small amount of feminine gender role congruent behavior is seen as hyper-feminine as compared to the scheme for a leader's behavior.

Gloria Steinem on the Iowa Cacuses

Women Are Never Front-Runners
By GLORIA STEINEM
Published: January 8, 2008
Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.

Economists Say Movie Violence Might Temper the Real Thing

A new study challenges conventional wisdom, suggesting that violent films prevent violent crime by attracting and keeping would-be assailants occupied.

I know why psychologists are upset about this study (other than the economists' encroachment into our turf): the conventional wisdom among psychologists is that catharsis does not work - watching violence does not 'get it out of your system.' Fighting this folk belief was a long and hard battle. I think many psychologists see this study as saying that catharsis works. Nope. It's saying that violent people like violence - either real or fictional. And fictional violence is so much easier to come by than the real thing so they go for the easy choice.