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Money is sexy

August 30th 2010 08:28

Money compensates for bad hair too

There is an old joke that defines "charisma" as something that short, fat, balding rich men have. An Israeli academic has just proven it correct.

Dan Ariely, who is a Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University in the US, determined that short men looking for women through online dating sites are disadvantaged and the only thing that can compensate, in the eyes of women, for their shortness of stature is money.

Specifically, men need to earn about US$35,000 more a year for every inch they are under 5ft10in.

Prof Ariely reached the conclusion after polling 28,000 online daters.

His research also revealed that women think men are most desirable aged 27, men think women are most desirable at 21, women go more for looks while men go more for age and weight, and both lie a lot in creating their online profiles.

For women, the attractiveness of men rises the more education they have, but men don't return the compliment, generally giving a woman no extra credit for a degree beyond a bachelor's. Intimidated?

Professor Ariely's rather sad findings are published in his book "The Upside of Irrationality".

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Dating, Human nature, Psychology, Romance

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Questions about the afterlife

April 19th 2010 11:38

A remarkable story has unfolded today about the near-death experience of a three-year-old boy in Germany.

The story has three extraordinary levels. The first is that Paul Eicke, of Berlin, revived three hours and 18 minutes after drowning. The child fell into a pond at his grandfather's house and is thought to have been in it for at least several minutes before he was noticed and pulled from the water.

Efforts to resuscitate him failed. The boy's father gave him heart massage and mouth-to-mouth for 10 minutes until a medical helicopter arrived. The paramedics on board continued resuscitation procedures during a 10-minute flight to hospital, where doctors then took over and tried for "hours" to save the child. Just after they gave up, however, Paul Eicke's heart decided to start beating again.

The second remarkable fact is that it appears Paul will make a full recovery, suffering no brain damage because of the coldness of the water he fell into. His core temperature after being pulled from the pond was measured at 28 degrees, compared to a normal human body level of 37 degrees. It is known that cold temperatures slow the metabolism and allow the body to survive longer without oxygen, but Paul's case is still exceptional. "When children have been underwater for a few minutes they mostly don't make it," said Professor Lothar Schweigerer, director of the clinic to which Paul was taken. "This is a most extraordinary case." That view is supported by an American study which showed that, of children who survive drownings, 92 per cent are found within two minutes of submersion.

The third remarkable aspect of the story surfaced after Paul was well enough to speak — when he was able to tell those around his hospital bed what he had seen and done during the three hours and 18 minutes he was thought to be dead.

Remember, this is the story of a three-year-old, someone unlikely to have woken and recognised the reality TV and sensationalist magazine possibilities.

Paul Eicke told his family, friends and assembled staff that he had been to heaven. And there, he said, he had seen his dead grandmother. "There was a lot of light and I was floating," Paul said. "I came to a gate and saw Grandma Emmi on the other side. She said, 'You go back to your mummy. I'll wait for you here'.''

He added, "Heaven looked nice, but I am glad I am back with mummy and daddy now." Mummy and daddy, no doubt, agree.

Near-death experiences like that described by Paul Eicke are not new. Popular interest in what are commonly termed NDEs was sparked by the book Life After Life, written by Raymond Moody and published in 1975, but NDEs have been studied for many years by people in a variety of fields, including psychology, psychiatry, parapsychology and hospital medicine.

All this leads to an Agence France Presse news story of two weeks ago which said NDEs are reported by between 11 and 23 per cent of survivors of heart attacks. The report used that fact to introduce what could be the fourth extraordinary level of this story. Or, perhaps, it proves that there was nothing extraordinary about the Paul Eicke story, nor about any other NDE.

AFP reported the findings of a study in Slovenia, published in the respected Belgian peer-review journal Critical Care, which investigated 52 heart attack cases, 11 of which reported NDEs. The researchers found no common link in terms of age, gender, education, religion, fear of death, time of recovery or drugs used to resuscitate the patients.

They did find one common link however — high levels of carbon dioxide, and to a lesser degree potassium, in the blood.

Can these things create hallucinatory experiences? Medical science isn't sure. The researchers say further work is needed. But it could be the beginning of the end for notions of premature visits to the afterlife.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Europe, Happy Spot, Health, Psychology, Religion, Science

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Women as bread winners

March 18th 2010 07:19

So much for males being the bread winners. According to new research based on monkey responses we may, at a basic and instinctive level, see women as the bread winners.

A team led by biologist Erica van de Waal, from the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, conducted research amongst wild vervet monkeys in South Africa. The team trained dominant male and female monkeys to teach other monkeys a simple box-opening task. The researchers made a comparative study of the responses to the teachings of the dominant males versus the dominant females.

The monkeys, they found, were far more likely to try, and to succeed in, opening the box if their demonstrator had been a female.

"Females are core group members with higher social status than males, and more knowledge about food resources," van de Waal in the research report, just published in a British Royal Society journal. Male monkeys have a tendency to wander off looking for mates in other groups — the old greener grass over there syndrome — whereas females tend to return to the home group.

The research, van de Waal concluded, revealed valuable insights into "the evolution of traditions and culture in species living in stable groups, including humans".
news.sciencemag.org; image: www.yoursafariexpert.com

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Africa, Psychology, Science

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Getting to the bottom of the graffiti problem

March 8th 2010 06:35

VYOOS EDITORIAL
Sometimes, the best decisions in law are innovative moments of colour splashed on grey areas of inefficacy.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Mexico, Human nature, Law, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Vyoos Editorial

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Today's news: beer goggles

January 11th 2010 21:41

Too much beer does not affect your ability to get a woman's age wrong, according to a British study.

The study at the University of Leicester had researchers showing a group of people — half of whom were sober and half of whom had consumed varying amounts of alcohol — images of females meant to be 13, 17 or 20

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Beer, Law, Psychology, Romance, Sex

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How cool is this?

December 22nd 2009 20:09

Adam Ferrier has a bright future in his chosen field of consumer psychology, whatever that is.

Ferrier, whom we should call Dr Ferrier because he has just completed a PhD at the University of Western Sydney, chose as his thesis subject something far more cool than the usual. His study was: what makes people cool

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Human nature, Psychology

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