Delicious LiveJournal Links for 3-30-2009

[andrewducker]

• The little white lie that grew
  A judge breaks the speed limite by 6mph, lies to cover it up, the lie spirals out of control and now he's off to prison for two years for perjury...
  (tags: law ethics australia)
• Women's lust for shopping linked to periods
  The most dangerous time to be wielding a credit card is, according to Professor Karen Pine, the ten days before a woman's period - the "luteal phase" - during which they're more likely to splash out as a way of handling the "negative emotions created by their hormonal changes", as the BBC puts it.
  (tags: emotion psychology women)
• Not sure what chart to use to show your data?
  This handy chart will show you which one to use.
  (tags: charts visualization graphs)

Comments

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Eek, what a nightmarish scenario for that judge.

[andrewducker]

Yup. But law officers need to be held to a very high standard - and punishment for perjury needs to be high enough to dissaude people, otherwise the whole system falls apart.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, I think the law did exactly the right thing. But in a very human way, I can see how the judge got drawn in.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely.

Having lied before to get myself out of trouble I know exactly how seductive it is. And I also know that they come out 99% of the time - and that the effects of this are generally far worse than it would have been to just tell the truth in the first place.

Nowadays I try not to do anything dumb enough to need lying about :->

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

What about the male side of shopping? I'd argue stress makes both sides ignore the bank balance. (Hardly surprising).

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

That chart of charts is actually pretty helpful.

[andrewducker]

Glad you like it. I originally chucked it to Julie for PhD stuff, but it seemed like it might be generally useful.

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

hm, I'd suspect that a lot of women *believe* that PMT is likely to result in a spending spree, so if she got her data by asking women when they spend (as the article suggests), there might be some bias.

[cloverbee.livejournal.com]

There isn't enough information is that glib report to know if there is bias or not. There are so many factors that could come into play with that sample set of women and their purchases with "hormonal shift" being just one of a varied set, that is just ridiculous to publish it and really offensive. It paints womens to be subject of their hormones as if they have less control during that time to exercise discipline when so many other factors could be affecting behavior. Reports like that just bother more than they should. Maybe it is my PMT cycle. I wish they had polled me when I choose NOT to shop. Boy would they get an earful of variables.

[andrewducker]

It paints womens to be subject of their hormones as if they have less control during that time to exercise discipline when so many other factors could be affecting behavior.

There will undoubtedly be many factors affecting things - and the report does, indeed, suggest that one of them is that, apparently, women's hormones affect their self control.

Whether it's horribly biased or not is something that will have to wait until the actual paper is published.

[andrewducker]

Certainly, asking them whether they spend more at point X in their cycle would be likely to produce biased results, but the article suggests they asked people how much they had recently spent and what their current point in the menstrual cycle was, which seems likely to be less biased.

I'll have to wait until the actual paper comes out to see what they really did though.