Undead Astronauts

so ssf4 has been announced and here is a bit of gameplay footage from 2 of the new characters, T hawk (bo-ring) and juri (taekwondo user). apparently it’s going to be priced as an upgrade.

Too tired to much analysis, but i did want to mention it. social scientists have long puzzled over the fact that winter babies have done worse in life, but they haven’t been able to figure out why. now, there appears to be an explanation.

Study after study has shown that they test poorly, don’t get as far in school, earn less, are less healthy, and don’t live as long as children born at other times of year. Researchers have spent years documenting the effect and trying to understand it.

for whatever reasons, babies born in the winter are disproportionately born to lower income parents. the reason this wasn’t picked out earlier is b/c researchers didn’t even contemplate the idea that family background might have something to do w/ it.

He and Ms. Buckles estimate that family background accounts for up to 50% of the differences in education and earnings.

another environmental only theory fails. one hypothesis as to why this happens is that spring break and prom play a part in the baby creation. i’m not completely sold on the idea however. one reason this phenomenon was discovered was that the researchers noticed that couples tended to have their kids in the same season. since spring break and prom should only occur a few times in one’s life, it seems unlikely it would affect multiple kids.

so the nytimes has a story describing some studies done on the effects of parenting. the researchers studied the effects on the happiness of kids who were raised either to believe they needed to submit their will to a higher authority like their parents, or raised so that they could figure things out for themselves.

the researchers found that kids raised to submit their will were not as happy as kids who were taught to find their own direction and think for themselves. this study took a novel (to me anyways) view that praise “might be just another method of control, analogous to punishment,” and that “the primary message of all types of conditional parenting is that children must earn a parent’s love.”

this is what the study found:

It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed. (more…)

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ic0352250

yeah.  I’m immature.

vanguard, the reporting unit that laura ling and euna lee belong to, did a piece on the chinese in africa. laura isn’t the reporter here, but there was a section here i found pretty funny. apparently all chinese looking alike can have its advantages if u’re looking to avoid responsibility.

the rest of the story describes how in a few years china has become a giant presence all over africa and are developing african infrastructure so they can reap the abundance of raw materials from it.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=16224

lol.  This reminds me of GTA4, except their problems were actual bugs.

inflammatory title no? it’s not like i’m against desegregation in theory. like some magical panacea, if u desegregate, everyone will suddenly go colorblind and not see race but rather individuals. but when u read some of the current news, it doesn’t suggest that, by itself, desegregation leads to improved racial relations.

from newsweek:

Moody found that the more diverse the school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity within the school, and thus the likelihood that any two kids of different races have a friendship goes down. (more…)