http://academicheadshots.tumblr.com/

2 out of 30 is about 7%, which is statistically significant using the standard definition.

In any case, even 1 university out of 30 does not really put non-Western universities into the running of even being statistically relevant. Indeed, if they were more relevant, it would likely invalidate the premise of the study, since the overriding characteristic of the East Asian profile photo is a straight-on photo, and – if more East Asian universities were included – the justification of discarding a larger percentage of photos would have been more questionable.

Your probabilites are wrong; the odds that zero of the 18 non-western universities would be chosen out of 30 selections is 182/200 (the odds that none would be selected as the first random selection), times 181/199 (odds that none would be selected second…)

This reduces to (182!/151!) / (200!/169!) after 30 selections, or about a 4% chance that none of them were selected, leaving a 96% chance that one of those 18 schools was included by the random sampling.

The point about excluding non-English languages still applies.

Did any thought at all go into this post?

But when I can’t avoid it (usually group shots), I usually present my left side. Mind you, I’m not looking to present myself as emotionally expressive; I’m not an emotionally expressive person. I am rather seeking to stand/sit at the left end of the line so that I don’t trouble people with my left-handedness and sharp elbows.

Especially since she still hasn’t (and most likely never will) post an update or otherwise edit this article to clarify that she was mistaken when she said “the right side of the brain is more involved in processing emotions than the left” was a fact, when it actually isn’t.

From the methodology of the study:

Portraits of academics were sourced from official university web sites of the 200 Universities listed in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2010–2011 [16]. A random sample of 30 Universities was taken from this list.

Immediately we have a massive bias, since the majority of universities among the top 200 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings are drawn from Western countries. Going there, you can see that 18 of the top 200 universities are not from a Western country. (Here, I’m including South Africa and Israel as Western; if you want to deny the massive Western influence in tertiary education in those countries, the number of non-Western universities goes to 21 out of the top 200.) So, you immediately start with only 9% of universities among the top 200 as belonging non-Western cultures, and the likelihood of any one of them being chosen is (at best) 18/171 (which is the likelihood of a non-Western university to be chosen as the 30th random university, given no non-Western university had been chosen before). But that’s not the only selection criteria:

Universities were excluded if the website for academic staff was not in English.

So this will also act as a barrier to exclude non-Western universities, since even pre-eminent Asian universities (like the Tokyo University) don’t always use English on their websites. And finally, there’s this:

Of the 5829 faces rated, 3168 were posing with either the left or right side of the nose visible and were used in the analyses.

It’s rather “fishy” that the methodology splits the groups into only left and right and that the straight-on photos (which constitute the vast majority of Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, and – likely – South Korean photos) are dropped in the analysis. This only further biases the results to Western universities.

So let’s look at how this study cannot claim universality:

1. It uses a list that contains only 18 non-Western universities out of 200.
2. It randomly selects 30 universities from that list.
3. It excludes websites not in English.
4. It excludes photos that conform to the major style of faculty profile photograph in East Asia.

And then it uses this heavily skewed methodology to make this apparently universally applicable conclusion:

In this study we have shown that there are clear differences in the way academics in the sciences and arts present themselves in their publicly accessible University profile picture. Mathematicians, Chemists and Engineers tend to show the right cheek, thus reducing the observable emotionality, while English and Psychology academics show the left cheek, exacerbating the expression of emotion.

Note: the authors make no mention about cultural bias anywhere in their paper.

EDITED for formatting issues.