11. desember 2003

Study: Pretty women make men lose their heads Scientists have now been able to demonstrate that the sky is blue and that men gets more irrational when they see a pretty woman's face. A principle in finance, called time value of money, is that a certain amount of money today is worth more than the same amount in the future. However, rational people will hold off a small reward now for a muich bigger reward in the future. Canadian scientists actually found out that just showing pictures of pretty women's faces from the "hot or not" website (no kidding!) made men more irrational when it came to preferring immediate cash to a larger furture reward. Margo Wilson and Martin Daly of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada decided to investigate discounting behaviour and see if it varied with sexual mood. Male students, when shown pictures of pretty women, were more likely to opt for short-term economic gain than wait for a better reward in the future. [...] Wilson and Daly found that male students shown the pictures of averagely attractive women showed exponential discounting of the future value of the reward. This indicated that they had made a rational decision. When male students were shown pictures of pretty women, they discounted the future value of the reward in an "irrational" way - they would opt for the smaller amount of money available the next day rather than wait for a much bigger reward. Women, by contrast, made equally rational decisions whether they had been shown pictures of handsome men or those of average attractiveness. Isn't it a factor that top male executives tend to have "trophy wives" and pretty secretaries? No surprise it goes downhill with the economy of top corporations after a while. 10:14:14 PM    comment []  trackback []

Today's underreported news The news about a large anti-terror, pro-democracy demonstration in Baghdad is remarkably absent from some of the big newsmedia. Five thousand to 10,000 Iraqis tried to send terrorists a cease-and-desist message Wednesday from downtown Baghdad in the biggest demonstration against violence to date. This story is also top news in the blogsphere, e.g. Healing Iraq. If there had been 5-10 thousand Iraqis demonstrating against the US, it would have made the BBC and CNN headlines. In fact, in October it did. 8:37:18 PM    comment []  trackback []

The left against free speech The Volokh Conspiracy has an interesting note: Free speech advocacy has moved from being mainly a liberal cause to becoming a conservative one. Earlier, it was various left wing groups that typically fought for and benefitted from free speech protection. Now, the left are more likely to be fighting to suppress speech that is not idealogically acceptable: Today, by contrast, the left believes "speech cases are often won by corporations, the media, and other powerful insiders.... Powerful private actors, such as pornographers and the media, are free to control, suppress, and distort the speech of others, and when they do, political processes cannot redress it." Political correctness is the new name of political oppression. 8:15:16 PM    comment []  trackback []

Tel Aviv blast may be crime, not terrorism The blast that killed 3 in Tel Aviv today may be related to organised crime not terrorism, according to Israeli authorities. The explosion may have been an attempt at killing suspected crime leader Ze'ev Rosenstein, who was among the injured in the currency exchange targeted. 5:45:35 PM    comment []  trackback []

Blogs against ban The Beeb has picked up the story about how Iranian webloggers have become a serious force for change. Iran's representatives at the UN's digital summit in Geneva find themselves being exposed for trying to block access to sites critical of the regime, not to mention the Google cache. 5:29:33 PM    comment []  trackback []

Why the sky was red in Munch's "Scream" Astronomer Donald Olson thinks he has found out why the sky in Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's famous "Scream" was so red: the massive volcanic eruption at the island of Krakatoa on the other side of the planet. 7:49:08 AM    comment []  trackback []

Sucking up to extremists: The Nobel Peace Lecture 2003 I was mildly optimistic when the Iranian lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi (picture) received the Nobel Peace Prize this year. Women's rights and children's rights, easily overlooked in a world where big issues, big money and big interests are fighting, surely need a recognition. Even though Shirin Ebadi strongly believes that human rights struggles can be fought and won within the framework of Islam... Well, it is worth a try isn't it? We're not going to abolish the world's second largest religion anytime soon, so reform is the only realistic way to go. However, as time has passed and the official awards ceremony approached, I have seen more and more criticism of her work. She accepts most tenets of Shariah Islam, and strongly argues that human rights and Islamic regimes can be unified. Also, after she won the prize, she has been most careful not to challenge the conservatives in Iran. Yesterday was the day for her prize acceptance speach, one chance in the lifetime of a human rights activists to have her own words spread literally around the world, in all newspapers, on all TV stations. And what does she do? She delivers a massive suck-up to the extremists in her own country, and appeals to the most primitive instincts in the Islamic world. She first used the opportunity to slam the old Satan the USA: At the same time, in the past two years, some states have violated the universal principles and laws of human rights by using the events of 11 September and the war on international terrorism as a pretext. [...] However, regulations restricting human rights and basic freedoms, special bodies and extraordinary courts, which make fair adjudication difficult and at times impossible, have been justified and given legitimacy under the cloak of the war on terrorism. Note her choice of words. Not that civil liberties have suffered during the war on terror, but that the whole thing has just been a "pretext" for human rights abuses. The war on terror is just a "cloak" in her world. Tell that to the relatives of the 3000+ who perished on that day. Let's get one thing clear. You may be right in believing that US anti-terror laws have harmed civil rights, and you don't have to be an ACLU member to worry about certain aspects of the Patriot Act. Still, let's keep things in perspective. Fact is that in all western democracies, people have vastly more extensive civil liberties than they have in any Islamic country. We are all lightyears ahead of her own country Iran, so why does this year's Nobel prize winner chose to bash the US and Israel, considering that she received the prize for her work for Muslim women and children? Maybe it is unfortunate that the US imprisons hundreds of Islamic militants on Guantanamo Bay without verdict, but let's face it, most other regimes would have shot illegal combattants at the spot without a single leftist in the world raising an eyebrow. By pointing her finger at the west, Shirin Ebadi has given a perfect (if misleading) excuse to all Islamic regimes to do nothing to improve their civil rights record. Her speech was propaganda well worthy of Saddam Hussein, the Iranian Ayatollahs' or countless other third world dictators arguing that the west is hypocritical to avoid dealing with their own massive human rights abuses. Her second target, Israel, was also obviously calculated to suck up to Islamists and the men in power in Iran. And, like any Islamist over the last decade or so, she compares UN resolutions regarding Iraq and Israel. Moreover, a question which millions of citizens in the international civil society have been asking themselves for the past few years, particularly in recent months, and continue to ask, is this: why is it that some decisions and resolutions of the UN Security Council are binding, while some other resolutions of the council have no binding force? Why is it that in the past 35 years, dozens of UN resolutions concerning the occupation of the Palestinian territories by the state of Israel have not been implemented promptly, yet, in the past 12 years, the state and people of Iraq, once on the recommendation of the Security Council, and the second time, in spite of UN Security Council opposition, were subjected to attack, military assault, economic sanctions, and, ultimately, military occupation?? Shirin Ebadi is a lawyer, and I doubt she is really so stupid she believes her own argument. The "dozens" of UN resolutions regarding Israel and the terrorities were General Assembly resolutions, which carries exactly zero weight under international law. Iraq, on the other hand, were under the pressure from Security Council resolutions that issued "or else" demands. Only one Security Council resolution ever tried to impose lasting demands on the parties in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, SCR 242 from 1967 (followed up in 338 of 1973), and it actually requires all states in the region to acknowledge the state of Israel, something Iran and all Islamic countries in the area (except Egypt) have refused to do. That resolution is however notable by not having any timetable or issuing any "or else" threats to the parties. Despite being factually fraudulent and absurd, her attack on Israel will no doubt be wildly popular among Islamists in the Middle East, it will be very satisfying to the fanatics ruling her own country, and it will also be popular among the leftists who currently dominate the Nobel institute in Norway. This speech will, however, do nothing to improve the civil rights situation in Islamc countries. Women will still remain second class citizens in the Islamic world. Children will still suffer under inhuman rules. This Nobel lecture marks the point in time where we realise that this year's prize, too, has probably been a total failure because the Nobel committee simply fails to understand the world we are living in. 6:22:40 AM    comment []  trackback []

False accusations of child abuse The retired Norwegian judge Trygve Lange-Nielsen has managed to help seven people who were convicted for sexually abusing children in Norway in the 90s to be retried and acquitted. He is convinced that at least one hundred people were falsely convicted for sexual abuse of children in that decade. Why? Because whenever somebody were accused of sexually abusing children, the child was examined at the Aker clinic (Akerklinikken), and they concluded in 30-40 percent of the cases that the genitalia showed evidence of sexual abuse. In reality, the doctors simply did not know how normal, healthy child genitalia looked like, so they thought totally normal finds were abnormal. The result is what is probably the worst miscarriage of justice in Norway since the witch hunts. The doctors at the Aker clinic, for example the manager at the time Helge Michalsen, are not apologetic for ruining the lives of around a hundred Norwegian men and their families. "It is a bit unfair to criticise us just because better methods and knowledge have been developed," he says. "Some things we thought was abnormal, is normal." His successor in the job, Erik Kreyberg Normann, adds that a lot of knowledge we have today will probably be similarily obsolete and proved faulty in a few years. Very reassuring! Our court systems are the last remaining vestiges of a mediaval mindset in our modern governments. (From a Norwegian article in Nettavisen) 4:54:20 AM    comment []  trackback []

Terror for dollars Read David Kaplan's story about how Saudi oil revenue was exchanged into Islamic terror. So why didn't the US put a tougher pressure on the Saudi Kingdom, considering that it was the primary source of all Islamist terror? Two answers: 1) Mecca; 2) Medina. Luckily, al-Qaeda decided to make the Saudis their targets, too, hopefully avoiding the potentially civilisation-wrecking decision of going to war against the Saudis. 4:00:13 AM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2004 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.01.2004; 02:46:37.