Science & Society
Researchers stray from the usual heteronormative parameters in a new take on determining the relationship between love and sex. They collected data from an Internet-based survey of almost 25,000 gay and bisexual men residing in the United States who were members of online websites facilitating social or sexual interactions with men.
The survey results determined that nearly all (92.6 percent) of the men whose most recent sexual event occurred with a relationship partner indicated being in love with the partner at the time they had sex. So experiences of love among people are far…
The DiscoverE outreach program and its Girls Coding Club program teaching computer programming to girls from grades 3 to 9, has won a Google RISE Award.
Last year, DiscoverE, an initiative by the University of Alberta Faculty of Engineering, became the first Canadian group ever to win a RISE Award, now in their fifth year, and now it is first to win two.
The Girls Coding Club started last fall as an offshoot of popular coding programs offered to girls in the DiscoverE summer camps. Girls in the club are split into two groups, from grades 3 to 5 and grades 6 to 9. Both…
Are American jobs less stable? Do workers change employers more frequently than in the past?
The reflexive answer is yes, especially since unemployment is the worst it's been in decades, but on average that is not the case. On average, job tenure (the number of years working for the same employer) has been reasonably stable over time between 1983 and 2008 - though that obviously leaves out the 1970s and the recent prolonged economic troubles.
Using data from the Current Population Survey, the primary source of U.S. labor-force statistics, sociologists Matissa Hollister of McGill…
Sometimes it's just public relations. We subsidize nicotine patches but regulators are increasingly interested in banning electronic cigarettes.
Such misguided legislation, not backed by sound data, may have consequences for public health, experts say. With smoking blamed for up to six million premature deaths each year, a lot is at stake in the newest push for regulations.
Tar, chemicals, and other substances found in tobacco smoke cause most of the health risks from cigarettes, not nicotine. That's why patches work and marketing campaigns using tax dollars endorse patches. Likewise, e-…
Almost one-third of US adolescents consume high-caffeine energy drinks and the teens who do also report higher rates of alcohol, cigarette, or drug use, according to a paper in the Journal of Addiction Medicine.
The same characteristics that attract young people to consume energy drinks—such as being "sensation-seeking or risk-oriented" — may make them more likely to use other substances as well, suggests the new paper by Yvonne M. Terry-McElrath, MSA, and colleagues of the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
The researchers analyzed nationally…
Estimates say there are over 3,000,000 registered freelancers worldwide, competing for everything from computer programming and web design to finance and engineering.
How can you make yourself more attractive to potential employers?
You have to look diverse enough to be able to handle different things, and experienced enough to handle what employers want.
"Previous findings would suggest that freelancers should specialize in a particular type of work so prospective employers know what they're good at," says Ming D. Leung, assistant professor, UC Berkeley's Haas School of…
British people traveling abroad for medical treatment are often unaware of the potential health and financial consequences they could face - with sometimes catastrophic effects for individual patients.
More than 63,000 UK residents travel abroad for medical treatment each year but many are embarking on medical tourism without doing research about the risks involved. These include a lack of redress in many countries should things go wrong, and the costs of non-emergency care at home to rectify poor outcomes of treatments received overseas. Since the UK has government-controlled health care,…
Agriculture in Finland is becoming more market driven.
What will that mean? Fluctuation in prices, more so than with current EU and Finland subsidies and quotas, but better efficiency. Competition will mean fewer farms. The reason for the changes is because profitability continues to be poor despite strong spending by the government. The return on investment for taxpayer spending has been negative on average for the last 10 years. In 2011 in Finland, it was the third weakest in the EU, at -1.1 per cent. The brunt of that inefficiency is small farms kept going only because of…
Airline-related complaints made to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) from 2002 to 2012 reveal that passengers were less likely to make a formal complaint about service quality if they were on a long-established "network" carrier.
Passengers of low-cost upstarts tended to complain less, even though the quality of service may have been just as poor.
The difference was not small. The paper in the Journal of Air Transport Management found that, regardless of the type of service failure, passengers complained up to 10 times more often about network carriers than low-cost…
Can a big name lead to a boost, even for low-profile work?
Indeed it can, according to an analysis which found that scientific papers written by well-known scholars get more attention than they otherwise would receive because of their authors’ high profiles - but there are some subtle twists in how this happens.
The study reports that citations of papers increase by 12 percent, above the expected level, when their authors are awarded prestigious investigator status at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a major private research organization. However, certain kinds of research…