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[Truean]

Certain to the extent the productivity is certain, granted.

[Burnt Pies]

Dragging this back to the grunting in Tennis, I challenge anyone to watch Victoria Azarenka for an entire game without getting annoyed at her loud, obnoxious shrieking. This is what they're talking about banning, as it seems to be used not for the extra power a grunt or a shout can give, but to put off her opponent. Most of the grunting is fine, this isn't.

[blackmagechill]

Complete proof that Zachary Wiener is misogynist.

[Mindmaker]

Dragging this back to the grunting in Tennis, I challenge anyone to watch Victoria Azarenka for an entire game without getting annoyed at her loud, obnoxious shrieking. This is what they're talking about banning, as it seems to be used not for the extra power a grunt or a shout can give, but to put off her opponent. Most of the grunting is fine, this isn't.

How can anybody take such a sport seriously?
Oh and at which point there was a discussion about grunting in here? I'm interested in this.

Edit:
Oh god, make it stop!

[Zrk2]

Posted by: Zrk2

@Truean: So the company is liable to support someone even if they don't come in? Employment is a two way street, you work for the company and the company pays you, you cannot demand pay without earning it. But that's a whole other debate.

It never ceases to amaze me how people point out the blatantly obvious as if I didn't know it. I mean really, as if I never considered that work is a two way street, or that you don't get pay you don't earn?

That was not what it sounded like when you talked about people 'needing' the pay and how that should force the company to pay you.

Anyway, this is unproductive and we may as well leave it be, as we won't conclude anything, only degenerate the thread into a flamewar.

[KaelGotDwarves]

Not so much ragey as confirming societal gender bias and how others and yourself see and treat yourself affects your actual actions and performance within the world.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/06/24/137398402/gender-is-dead-long-live-gender?sc=fb&cc=fp

Conjure before your mind the image of a physics professor. Imagine what his life is like. Now pretend, for a few moments, that you are that person. Try to get a feel for what it is like to be him.

Now let's start anew. This time think of a cheerleader. Picture her; imagine what her life is like. Now pretend to be her. Imagine what it is like to be her.

When psychologist Adam Galinksy and his collaborator at Northwestern University asked subjects to carry out this sort of exercise, they made a startling finding. After the exercise, subjects were asked to characterize themselves. Those individuals who had imaginatively adopted the perspective of the professor were more likely to describe themselves as clever than those who had been assigned the cheerleader persona. And those who had adopted the cheerleader perspective, were correspondingly more likely to describe themselves as gorgeous.

 
But that's not all. The exercise had actual effects on how people performed on tests. Those who had identified with the professor performed better on tests of analytic intelligence than those who had identified with the cheerleader!

This study, and many others like it, is described in Cordelia Fine's brilliant new book Delusions of Gender. She offers a fair and detailed review of research on the psychological and neurobiological foundations of gender difference. Her finding is clear and persuasive: Whatever cognitive or personality differences there are between men and women cannot be attributed, except in a few isolated cases, to intrinsic biological or psychological differences between men and women, at least not in the current state of knowledge.

Which is not to say that there may not be differences.

Witness the study just described. The differences in performance on the test were pronounced; this is a real behavioral difference, the sort of different that could easily make a difference, for example, to performance on the job. But what caused the difference? Not anything in the make-up or constitution of the tested individuals. The controlling factor was an accidental fact about which imaginative exercises individuals had been assigned in the pre-test situation.

This is a glorious and beautiful finding, for it reveals something deep and pervasive in human life.

The social constructivist sociologist and hippie formative psychologist within me laughs vindictively.

[SalmonGod]

I've always had the impression that most people's self-perceptions inform their behavior a lot more than their behavior informs their self-perceptions.

And this is really easy to take advantage of, too.  My performance in high school wrestling improved dramatically when I began imagining myself as made of stone before every match.  Maybe not exactly the same thing, but related.

[RedKing]

I'm skeptical on that one. It's less gender bias and more profession bias. If they had used a female professor and a male cheerleader, you still probably would have gotten the same results. Cheerleaders are typically selected for their appearance, not their intelligence, while the opposite is true of professors.

If anything, it shows gender bias on the part of the people who constructed the study.

 

[KaelGotDwarves]

I'm skeptical on that one. It's less gender bias and more profession bias. If they had used a female professor and a male cheerleader, you still probably would have gotten the same results. Cheerleaders are typically selected for their appearance, not their intelligence, while the opposite is true of professors.

If anything, it shows gender bias on the part of the people who constructed the study.

Nope. Read on.

Consider another study Fine reports on in her book. Students at a private college were asked to perform a spatial reasoning task. Before the test one group of students filled out a form on which they were asked to report their gender. The other group was not asked this question but was instead asked to name their university. In this way, one group was "primed" to consider themselves in the light of gender identity, whereas the other was primed to think of themselves under the category "private college student."

Men primed to think of their gender showed a marked improvement in performance over men who were primed to think of themselves as students at a private college. Exactly the opposite was observed in women. Women primed to consider their status as students at a private college significantly outperformed women who'd been primed to think of themselves as women.

They confirmed actual gender bias through performance within society, not that the scientists were gender-biased. They had a hypothesis and carried out the peer-reviewed study.

EDIT: Studies of these sorts also match the sort of poor, minority student academic score studies; that is if you treat people and they see themselves treated as second-class, inferior students, they will perform as such. If they are treated and treat themselves with respect as able to be high-performing, intelligent students, they will do better on standardised tests.

That was also studied many times and proven to be true.

[Vector]

There's also the "identity threat" thing, where women (and other minorities) asked to identify themselves on examinations did waaaaaaaaaaaay worse than those not asked to do so.  There's a lot of studies on this that I don't feel like digging up right now.


Have some blogs/articles.

Kansas is becoming close to the first abortion-free state.

Short article on racial disparity in prison charges.

Interesting article on health and fat.

Once again, the Dilbert creator is a total asshat.

Yup.

[Aqizzar]

Kansas is becoming close to the first abortion-free state.

This should be a travesty, because it is quite literally terrorism working, and the state and federal government not doing a damn thing about it.  How this isn't a bigger public case, I don't understand.

[Vector]

This should be a travesty, because it is quite literally terrorism working, and the state and federal government not doing a damn thing about it.  How this isn't a bigger public case, I don't understand.

Ain't terrorism if they're just talking about wimminz health and stuff.

Also, it's not like most of this stuff ends up on the evening news, or anything.

[SalmonGod]

What disturbs me even more than the story is the comments... I'm used to the powers that be doing rotten stuff, but abortion is one nasty case of them being able to get away with anything and a very large amount of people defending it.  It's always depressing to read the comments on any abortion article...

They always look exactly the same, too.  No one ever says anything new.  They repeat exactly the same lines at each other as if they honestly expect them to surprise anyone who disagrees, and both sides of the debate tend to abuse their most offensive arguments to get a rise out of each other, when there are reasonable arguments both sides can make without intentionally jabbing at the other's sensibilities.  It really pisses me off how people approach an issue with real-world consequences so childishly.

[Aqizzar]

Apparently, the New York state Senate just passed their same-sex marriage bill, after an amendment about religious exemptions (I think that means religious institutions don't have to recognize such marriages for their own purposes, but preserving all governmental effects).  It's already passed the state House (although it probably has to be reconciled with the amendment) and the governor has said he'll sign it.  Probably the most important factor, is that the New York marriages are not residency based, meaning that anyone can go to New York and get a marriage license, and take it back to their home states under the Constitutional Contract Clause.  Granting trans-state marriages and doubling the number of citizens residing in same-sex marrying states is going to have some powerful repercussions around the country.

[Vector]

Hell.  Yes.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.