Link Banana

Uncommon Knowledge highlights interesting facts about the Olympics. This one was new to me:

the disruptions in the host city - or at least the perception of disruptions - are actually a major boon to competing locales. In 2002, the year Utah hosted the Winter Olympics, counties with ski resorts in Colorado netted an additional $160 million in retail sales, according to sales-tax data.

This on isn’t surprising, but it’s still interesting:

Male athletes were seen as more composed and intelligent in victory, and less committed in defeat. Female athletes were seen as more courageous in victory, and weaker athletes in defeat. A similar pattern was found [in NBC’s coverage] with regard to nationality. Americans were seen as having more concentration, composure, commitment, and courage in victory, while non-Americans were granted more athletic skill. The authors note that “parallels between long-held racial stereotypes (e.g., blacks being ‘born’ athletes and whites being superior intellectually) may transfer in similar ways within the domain of nationalism.”

It turns out everyone sees themselves as an above-average driver because we naturally consider individuals as more impressive than groups.

…we find it easier to consider the favourable evidence for a single person than we do for a whole group. Consistent with this is the finding that people tend to be biased when comparing any single individual, not just themselves, against a group of others.

(via Marginal Revolution)

This isn’t actually surprising, but now there’s scientific evidence that it’s true.

it appears that even brief exposure to “outed” gays and lesbians can have a significant impact on bias — both implicit and explicit. It’s no small wonder, then, that anti-gay activists would prefer for famous gays and lesbians not to publicly out themselves, and for news organizations to sweep this information under the rug.

(via clusterflock)

It was the best title I could muster… Nicholas Kristof wrote a column yesterday that mentioned a test I’d never tried. (I would have linked to it yesterday, but the site was New York Times‘d.) You’re shown black and white men holding either guns or cellphones. You’re supposed to shoot those with guns and holster your weapon for those with a cellphone. It’s goal is to test if your response times differ because the men’s race. Such a difference is seen as proof of an “implicit” bias that you probably didn’t know you had. It’s the same purpose as these tests, which I had seen before.

The same people who brought you crowdsourced color names, have crowdsourced the evaluation of media bias. Their results look interesting, even if I’m not sure they’re trustworthy. (It appears they let people know the source of the story, which could very well change their perception of that story’s bias.)

This is a pretty interesting little tool. It maps how (geographically) the world is seen by some prominent newspapers and their editors-in-chief.

(via Boing Boing)

Something I, having suffered through three weeks of the less-than-funny show, have to doubt. Nonetheless, Lorne Michaels had this to say:

“I’m sensitive to the suggestion that we’re in the service of Hillary Clinton this year,” he said. “That obviously is not the case.” He added, “We don’t lay down for anybody.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education covers some interesting research about why university professors tend to be liberal.

They found that in a variety of ways, conservative students were less interested than liberals in subject matter that often leads to doctoral degrees, and less interested in doing the kinds of things that professors spend their time doing.

For example, liberal students reported valuing intellectual freedom, creativity, and the chance to write original work and make a theoretical contribution to science. They outnumbered conservative students two to one in the humanities and social sciences — which are among the fields most likely to produce interest in doctoral study. Conservative students, however, put more value on personal achievement and orderliness, and on practical professions, like accounting and computer science, that could earn them lots of money.

The Woessners also found that conservative students put a higher priority than liberal ones on raising a family. That does not always fit well with a career in academe, where people often delay childbearing until after they earn tenure.