Rotundus.com

Mediterranean Diet Can Cut Heart Disease, Study Finds

This clinical trial compared a low-fat diet to a Mediterranean "diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables" allowing participants to "even drink wine with meals." Worth noting is the following comment from a cardiologist: "Low-fat diets have not been shown in any rigorous way to be helpful, and they are also very hard for patients to maintain" and per the NYT vegan diets have never been rigorously tested.

GOP has lost another key bloc: Silicon Valley techies

California GOP consultant Kevin Spillane: "Technologists are often single, socially moderate-to-liberal, much more secular than the population as a whole, and those demographics are a problem for the Republican Party right now." In the recent US presidential race 85% of contributions went to the Democrats - and that figure doesn't yert account for things like this case study on the Obama campaign's use of Amazon's cloud that I've encountered oodles of links to over time.

Study of the Day: Soon, You May Download New Skills to Your Brain

A thoughts on a study that seems to have successfully used an fMRI to induce some sort of learning. "Interestingly, behavioral data obtained before and after the neurofeedback training showed improved performance of the relevant visual tasks especially when the subjects were unaware of the nature of what they were learning."

Tuition at Learn-to-Code Boot Camp Is Free — Until You Get a Job

"New recruits signing up for App Academy promise to pay 15 percent of what they earn during their first year on the job, payable over the first six months after they start working." Seems like a fairly reasonable model. They'd likely to be lacking some of the theoretical stuff you'd learn in a CS program but still it's not a bad start.

I've been playing catchup in my reading for the later part of today - and wound up reading the two articles around which this post is based back-to-back.

What did the article Why You Should ‘Lean In’ to Sheryl Sandberg’s New Book have to say?

Take the much-discussed case out of Columbia Business School, recounted by Sandberg, that measured “likability” among men versus women in business. Some students were told of an aggressive, successful venture capitalist named Heidi; others were told the same story except that the VC’s name was changed to Howard. Even though no other details were changed, students found Howard the more likable of the “two.” Just knowing that this type of thinking remains in our culture, however mild or entrenched it may be, can give a woman a new perspective on her career (as it did for me). For highlighting all of these studies alone, Sandberg’s book is worthwhile.

That made me think back to the previous article I'd been reading - Are Successful Women Really Less Likable Than Successful Men?. What do you find there?

... In a recent segment for his show, CNN's Anderson Cooper had New York University's business school repeat the Heidi/Howard study, now ten years after it was originally conducted. This time around, students rated the female entrepreneur as more likable and desirable as a boss than the male.

So that particular study Sandberg was mentioned doesn't appear to have produced repeatable results. The whole realm of priming on which these results were based appears to be under question due to relatively widespread problems reproducing results. Is such a study worth thinking about? Maybe. Is it enough to justify her conclusions? I'd tend to say no.

As an addenum, I figured I'd also mention another study from Sandberg's book which the review I found the claim cited in declared "pretty persuasive":

... the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework.

Compare to a recent Norwegian study which concluded that:

The divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 percent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work.

Which study is more reliable? I don't know. Might they both be accurate for the cultural context studied? Maybe. I've got no idea what study Sandberg was citing, though perhaps if I had the book it could be tracked down in a footnote.

I recently stumbled on the following quote on a blog somewhere:

Atheists’ anger doesn’t prove that we’re selfish, or joyless, or miserable. It shows that we have compassion, and a sense of justice. We’re angry because we see terrible harm all around us, and we feel desperately motivated to stop it.

- Greta Christina, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless

Reminds me a bit of a typical Christian answer to the question of how a loving God can be an angry God.

Engineers plan to upload bee brains to flying robots

"Engineers from the universities of Sheffield and Sussex are planning on scanning the brains of bees and uploading them into autonomous flying robots that will then fly and act like the real thing." They seem to be aiming for 2015 to build their robots bees by, but I'm not sure how long this'll actually take. As the article Mind reading is possible! notes with a number of examples, there's a lot that can be read from a person's brain. Just how much of this might actually be useable to construct an artificial neural network I'm unsure.

Neighborhoods Seek to Banish Sex Offenders by Building Parks

"local residents and city officials developed a plan to force convicted sex offenders to leave their neighborhood: open a tiny park. Parents here, where state law prohibits registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or a public park, are not the only ones seizing on this approach." Pair that with the following: "the pocket parks ... will probably leave more convicted sex offenders homeless. And research shows that once sex offenders lose stable housing, they become ... more likely to commit another crime" (emphasis mine)

Aleksandra Duliba wins the 2013 L.A. Marathon

At least the LA Times correctly identified this as a "gender bonus" as her marathon time wasn't even in the top 10 for the race despite her finishing time 5 minutes ahead of the second-fastest woman. Her run took more than 16 minutes more than the male winner. (He took 2:09:43; she took 2:26:08).

Are There Any Europeans Left?

Something to think about: "The history of Europe’s past half-century is usually depicted as step after step toward a common future. But maybe, to understand where we are now, the story should start earlier — not with the coalescing of France and Germany in the 1960s but with the model of Europe in the decade before the calamity of 1914. In important ways, the Europe of 1913 was more cosmopolitan and European than the Europe of today."