Is beauty ‘real’, or a cultural phenomena? The debate is of course huge and has been raging for years but there are some fascinating insights from a study on foxes:

• Dmitry Belyaev bred silver foxes in Russia . He wanted to breed foxes that would be friendlier and so easier to work with. He found that he could; but with the added effect of a change in the foxes’ appearance. Their faces flattened, jaws shortened and skulls became more rounded.
• The link between the friendliness and face change appears to be hormonal. Seratonin and estradiol affect both behaviour and aspects of development.
• So is there a link between how we look and how we act?
• Unattractive people are off to a bad start. At least 15 studies show mothers treat attractive children differently to unattractive ones. 13% of (independently assessed) attractive children, for example, were secured comfortably in grocery carts at the supermarket. 1% of unattractive were similarly secured.
• According to evolution, we’d expect more attractive people to find it easier to get a mate, and so on average to have more children. This does indeed happen, with the most attractive having more children than the least attractive by 16% and 13% for women and men respectively.
• So is the human race becoming both more attractive and more friendly? Maybe. Reconstructions of faces are accurate for the recently deceased. When faces of ancient people are reconstructed, as a rule they tend to be less attractive than modern folk.

The idea that beauty is an indicator of more favourable behaviour is sure to ruffle many feathers. We wonder, does this mean that we could give people seratonin and estradiol supplements to make them nicer? For an interesting and engaging article with persuasive evidence, look over here

Source: The Economist

Freakonomics Steven Levitt is not a fan of priming, and failed to produce satisfying results in a study of his own. But he may be becoming convinced…

• ‘Priming’ is the idea that you can give a person hints and stimuli to influence their behaviour in the short term. Ask someone if they are a woman before they do a math test, and the cultural perceptions of women being worse at math will influence their performance.
• Levitt tried his own priming study, that failed to produce results.
• However, a study has been done going into prisons and asking prisoners either what their crime was, or how much t.v. they watch. Prisoners then flipped coins in secret, and received payment based on the number of heads they recorded.
• The results? Control non-prisoner populations lied 6% of the time. Prisoners asked about t.v. lied 10%, and prisoners asked about their crime lied 16% .

The article over here is pretty short, but contains a fuller methodology, links to the Freakonomics study and the priming prison study.

Source: Freakonomics

The good side to this story is that detectives are cracking down on Kenyan police bribery. But the police aren’t taking this lying down.

• In the ‘old days’, police would stop a vehicle and ask to see paperwork. The driver would either fold a note into their driving licence for inspection, or drop a tightly scrunched note onto the floor to be picked up later.
• In either case, the money would be stashed by the officer somewhere secret and taken home at the end of the day.
• Truckers in particular regularly broke traffic regulations. Police could expect to receive between US $5 and $175 a day in bribes
• Kenyan detectives have cracked down on bribery. In response, Kenyan police now receive bribes through money transfers on their cell phones. If the people coming past the roadblock are regulars, this can be arranged.
• Money transfers on cell phones can be traced, as the sender has to provide national identity. Brokers have sprung up to act as intermediaries between the bribed and the bribers.
• Between January and May, 35% of those arrested on charges of corruption were police.

The full story can be found over here

Source: Balancing Act Africa

Via: Marginal Revolution

After a series of scandals including the hacking of a murdered schoolgirl’s cell phone by the News of the World, a Royal Charter has been drawn up to keep the press in check. But what exactly does it mean?

• A Royal Charter is technically approved by the Privy Council, but as the days of monarchical rule are gone, this is merely a formality.
• The big difference is that any changes to a Royal Charter have to be approved by a 2/3 majority in parliament instead of a mere majority; making the Charter much harder to alter.
• Unlike the Royal Charter’s predecessor, the charter would create a new regulator who would be able to issue fines of up to £1m ($1.61m)
• Press organisations would not be forced to sign up, and if they don’t then complaints against them would go to court instead of to the Charter’s regulator. But in this case papers can expect to pay complainants costs even if the press wins the case.
• Third parties will also be able to complain about articles. If a paper makes a sweeping generalisation about Muslims, then Muslim organisations can complain to the regulator. But so can anyone else, for free, a move that newspapers are saying may lead to excessive complaints.

The article is in depth and takes perspectives from both government sources and journalists, as well as having links to the stories that caused the Charter to come into being. Read more over here

Source: BBC

How is the value of art determined? Systematic price rigging, explains Allison Schrager:

• Expensive art is sold in a very different way to most commodities. The price of an individual piece of artwork is not public knowledge, and sales are negotiated with individuals collectors.
• Primary sales (from the artist to the buyer, as opposed to from owner to owner) predominantly occur through art galleries. Sales are negotiated by art dealers (who own/work at galleries).
• Art dealers have to set prices exactly right. If the art is too cheap, it is seen as being of poor quality. If the price is too high it won’t be bought. If it isn’t bought at a given price, the artist is viewed as being overvalued. And lowering prices is an easy way to destroy an upcoming artist’s career and harm a gallery’s reputation
• Galleries hate art being sold on the secondary market (owner/owner). This is generally done at an auction house, and the final price could be anything. In the art world prices mean reputation, and so galleries will often send agents to auctions to bid up prices.
• Re-selling art without a gallery’s permission is serious for anyone in the art world. Think being permanently outcast from the industry
• Artists do of course want to be exhibited at high end galleries. The Guggenheim, for example, often gets art for around 30% less than other buyers.

For an excellent article about a highly controlled, manipulated market click here. But before you get too outraged about price fixing, remember it’s only the richest who are paying too much. As Schrager puts it, “Being outraged at the practice of high-end art price rigging is like being upset that the market for high end yachts is inefficient”

Pictured: Blue Concentric by Carla Accardi, 1960.

Source: Quartz

Of all the problems to have occured after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, a surge in wild boar is perhaps the least expected. This is no laughing matter for the locals, Gwynn Guilford reports:

• Deer and wild boar have become a nuisance across Japan. They both eat crops, and remove foliage from hills increasing the risk of landslides. A wild boar injured eight people in Hyogo last year.
• Total damages from wild animals are estimated at $200 million a year. But most hunters are men over the age of 60, and decreasing in number.
• Enter the women. Rules on gun ownership in Japan are very strict, and include alerting the police every time a shot is fired. But as boar and deer have no natural predators on the islands, hunting is considered necessary to act as a population control.
• The tagline of the Woman Hunters of Hakaido is ‘shoot and eat’. Bringing home fresh meat is a significant focus of the women hunting groups.

Click here for the full article. For the vegetarians amongst us, the article doesn’t mention any alternatives to shooting for limiting numbers. The mayor of Bungo-Ono (Southwest Japan), does though: wolves

Source: Quartz

Want to have a nice gulp of air but stuck on the moon? Just melt the rocks, suggests a serious NASA venture:

• The cost of moving stuff from the Earth to the Moon is $100,000 per kilo, so making oxygen on the moon would be a cost-saving measure.
• Oxygen is partly for the astronauts, but overwhelmingly to fuel the rocket
• Melting rocks to produce oxygen would be done along similar lines to how aluminium is refined industrially; by passing a big electric current to reduce/oxidise the lunar stone, which should also heat up the materials to their melting point.
• As an added bonus, the by-products of the reaction would be silicon (for solar cells) and iron (for making…things)
• This rock to oxygen process has actually been done successfully on Earth, using lunar materials brought back by astronauts.
• There are big dreams involved. 85% of a rocket’s mass is fuel used to escape the Earth’s orbit. If we could ‘pit stop’ on the Moon and refuel, getting further into the Solar System would become more viable…

The full article is pretty chemistry heavy. But if you want to know why the surface of the Moon is all the same material or what this has to do with steel smelting, look over here

Source: Society of Chemistry and Industry

As we all know, the best research begins with setting up a fake porn site. Here are some of the highlights from Christopher Mims:

• First, some numbers. 42.7% of internet users view porn, and 20% of men view porn whilst at work.
• One of Mims major findings was the vulnerability of porn viewers to malicious software. 43% of clicks on Mim’s porn website came from users with a known vulnerability in their browsers.
• ‘Traffic Brokers’ sell adult traffic to websites, to the tune of $160 for 47,000 clicks. The researchers discovered that if their site had hosted malicious software, they could have made $130 per 1,000 installs of said malware.
• Wondering how prevalent this was, the researchers then trawled almost half a million adult URLs, and found 3.23% of these triggered ‘malicious behaviour’.
• The study also found that 9 out of 10 adult sites were free, and made their money by directing traffic to pay sites or other free sites.

The full article is over at the MIT technology review, and can be found here

Source: MIT Technology Review

In a rather charming story of beer versus bankers, we hear from Jamila Trindle how beer company lobbyists changed the practices of the London Metal Exchange:

• The worldwide price of aluminium is largely set by the price of derivatives at the London Metal Exchange (LME), even though the LME in practice only deals with a small portion of the market
• Actual physical aluminium is tied to financial contracts, and held in warehouses.  The LME allowed the warehouses that held the metal to only release small quantities at a time, driving up prices. This upset the beer companies who sell their drink in cans.
• Unfortunately, as the Exchange is based in London, American beer companies could do very little. That is, until representatives from the Beer Institute, Miller Coors, the American Beverage Association and others started applying pressure together, at which point the Commodity Futures Trading Commission got involved, and started asking for records from the warehouses.
• Wait times for aluminium were estimated to have added $3 billion to the cost of aluminium last year. At a hearing with two senators, scrutiny was placed on JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, who subsequently announced they would provide immediate delivery to warehouse customers.
• The LME has since announced that it is changing rules to help prevent the formation of long aluminium waiting times.

The Beer Institute has yet to declare victory and become satisfied. Read the full story over here

Source: Foreign Policy

E-book reader sales grew by 252% in 2010, but only 5% in 2013. What has caused this drastic decline?  Nicholas Carr offers some suggestions:

• E-books may be suited to some genres better than others. It may be lovely reading novels on an e-book reader, but not so great for flicking between equations in a textbook. Perhaps the e-book is, like the audio book, a complement to the paperback but not a replacement.
• Early enthusiastic adopters already have one, and other people are more reluctant to transfer from hard copies. 59% of Americans have ‘no interest’ in e-books.
• Prices for e-books have not fallen as drastically as expected, and are in many cases the same as paperbacks. One analyst suggests Amazon has seen the plateau in e-book sales and is no longer willing to invest in loss-leaders.
• Or maybe buyers of e-book readers had more colourful motives; 50 Shades of Grey aside, the UK e-book best seller list is full of erotic fiction. More socially acceptable to have a Kindle on the kitchen table than shelves full of Mills and Boon, perhaps?

For the full article click here, or for a short but infographic friendly response from the Ivy Business Review click here. We have previously looked at the economics of daily ebook deals, have a look over here

Source: Rough Type

via: Ivy Business Review