Women Cheat More, Better Liars About It

Offered with little comment, a story about research that finds women not only have more affairs than men, but they're better at lying about it.  I suppose what you know, guys, isn't what's really happening.  Kinda what people know, at least on a Friday when my standards are low.

"I look better when tanned"

Skin cancer may be the fastest growing type of cancer in the U.S., but some people -- especially young women -- insist that they can't get enough of a tan.  It just makes 'em feel better and more attractive, or at least that's the motivation.

Turns out, according to this study (accessed from campus, your mileage may vary), that it may be unfortunately true. An experiment shows men found darker tanned women to be more physically attractive, thinner, and healthier than they did light and medium tanned women. The study was published in the American Journal of Health Behavior (2008, Volume 32, p. 243-252).

The conclusion?

Campaigns and other interventions targeted at males need to reduce the perceptions that tanned females are healthier, thinner, and more attractive.  Educational efforts targeting females need to reduce attraction-based motivations and to address the need to keep themselves healthy and to not tailor their behaviors to attract males.

In a perfect world, perhaps.  Hopefully someone will come up with a good health campaign to accomplish this, but I have my doubts.  I suspect it'll require some pop culture thing to happen -- a movie, a celebrity, some awful incident.  I suppose a "pale girls are sexy" campaign might work, but it'd have to be done in a clever way.

What My Congressman Knows

This is what my congressman knows:

• Barack Obama is a fascist
• Obama is creating a national police force
• Obama can be compared to both Hitler and the commies
• The use of "czars" on policy topics has deeper, scary meaning
• Aliens are living among us, but Men In Black will keep us safe.
  

Okay, the last one I made up -- kinda like most everything U.S. Rep. Paul Broun says -- and you can read more here about this nutjob's rants.  Or you can listen to the audio (small children and sensitive pets should leave the room).

I'm no liberal, more of a radical moderate who dislikes both sides equally, but this guy gives conservatism beyond a bad name -- it sends it out to where the black, unmarked helicopters fly.

It's rare I hijack my what people know blog for partisan venting.  And what's scarier is there are many people out there (10-20 percent) who actually believe this stuff.  Another case of partisan ranting that gets in the way of reasoned policy debate.

Added stuff:

For a thoughtful analysis of media miscoverage of the town halls, read this.  If anyone thinks the news media, especially TV, plays into Obama's hands, then think it through.  Over-coverage of town hall screamers energized those opposed to the Democrat plans to overhaul health care.  The TV guys played into Republican hands.

People Know -- That They're Confused

A new CBS News poll finds that two-thirds of Americans are confused about the whole health care debate.  A pdf of the entire poll is here.

No doubt the screaming in town halls, the wailing of talk radio hosts, and the frothing by Fox News guys has generated some of the confusion -- as has the inability of the Obama Administration or Congress to explain this in a clear, coherent manner.  Still, more people (49 percent) think the town hall protesters do not reflect the views of most Americans.  Forty-one percent think they do.  The breakdown falls along unsurprising partisan lines, there are just more people identifying themselves as Dems today than GOPers. 

And folks kinda blame Obama.  Three out of five Americans think he's not done a good job explaining all health care reform.  His overall approval ratings have also dropped.  A lot.  He's gone from a high of 77 to 55 in approval, according to this site.  He's also as low as 51 percent, according to the same site, different page.

News by Youth

We talk a lot in the news biz about attracting and keeping a young audience, but here's a case of a couple of fairly young people taking over a small newspaper -- a pair of 22-year-olds.  Cool.

Maths? and Science Knowledge

Reading this press release,says U.S. students "trail in maths and science knowledge" compared to kids in other peer nations.  No surprise there, except for the use of "maths" instead of math.  Perhaps this is a language difference (this is the "worldwide" version of the web site), or maybe "maths" is correct because there are different flavors of math.  Dunno, but the plural of math threw me off.  CNN version of the story here.  No plural of math.

Problems with Internet Polls?

Public opinion surveys are a key means of learning what people know or think about the issues of the day.  The growth of Net-based polling is not without critics, and this story based on new research by some Stanford folks suggests that these "opt-in" panels are nowhere near as accurate as traditional randomly drawn samples.  Read the full study here (pdf).