Delicious LiveJournal Links for 7-30-2008

• How much it costs to run an LJ clone
  From the people working on dreamwidth
  (tags: livejournal internet business)
• BBC NEWS | Health | Hour's exercise 'to lose weight'
  "Women who want to lose 10% of their weight - and keep it off - need to be exercising for almost an hour, five days a week, according to US experts." So most people will need to combine that with a diet. Which is also unlikely to work.
  (tags: diet exercise health research weight obesity)
• Jazz label joins the DRM-free revolution
  "Record label Universal Music Classics & Jazz is making its entire catalogue available online without copyi protection as part of an experiment to gauge fans' demand for MP3 tracks."
  (tags: mp3 music technology)
• 'Transsexuality gene' boosts male hormones - sex - 29 July 2008 - New Scientist
  A gene variant has been identified that appears to be associated with female-to-male transsexuality. The variation is in the gene involved in the metabolism of sex hormones. 44% of FtM transsexuals carried it, compared with 31% of non-transsexual women.
  (tags: transexualism hormones genetics)
• Starbucks: Good System, Bad System
  Great article on how systems get in the way if you don't allow exceptions.
  (tags: customerservice business)

Lunchtime polling

[Poll #1232147]

Women are confusing, men are simple

Yesterday I posted a link to the page which tried to use your browser history to work out if you were male or female.

Today I found myself discussing the vagaries of research into female sexuality with marrog.

Strangely, these two things seem somehow linked together in my mind, along with the results of some of Simon Baron-Cohen's research into systemising/empathising functions in brains, and the male/female split therein. I exchanged an email or two with him after his research was covered in some newspapers, pointing out that while men did, statistically, seem to have a tendency to be focussed systemisers, lacking in empathy, women tended not towards empathy, but towards balance between the two functions. The papers were, of course, reporting it much more one-sidedly than that.

This linked into the poll yesterday, where it's obvious that the (very basic) algorithm can tell that a man is a man 2/3 of the time - but is no better at telling that a woman is a woman than a coin toss would be. Which would, again, tend to indicate that men are more likely lean over in one direction, making them easy to spot, while women are spread all over the place.

This tends to be picked up by reporters as "Men tend to be X, and women don't." and then reported as "Men are X, women are the opposite of X.", which is clearly nonsense.

(This then tends to be interpreted by a large chunk of people as "_all_ Men are X, _all_ Women are Y", which is beyond nonsense and into gibberish.)

And this is why police dogs are so great

As theweaselking says - "You think a *human* charging you is fast and hard to hit?"