Quick hit - kawaii!!

From Jezebel: there are now more pet dogs in Japan than children under 10. Said dogs are mostly kawaii (tiny and cute) - when they're not inbred and deformed - and are pampered, adored and paraded around in prams. Like babies, only less demanding, and you can keep your job:

For Ms Horikoshi, sharing her life with dogs instead of babies is an active choice. She divorced her husband who had asked her to follow Japanese tradition and become a stay-at-home mum; she wanted to pursue her career. Her current partner has to accept that her dogs and her work are at the centre of her life.

A specialist in cataracts, Ms Horikoshi is now at the top of her profession and likes to spend her money on travel, her black Porsche and her dogs. Her friends share her choice.

"My friends - married, one poodle, no child. Married, two Chihuahuas, no child. Married, one Chihuahua, no child," she counts off her fingers.

According to ABC news (the Australian one), you can buy all sorts of stuff for them - bumble bee costumes, spa packages, silk-and-cashmere dog sweaters, kimonos, sushi, cookies... who knows what else.

Muslim women and sports

There's been quite some discussion about Saudi Arabia's ban on female athletes competing in the Olympics. Owl's recent blog post on the tensions she's encountered as a "sporty Muslima" is an interesting contribution. Excerpt:

So why is this such a taboo in the minds of so many Muslims? Well, partly I think it’s a culture clash. I notice many questioners come from ethnicities or generations where women do/did little physical activity beyond child rearing and housework, which are worthy pursuits but currently not part of my life. The idea of women wanting or enjoying sport and fitness is as foreign to them as the idea of women wanting to stay in the home all the time is to my peers. It is simply an unknown to them and they are expressing their curiosity, which is fine. Most retain an open mind and have a willingness to understand, which we all need to have.

But the rest of the complainants are men of a certain bent - men who not only disapprove of my athleticism, but also my profession, my education, and my mind. And as they cannot easily forbid me from any of those – as Islam urges education equally and allows women to earn and own – they focus on my hobby. It strikes me as a control issue, and that saddens me. I am a much more fruitful contributor to my Ummah if I am capable, strong and empowered. To be a mindless subservient would make me drain instead of a boon, and though it would probably be easier to ‘control’ me that way, it would be at a cost of the energies of my ‘controller’ and of the actualization of my own potential.

Check out the blog itself for a breakdown of the religio-cultural arguments against women exercising.

Regional cultures

A prime example of regional cultural diversity within the US, from Streetsblog:

While in DC bikes are all the rage and bike-sharing is brilliant, apparently in Michigan biking is a "transportation alternative" and bike-sharing qualifies as "bizarre news."

Pulpeuse - or, the most disturbing commercial ever

How disturbing is that commercial? Jessica over at Jezebel counts the ways, including the raunchy inter-species sex, the oddly anthropomorphized animals (a doe with breasts? a panda sans bikini?), and all the bodily fluids apparently replaced by Orangina.

According to the British newspaper The Telegraph,

The advert was based around the idea of "pulpeuse", which in French means both "containing pulp" and also "voluptuous" or "sexy".

And Orangina does have pulp, which is a sought-out quality in a fruity beverage (unlike the US, at least in my experience). So yes, I get the pun, and like most French people I appreciate the desire to capitalize that (whereas in the US puns tend to induce eye-rolling, in France jeux de mots are the highest form of humor). I'm also used to sex being used to sell pretty much anything in France - in fact I'm pretty sure you are required to show at least one nude breast if you're selling body wash, and two for yogurt. But I'm still skeeved out. Thoughts?

Science!

Ok, so maybe I've been (successfully) avoiding science classes since I was 15, but I still thought this was pretty cool (thanks Emma for sharing it!). Full story at Wired Science and the actual scienciness at PLoS ONE. It also appears that Japanese are more sensitive than Westerners to the Big Picture.

Culture shapes perception so fundamentally that it may determine the way we look at faces.

East Asians focus their gazes on the center of faces; Westerners looked to first the eyes, and then to the mouth.

The findings were produced by University of Glasgow psychologists who tracked the eye motions of observers as they looked at portraits.

The study was small and hasn't been replicated, but the differences were stark.

Other researchers have found similar differences in the perception of scenes, but never something so basic as individual faces. The phenomena could reflect a cultural mediation of individual neurobiology.

"Western society is very individualist. Asian societies are much more collectivistic," said study co-author Roberto Caldara.

From that perspective, the Western approach to facial recognition is piece-by-piece and intimate. The East Asian approach is both more formal and holistic: peripheral information is gathered, but without direct confrontation.

But is this tendency a product of a particular approach to life -- or vice versa?

"It's the chicken and the egg problem," said Caldara. "We're testing children to see whether these effects arise early in time."

The tendencies do appear plastic, he said.

"We tested some Chinese who had been in Glasgow for three or four years, and you see a clear difference between them and those who just arrived," he said. "That really demonstrates that it's not genetic. It's experience."

Caldara suspects that the East Asian approach may be more efficient, but both groups in the study proved equally adept at learning and recognizing faces.

"It's fascinating, and this is just the beginning," he said.

Caldara's next studies will involve British-born Chinese and children, but he said that the current research is already instructive.

"Culture is underestimated. The majority of papers published in psychology are based on Caucasian populations. In the future, before generalizing findings, we should be careful. Human beings are not all the same," he said.

Guess the accent

From Amanda over at Wrong Rights:

The Language Trainer's Group has posted an accent guessing game on their website. You watch people from around the world read bits of Kipling (in English), and try to guess where their accents are from.

Quick hit from Jezabel

We've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating. ... [Always 'asking' For It]

from Jezebel by Megan

We've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating. Many women in Egypt report being harassed by men, even when wearing the pictured niqab or the more common hijab. Seventy-two percent of the 83 percent of Egyptian women that reported being harassed say they were harassed while veiled. Conservative groups in Egypt are encouraging women to adopt hijabs or niqabs to avoid harassment, while some women say they gave it up entirely after experiencing so much harassment — and are harassed less without. Once again, the problem is never what the woman is wearing — or what she was drinking — it's what men feel inappropriately (or illegally) entitled to do about it. [Washington Post]