My Science - Blog / Mein Naturwissenschaftsblog

Hopefully some interesting bits of information extracted from science and non-fiction literature. (For historical reasons there are some poems scattered throughout this blog.) Sachthemen und Sachtexte. (Historisch finden sich auf diesem Blog auch einige Gedichte und Aphorismen.) [Just collecting some exciting bits of information here.] [Eine Sammlung von interessanten Texten, Fragen und Antworten will das hier sein. Nicht mehr, aber auch nicht weniger.]

Samstag, 21. November 2015

Evolution of Long Hair

Evolution of Long Hair -> pdf
Peter Frost (2015)

Samstag, 14. November 2015

Hormonal contraceptive use during relationship formation and sexual desire during pregnancy

Hormonal contraceptive use during relationship formation and sexual desire during pregnancy
Kelly D. Cobey, Jan Havlíček, Katerina Klapilová and S. Craig Roberts (2015)

Abstract

Women who are regularly cycling exhibit different partner preferences than those who use hormonal contraception. Preliminary evidence appears to suggest that during pregnancy women’s partner preferences also diverge from those prevalent while regularly cycling. This is consistent with the general assertion that women’s mate preferences are impacted by hormonal variation. During pregnancy women’s preferences are thought to closely resemble those displayed by women who are using hormonal contraception. Here, based on this literature, we compare levels of sexual desire among pregnant women who met their partner while using hormonal contraception and pregnant women who met their partner while regularly cycling. We predicted that women who met their partner while using hormonal contraception would experience higher levels of in-pair sexual desire during pregnancy since these women will have partner preferences that more closely match those prevalent at the time of their partner choice. Our results provide support for the idea that previous contraceptive use/non-use may impact subsequent sexual desire for the partner during pregnancy. Pregnant women who met their partner while using hormonal contraception were shown to have higher levels of in-pair sexual desire than those who met while regularly cycling. In contrast, levels of extra-pair desire were not related to previous use/non-use of hormonal contraception. These findings were robust when controlling for a number of relevant individual difference variables known to impact sexual desire. Our results thus provide a more fine grained understanding of factors affecting relationship functioning during pregnancy.

Dienstag, 10. November 2015

England & Wales: Percentage of women remaining childless by their 30th birthday and completion of childbearing, by year of birth of woman

[Source | h/t hbd chick]

Dienstag, 3. November 2015

The path and performance of a company leader: A historical examination of the education and cognitive ability of Fortune 500 CEOs

Jonathan Wai & Heiner Rindermann (2015)

Intelligence

Highlights

(o) Becoming and performing as CEO can be considered a difficult mental test battery.

(o) To test this idea, Fortune 500 CEO education/ability was assessed from 1996 to 2014

(o) Across the last two decades ≈ 40% of CEOs were on the top 1% of cognitive ability.

(o) Even within CEOs, education/ability was associated with company gross revenue.

(o) The CEO filtering structure has remained similar across the last two decades.

Abstract

The path to becoming a CEO (and performance on the job) can be viewed as a difficult cognitive challenge. One way to examine this idea is to see how highly selected CEOs are in terms of education and cognitive ability. The extent to which Fortune 500 CEOs were selected on education and cognitive ability at an earlier age was retrospectively assessed at four time points that spanned 1996 to 2014 (Total N = 1991). Across the last 19 years, between 37.5% and 41.0% of these CEOs were found to attend an elite school which likely placed them in the top 1% of cognitive ability. People in the top 1% of ability, therefore, were likely overrepresented among these CEOs, at about 37 to 41 times the base rate. Even within each of the four samples, higher CEO education and cognitive ability was associated with higher gross revenue of the CEO's company. Although Fortune 500 CEOs were highly selected on education and cognitive ability, when placed in the context of a broader array of occupations in the extreme right tail of achievement (e.g., politicians, judges, billionaires, journalists, academics, powerful people, and other business elites), CEOs were not at the top. This showed the wide cognitive ability range (and mental test difficulty) across various occupations that compose the U.S. elite. That Fortune 500 CEOs had similar education and cognitive ability selectivity over time shows that the CEO (and perhaps business) occupational and filtering structure has remained relatively unchanged across the last two decades.

Abonnieren Posts (Atom)

">"[Wir] sagen, es sei uns etwas Erlebnis, wenn wir damit meinen, dass uns etwas nicht fremd und distant geblieben, sondern zu einem Stück unseres Selbst geworden sei."

(Philipp Lersch)

"gerade die Großartigkeit mancher Lösungen ist eng verbunden mit dem Grad an Intuition."

(Gerhard Roth)

"Thinking is hard work. If my students are any guide, many have never experienced working to their maximum (except on standardized tests) so do not even know what they are capable of until pushed."

(Linda S. Gottfredson)

"If our professions do not allow us to devote more than two hours a day to a subject, do not abandon the work on the pretext that we need four or six. As Payot wisely noted, 'A little each day is enough, as long as a little is produced each day.' "

(Santiago Ramon y Cajal)

"I have always fiercly defended the position that we should base our view of the world on the state of our knowledge, on fact, and not on what we would like it to be."

(James Watson)

"So zu lesen und zu studiren, daß es sich immer ansezt, kan ich rathen, obgleich die Welt nicht an mir den Nutzen dieses Rathes sieht, ich gebe ihn nicht weil ich ihn durch häufige Erfahrung nützlich befunden habe, sondern, weil ich jezt sehe und deutlich, daß ich ihn hätte befolgen sollen."

(Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg)

"no matter who your are, your joie de vivre mostly derives from paying attention to someone or something that interests you."

(Winifred Gallagher)

"Almost anything can be interesting once. Only a few things ever become endlessly fascinating, and nothing is endlessly fascinating for everyone."

(Paul Silvia)

"Every organism, whether a bacterium or a member of Homo sapiens, has a set of things in the world that matter to it and which it (therefore) needs to discriminate and anticipate as best it can."

(Daniel C. Dennett)

"Hehle nimmer mit der Wahrheit! Bringt sie Leid, nicht bringt sie Reue; ..."

(Theodor Storm)

"Und sollt er auch straucheln überall ..."

(Friedrich Schiller)

"we don't actually go to art for information. The information content is not the primary thing. It's the experience."

(Roger Scruton)

"You have to be somebody before you can share yourself."

(Jaron Lanier)

"because when you start getting bored without constant external stimulation, that's when stuff starts coming up from the inside[.]"

(John Cleese)

"The key, Paul [Silvia] explained, is that novelty for the beginner comes in one form, and novelty for the expert in another. For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn't been encountered before. For the expert, novelty is nuance."

(Angela Duckworth)

"So I discovered early on if you want anything you went for it and you got it. And most people don't ever go anywhere or want anything, so they never get anything."

(Ray Bradbury)

"But thinking is to be a corrective in our life, it's not supposed to be the center of our lives. Living is supposed to be the center of our lives."

(Ray Bradbury)

"when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry."

(Ray Bradbury)

"The PE is therefore a signal that states: 'This is good stuff, by your standards - maybe the best you are capable of, under current circumstances. Don't ignore it, don't forget it, and try to understand it'."

(Bruce Charlton)

"the physical universe has structure, and one’s perceptions of this structure, one’s partiality to some of its characteristics and aversion to others, are precisely the elements that make up one’s taste."

(Chen Ning Yang)

Genialität als ein Etwas, das uns in die Lage versetzt, Wert zu detektieren, und das uns danach streben lässt, Wert hervorzubringen.

In seinen lebendigsten Stunden findet der Mensch Erfüllung.

Aufgabe der Philosophie: Den Charakter dieser Welt einzufangen; in deutlichen und klaren Worten. Unter Miteinbezug innerer Erfahrung.

Dem Philosophierenden geht es darum, fundamentale Einsichten in den Charakter dieser Welt zu gewinnen.

Einen Menschen sehen, in voller Stärke, ganz und gar in seinem Element ...

Der Reiz mancher Gedanken erschöpft sich nicht. An manchen Gedanken können wir wieder und wieder und wieder Anteil nehmen.

Das tun, was in der eigenen Macht liegt. Der Rest ist Schicksal.

Menschen, die auch im Schmerz noch singen. Denen der Mut nie abhanden kommt.

Freiheit: Die Bestrebung, das "Ich muss" zu entfernen, und, als Ersatz, das "Ich will" zu kultivieren.

Es gibt Richtungsentscheidungen, im Leben, die zu einem Mehr an wertvollem Leben hinführen, oder von solchem Leben entschieden wegführen.

Die Welt ist in einer Weise beschaffen, dass wir in ihr zutiefst positive Erfahrungen sammeln können.

Life comes in distinct flavors.

Every scientific field has its distinct population of ideas and statements.