OKCupid is one of the largest dating sites in the world with over 4 million monthly active users. While the explicit purpose of OKCupid is to help users find romance, the site's co-founder Christian Rudder has discovered a dual purpose for the information produced through the dating site.Courting controversy, Rudder has sorted through the data of 25 million users, revealing findings on beauty, attraction, race, and gender. Rudder has recently released some of those numbers in a book titled Dataclysm. In this short video, Rudder shares some of his discoveries and discusses “who we are when we think no one’s looking.”
1 September 2016
Salon: Jealous of what? Solving polyamory’s jealousy problem
I am lucky; I live with the two loves of my life. I am smitten with my husband of 16 years, and adore my partner of four. The three of us depend upon and nurture each other; we are a family. When my partner and I hadn’t had a date in a while, my husband encouraged us to take a holiday at the art museum, knowing how the visual connects us. When my husband and I hit an emotional snag in discussing our issues, my partner helped us to sort it out and come together. And when I was picking out Christmas presents, I gave the foodies in my life some bonding time over a Japanese small plates cooking class. [...]
I think back on my life of four years ago as we first formed our polyamorous family. My new boyfriend was surprised that he felt no jealousy of my 14-year relationship with my husband. He felt supported and welcomed into our lives, and longed to make a commitment to us, but the absence of jealousy was perplexing to him. Doesn’t jealousy naturally emerge from a partner having another partner, he wondered? He waited for over a year before he made a commitment, just in case jealousy would emerge. He was waiting for Godot. [...]
Eric Widmer, a sociologist at the University of Geneva shows that trust in any dyadic (two-person) relationship is influenced by the density of the larger social configuration in which it is embedded. Research indicates that people feel more comfortable when those persons they are close to are also close to one another, which is termed transitivity. This leads over time to dense networks, where the number of actual connections between members comes close to or equals the number of potential connections. In my polyamory family there were three potential dyadic relationships and all have been realized either through a love relationship (my partners and I) or a close friendship (between my partners). A dense, socially cohesive network allows for a greater degree of trust between any two members. My family’s wider social network of friends and family varies in its transitivity with us. But the cohesiveness within our immediate family alone begins to account for the seemingly surprising lack of jealousy. [...]
Research on polyamory indicates that participants tend to be highly educated professionals. According to psychologist Hazel Markus, such professionals tend toward an “independent model of agency” where actions are perceived as freely chosen and independent from others (vs. working-class Americans who view their actions as interdependent with others). For instance, in a work organization, upper-middle-class employees tend to have broad networks of colleagues who work closely together but in changing configurations from one project to the next. Without a small, consistent work group, such employees tend to think of themselves as individual agents, with a sense of agency (within organizational constraints) in choosing projects and colleagues. Sounds pretty fantastic, right?
CityLab: The 3 Biggest Lessons of Denmark's Clean-Energy Movement
To find the world’s most aggressive clean energy targets, look no further than Denmark.
The city of Copenhagen is working hard toward meeting a pledge to become carbon-neutral by 2025. A much smaller municipality near the German border, Sønderborg, wants to do the same by 2029.
The targets are not onerous national mandates imposed on unwilling local governments. Instead, in a mutually reinforcing cycle, robust action by municipalities to cut carbon and add clean energy to the grid begets ever-more ambitious policy at the national level. By 2020, at least half of Denmark’s electricity will be supplied by wind turbines. By 2050, the country intends to be free of fossil fuels.
As a journalist, I’ve been reporting for several years on how Denmark’s policymakers, entrepreneurs, business leaders and citizens are implementing these goals. Their stories are included in my new e-book, “Quitting Carbon: How Denmark Is Leading the Clean Energy Transition and Winning the Race to the Low-Carbon Future.” There is much city leaders across the globe can learn from Denmark, both in terms of novel clean-energy solutions as well as the creative thinking behind them.
Here, distilled from the book, are three lessons Denmark has for cities around the world.
The RSA: The Psychology of Money | Claudia Hammond
he Psychology of Money with Claudia Hammond. Why don’t money and friendship mix? Can money buy happiness? Why does money have such a hold on us? The surprising psychology of money reveals that our relationship with it is more complex than we might think. BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Claudia Hammond explores the latest research in psychology, neuroscience, biology and behavioral economics, and offers some simple yet effective advice that can help us improve our relationship with money.
CityLab: Do Taxes Really Cause the Rich to Move?
Like its economy, America’s tax system is heavy up top—especially at the state level, where payments from the super-rich form a substantial share of revenue. When hedge-fund magnate David Tepper announced he was moving from New Jersey to Florida, the state estimated that it could face millions of dollars in lost taxes, putting New Jersey’s revenue base and budget at risk. Indeed, income tax rates vary considerably across states, from zero in places like Florida to nearly nine percent or more in states like New York. [...]
Strikingly, they find that millionaires move at a lower rate (2.4 percent) than the population as a whole (2.9 percent). The chart below, which tracks migration rates from 1999 to 2011, shows how these rates fall as incomes rise. Those making $10,000 a year have the highest migration rates—about 4.5 percent per year. As incomes climb, the migration rate falls steadily, until it reaches its lowest point (2 percent) for those making $90,000 a year. Once incomes reach millionaire-level, the migration rate increases, but only slightly. As the study points out, “higher-income earners show greater residential stability … than do low-income earners.” In other words, the well-off tend to be even more settled than other residents. [...]
That said, those millionaires who do move are more likely to move to a lower-tax state, the study finds. On average, a 10 percent increase in a state’s top tax rate leads to a one percent decline in its millionaires. Still, only around 2 percent of millionaires move due to income taxes, according to the study.
Al Jazeera: Texas colleges open with guns allowed in classrooms
Under a new campus carry law in Texas, concealed handguns are now allowed to be carried in university buildings, including classrooms and dorms.
Moye, whose curriculum at the University of North Texas (UNT) centres on race relations in US history, told Al Jazeera that he worries especially about the presence of guns during lectures on topics that arouse strong feelings.
"Will I have to censor myself or tamp down discussions?" he asked. [...]
While public universities are obliged to respect the law, private academic institutions have the chance to opt out. Dozens of private universities in Texas have decided to ban campus carry, while only one will permit it. [...]
More than 100,000 Americans are killed or injured by gun violence each year, according to The Joyce Foundation, an organisation that lobbies for gun control and policies to reduce and prevent gun violence.
TED Talk: The jobs we'll lose to machines -- and the ones we won't | Anthony Goldbloom
Machine learning isn't just for simple tasks like assessing credit risk and sorting mail anymore -- today, it's capable of far more complex applications, like grading essays and diagnosing diseases. With these advances comes an uneasy question: Will a robot do your job in the future?
NBC News: What will happen to the GOP after Trump: Beyond Trump
The GOP for years was a diverse but sturdy three-legged stool of security hawks, tax cutters and religious conservatives. Within that coalition, stakeholders might jostle for prominence but generally got along, united by the common goal of winning elections.
Divisions within the party existed before Trump won the 2016 nomination, but were exacerbated in recent years as establishment Republicans battled with conservative populists over a variety of hot-button issues, including immigration. Tactical fights erupted over whether to threaten government shutdowns and how much to compromise with Democrats. Smaller factions within the party, like libertarians, battled to push their policies to the top of the agenda. [...]
Trump violated party orthodoxy on trade, entitlement reform, money in politics and national security. He exposed a huge portion of the Republican base that either disagreed with party leaders on key issues or didn’t care what they had to say. To some degree, the celebrity candidate challenged the idea that policy proposals even mattered: His own positions were far from consistent; he shifted regularly, even on signature issues; and he scoffed at the need for depth or nuance. The thrice-married candidate’s checkered personal history and crude rhetoric flew in the face of the party’s religious, conservative image. And his appeals to bigotry forced some Republicans to consider whether the left’s portrayal of the GOP as the party of white resentment was more accurate than they had once thought. [...]
Trump has said his vision for the GOP is a “worker’s party.” In a break from the party’s smaller-government past, he has suggested a massive federal investment in infrastructure to provide jobs directly to struggling areas, not unlike the federal stimulus package President Obama pushed through early in his first term over nearly unanimous GOP opposition. [...]
Proponents of this theory, who include prominent “reform conservative” writers like New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and National Review editor Reihan Salam, mostly loathe Trump, especially his appeals to racial prejudice. But they’ve also spent years warning Republicans of a rude awakening if they don’t find ways to address his voters’ concerns about stagnant wages and competition from immigrants and foreign rivals. Douthat has described Trumpism as “reform conservatism’s evil twin” — an unworkable agenda GOP leaders brought upon themselves by ignoring the conservative intellectuals’ think tank-friendly alternative.
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