Month: May 2010

“An Epidemic Of Not Watching” Ctd

A rabbi in the West Bank forbids women from running for local office:

In his weekly column, Rabbi Levanon wrote that, according to the teachings of influential rabbis, women were not allowed to apply for the position. "The first problem is giving women authority, and being a secretary means having authority," Rabbi Levanon wrote in the community's newspaper.

"Within the family certain debates are held and when opinions are united the husband presents the family's opinion. This is the proper way to prevent a situation in which the woman votes one way and her husband votes another," he wrote.

He also said it was not appropriate for women to mix with men in late evening meetings of community leaders.

Is Your Medial Frontal Gyrus A Snitch?

Margaret Talbot isn't impressed by fMRI lie detectors:

One conclusion you can draw about lie detection by fMRI from this and less quirky studies is that, as Miller says, “If you sample a population in which you know that there is a ten percent chance that they are lying, then for every 9 hits (correctly identifying someone as lying), you will also get 9 false alarms (saying somebody is lying when they are not.)”

Time Flies?

Prior research has suggested that time appears to move faster as one ages. The BPS blog highlights some research pointing the other direction:

Age accounted for four per cent of the variance in how quickly participants said the last ten years had passed and just one per cent of the perception of time's speed in general. By contrast, how busy and rushed people reported feeling accounted for ten per cent of the variance in subjective speed of time. Consistent with this, women reported feeling more rushed than men, on average, and they perceived time to go by more quickly.

Quite why the idea that time speeds up with age is so widely believed requires further study, the researchers said.

Paying With Coins

Ideasmachine

Balko pays homage to the vending machine, now entering a new era:

For nearly a century before the Internet put the anonymous consumption of vices literally at the world’s fingertips, vending machines dispensed taboo wares, experiences, and entertainment free from the gaze of prying eyes. Salyers argues that the first vending machines in wide use were the snuff and tobacco boxes in 17th century English taverns, appropriate forerunners to the ubiquitous, plastic-handled cigarette dispensers that populated bars, bowling allies, and restaurants in the second half of the 20th century. Be it the condom machine in the gas station bathroom, the coin-operated peep show, the pinball craze that prompted a moral panic in the 1940s, truant hoods spending afternoons in smoke-blanketed video game arcades in the 1980s, or the rebellious rock ’n’ roll dispensing jukebox, there has always been a subversive element to coin-operated commerce. Even the Norman Rockwell–celebrated Coca-Cola machine has gone rogue, as public health activists now fault soda and candy—and, in particular, the widespread availability of both through vending machines—for the fattening of American children.

(Image from Jake Bronstein's toy vending machine project. Bronstein bought a machine off the internet and "filled the toy capsules with ideas of fun things to do and started placing the machine in various spots around New York.")

It’s Not DC, It’s Journalism

Ezra Klein tweaks Friedersdorf's fears about intellectual capture:

The larger danger is not friends but professional contacts. And that's not so much about D.C. as it is about the type, and amount, of reporting you choose to do. Neither Ben Smith nor Joe Klein nor Jonathan Alter live in the District. But all of them are seriously plugged in, with the difficult trade-off that entails: It's hard to know what people in power are thinking if you refuse to talk to them, but it's also harder to make them really upset if you want to continue talking to them. (I should note that I think all the writers I just mentioned handle this problem particularly well, which is why I used them as examples.) And unlike the books-by-acquaintances issue, this one has real consequences for your audience. That's not a D.C. problem, though. It's a consequence of reporting, and one that isn't limited to any particular city.

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, Andrew was cautiously optimistic about the dramatic developments over DADT and wondered why Obama seemed to shift all of a sudden (clues here and here). Fallows also weighed in. Meanwhile, support for ending the ban was as popular as ever – as was acceptance of gay and lesbian couples.

In spill coverage, BP will try to plug the leak, ABC looked down below, Elizabeth Kolbert glanced at our oil future, readers wrung their hands over Obama's response to the crisis, and we worried about hurricane season. In Palin coverage, Joe McGinniss got a little too close, she responded with another flub, Andrew Sprung tried to make sense of her latest narrative on Obama, and Wendy Kaminer wondered how the Kagan response would be different if she looked more like Palin. In other news, the Church kept misleading its followers over HCR, Julian Glover reviewed the Queen's speech, and a plunge in the stock market popped back up.

In other coverage, Jonah Lehrer gave props to parenting and Tablet and Beinart tried to talk to their kids about Zionism. More discussion of Christianity here and here. Conor-led DC talk here and here (bonus suburbia here). Malkin Award here, creepy ad here, Lost's many jumping sharks here, crappy old postcards here, and butched-up rainbows here.

— C.B.