Human behavior

Now that our politicians have allegedly ignored the vast silent majority and passed a gay marriage bill perhaps we should revisit another bill that was passed despite massive public discord:

Smacking does children no harm as long as they know it is for the right reasons and feel loved, a study has found.

Being a strict mother can be good for children as long as the discipline is tempered with a little love and affection, the researchers claim.

But parenting groups and charities have reacted angrily to the findings, maintaining that a child can suffer long term damage from physical discipline.  Read more »

Shane Koyczan has created an anti-bullying project called To This Day.

My experiences with violence in schools still echo throughout my life but standing to face the problem has helped me in immeasurable ways.

To This Day Project is a project based on a spoken word poem written by Shane Koyczan called “To This Day”, to further explore the profound and lasting impact that bullying can have on an individual.  Read more »

The NZ Herald has an article about cheating.

“A Colmar Brunton survey has revealed that 81 per cent of adults admitted cheating of some kind – including 36 per cent cheating in their relationship and 22 per cent at work.”

I’m not sure how you cheat “at work”. It isn’t explained in the article.  Read more »

One of the worlds great thinkers, Ahmadinejad reckons that  ”Capitalism Causes Homosexuality“. This will be a huge cause of concern for the likes of Andrei and other reactionary commenters on this blog who all think that poofs are a liberal cause célèbre.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday compared countries that accept homosexual behavior to countries that “wish to legitimize stealing.”

Appearing on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight,” Ahmadinejad was asked by host Piers Morgan whether he might willing to acknowledge that “everyone is entitled to be whatever sexuality they are born to be.”

Speaking through a translator, Ahmadinejad responded by asking Morgan, “Do you really believe that someone is born homosexual?” When Morgan answered that he “absolutely” believes that some people are born gay, Ahmadinejad pressed him further.

“I’m sorry. Let me ask you this. Do you believe that anyone is giving birth through homosexuality? Homosexuality ceases procreation,” countered the Iranian leader. “Who has said that if you like or believe in doing something ugly, and others do not accept your behavior, that they’re denying your freedom? Who says that? Perhaps in a country they wish to legitimize stealing.”

You know what? …he sounds almost exactly like Colin Craig and all his apologists that comment here.

Oh no here is something else for the PC wankers to get all upset about – lookism

General Pants, a popular clothing chain, appears to have found a winning formula for hiring shop assistants: no ugly people.

Wander into any store across Australia and it’s likely you will be greeted by staff who are young, beautiful and hip to the hipbone.

While General Pants would hardly be alone in seeking to recruit presentable staff – and the company wasn’t immediately available to comment – would such a practise be illegal even if it did?

Employers can be sued for discriminating on the basis of gender, race or disabilities. But, with the exception of one Australian state, they are free to discriminate when it comes to physical appearance.

But you can be too good looking

The most famous case of “beauty lookism” happened in New York in 2010, when Debrahlee Lorenzana, a Puerto Rican single mother, filed a suit against Citigroup, claiming that she was fired from her job at a Citibank branch for looking too “hot”.

Cannot see what the fuss is about.  Good looking people generally earn more money in sales and therefore cost more to hire.  The market will decide what rate an employer can afford to pay.  The demand for good looking people in sales is driven from consumers buying their product.  Do not pretend it is just men driving this requirement, women like being served by young, good looking men just as much as men the reverse.  Many retail stores have become half nightclub, all hook up joints these days.  Loud booming music and even their own scent.

The litigation that will result from adding “lookism” into discrimination law will be ridiculous.

ᔥ NZ Herald

Perhaps he might like to assist the National party, since they just seem to think that the best approach to domestic violence is to sweep it all under the carpet and have senior politicians wax lyrical about the standing of Mr B:

For the past two years, the community-minded McGlashan has been the national coordinator and an ambassador for Blow The Whistle On Violence, a nationwide campaign through which sports stars have encouraged families and communities to work together to eliminate domestic violence.

ᔥ Mashable

According to some the internet provides browsers with a death spiral into procrastination and indolence.

Doghouse Diaries understands the web’s tight grip, and has illustrated the familiar browsing cycle in handy flowchart form. Check, recheck, refresh, repeat.

ᔥ The Telegraph

Apparently there is an app that can help you dream better. I wonder if it can be programmed to cause dreams of hunting or hot lesbians:

Professor Wiseman expects thousands of people to take part in an experiment in manipulating dreams.

Participants will download a specially designed iPhone app that turns their phone in to a dream factory.

Placed on the bed, the phone can detect when a sleeper is not moving, which signifies the onset of dreaming.

It then plays a carefully crafted ”soundscape” designed to evoke pleasant scenes such as walking in woods, or lying on a beach.

The idea is that this will influence dreaming, causing dreamers to conjure up situations and experiences inspired by the sounds they are hearing.At the end of the dream the app sounds a gentle alarm to wake the dreamer, who submits a brief description of the dream to a ”dream catcher” database.

Prof Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire, who is best known for his work on the paranormal, said: ”Getting a good night’s sleep and having pleasant dreams boosts people’s productivity, and is essential for their psychological and physical well being. Despite this, we know very little about how to influence dreams. This experiment aims to change that.”

As many as 10,000 people are expected to take part in the mass-participation study, launched at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

Prof Wiseman teamed up with app developers YUZA, which created the “Dream:ON” software.Participants will be encouraged to share their dreams via Facebook and Twitter.

The Economist has an article that will bend Labour and other assorted pity-partiers out of shape:

DESPITE global economic gloom, the world is a happier place than it was before the financial crisis began. That is the counterintuitive conclusion of a poll of 19,000 adults in 24 countries by Ipsos, a research company. Some 77% of respondents now describe themselves as happy, up three points on 2007, the last year before the crisis. Fully 22% (up from 20%) describe themselves as very happy—a more important measure, says Ipsos’s John Wright, since whenever three-quarters of people agree on anything, “you need to pay attention to intensity in the results.”

All such polls come with a health warning. The level of happiness is self-reported—and the term means different things to different people. The Ipsos poll, measuring degrees of happiness, is not strictly comparable with those that ask about “well-being” (such as Gallup) or “life satisfaction” (the World Values survey), so it is hard to test the validity of the conclusions against other efforts. The margin of error is wide, at plus or minus 3.1 points for most countries. Still, Ipsos has been doing its survey regularly for five years and the figures have proved fairly stable during that time, not wildly volatile which they would have been if they had been flaky.

Two conclusions emerge. Large, fast-growing emerging markets do not share rich industrialised countries’ pessimism. The already large “very happy” cohort rose 16 points in Turkey, ten points in Mexico and five points in India. Even rich-country pessimism is uneven. The share of “very happy” people rose six points in—of all places—Japan, defying tsunami and nuclear accidents. But growth amid global misery does not explain everything: the biggest falls in happiness also occurred in large emerging markets, in Indonesia, Brazil and—a perennial miseryguts—Russia.

Pretty interesting video to assist the left wing at the moment, who are prone to tantrums. Especially Trevor Mallard. For the rest of us suffering the left wing tantrums, the advice is simple:

The trick in getting a tantrum to end as soon as possible, [study co-author Michael Potegal] said, was to get the child past the peaks of anger. Once the child was past being angry, what was left was sadness, and sad children reach out for comfort. The quickest way past the anger, the scientists said, was to do nothing.