How Men and Women Have Different Dating Profile Pics

Some very interesting data. Example – Men are less likely to smile than women in their profile picture.

Just 4.8% of women are in their swimwear in their main profile picture. Not many people wear their bathing suits in their dating profile photos, though women are 10x more likely to be in their bathing suits than men. Given that photos in swimwear tend of perform better on dating sites for both genders, perhaps it’s time for men to show a little more skin?

Wearing sunglasses in your profile photo is generally considered a no-no for your dating profile photo.

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Priceonomics

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The Puzzling Search for Perfect Randomness

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Recently, randomness has even made the news: Apparently there’s hidden order in random surfaces, and we may be close to seeing a quantum computer generate ultimate randomness. This latter quest for perfect randomness is important because randomness brings unpredictability, and all non-quantum attempts to achieve it have the hidden flaw of being generated by algorithmic methods which can, theoretically, be deciphered. In this Insights column, we will explore how we can create randomness and defeat it in everyday activities, before soaring to philosophical heights in debating what randomness really is.

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Pradeep Mutalik — Quanta

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Greta Thunberg: The Crusader Kid

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The young shall change the world. Amen.

WHEN IT COMES to Greta Thunberg, people fall into one of three camps: they either love her, hate her or don’t know about her. Those who appreciate her are leaders like António Guterres (Secretary-General of the UN), US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Barack Obama. Those who dismiss her are the likes of Canadian businessman and politician Maxime Bernier, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson and climate sceptic Bjørn Lomborg. But this much is clear, she is arguably the world’s best-known 16-year-old today.

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Nandini Nair — Open

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The Unique Struggle of Mental Health Caregivers

One of the reasons depression can put a strain on relationships is because often the caregiver is left without the proper resources. According to the 2016 study, a full quarter of the 8 million mental health caregivers claimed that they have trouble finding a mental health professional for their loved one. Even once a professional is identified, additional services are harder to find; a majority of caregivers report experiencing trouble finding day programs or treatment (64%) or peer support (58%). About half have difficulty arranging a case manager (49%), in-patient treatment (48%), or treatment for substance abuse (45%). Once those resources are found, many caretakers report difficulty navigating the insurance system to get adequate coverage. There simply are not as many resources or services available for mental health caregivers as there are for people caring for those with physical disabilities.

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Dani Fleischer — Medium

China Experiments with a New Kind of Megalopolis

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Trust China to do the most bold things.

Chen Yalei, the financial broker, says Beijing is making a kind of offer to the cities in the Greater Bay Area that they simply can’t refuse. “Of course, there will be major shifts and, of course, some of these cities will lose importance while others gain ground.” But, he adds, at least for the time being, Hong Kong will remain indispensable, as the financial center of the Pearl River Delta and as China’s gateway to the world.

And afterwards? “The reformer Deng Xiaoping created a monument to himself in Shenzhen, and for his successor, Jiang Zemin, it was in Shanghai ” says Chen Yalei. “The Greater Bay Area is the project that President Xi Jinping intends to be remembered by in the history books.”

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Bernhard Zand — Spiegel Online

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Doctors aghast at Groupon deals for medical care

With AFP Story by Fabienne Faur: Lifesty

The sad state of medicine.

The deals—which have actually been around for years—cover things like elective medical services, dental work, eye care, and preventative scans, such as mammograms. They’re often used by people who do not have health insurance or have limited coverage. Still, some insured patients turn to them for cost-saving deals, more pricing transparency, and control over their healthcare bills. Without the coupons, the same services provided by some hospitals and providers can have wildly varied pricing, which can be nearly impossible to estimate in advance.

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Beth Mole — Ars Technica

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THREE YEARS OF MISERY INSIDE GOOGLE, THE HAPPIEST COMPANY

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A detailed account.

Google employees lit up the company’s internal social networks, once again contemplating galling facts about the status of women in Silicon Valley. But this time the discussion was less easily derailed, perhaps because some of the most important exchanges took place on an anonymous mailing list called Expectant New Moms. The group’s 4,000 members knew the stories about Rubin and Singhal—thanks in part to email threads on the list after each executive departed. But Rubin’s $90 million payout felt like a sucker punch. The fact that leaders’ misconduct had been an open secret made it worse. Why had they given so many years of their lives to make these men insanely rich?

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Nitasha Tiku — Wired

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Ram Dass is ready to die.

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Insightful interview of Ram Dass – a spiritual guru who has been relevant for quite some time in the US.

Ever want to take acid for old times’ sake? Yeah. I think I want to delve into planes of consciousness. I gave my guru in India LSD, and he said that plants with similar effects were around in the olden times and that by taking them you could stay in the room with Christ for only a few hours instead of living with the Lord. That’s why I went to the east. They had methods for living with the Lord.

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David Marchese — The New York Times Magazine

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The #MeToo Backlash

An article on the unintended consequences and backlash after the #MeToo gained momentum.

Because the data was collected soon after the #MeToo movement gained momentum, and because much of it focused on expectations, the researchers conducted a follow-up survey (with different people) in early 2019. This revealed a bigger backlash than respondents had anticipated. For instance, 19% of men said they were reluctant to hire attractive women, 21% said they were reluctant to hire women for jobs involving close interpersonal interactions with men (jobs involving travel, say), and 27% said they avoided one-on-one meetings with female colleagues; only one of those numbers was lower in 2019 than the numbers projected the year before. The researchers say that some of the behaviors are manifestations of what is sometimes called the Mike Pence rule—a reference to the U.S. vice president’s refusal to dine with female colleagues unless his wife is present. “I’m not sure we were surprised by the numbers, but we were disappointed,” says Rachel Sturm, a professor at Wright State University who worked on the project. “When men say, ‘I’m not going to hire you, I’m not going to send you traveling, I’m going to exclude you from outings’—those are steps backward.”

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Leanne E. Atwater, Allison M. Tringale, Rachel E. Sturm, Scott N. Taylor, and Phillip W. Braddy — Harvard Business Review

Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience

Esalen is the place.

Esalen is one such place. Another is 1440 Multiversity, a sleek campus in Santa Cruz County—the boutique hotel to Esalen’s summer camp. Spirit Rock, a meditation center in Marin County, recently held a gathering to discuss “technology as an existential threat to mindfulness.” There are invitation-only dinners, private cuddle parties, conferences called Responsible Tech and Wisdom 2.0. “There’s a lot of debate about what to call it,” Paula Goldman, who runs a new department at the software company Salesforce called the Office of Ethical and Humane Use, said. “Ethical tech? Responsible tech?” If the name is one source of confusion, the substance is another. Is it a movement, or the stirrings of what might become a movement? Is it evidence of canny P.R., or of deep introspection?

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Andrew Marantz — The New Yorker

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