The Future of Sex

July 10, 2010 Leave a comment

Okay, the title of the talk was really “Men and Women: The Battle for Supremacy.”  Although the talk was about gender equality, I think the audience only cared about what Karen Moloney, director of Moloney Minds Ltd., had to say about the future of sex.

In terms of the serious content, she discussed different aspects of gender equality, looking at temporal and geographic differences in cultural approaches to the issue.  Moloney saw three possible scenarios for the future of interactions between men and women:

  1. Carry on carrying on. In this future, we would continue to strive towards equality between men and women, in the private, public, and personal sectors of life.  This future involves setting quotas for inclusion of women at high levels of management, for example.
  2. Back to the kitchen.  Moloney, I was pleased to see, shared the statistic that some – between 10% and 30% of women – would prefer to be primarily a homemaker, and didn’t rule this future out as an option.
  3. Parallel worlds. Perhaps, Moloney conjectured, after all these years and with the potential of extreme biological innovation, men and women might form separate communities and find no need to interact.

In terms of the future of sex and pleasure, Moloney talked about feel-good hormone injection, virtual dating and relationships, and direct stimulation of the brain’s pleasure nodes.  Essentially, more advanced sex toys.

In subsequent discussions about Moloney’s talk, two people recommended reading Larry Niven‘s Known Space series for further consideration of the topic.  In the series, wireheads – people who have been fitted with a brain implant that stimulates pleasure nodes in the brain – become addicted to the pleasure and tend to die.  I’ve added it to my reading list.

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Economists Playing (Video) Games

June 21, 2010 1 Comment

Turning to virtual games for troves of research material is not a new technique — scientists, mathematicians, and scholars of all sorts have used games such as Second Life and  Full Tilt Poker as data sources.  Now, economists are taking it one step further; they’re running economic analyses on player behavior using data derived from a game called EVE.

In EVE, players are space-ship pilots, taking part in a world divided into five warring empires.  The game is set 20,000 years from now in a galaxy named New Eden.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal, “Real Economist Learns from Virtual World,”  Michael Casey explains why economists even pay attention to such a game.   Essentially, in games such as EVE, player actions are extremely well documented.  This constant attention to detail generates a repository of players’ decision-making information ready to analyze — an economist’s dream.  ”In effect,” Casey writes, the game “creates a giant laboratory within which to study human behavior, dramatically scaling up … classroom-based experimental economics.”

So, what did they find?  The team, the Social Media research group at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, published what the WSJ calls a “somewhat sensitive” finding.  ”Confirming decades of gender research by economists, sociologists and anthropologists, [the] group found that the same biases that have historically favored men in the real world exist in a virtual economy,” Casey writes.  ”Their research demonstrates that both women subscribers and female avatar characters operated by male subscribers in EVE are biased toward a slightly lower chance of success in competition with their male counterparts.”

Some critics say that such findings in a “virtual world” might not reflect actions taken in the “real world.”

But Hilmar Petursson, CEO of the company responsible for EVE, disagrees.  “People say the real world in a casual way, where it sounds like something fundamental,” he told WSJ. “But people tend to forget that the world we live in is just a game designed by our governments. Our economic systems are just a game.”

And, with websites like Facebook becoming a more and more central part of our lives anyway, who’s to draw a definitive line between “real” and “virtual” worlds anymore, anyway?

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Final score: Women 141, Men 100?

April 16, 2010 2 Comments

Think about someone you know who is 22 years old.  Has this person graduated from college yet?

It turns out the answer is dependent in part on whether that individual is male or female.  The New York Times Freakonomics Blog recently posted that “Among 22-year-olds, there are 185 female college graduates for every 100 male graduates.”

Wow.  That’s almost — not quite — two women for every man who has graduated by 22.

By age 25, the ratio is a little less skewed: 141 female graduates for every 100 men.

141 to 100 is still incredibly disparate.   The Freakonomics Bloggers offer a few reasons why this gap may exist, such as men taking longer to graduate from high school and college or taking a gap year.

However, what’s almost more interesting than that statistic is the following: according to the American Council on Education, the collegiate student body has been composed of approximately 133 women per 100 men since 2000.  That’s a decade.  That means that even at enrollment, at the beginning, women are outpacing men in the college environment.

But not by as much as they are at graduation.  While the 133: 100 student body ratio is still substantial, it’s not as large as the aforementioned difference at graduation, 141 to 100.  Where are those men going between enrollment and graduation?

Do these ratios change if we look at the 26-year-old age group? What about 30?  What does this mean for future hiring patterns, or graduate school applications?

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Toastmasters Area Competition

March 17, 2010 4 Comments

As you know, I am a member of Toastmasters International, a non-profit organization geared towards helping members become more confident public speakers.  Last week, after winning the club competition, I participated in the area competition.
Below is a video of the speech I gave.  It was apparently good enough for the judges, because I won the area competition too — I’ll be competing in the division competition in April.

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I’m geeky, you’re geeky, she’s geeky

February 2, 2010 Leave a comment

Everyone knows a girl or two who’s a little geeky.  Maybe that girl watches Star Trek or is an avid player of Halo.  Maybe she majored in engineering, or types l1k3 th15.

She’s Geeky is an organization that hosts get-togethers, called “unconferences,”  for geeky women to network and share ideas.  This weekend, I wrangled a group of ladies from the HP Young Employee Network to attend one of these unconferences in Mountain View, at the Computer History Museum, a paragon of Silicon Valley geekiness.

This conference attracted about 80 women from a diverse array of STEM fields –  Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, and from a broad range of IT companies, like Adobe, Google, and, of course, HP.  To kick off the day, each woman introduced herself and gave a reason that she was geeky, such as owning the complete series of Battlestar Galactica or preferring to code software on a Saturday night rather than go out.  I consider myself fairly geeky, but I was definitely out-geeked by many of the women there.  For example, one of the woman was using what she called a Hackintosh to take notes – a Dell netbook that she had hacked to run the Mac operating system. Read more of this post

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