Thursday Round-Up

My op-ed on Opal-gate has been e-published on Chowk.com, a pretty good website dedicated to South Asian issues.

Remember… the daily perv link is no more. It’s gone. No more sordid sexual tales will be linked from this site. None. I don’t need people falsely accusing me of advocating for certain marginalised and criminal activities, when all I’m really doing is trying to figure out, epidemiologically, if increased media reports of a certain act are representative of a genuine increase in incidence or merely of a detection bias. So that bit of public service and passive science is done with. Got me? So, whatever you do, don’t click here.

The public health project in Guyana that I consult on is well profiled in this blog post.

A Swedish study confirms what I’ve been arguing for years, and is summarised by Slate here: 1) sexual orientation is mostly biologically based, not a choice; and 2) Sexual orientation is more biologically based in men than in women. This explains that annoying subset of young women, the “LUGs”, or “lesbians until graduation.”

Thanks to Mischa for this link to a Salon article summarising the failures of America’s complicit lapdog media.

Canada’s best blogger, The Star‘s Antonia Zerbiasis, has an interesting post on the battle between blogs and the mainstream media (MSM). Print media’s revenues are down, largely due to the web’s ability to seduce advertisers with cheaper rates and unlimited space. But the MSM will never die, the post argues, because blogs are parasitical by nature, feeding off of actual news that only the reporters of the MSM can create. In this view, blogs are replacing the commentary/columnist function of the MSM, but not the reporting.

I believe there is some truth to this, though conversations with Nasty Nick have caused me to massage that viewpoint somewhat; blogs can produce news, since anyone can now report on events as they occur. Whatever happens, we are seeing an exciting evolution of both media and journalism, and indeed of power dynamics in general. Increasingly, control of information will be decentralized. We have an interesting few years ahead of us.

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