Archive: May 2010

Eden H. sent in this image, found at FlowingData, that shows the categories federal ag subsidies fall into, compared to federal recommendations for how often we should eat those types of food (originally found at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine):

Just to clarify, the 73.8% figure for meat and dairy on the left doesn’t refer just to direct subsidies; it also includes subsidies for crops that are grown primarily to feed livestock. The “grains” category (13.23%) refers to grains grown for human consumption. If you included all grains in one category it would be much larger, but somewhat misleading in that the vast majority of grains grown in the U.S. aren’t intended for people to eat.

Without subsidized grain, keeping livestock in confined feeding facilities to fatten them up would be much more expensive, if not entirely cost-prohibitive. Thus, farm subsidies are an essential component of U.S. agribusiness.

J.L. Bell at Oz and Ends counted the number of rumors about President G.W. Bush and President Obama that were identified and determined by rumor-validation site, snopes.com, to be true, false, a mixture of true and false, or uncertain.  It turns out, there are a lot more rumors and a lot more false rumors about Obama than there were about Bush:

Jay Livingston summarizes:

In less than two years, Obama rumor-mongers have had nearly twice the output that their Bush counterparts managed in eight years – 87 to 47. And while the Bush rumors split almost evenly true-false, false Obama rumors dwarfed the true ones. The false rumors about Obama outnumbered the total number of rumors about Bush. And while the lies about Obama are almost all negative, some of the false rumors about Bush are quite flattering, along the lines of the George Washington cheery tree rumor – like the rumor that had Bush paying for the funeral of a boy who had drowned near the Crawford ranch.

Looking closer at the mixed rumors, Bell reports that:

I delved down to the stories that the site designates as a mixture of truth and falsehood. For Obama, in most cases the truth is innocuous while the lie reflects poorly on the President, particularly photographs that are misrepresented or show behavior that produced no complaints when his predecessors did the same. In contrast, in this mixture of truth and falsehood about George W. Bush praying with an injured soldier, the lie reflected well on that President…

Looking at the last two Presidential candidate losers reveals the same pattern: more false rumors about Kerry than McCain.

Bell interprets this evidence to mean that Republicans fight dirtier than Democrats.  What do you think?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

I swore months ago to never post another Evony ad. I’ve seen so many, and the direction they’re going seems pretty clear.

But today I’m breaking my vow. I submit to you this screencap, taken by spinach, of an Evony pop-up ad featuring a faceless woman’s torso, obscuring the website spinach was viewing at the time: a biography of feminist poet/theorist Adrienne Rich.

A moment of silence, please.

Nationalist white supremacy organizations, and their gentler counterparts in the U.S., sometimes argue that non-white women are having more children than white women.  The result is a shift in the national demographic (that they don’t like).

This month the Pew Research Center released a report on the changing demographics of American motherhood (discovered thanks to a tip by Michael Kimmel).  Under “Mother’s Race,” we see that there has been a 12 percentage point decrease in the share of births to white women between 1990 and 2008.  In contrast, births to Asian and, especially, Hispanic women have increased (a combined 13 percentage points):

The share of births to native versus foreign born women has also shifted, with a quarter of births now to women who have immigrated to the U.S.:

They summarize:

White women made up 53% of mothers of newborns in 2008, down from 65% in 1990. The share of births to Hispanic women has grown dramatically, to one-in-four.

So, whether you agree with the national white supremacists’ evaluation of the data or not (I assume you do not), they’re right about the data.

UPDATE: Sabrina, in the comments, rightly points out that my comments assume that the father’s race matches the mother’s.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

An article at The Economist summarizes the research of Sarah Pearson, who has spent almost 100,000 hours watching British people watch television. People underestimate how much time they spend watching television and listening to the radio (especially the first one), but they overestimate how much time they spend watching online videos.

Pearson found that they also underestimate how much time they spend watching shows as they are being broadcasted. Despite the many ways that shows can now be recorded and rebroadcast, most of our television watching is just like it was 50 years ago. “Even in British homes with a Sky+ box,” she finds, “…almost 85% of television shows are viewed at the time the broadcasters see fit to air them.”

Why? Because television is a social activity. People sit down to watch things together and then they “see what’s on.” And, even when people watch television alone, they like to watch shows at the same time as other people are watching it, or as soon as possible afterward.

Via BoingBoing.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Dodai at Jezebel recently posted an Elle cover from May 1986. Like her, I was struck by how un-retouched the photo appeared to be. Dodai says that you can see freckles and moles on her face.

Dodai also argues that the fashion spreads in the 1986 issue look like they are happy and having fun and she compares them to the spreads in the May 2010 issue in which, she says, the models appear somber. See for yourself.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Michelle R. sent in a segment from CNN that asks children to associate positive or negative attributes with various skin tones, much like a famous 1940s experiment that asked children which doll they preferred. The original experiment, and recreations since then, have found that children of all races tend to view lighter-skinned dolls or images more positively (prettier, smarter, more desirable as a classmate) than darker-skinned ones, and to believe that adults do so as well (sorry for the ads before each segment).

Anderson Cooper then talks to some of the children about their answers:

It’s fascinating that kids pick up on competing cultural themes and use them in their answers — that is, skin color isn’t supposed to matter and you judge people as individuals, but people still do care about skin color. And they all agree that the “good” skin color (from their own perspective or what they think adults prefer) is lighter. And to hear a girl refer to her own skin color as “nasty”…heartbreaking.

NEW! (May ’10): Alex P., Dimitriy T.M., and Abeer K. sent in a final segment, in which a parent reacts to her child’s preferences:

Related posts: another recreation, and the original study.

Mr. Wray, AP Psychology teacher, sings the biases:

Sent in by Dmitriy T.M.

Lyrics after the jump:

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