Rotundus.com

What do Canadian men and women think about feminism and gender equality issues? Roughly the same thing according to this article in the Canadian Review of Sociology:

When attitudes are examined, clear and consistent gender gaps emerge on questions of force and violence and social welfare, but not on feminism and equality. Unlike the other areas where differences are pronounced, aggregate gender gaps on most feminism and equality subjects are small and lacking statistical significance, or non-existent.

Interestingly, in the current US race for the Republican presidential nomination, Rick Santorum, probably the most "socially conservative" candidate out there is drawing more support from women than from men.

That's the title of a story in reneweconomy on the impact of solar power generation on electrical grids. It's kind of interesting to look at their figures showing the price of electricity throughout the course of the day on Germany electrical markets both 5 years ago (before) and now with greater amounts of solar energy (after).

The first graph, from 2008, shows peaking power prices rising to around €60/MWh and staying there for most of the day, with some visible peaks around noon and the early evening – the size of which would depend on the temperature and the usage.

The second graph shows a brief leap to €65/MWh around 9am, before the impact of solar PV takes hold – erasing the midday peak entirely and leaving only a smaller one in the evening. The huge bite out of day-prices is also a bite out of fossil fuel generators’ earnings and profits.

This is quite interesting for it's future implications as the price of solar panels seems to be improving steadily, but at the moment the graphs hide the impact of feed-in tariffs, paying premium rates for green energy, and how they distort the electrical markets. Typically power markets rates are set based on the marginal cost of the next unit of generation, which tends to go up at a fairly steep rate with increasing use. Thus, a small amount of solar might have a disproportionate impact. This solar also bypasses the electrical markets through Germany's feed-in tariffs - how expensive is that solar energy?

The average level of feed-in tariff was €0.0953 per kWh in 2005 (compared to an average cost of displaced energy of €0.047 kWh).

So, still fairly heavily subsidized. If the price of solar continues to decline though and energy storage continues to improve electrical markets could look quite a bit different in years to come.

HT: Green Internet and Cyber-Infrastructure

Came across an article entitled Film Inspired by ‘Abortion Survivor’ Is Quiet Hit. Here's the film's trailer:

On Rotten Tomatoes the film shows a 23% approval rating from film critics and a an 89% approval rating from the public.

Why a woman’s age at time of marriage matters, and what this tells us about the apex fallacy

"The common belief that divorce rates are driven by men discarding older wives for a younger model simply doesn’t fit with the data. This is reinforced when you consider that the AARP found that 66% of the divorces in middle age were initiated by women"

Vaccine to stop heart attacks could be developed

"Injections of antibodies could prevent the build up of fat in the arteries which cause narrowings and break off leading to heart attacks, experts said. ... Several different approaches are in the pipeline and could be licensed within five years, the Frontiers in CardioVascular Biology meeting at Imperial College London was told."

The psychological secret to humor is making immoral behavior seem harmless

"A sense of humor is one of our most fundamentally human behaviors, but psychologists and philosophers alike have never really been able to satisfactorily explain why we find certain things funny. The latest theory suggests it's all about benign immorality."

Amazing! Google's self-driving car allows the blind to drive

A Google Test Drive - they had a cop in the car to supervise (dual control perhaps?) but I'm still a bit curious how they got approval for this. Thought that Nevada might have already tweaked it's laws to allow for self-driving cars, but didn't think that California was at that state.