Wednesday, June 25, 2014
How Bing became the search engine for porn
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Women go for 'road-tested' mates
Women go for 'road-tested' mates
Women find experienced men more desirable, say researchers, as long as they don't play the field too enthusiastically
A little experience goes a long way towards making a man more desirable to the opposite sex, Australian researchers have found.
Women are more likely to rate a man desirable if he has had one or two partners than if he has had no relationship experience, according to a study published in the journalHuman Nature.
"Our results suggest that women do not always make mate choices independent of one another [and] there appears to be a significant desirability advantage for men who have been previously selected as a romantic partner," say the authors.
However men who have played the field a little too enthusiastically lose out in the desirability stakes, with the study showing those who had been with five partners in a four-year period were less desirable than those who had been with fewer.
Lead author Ryan Anderson, a PhD candidate at James Cook University, says 'mate copying' is a well-established practice in the rest of the animal kingdom, but there has been little research on what role it plays in human mate choice.
While men generally go for mates based on physical attributes that might indicate whether a woman is more genetically robust -- such as symmetry, beauty, and good child-bearing hips -- women's definition of desirability is a little less obvious to the eye.
"A man seeking a mate can get a lot of the information he needs just by observing his potential mate, but females aren't as visually orientated," Anderson says.
"Females are not as superficial as males -- they seek things more like parenting ability, is he going to make a good parent, is my mate going to be a good mate, is he going to be a good partner, is he going to commit to me -- so these things can't really be easily assessed in a visual observation."
Instead, women look for a mate who has been road-tested by other women, as an indicator that he is more likely to have met these criteria.
Desirability rating
To test this theory, researchers asked 123 university students to rate the desirability of a series of men based on photographs that included silhouettes of the number of women these men had had relationships with over the past four years.
"We found that in terms of desirability … one or two was really desirable but when you go to five, the guy becomes really undesirable," Anderson says.
"Maybe that's an indication that he's promiscuous or unable or unwilling to commit, maybe he's a bit flaky -- for whatever reason, he just can't hold down relationship so that was seen as a huge turn-off."
The researchers also found that age influenced how women used the information on a man's relationship history, with younger women more likely than older women to rate men's desirability based on the number of previous partners.
"Older women have had more relationship experience, on average, and therefore will probably be more confident in their decisions," Anderson says.
Anderson says the study reinforces the similarities between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.
"Humans are nothing more than a really pretentious species of animal."
Which Country Is The Nicest?
Which Country Is The Nicest?
The goodness of nations
A new index ranks national decency
SEEN from space, our pale blue dot of a planet is a borderless sphere floating amid the stars. But worldly men know better: the land is carved up into countries. Borders divide us; they encourage us to seek our self-interest rather than reach for a common, planetary solidarity. But the Good Country Index, released on June 24th by Simon Anholt, an independent policy advisor, aims to overcome this. It ranks countries based on how much they do for others globally. Ireland and Finland come on top; Libya is rock bottom. The measure is based on 35 datasets broken down into seven areas, such as technology, health and culture. The idea is clever but the execution is tricky. The index often scales countries on a GDP basis to give poor countries a chance against rich ones. That's nice, but is Cyprus really a tech leader or Malta a cultural paragon? And the "peace and security" area is flawed: it penalises countries involved in armed conflicts abroad or that sell arms. Couldn't one argue that this fosters a stable world? Still, the index is a worthwhile pursuit by imagining how countries might compete when they aim to serve others.
North Korea threatens war on US over Kim Jong-un movie
North Korea threatens war on US over Kim Jong-un movie
The Interview stars Seth Rogen (left) who directed the film with Evan Goldberg
North Korea has promised "merciless" retaliation if a forthcoming Hollywood movie about killing Kim Jong-un is released, say agencies.
A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said in state media that the movie's release would be an "act of war".
He did not mention the title, but a Hollywood movie called The Interview with a similar plot is due in October.
Hollywood actors James Franco and Seth Rogen star in the action-comedy film.
They play a talkshow host and his producer who are invited to interview Kim Jong-un, and are subsequently recruited by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to assassinate the leader.
The film's teaser trailer, posted on Youtube, shows a lookalike actor playing Kim Jong-un, as well as fight scenes involving what appear to be North Korean tanks and helicopters, and a nuclear missile launch.
The North Korea spokesman was quoted by the state KCNA news agency as saying: "Making and releasing a movie on a plot to hurt our top-level leadership is the most blatant act of terrorism and war and will absolutely not be tolerated."
He added that the "reckless US provocative insanity" of mobilising a "gangster filmmaker" to challenge the North's leadership was triggering "a gust of hatred and rage" among North Korean people and soldiers.
"If the US administration allows and defends the showing of the film, a merciless counter-measure will be taken," the spokesman was quoted as saying.
Hollywood actor James Franco stars in The Interview as a talkshow host invited to interview Kim Jong-un
Kim Jong-un took power after his father Kim Jong-il died in 2011, which prompted a change in the film's script
Apparent evidence emerged last week supporting claims that North Korea is further developing its missile technology. Some experts said they had identified a new anti-ship cruise missile shown in a North Korean propaganda film. Other observers were more sceptical.
North Korea is holding three Americans in custody. The latest to be detained is said to be a tourist named Jeffrey Edward Fowle who reportedly left a Bible at a hotel.
Rogen, one of the directors of The Interview, recently said he was inspired by journalists' trips to North Korea.
He told Yahoo: "People have the hypothetical discussion about how journalists have access to the world's most dangerous people, and they hypothetically would be in a good situation to assassinate them."
He added that the film was originally about meeting Kim Jong-il, but they had to revise the script when he died in 2011 and his son Kim Jong-un took power.
Why Are We Still Calling the Things in Our Pockets ‘Cell Phones’?
Why Are We Still Calling the Things in Our Pockets ‘Cell Phones’?
This is a texting machine, not a phone.
Last week, when Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to a Seattle stage to announce a new smartphone called the Amazon Fire, he spent an hour and a half describing feature after feature: unlimited photo storage, 24/7 video support, 13-megapixel camera, a 3-D-like "dynamic perspective" display, a visual-recognition shopping button called Firefly, and dozens more bells and whistles.
But there was one question Bezos left unanswered about his new device's feature set. Namely: Could it, you know, make phone calls?
Several years ago, Bezos's neglect of the Fire's phone capabilities would have seemed like a huge, glaring omission. (Remember the raging debateover the iPhone 4's poor reception?) But these days, smartphones are phones in name only. For many of us, the green, phone-shaped icon on our home screens has become just another minor feature – like a stopwatch or a stock ticker. And for others, it's completely irrelevant.
“I haven’t made a phone call on my phone in a long time,” Bezos later told the Times. “But I know people still make phone calls.”
Not so much. In fact, the use of voice calls – which has been dropping since 2007, the year Apple introduced the original iPhone – has fallen off a cliff lately. As of last year, cell providers in the U.S. are now making more money per user from data use than voice calling. (The U.S. is only the seventh nation to reach the data-voice tipping point — it happened in countries like Japan as early as 2011.) A recent survey of 7,000 U.S. high-school seniors found that only 34 percent made phone calls every day — far fewer than the number who texted or used apps like Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. And companies like AT&T and Verizon, which saw the data boom coming years ago, have been spending more and moreon new, bigger LTE data networks, while essentially giving away their voice plans for free.
In the app age, old-fashioned phone calls have become not only pass̩, but ominous. Today, when I get a call outside of work hours, I think: Who died? Who's trapped on a mountain? What awful global calamity is unfolding? I use apps and text messages for everything Рordering dinner, hailing cabs, telling friends I'm running late Рand I rarely check my voice mail. I don't have any friends who regularly call me; even my parents have switched to texts.
All of which raises a question: Why are we still calling these things phones?
This isn't just a semantic issue. It's a marketing one. Wireless companieswant us to think of our rectangular gadgets first and foremost as phones, since what their plans give us in the phone department (unlimited minutes and texting, on most carriers) is much better than what they give us in the data department (tiered caps on data use, with charges for overage). In fact, these companies make millions of dollars a year from our tendency to overestimate the number of calls we'll make in a given month, and underestimate the amount of data we'll use.
For example, take my case. For several years, I paid about $100 a month for a phone plan that gave me 900 minutes per month and allotted me two gigabytes of data. That suited me fine – I rarely went over my allowances – but this year, I found a "loyalty" plan from Verizon that cost only $60 a month, and had unlimited talking and texting with the same two gigabyte data cap. Great news, right?
Not exactly. Like most Americans, my data use has skyrocketed – from less than two gigabytes a month to more than five gigabytes on average – and as a result, I end up spending $30 or $40 each month on overage charges. The upshot is that I'm still paying Verizon about $100 a month to use my phone, even though I nominally have a better, cheaper plan. And if I wanted a plan with a bigger data allotment, I'd have to pay much more – in fact, at my current levels, it costs less to pay the penalties than move up a notch.
I'm not alone in my frustration; a 2013 study by Cisco estimated that, by 2017, the average North American mobile user will use six gigabytes of data per month. It's not wrong, necessarily, for carriers to charge more for all that extra data, which taxes their networks in a way voice calls don't. But it is opportunistic of them to encourage us to focus on the bold print in smartphone plans – the "unlimited talk and text" part – while distracting us from the more important matter of how much data we're allowed to guzzle before we're charged extra. (An exception among big carriers is T-Mobile, which doesn't charge data overage fees, though it does slow down users' data after they exceed their plans.)
Regardless of its implications on wireless carriers, it's odd to refer to these vast, all-encompassing gadgets merely as "phones." It would be like calling a car a "radio box," or a microwave a "popcorn maker." All smartphones can make calls, sure, but what makes one device different from another is how well it can do everything else.
So let's call these devices something that more accurately reflects how we use them. One idea would be to take a cue from the British and start referring to them simply as "mobiles." We could even call them "Handys," as the Germans do, or "mini-tablets," which is essentially what they are. Or we could coin another neologism, like "pocket computer." ("Pock-comp" for short.)
All of these words sound more awkward to our unaccustomed American ears than "phone" or "cell phone." But they're better descriptors of what these devices are. And when we accept the fact that our iPhones are being used for apps, rather than calls, perhaps providers will be convinced to create more customer-friendly data plans. Now that would be news worth calling home about on your mobile, Handy, or pock-comp – if you can still remember how, that is.
How to Write 225 Words Per Minute With a Pen
How to Write 225 Words Per MinuteWith a Pen
A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand
Students in the shorthand class at Broken Bow College, 1903. ( Nebraska State Historical Society )
As a journalist, I begin most interviews by holding up my pen and asking, “Have you ever seen one of these?” No one ever has.
It’s not an ordinary pen, of course. It’s a Sky wifi smartpen, a piece of gee-whiz technology from a company called Livescribe. Basically, the smartpen replaces all your standard reporter’s tools. To start with, it’s an old-fashioned pen for old-fashioned paper, so I can still scribble my notes the way I always have. The smartpen is also a high-quality digital recorder, creating an audio file of the interview as we go along. Finally, a tiny camera near the tip of the pen simultaneously takes pictures of my notes as I write.
All of that information is then pulled together by a microprocessor housed in the barrel of the pen. And because the smartpen is really a computer, it’s able to sync up the picture of my handwritten notes with the audio file. That means I can tap the tip of the pen anywhere in my notebook, and the pen will instantly replay the audio of whatever was being said when I took that note. And since it’s WiFi enabled, the whole interview—audio file, notes, and all—is automatically uploaded to my Evernote account. It’s a little like magic.
There’s one other feature I like to point out. It’s possible, I tell people, to get optical character recognition software to go with the pen. If you write like a normal person, the OCR will automatically convert your handwritten notes into a text file that you can then copy and paste into your word processor. For many reporters, this is the best feature, obviating the painful task of transcribing long interviews. But it doesn’t work for me, I explain, because even though I’m recording this interview with the latest model Sky wifi smartpen, I’m taking notes using a 19th Century technology called Gregg shorthand.
In many respects, Gregg is even more ingenious than the smartpen. And, although no electronics or gizmos were involved, it was a tremendously powerful and influential technology for nearly 100 years. Now, it’s become the key to my workflow in the Internet age.
Gregg is a way of compressing language. You are the machine that does the encoding and decoding. And your brain can do it in real time at very, very high speeds. To understand why, you have to know a little about how it works.
Gregg is basically a much simpler and more efficient writing system than longhand English. This starts with the letters themselves. The Roman alphabet, which we use to write English, is much more complicated than is strictly necessary to distinguish one letter from another. To print a lower-case “b”, for example, requires a long, downward stroke with a clockwise loop at the base. Then, you have to pick up your pen to move to the next letter, an extraneous step that takes up almost as much time as the writing itself. Cursive (when was the last time you heard that word?) may seem a little faster, but it actually requires additional strokes, short ligatures at the beginning and the end of each letter. That’s a lot of wasted motion, which is why cursive is actually only about 10 percent faster than print.
In contrast, Gregg’s “letters” are much simpler shapes. Here's the first paragraph of this article written in shorthand:
Consonants are either shallow curves or straight lines; vowels are either loops or small hooks. The Gregg “b”, for example, is an uncomplicated downward stroke of the pen—a long, forward-leaning curve that faces to the right, like an open parenthesis in italics. If you measure the complexity of writing in the number of strokes, the Gregg “b” requires just one stroke compared to the four or five that comprise the Roman “b.” Gregg letters also require no ligatures; each letter blends seamlessly into the others. In the combination “b-r”, for instance, the long, downward curve of a “b” joins the short, horizontal curve of an “r” to form a sort of right-handed fishhook.
Here, you can see the Gregg letter "b," then "r," and a combination of the two, which would represent "bring" (more on that abbreviation in a minute):
In Gregg, the simplification of the forms of letters reaches its apogee in a process called “blending”. The individual strokes of many frequently combined letter pairs are written with a single blended stroke. The short, straight, horizontal dash of an “n” and the long, diagonal, upward stroke of the “d” join to become a long, upward curve that represents “nd”. This not only reduces the number of strokes, it eliminates the momentary pause necessary to form an angle between the “n” and the “d”. This simplicity of design—the absence of superfluous strokes—accounts for about 10 percent of the speed of Gregg.
Here's "n," "d," then the "nd" combo:
Another advantage of Gregg is that it’s phonetic. The word “bay”, for example, is written “b-a”—the simple downward curve of the “b”, finished with the large, counter-clockwise loop of an “a”, so that the whole word, three letters in longhand, looks pretty much like a single sloping version of the Roman “b”. Gregg eschews the parade of silent letters, like the “y” in “bay” that make English so difficult to learn as a second language.
Here a sequence showing "b," "a," then "ba" for "bay:"
Some letters, like “c” and “q”, are completely absent from Gregg; there is no sound for “c” besides those already represented by “k” and “s”. On the other hand, there are common phonemes in English—“sh”, “th”, “ch”—that require a combination of letters in the Roman alphabet, but can each be written with a single letter in Gregg. “Though,” which, in longhand, requires six complex symbols strung together with seven short ligatures, is rendered with two short strokes in Gregg: “th-o.” But Gregg goes even further, eliding unstressed vowels and unvoiced consonants to get to the phonetic nugget of the word: “bed” is written as “b-d”; “act” as “a-k”; “done” as “d-n”. This economy of spelling saves another 10 percent of the note-taker’s time.
But the biggest impact from Gregg shorthand comes from its systematic approach to abbreviation. For instance, almost every letter in Gregg, written by itself, represents a common word. Some are used for several different words, depending on the context. Our Gregg friend “b” can mean “be”, “by”, or “but”. The Gregg letter “r” can mean “are”, “our”, or “hour.” The Gregg letter “t” can mean “it” or “at.” In this way, nearly 100 of the most common words in English can be rendered in a single stroke. Similarly, most common English words have an abbreviated spelling of one or two strokes. The elegant Gregg version of “b-r,” for example, is short for “bring” and is written in an instant. Here it is again:
And, since 60 percent of spoken English is comprised of about 600 of these common words, brief forms play a huge role is speeding up Gregg. “Brief form” is actually a technical term in Gregg. Anyone can learn the Gregg alphabet in an afternoon and probably double their writing speed; but to become truly fast—like the remaining handful of Gregg-powered court reporters in the federal courts who take down testimony at more than 200 words per minute—you have to memorize dozens or hundreds of common abbreviations.
That sounds hard until you remember that your head is chock-a-block with common English abbreviations, most of which you learned organically as you needed them. Gregg is no different. And the Gregg versions are at least more systematic, so they accrue quickly.
But the brief form is more than a simple abbreviation, it’s the distillation of the basic premise of shorthand: Never write more than is necessary to understand it later. Using this principle, thousands of long, Latinate words are shortened to three or four letters in Gregg: “a-b-a-nd” for “abandon,” “h-u-nd” for hundred, “n-a-sh” for “nation.” Short forms were especially important in the polysyllabic lexicons of medicine and law—fields that, not coincidentally, were also epicenters of shorthand in Gregg’s heyday.
One especially fertile approach to abbreviation in Gregg is the use of single letters as stand-ins for common prefixes or suffixes, depending on whether they’re written before or after the words they modify. As prefixes, these letters can be either attached to or detached from the word. For example, a detached “g,” written just before and above a word represents “grand,” as in “grandmother,” but also as in “grandiloquent,” or even “granular” (which can be written “g” above “l-r.”)
On the other hand, an attached “k” at the beginning of a word can be the prefixes “con,” “com,” or “count;” so “k-g” is pronounced “cong,” and is the short form for Congress. But a detached “k” written above a word is the prefix “counter” or “contra”; so “k” written over a “b”, for example, is read “contrib” and is the short form for “contribute” or “contribution.”
It’s much the same with suffixes. A detached “g” at the end of a word stands for “gram,” as in “program.” A detached “k” stands for “ical,” as in “medical.” And a detached “o” takes the place of “ology,” as in “biology.”
These forms can also be added together to create longer words. “Biological” is written “b-i” followed by a detached “o-k.” In this way, long, complex words are reduced to two or three quick flicks of the pen, and yet remain completely legible to anyone who knows the Gregg system. Combined, the brief forms and the abbreviation principle account for about half of Gregg’s advantage over longhand. Not only are the letters uncomplicated and simply joined, there are fewer of them to write.
The final element that makes Gregg so blazingly fast is a technique called “phrasing.” Using this method, many common expressions can be dashed off in a few strokes without ever lifting the pen from the page. For example, the phrase “it will be” is composed of three common words, each of which can be written separately with a single letter: “i,” written with a short, straight, upward stroke that slopes to the right, represents “it;” “l,” a long, horizontal, upward-facing curve, represents “will;” and, as we’ve seen, “b,” the long, downward curving stroke, represents “be.” Phrasing allows you to join all three of these letters in one elegant, continuous form—“i-l-b”—that takes less than a quarter-second to write.
Here's "it will be" on the first line, with "I have been" below it:
And there are literally thousands of these phrases in Gregg shorthand. Most importantly, unlike short forms, they don’t require much memorization; they’re the product of a few simple rules.
* * *
There you have it: a short course in the technology that made the Irishman John Robert Gregg an American tycoon in the first half of the 20th Century. By the time he died, in 1949, Gregg presided over an empire that reached from his headquarters on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan into almost every school, business and courthouse in the country. While he was fundamentally a publishing magnate—Gregg Publishing put out hundreds of textbooks, dictionaries, study guides, magazines, and shorthand versions of classical literature—John Robert Gregg also oversaw a national infrastructure of certification agencies, business schools, and testing facilities that endorsed the skills of all professional shorthand writers. If you wanted to be an executive secretary, you needed a certificate from Gregg saying you qualified at 150 words per minute. If you wanted to be a court reporter, you had to demonstrate you could write an astonishing 225 words per minute with better than 98 percent accuracy. Altogether, millions of people passed through Gregg training and the Gregg certification system.
For nearly a century, Gregg was an essential part of American society. As recently as the 1970s, almost every high school in the country taught Gregg. Certainly, every business school and most colleges offered Gregg-certified shorthand courses. But Gregg’s decline began when McGraw-Hill bought Gregg Publishing, shortly after John Robert Gregg’s death. The rise of stenography machines in the 1940s and 1950s steadily drove shorthand from the courtroom (though there are still a handful of “pen writers” in the federal court system). The Dictaphone and other recording devices made verbatim note taking less and less important in the office. And some people say improvements in women’s rights also played a role in the decline of Gregg. In a time when they were denied careers in fields like the law or medicine, the smartest, most talented women often ended up as secretaries or executive assistants and became gifted shorthand practitioners. In the 1960s and 1970s, as these women began to move on to better opportunities, those left behind never became quite as fast or skilled at the complexities of Gregg.
The real death knell for Gregg, though, was the arrival of the personal computer in the 1980s. Even high-level executives no longer dictated letters to their secretaries; they wrote them themselves on their desktop computers. Companies that used to have scores of skilled shorthand writers eliminated their steno pools entirely. Today, I'm not aware of any high school that teaches Gregg. It's almost impossible to find it taught in colleges—with two exceptions in Kingsborough and Queensborough community colleges in New York City, where Gregg writers are still prized by some white glove law firms. The only book still published by the Gregg Division of McGraw-Hill is The Gregg Manual, an office reference that contains no mention of shorthand.
But, as a technology for writing fast with pen and paper—still a fundamental skill for reporters like me—Gregg shorthand has never been surpassed. Nowadays, you may have to buy an old Gregg manual on e-Bay and teach yourself, but even if you just learn the basics, Gregg will probably double your note taking speed. With practice and daily use, it’s not uncommon to reach speeds of 100 words a minute or more. And, paradoxically, shorthand is the perfect complement to the 21st Century technology of the smartpen.
After all, shorthand—at least my shorthand—isn’t foolproof. Even though, for short stretches, I can write 120 words per minute, the average American now speaks at more than 150 words a minute, so something is inevitably lost in the translation. With my trusty Sky smartpen, though, I don’t have to worry. Most of the time, when I get around to writing the story, I can rely on my handwritten notes for short quotes and background information. But when I need a longer, verbatim quote, I can use my notes as a kind of index to find the right part of the interview, and tap there with my pen to hear the playback. No more of the forward/reverse dance with a digital recorder when it’s time to transcribe. It’s an almost flawless system.
But whenever I get a little too smug about my clever use of this hybrid technology, I like to think about the great court reporting contests of the late 1920s when legends of shorthand, like Charles Swem and Martin Dupraw,competed head-to-head against one another. They took dictation in categories like “jury charge” and “testimony.”
By 1927, the last of the National Speed Contests just between pen writers, the testimony category was conducted at 280 words a minute. That’s more than four words a second, fast even with a smartpen.
Dupraw won, for the third year in a row, with a fountain pen.
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