More or Less: Behind the Stats - WS More or Less: Menstrual Syncing
It is a commonly held belief that if women spend enough time together, their bodies start to communicate through chemical signals, known as pheromones. Eventually the women?s bodies will start to menstruate at the same time.
But where does this idea come from? And is it really true? We look at the evidence and wonder ? could it be down to chance?
Curious City - How Chicago Beaches Get and Keep That Nice Fine Sand
Here’s why you shouldn’t that "sand between your toes" experience for granted!
More or Less: Behind the Stats - Irish Passports
Britons entitled to Irish passports After the Brexit vote in June, so many Britons applied for Irish passports that Ireland?s foreign minister had to ask them to stop ? pointing out that the UK remains, for now, in the EU. If some of the figures that have been quoted are correct, the Irish passport service may find itself completely inundated in future. But does one in four Britons really have Irish heritage? We reveal the dubious history of that number and attempt to estimate the number of Britons who are actually entitled to dual nationality with Ireland.
Do women?s periods sync? It is a commonly held belief that if women spend time together, their bodies start to sync and they will have their periods at the same time. But where does this idea come from? And is it really true? We look at the evidence and wonder ? could it be down to chance?
Numbers in music Marcus du Sautoy takes us on a journey through some of his favourite musical pieces, pointing out the interesting mathematical patterns hidden in the compositions.
Dangerous algorithms Cathy O?Neil, a data scientist and activist, has written a new book, ?Weapons of Math Destruction.? She is concerned about the proliferation of certain kinds of algorithms ? that help make important decisions, but that could be based on unfair statistics with hidden biases. She explains how to look out for them, and what we can do to protect ourselves.
Desk of Good News ? organ donations We look at the trends for organ donations and transplants.
Cato Daily Podcast - Paul Ryan’s Focus on Poverty amid Political Season
In a political season featuring divisive candidates, Paul Ryan has spent an inordinate amount of time promoting his own sketched out plans for reforming programs aimed at alleviating poverty. Michael Tanner comments.
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Cato Daily Podcast - A Doubling Down on ‘Trumpism’
Donald Trump's photo-op in Mexico has done nothing to obscure his insistence on both building a wall at the southern border and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants. Alex Nowrasteh comments.
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Social Science Bites - Michael Billig on the Royal Family and Nationalism
“One of the values of the social sciences,” argues Michael Billig, “is to investigate what people take for granted and to bring it to the surface.” In this Social Science Bites podcast, Billig, a professor of social science at Loughborough University since 1985, discusses a particular strain of something taken for granted, what he terms “banal nationalism.” That refers to the idea that much of what we would consider markers of the nationalistic impulse pass without notice, the “unwaved flags” we’d only notice if they disappeared.
In his conversation with interviewer David Edmonds, Billig dives more deeply into one particular example of nationalism, the British royal family, and what the British themselves think about the royal family and the place of the royals in British ideology.
Drawing on what he learned while supervising the qualitative surveys of average British citizens that formed the basis of his 1992 book Talking of the Royal Family, he suggests that the British people, while much less deferential to the royals than outsiders might think, tend to accept that the RF is a good thing and therefore sympathize with them – as long as the public perceives the family as publicly suffering from their privilege.
As he tells Edmonds, it was while doing that project that he realized he in fact was writing about nationalism when he write that book, which started him down the road to his 1995 book, Banal Nationalism. Since then he’s addressed a number of other topics, including laughter, rock ‘n’ roll, and how to write badly – a topic that concludes the podcast. He also defends the role of social scientists – trained as a social psychologist he prefers to describe himself using the broader term by citing the ephemerality of the findings. “The idea that you may get eternal truths from social science is a bit of a mythology,” he insists. “This is why you always need social scientists.”