Women Drivers

King Abdullah, who is regarded as a reformer by Saudi standards, recently decreed that women would be allowed for the first time to vote and run as candidates in elections for municipal councils starting in 2015.

So far, though, he has not given them permission to drive.
You have to wonder if he considers driving more dangerous than voting.
In Saudi Arabia, no woman can travel, work, marry, get divorced, gain admittance to a public hospital or live independently without permission from a "mahram," or male guardian. Men can beat women who don't obey them and fathers or brothers have the right to prevent their female relatives from getting married if they don't approve of her suitor.
Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that bans women -- both Saudi and foreign -- from driving. The prohibition forces families to hire live-in drivers, and those who cannot afford the $300 to $400 a month for a driver must rely on male relatives to drive them to work, school, shopping or the doctor.

The ban is rooted in religious edicts and Saudi Arabia's conservative traditional culture, which views limitations on women's freedom of movement as a necessity to prevent sins.

In most cases, the women who try driving are stopped by police and held until a male guardian is summoned and the women sign a pledge not to drive again. Some are referred to court.

This week, a Saudi court sentenced one woman,  Shaima Jastaina, to ten lashes for driving, however, there is no actual written law banning women from driving and as a result, there is no set punishment for the offense.  Saudi activists like Samar Badawi argue this means there is no legal basis for bringing the women to trial.

Perception

From an article in today’s Health Blog of the Wall Street Journal:

What you wear can influence how others view you — specifically what they perceive your race to be, a new study finds.

The findings show how stereotypes and prejudices play a powerful role in how we mentally categorize people, says Jon Freeman, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in psychology at Tufts University.

The researchers, a group of psychologists and sociologists from Tufts, Stanford University and University of California, Irvine, asked study participants to determine the race of computerized faces wearing high-status attire (a business suit) or low-status attire (a janitor’s jumpsuit). Faces viewed in high-status attire were more likely to be seen as white and faces viewed in low-status attire were likely to be seen as black.

Using a technique that tracked the movements of a computer mouse, the researchers recorded the trajectory of participants’ hand movements as they selected a racial category on a computer screen. When viewing racially ambiguous faces, they found participants were initially drawn to the race stereotypically associated with the style of dress even if they ultimately chose the opposite. So even if a participant decided a person wearing a business suit was black, the trajectory of the mouse revealed he or she was first drawn to the “white” option.

I appropriated (stole) the picture below from another website.

My source said that a sociologist also used this picture to analyze perception. Participants were asked to look at the picture for 30 seconds, then describe what they saw.

According to that article:

• Young men see a remarkable butt.  Only the most observant young men notice that the butt is crossing the street, and even fewer mention that she seems to be wearing thong underwear.
• Older men tend to see a respectable woman crossing the street.  A few will make some comment about her derriere, and even fewer will point out that she seems to crossing at a designated cross-walk.
• Half the women say they wonder why she ever left the house dressed like that, and the other half (mostly younger women) wonder where she bought that blouse.
• Only small children seem to notice that the taxi is being driven by a dog.

Kermit Having a Monday

I posted this picture from Queensland, Australia, just so I could say….

 It’s a Frog-Eat-Frog World!

Bob Couch – International Expert

The young lady on the throne of ice is Irina Savitskaya, a psychologist and single mom from Russia. 

She joined Facebook a while back in an effort to improve her English – particularly her understanding of American Slang.  I’m not sure who she connected with first, but she is a Facebook “friend” of several people I knew in high school, and she “friended” me several months ago.

Saturday,  pretty much out of the blue, she sent me the message below:

Although I’m sure she sent similar messages to quite a few people, I found her request unbelievably flattering.

I told her that my personal favorite was #2.  If you disagree, let me know and I’ll gladly pass your opinion along.

Last Meals and Lethal Injection

Texas stopped serving so-called last meals to death row inmates this week after a state lawmaker complained about an inmate request he considered excessive.

The furor arose after Lawrence Brewer, 44, a convicted murderer and self-described white supremacist, requested a last meal that included: two chicken-fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions; a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger; a cheese omelet with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and jalapeños; a bowl of fried okra with ketchup; one pound of barbecued meat with half a loaf of white bread; three fajitas; a meat-lover’s pizza; one pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream; a slab of peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts; and three root beers.

State Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat, was outraged at the meal request, which he considered outlandish. On Thursday, he shot off a letter to Brad Livingston, executive director of the state prison agency, demanding that prison workers stop preparing special last meals.

Livingston officially responded to Whitmire's letter Thursday, agreeing to end the practice that originated with the state’s first execution by electrocution back in 1924.

Kathryn Kase, the interim executive director of Texas Defenders, a nonprofit organization that trains and assists lawyers who represent death row inmates, said the state's decision to end last meals shows a lack of "compassion for the condemned." The action "says more about us, I’m afraid, than perhaps was intended.”

“I’m very sorry that the state of Texas has chosen to send that message,” she said.

Executions have been all over the news this past week; Two men were executed Wednesday night, both by lethal injection, and in two of the most racially charged cases in recent memory.
In Georgia, Troy Davis, a black man who was convicted of killing a white off-duty police officer in Savannah, Georgia, in 1989, was executed. In the other, Texas executed  Lawrence Brewer, a white man who in 1998 participated in the grisly murder of James Byrd Jr., a black man.

The difference between the two death penalty cases:

• There was at least some doubt in the Davis case, and Davis maintained his innocence. No weapon or physical evidence was ever found linking Davis to the killing of officer Mark MacPhail in a Burger King parking lot. Seven of nine witnesses who initially fingered him have since recanted.

• Brewer admitted to the Byrd murder. In jailhouse letters written after Brewer was arrested for the murder, he boasted about the killing and the thrill of it. "Well, I did it," Brewer wrote in a letter introduced during court proceedings, according to published reports. "And no longer am I a virgin. It was a rush, and I'm still licking my lips for more."

While many people feel the death penalty is justified punishment for murder, some people believe the risk of killing an innocent person is too great – opinions range from “never do it” to “quit wasting time and money; convict them, kill them and be done with it.”

One of the articles I used as a source for today’s post is running an on-line poll this morning, and right now the results are (pardon the pun) dead even.

Back to the Future

For the last three years, the CERN lab in Switzerland has been conducting experiments that seem to show that certain subatomic particles, neutrinos, can – and occasionally do – move faster than the speed of light. 

Since Einstein published his theories, it has been accepted fact that nothing moves faster than light - but they have been able to repeat their experiments, and duplicate their results hundreds of times!

So they published their findings yesterday in the hopes that somebody somewhere could show them what they were doing wrong.

Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.

In their experiments, the CERN team prepared a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.

In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up 60 billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance.

I can’t help them with their experiment, but it did remind me of a limerick:

An astronaut once took a flight

In a spaceship faster than light

He came back the next day

In a relative way

And arrived on the previous night

Prepositions Matter

Prepositions do matter. 

Four years ago, Cosmopolitan Magazine published an article – complete with instructions and diagrams -extolling the virtues of sex ON a pool float.  Kinky, maybe, but Cosmo is just mainstream enough to imply that this activity is close enough to normal to be socially acceptable.

This month, we have the story of a guy arrested for having sex WITH a pool float. 

What a difference a preposition can make - Huge difference between ON and WITH!

Hamilton, OHIO -

According to local police, a man was arrested for having sex with a pink inflatable swimming pool raft in an alley in Hamilton, Ohio, just north of Cincinatti.

The Hamilton Journal News reports that Edwin Charles Tobergta, 32, who has been arrested before for public indecency, was arrested again early Sunday morning at his home in Hamilton.

Police were reportedly informed of Tobergta's public union by the raft's owner, who witnessed the act. The owner told police Tobergta fled with the raft after he was caught and shouted at to stop.

Tobergta admitted to the act and told officers that he has a problem and needs help.

Relatives say that Tobergta has mental problems and was being helped by Butler County Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, but he was dropped because he had too many arrests.

The relatives said officials told them Tobergta could not get additional help unless he commits a felony crime.

 
Hamilton Municipal Court records show that Tobergta has been arrested at least five times previously for similar offenses. He was indicted in May 2010 for tampering with evidence and possessing criminal tools. Then in 2008, he was convicted for public indecency and was sentenced to community control. He was also required to seek mental health services.

Tobergta is currently being held at the Butler County Jail on a charge of public indecency and contempt of court.

FYI – I had to wade through multiple accounts of this event before I finally found one that listed the charges.  Apparently the Ohio legislature is not weird forward-thinking enough to have drafted a law specifically outlawing this activity.