Leatherhead Matters

Petrol & Diesel prices are now so high that some people are selling their bodies in exchange for fuel!

Read more HERE

Maureen Salamon at CNN must have been having a “get at hubby day” when she filed this report:

Jen Simmons loves to watch her husband Danny tend to their two little boys, mop the floor or hang a picture. She also finds it sexy.

The 36-year-old Camden, Delaware resident, a middle school teacher says:

“I am very turned on when he’s doing housework. If there’s a sink full of dirty dishes, he knows I’m going to take care of that before I want to get intimate. If he wasn’t helping with the housework, I would not find that very attractive.”

Simmons’ attitude is pretty typical of married women, researchers say. They like it when their spouses share the household chores, but also find that — paradoxically — a husband may also create more work for them, or not contribute as much as women would like.

“When a man does housework, it feels to the woman like an expression of caring and concern, which then physically reduces her stress,” says Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco-area psychologist and author of “The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework.”

Research found that men create, on average, seven more hours of housework a week for women. That extra work may not be as obvious as doing the dishes or mowing the lawn. So-called “emotional labour” — tasks like writing holiday cards, scheduling doctor appointments and planning family gatherings — is too often left to wives, says University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock.

Maybe just a tad one-sided perspective on harmonious married life?

Just to provide a male perspective to this mainly feminist view, I should add that I personally find it quite a turn on when Mrs Leatherhead goes up a ladder to fix the electrics or, gets all sweaty (sorry dear…perspires) when digging over the garden or, comes in all greasy & oily after some maintenance on the car or, best of all - in with a wet T shirt after fixing the plumbing in the basement!

Read Maureen’s full report HERE

First it was the solar bra. The technology may be great but the concept is crap. Using the surface area of the breast to capture solar energy (via solar panel bras) sounds neat, The new device generates enough energy to power your cell phone or your iPod. But, how often do you go out exposing your bras to the elements? Read more HERE

Now, advances in technology may harness breast movement to generate power. The physics of breast motion have been studied closely for the last two decades by researchers, most of them women. LaJean Lawson, a former professor of exercise science at Oregon State University, has studied breast motion since 1985 and now works as a consultant for companies like Nike to develop better sports bra designs. Lawson was enthusiastic about the idea but warned it would be tricky to pull off. Lawson explained:

Breasts move on three different axes: from side to side, front to back, and up and down. The most motion is generated on the vertical axis. Naturally, the bigger the breast, the more momentum it generates. Let’s face it—if you’re a double-A marathoner, you’re probably not going to get that iPod up and running.

Measurements compiled by Lawson and her colleagues show that a D-cup in a low-support bra can travel as much as 35 inches up and down (35 inches!) during exercise, while a B-cup in a high-support bra barely moves an inch.

Fabric and design are also important factors in distance travelled. Elastic fabric allows the breast to move more. Choosing between an encapsulation design, in which the cups are separated, or a compression design, where they are hugged close to the body, can also affect breast motion. An encapsulation design further reduces motion because two smaller masses are easier to control than one large one. “Also, if you have a really high neckline, the breasts won’t fly up,” Lawson said.

But, how do you convert the motion into useful energy?

Professor Zhong Lin Wang of Georgia Tech, is currently trying to develop fabric made from nanowires to capture energy from motion. The nanowires are about 1/1,000^th the width of a human hair. The nanowires rub up against one another and convert mechanical energy from the friction into an electric charge. According to Wang, the fabric is cheap to produce and surprisingly efficient; his team hopes to use it to create energy-generating T-shirts and other articles of clothing. A square meter of fiber produces about 80 milliwatts of power, which is enough to run a small device like a cell phone. Wang expects to have a shirt available for purchase within five years.

Bra patterns call for about a meter of fabric, which would probably mean that a regular bra could power an iPod. But the fabric could also be layered, doubling or even tripling the amount of energy produced.

If Professor Wang is successful perhaps he could adapt the technology for males. How would this work? Answers on a postcard please!

 H/T Slate

Well do you? Perhaps there has never been an era of financial transparency between couples.

Couples tend not to view themselves as “Partnership Inc.”, with a financial statement of income, operating costs, assets & debt to manage. Consequently, individual responsibilities for managing “Partnership Inc.” financial matters are neither clearly defined nor allocated. As in any enterprise this is a recipe for potential disaster, allocation of blame and the dissolution of the enterprise.

The lack of clarity leads to lack of transparency.

Half of the pairs in a 2003 study came up with completely different figures when asked to estimate their family’s income and net worth. In a survey last year of couples ages 43 to 70, some 35% were more than two years off when guessing when their spouse planned to retire.

About a third of those surveyed admitted to lying to their partner about money. And four out of five respondents in another poll revealed that they hide purchases from the one they love.

Without total transparency, you can’t come to smart decisions - or even joint decisions - if you don’t know what assets and liabilities you’re working with and what your partner’s goals and priorities are. Two heads really are better than one for solving financial problems. Failure to have all information available means you don’t know when your sailing close to the financial rocks, making a crisis more difficult to handle. Should your spouse become ill or, worse, pass away, you’ll be left scrambling to find bank accounts and insurance policies. And if you divorce, you’ll be at a real disadvantage in getting your fair share.

Fortunately, the solution is simple: Mostly, what you have to do is talk to each other. But, how do you approach what can often be a prickly subject?

Since talking about money matters often makes couples tense, New York City psychologist Bonnie Eaker Weil, author of Financial Infidelity, suggests taking regular “walk and talks,” which allow you to converse about difficult subjects while enjoying mild endorphin rushes from the exercise.

The promenade, which she says should last about 15 minutes, is an ideal time to indulge your financial fantasies - for example, what you’d each like to do if you won the lottery. Maybe you dream about spending a month in Brazil while your partner wants to collect Chinese ceramics.
You may conclude that you want to rev up your savings or cut expenses to accommodate such items. Conversely, you could decide that times are tough and that the fantasies will all have to wait until little Arabella and Toby finish college.

Walk-and-talks can make it easier to air problems too. Maybe you noticed your joint checking account was looking a bit anaemic. If you ask, they’ll usually tell. Refrain from immediately jumping down your spouse’s throat. You may not agree about it, but it’s important to know.

H/T  CNN Money

Some of Margaret Thatcher’s most famous quotes:

 Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t!

 Being prime minister is a lonely job… you cannot lead from the crowd.

 Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

 I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.

 I don’t mind how much my Ministers talk, so long as they do what I say.

 I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

 I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.

 If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.

 If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.

 Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

 Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.

It’s amazing how office equipment can be abused, sometimes for the most bizarre reasons. Great ad for office copier repair service. They must have seen it all & it’s not a pretty sight!

WHEN IT COMES to the huge and persistent gender gap in science and technology jobs, the finger of blame has pointed in many directions. Why aren’t there more women in science and engineering? New research suggests: They just aren’t interested!

The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany.

Women make up almost half of today’s workforce, yet hold just a fraction of the jobs in certain high-earning, high-qualification fields. They constitute 20 percent of the nation’s engineers, fewer than one-third of chemists, and only about a quarter of computer and math professionals.

Over the past decade and more, scores of conferences, studies, and government hearings have been directed at understanding the gap.

Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

One study of information-technology workers found that women’s own preferences are the single most important factor in that field’s dramatic gender imbalance. Another study followed 5,000 mathematically gifted students and found that qualified women are significantly more likely to avoid physics and the other “hard” sciences in favour of work in medicine and biosciences.

It’s important to note that these findings involve averages and do not apply to all women or men; indeed, there is wide variety within each gender. The researchers are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures on women don’t play a role, and they don’t yet know why women choose the way they do. One forthcoming paper in the Harvard Business Review, for instance, found that women often leave technical jobs because of rampant sexism in the workplace.

But if these researchers are right, then a certain amount of gender gap might be a natural artifact of a free society, where men and women finally can forge their own vocational paths. And understanding how individual choices shape the gender balance of some of the most important, financially rewarding careers will be critical in fashioning effective solutions for a problem that has vexed people for more than a generation.

A few years ago, Joshua Rosenbloom, an economist at the University of Kansas, became intrigued by a new campaign by the National Science Foundation to root out what it saw as pervasive gender discrimination in science and engineering. The agency was spending $19 million a year to encourage mentoring programs, gender-bias workshops, and cooperative work environments.

Rosenbloom had no quarrel with the goal of gender equity. But as he saw it, the federal government was spending all that money without any idea what would work, because there was no solid data on what caused the disparity between men and women in scientific fields.

To help answer the question, Rosenbloom surveyed hundreds of professionals in information technology, a career in which women are significantly underrepresented. He also surveyed hundreds in comparable careers more evenly balanced between men and women. The study examined work and family history, educational background, and vocational interests.

The results were striking. The lower numbers of women in IT careers weren’t explained by work-family pressures, since the study found computer careers made no greater time demands than those in the control group. Ability wasn’t the reason, since the women in both groups had substantial math backgrounds. There was, however, a significant difference in one area: what the men and women valued in their work.

Rosenbloom and his colleagues used a standard personality-inventory test to measure people’s preferences for different kinds of work. In general, Rosenbloom’s study found, men and women who enjoyed the explicit manipulation of tools or machines were more likely to choose IT careers - and it was mostly men who scored high in this area. Meanwhile, people who enjoyed working with others were less likely to choose IT careers. Women, on average, were more likely to score high in this arena.

Personal preference, Rosenbloom and his group concluded, was the single largest determinative factor in whether women went into IT. They calculated that preference accounted for about two-thirds of the gender imbalance in the field. The study was published in November in the Journal of Economic Psychology.

It may seem like a cliche - or rank sexism - to say women like to work with people, and men prefer to work with things. Rosenbloom acknowledges that, but says that whether due to socialisation or “more basic differences,” the genders on average demonstrate different vocational interests.

“It sounds like stereotypes,” he said in an interview, “but these stereotypes have a germ of truth.”

In the language of the social sciences, Rosenbloom found that the women were “self-selecting” out of IT careers. The concept of self-selection has long interested social scientists as an explanation for how groups sort themselves over time. Since human beings are heterogeneous, self-selection predicts that when offered a menu of options and freedom of choice, people will make diverse choices and sort themselves out in nonrandom ways. In other words, even given the same opportunities, not everybody will do the same thing - and there are measurable reasons that they will act differently from one another.

The concept of self-selection sets off alarms for many feminists. It seems to suggest that women themselves are responsible for the gender gap. It can also be an excuse for minimizing the role of social forces, including discrimination in the classroom and the workplace.

But self-selection has also emerged as the chief explanation in other recent studies of gender imbalance, including a long-term survey done by two Vanderbilt researchers, Camilla Persson Benbow and David Lubinski.

Starting more than 30 years ago, the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth began following nearly 2,000 mathematically gifted adolescents, boys and girls, tracking their education and careers in ensuing decades. (It has since been expanded to 5,000 participants, many from more recent graduating classes.) Both men and women in the study achieved advanced credentials in about the same numbers. But when it came to their career paths, there was a striking divergence.

Math-precocious men were much more likely to go into engineering or physical sciences than women. Math-precocious women, by contrast, were more likely to go into careers in medicine, biological sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Both sexes scored high on the math SAT, and the data showed the women weren’t discouraged from certain career paths.

The survey data showed a notable disparity on one point: That men, relative to women, prefer to work with inorganic materials; women, in general, prefer to work with organic or living things. This gender disparity was apparent very early in life, and it continued to hold steady over the course of the participants’ careers.

Benbow and Lubinski also found something else intriguing: Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don’t do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts. They can become scientists, but can succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can.

These studies looked at different slices of the working world, but agree that in a world in which men and women both have freedom of choice, they tend to choose differently.

They have a provocative echo in the conclusions of Susan Pinker, a psychologist and columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail. In her controversial new book, “The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap,” Pinker gathers data from the journal Science and a variety of sources that show that in countries where women have the most freedom to choose their careers, the gender divide is the most pronounced.

“It’s the opposite of what we’d expect,” says Pinker. “You’d think the more family-friendly policies, and richer the economy, the more women should behave like men, but it’s the opposite. I think with economic opportunity comes choices, comes freedom.”

Extracted from: The freedom to say ‘no’ - The Boston Globe

  A little Google research suggests that the average cost of a UK wedding is now close to £20,000. That’s approximately double the average cost at the end of the 90’s.  However,  there’s a huge range around the average. There’s no doubt that the celebrity culture of the last decade, Hello magazine and easily available, low cost debt have fuelled the demand for weddings with all the celebrity trimmings. The wedding cost planner (from a US web site ) shown on the right (click it for larger version) gives a clue as to why weddings are so expensive. And did you see the dead giveaway in the top left hand corner of the planner?

“Tell us how much you spent for total wedding cost” - “This information will be seen by other couples!”

 Now the marketers are smart. They realise that weddings are less & less about romance/love or, a big family celebration…..no, it’s about bragging rights!

Interestingly, anecdotal evidence from wedding planners suggests that the longevity of a marriage is roughly inversely proportional to the cost of the wedding!

The eye watering cost, particularly if you are in your 20’s, would go a long way to pay for private schooling  for a child, if invested early or, perhaps a deposit on a home?. Instead, couples have been choosing to blow it on a single, one day event and live on the celebrity induced glow for a week or two.

Last week, the Governor of the Bank of England  officially pronounced the death of the NICE decade (nice as in non inflationary, continuous expansion, decade). Cash is going to be tight for a while due to higher inflation & loans are getting very expensive. This all suggests that either the amount couples spend on weddings will fall rapidly or, weddings will get deferred.

All the media focus at present is on house prices as a proxy for an economic meltdown. Perhaps the Bank of England should develop an alternate economic index, the monthly WPI (wedding price index)….. it’s just peaked and it’s now set to drop as fast as a bridegroom’s britches!

Absolutely brilliant video on the difference between a man’s & women’s brain. Rib tickling humour but, I think it may be true!

Guido Fawkes has lifted the lid on the latest Labour Party sleaze. The Labour Party have organised an opportunity for you to leave a “tribute” to the late, great Gwyneth Dunwoody. I didn’t always like her politics but, there was never any doubt where she stood & she spoke her mind. Something which appears to be lost forever among her cynical colleagues in the parliamentary Labour Party.

As if to prove the point, even this tribute to Gwyneth is not what it seems. Visit the tribute page on her constituency website and you are asked to “leave a tribute which will be passed on to her family”. But, as the snapshot below shows you are then requested to provide  detailed contact details. Fair enough you may say,  but this is not as innocent as it seems.

A close study of the data capture process reveals that it includes a sophisticated software routine designed to look-up and verify the postcode and collect the data for Labour HQ in London. This is not a spontaneous local initiative - it was designed by Tangent Labs, the Labour Party’s national e-campaigns software contractors.

The Labour Party appear to not to understand basic standards of decency. Everything is used for political opportunity, even the death of one of its favourite daughter. It’s cynical and its sleazy but, the Labour Party just don’t get it!