Original Cin

Overcoming Bias has a note on how the benefits of Fairtrade certification in the coffee market appear to accrue to landowners rather than laborers.

On the title of this pointer: See here and here.

This ties in perfectly with that post a little while back:

Eighty percent of American men think they are in the top half of social skills; the majority of workers rate their job performance above average; and the majority of motorists (even those who have been involved in accidents) rate their driving as safer than average.

- Seligman, Martin E.P., Authentic Happiness, 2002, 37. Citing Headey B. and Wearing A. (1989) “Personality, life events, and subjective well-being: Toward a dynamic equilibrium model.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 731-739.

For some reason beyond my understanding, Yuki Kajiura’s song “Winter” always reminds me of The King of Town.

Someone left a direct-mail “subscribe now” pamphlet for Ladies’ Home Journal lying around, and one of the stories mentioned in it caught my attention.

It has often been remarked that people consider themselves above average regardless of actual standing. Yet, in a normally distributed population, half the people have to be above the average, and half must be below. So, I was somewhat surprised by this “survey says” factoid:

26% [of women surveyed] said their sex life was above average and 22% said it was great!

In other words, as we would expect from a realistic evaluation of the quality of women’s sex lives, half said that they were above average. In fact, the total that said they were above average was actually slightly less than half (48%).

Now, mind you, there are all sorts of things this doesn’t tell us.

• This doesn’t tell us what men think of their sex lives, so no comparison is possible just from this.
• We don’t know anything about the sample size or how the survey was conducted. Given the publication, it probably wasn’t all that formal. Also, surveys about sex are famously prone to all sorts of biases.
• The survey included only Ladies’ Home Journal readers. They might be atypical in some way that would allow them to better compare their sex lives to those of other women (maybe they’re using LHJ itself as a reference to judge their own relationships – the back of the same mailing has “spice it up now” hints and tips).
• We don’t know (and probably can’t reasonably measure) how womens’ sex lives really compare to one another – that is, if Alice really has a better thing going for her with her husband Alfred than her friend Barbra has with her boyfriend Barry, or if Alice just thinks her relationship is better.

I was using trying to download a video with a Flash player the other day, and Ook, my video downloader, wasn’t picking it up. By observing the network connection in Firebug, I managed to manually download the video. Awesome. On YouTube itself, it appears you can look for the request that returns a FLV MIME-type.