Culture

It is generally perceived that feminism and romance are in direct conflict yet according to a study by Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan of Rutgers University, feminism and romance are not incompatible and feminism may actually improve the quality of heterosexual relationships. They carried out both a laboratory survey of 242 American undergraduates and an online survey including 289 older adults, more likely to have had longer relationships and greater life experience. They looked at men’s and women’s perception of their own feminism and its link to relationship health, measured by a…

Legislation targeting companies has the best of intentions - preventing another Enron by Sarbanes-Oxley is an example - yet the punishment clauses have made it difficult to attract anyone except risk takers and has pushed CEO salary costs through the roof. The opposite of the salary-heavy CEO is the one who takes options instead. On the exterior, it may seem to make sense because companies are paying solely for performance. More often than not, companies are paying no matter what. A new study by Donald Hambrick of Penn State and W. Gerard Sanders of Brigham Young finds that CEOs with stock…

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change. How do global warming studies merit a peace prize? In the words of the committee, extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind, inducing large-scale migration…

The British Interplanetary Society is having a conference on 15 November 2007, 9:30 am-5:00 pm, titled "Warp Drive, Faster Than Light:Breaking the interstellar distance barrier" and is inviting attendees. Details below: *** General Relativity defines the geometrical warpage of spacetime within the vicinity of a matter distribution. Since its publication by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago our understanding of the universe has undergone a revolution. In particular, the existence of black holes, objects once considered not worthy of serious consideration for the end point of stellar…

A new study reveals that even married men who are considered aloof spouses and provide minimal parenting have much lower testosterone levels than single, unmarried men. In the October issue of Current Anthropology, Peter B. Gray (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Peter T. Ellison (Harvard University), and Benjamin C. Campbell (Boston University) investigated the links between male testosterone levels and marital status among modern-day pastoralists in northern Kenya – of whom less than 1.5 percent consider their wives a source of emotional support. The Ariaal males serve as herd boys until…

Sociology studies often contend that crime rate and budget alone do not account for the size of an area’s police force. Police forces tend to be larger in areas where blacks comprise a larger percentage, and many sociologists have attributed this to racial attitudes, specifically the white population’s perceptions of threat. A new study attempts to empirically examine this premise and concluded that while direct measures of anti-black prejudice are not correlated to police size, whites’ fear of crime and perceived economic threat still somehow account for more than one-third of the effect…

Good-looking people capture our attention and render us temporarily helpless to turn our eyes away from them, according to a new Florida State University study. That applies to men and women and, in the case of married people, even to looking at the same sex. “It’s like magnetism at the level of visual attention,” said Jon Maner, an assistant professor of psychology at FSU, who studied the role mating-related motives can play in a psychological phenomenon called attentional adhesion. The paper is one of the first to show how strongly, quickly and automatically we are attuned to attractive…

The international car industry is currently presenting many environmentally friendly models at the IAA, the biggest car exhibition in the world. Can the idea sell in the home of Aston-Martin and Jaguar? Estimates say 64% of British drivers could use hybrids and 21% are thinking hybrid for their next new car. They would even be willing to pay $1900 more than for a conventional car, according to market research institute Maritz Research. "There is huge enthusiasm for hybrids amongst British consumers," explains Christian Vorwerck, director of marketing at Maritz Research. "The potential for…

Swedish researcher Maria Engberg has studied how the ability of the computer to combine words, images, movement, and sounds is impacting both writing and reading and she's going to defend her dissertation on the subject this week. “The way digital poetry experiments with language raises questions and challenges conceptions of literature that were formed by printed books,” says Engberg, who has examined what this entails for literary scholarship. She has analyzed works by English-speaking poets such as John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, and Thomas Swiss. The focus is on space, time, movement…

It turns out boyfriends really do try harder than husbands, according to a new study from George Mason University. The study of more than 17,000 people in 28 countries found that married men report doing less housework than men who are live-in boyfriends. Still no word on whether or not married men also get less sex. Not that correlation equals causation. This study was recently published in the Journal of Family Issues by Shannon Davis and co-authors Theodore Greenstein and Jennifer Gerteisen Marks of North Carolina State University. According to Davis, the key finding of the study is…